<p>Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. <em></em></p><p><em>Cinema and Desire</em> presents Dai Jinhua's best work to date. In the book she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling of international film festivals, establishes Huang Shuqin's <em>Human, Woman, Demon</em> as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyzes the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s urban China as a strange montage in which the political memories of Tienanmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intertwined.</p>