As the twentieth century ended with globalization and commercialization, popular culture begins to challenge the dominance of national culture. The Chinese intellectual community tries to defend national culture against the incoming global culture and local cultures. The conflicts between localism and nationalism, and also between globalism and nationalism, are clearly demonstrated in the Hero phenomenon, which basically concerns the unanimous disparagement on director Zhang Yimou's debut martial arts film Hero within the Chinese critics' circle. Through a discursive analysis of the phenomenon, we can see how the conflicts between modernism and postmodernism, between elitism and commercialism shape the landscape of contemporary Chinese culture. In this article, I first seek to understand how modernism evolved into nationalism in China during the last century and what role the intelligentsia played in the process of such evolvement. I further seek to understand why the intellectual community has distaste for popular culture and commercialism. Other research on this topic has linked nationalism to national culture, and localism and globalism to popular culture.

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