Read this paper

Figure 5: Xiao Wu (played by Wang Hongwei) and Policeman Hao in Xiao Wu (1997)
repeated loudspeaker exhortations in broadcast-standard Putonghua to
crack down on petty crime, in the first scene, his encounter with Hao, Xiao
Wu greets Hao as “teacher,” and they seem to be longstanding associates:
tension between authority and criminality is thereby undermined. Hao
urges Xiao Wu to reform, following Xiao Yong’s example (fig. 5). During
the course of the movie, everyone tries to adapt to modern society except
Xiao Wu, who cannot let go of his old value system and embrace the new.
The marginalization of Xiao Wu parallels the fate of the small county in
which he loiters. Although Fenyang used to be the hub of Shanxi draft banks
(piaohao), a national financial center in late imperial China, it has been
left behind in the reform era. Xiao Wu’s actual Henan Anyang Mandarin
(spoken by Wang Hongwei), which is often unintelligible to the Fenyang
people, has already excluded him from the local speech community, evoking
an aesthetic effect of alienation for the local Fenyang audience. On the
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 173
MCLC 18.2.indd 173
12/20/06 2:01:36 PM