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    CINEMA

    In the past three decades, Chinese cinema has undergone dramatic changes. Due to the ever-growing development of Chinese economy, Chinese cinema has been gradually transformed from a fully-controlled propaganda tool to an industry with an overt intention of profit-making. The result is the transformation of a political machine into a money machine, though still under the close monitoring of the Communist Party. The 1980s witnessed the emergence of the Fifth Generation directors, who demonstrated a changing face of Chinese cinema to both domestic and foreign audiences. Since then they have been major players in the arena of Chinese cinema. In the 1990s, when the Communist Party implemented aggressively a series of economic reforms, entertainment films represented by Feng Xiaogang's movies became popular and generated high box-office returns. Towards the end of the century, four modes of productions — government-sponsored, private, co-production, and underground cinemas — formed a mosaic of Chinese cinema. In the new millennium, due to the pressure of profit-making, all these different modes of production have been merging into a mainstream of a highly commercialized yet still politically-correct cinema.