COURTSHIP. LOVE AND PREMARITAL SEX daily life, they also have turned to the opposite sex to relieve their loneliness and fears. Through these contacts, a number of young villagers fell in love while yorking outside Xiajia village, and some of them brought their partners back to Xiajia to marry. My survey shows that, among the free-choice marriages in the 1990s, more than 30 per cent involved romances entirely outside the village Even those who have not left the village have been strongly influenced by visions of modern urban life. Public activities in the village have declined since the 1980s and leisure activities have shifted to private homes owing to the rapid development of television and other means of mass media, the influx of formation and images from the cities and foreign countries has replaced the former organized sociality with a powerful but mostly imaginary space whereby villagers develop and pursue new life aspirations. In 1978 several young Xiajia villagers walked for five miles to another village to watch the first television set in the local area. By 1991 there were 135 televisions in Xiajia alone, including 8 colour sets; by the end of the 1990s, virtually every household owned a television, and some had two. While still under state control, Chinese television programming has changed profoundly to adapt to market competition. For instance, as early as 1991 I found myself watching Hunter"the American police series-in Xiajia village, the same show that i had watched in Boston several months earlier. In the summer of 1997 for several weeks I joined a small group of villagers watching a Taiwanese soap opera about love, marriage and money. The young women in particular were attracted to the comfortable middle-class lifestyle as well as to the modem values of family life depicted in the series. When older villagers had difficulties following the plot, the younger members of the audience explained the story to them, at the same time lecturing them about modern family life. In 1998 I saw two large posters of pop stars (a Hong Kong man and a Japanese woman) hanging in the bedroom of a 19-year-old, the son of an old friend The father me that his son was a fan of several pop stars and his dream was to become a professional singer. Under the impact of a global flow of information and images, the imaginary social space that villagers can appropriate has expanded far beyond the physical and social boundaries of Xiajia Ways of Expressing Love Despite the strong influences flowing in from outside the village, casual recreational dating remained an alien idea to Xiajia youth in the 1990s. any effort to attract someone of the opposite sex is meant to build a bridge to mariage,although this bridge of courtship has become much extended and widened by the standards of earlier generations See James Lull, China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance(London: Routledge 1991);and Zha Jianying, China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture(New York: The New Press, 1995)COURTSHIP, LOVE AND PREMARITAL SEX daily life, they also have turned to the opposite sex to relieve their loneliness and fears. Through these contacts, a number of young villagers fell in love while working outside Xiajia village, and some of them brought their partners back to Xiajia to marry. My survey shows that, among the free-choice marriages in the 1990s, more than 30 per cent involved romances entirely outside the village. Even those who have not left the village have been strongly influenced by visions of modem urban life. Public activities in the village have declined since the 1980s, and leisure activities have shifted to private homes. Owing to the rapid development of television and other means of mass media, the influx of information and images from the cities and foreign countries has replaced the former organized sociality with a powerful but mostly imaginary space whereby villagers develop and pursue new life aspirations. In 1978 several young Xiajia villagers walked for five miles to another village to watch the first television set in the local area. By 1991 there were 135 televisions in Xiajia alone, including 8 colour sets; by the end of the 1990s, virtually every household owned a television, and some had two. While still under state control, Chinese television programming has changed profoundly to adapt to market competition.23 For instance, as early as 1991 I found myself watching "Hunter"-the American police series-in Xiajia village, the same show that I had watched in Boston several months earlier. In the summer of 1997, for several weeks I joined a small group of villagers watching a Taiwanese soap opera about love, marriage and money. The young women in particular were attracted to the comfortable middle-class lifestyle as well as to the moder values of family life depicted in the series. When older villagers had difficulties following the plot, the younger members of the audience explained the story to them, at the same time lecturing them about modem family life. In 1998 I saw two large posters of pop stars (a Hong Kong man and a Japanese woman) hanging in the bedroom of a 19-year-old, the son of an old friend. The father told me that his son was a fan of several pop stars and his dream was to become a professional singer. Under the impact of a global flow of information and images, the imaginary social space that villagers can appropriate has expanded far beyond the physical and social boundaries of Xiajia. Ways of Expressing Love Despite the strong influences flowing in from outside the village, casual recreational dating remained an alien idea to Xiajia youth in the 1990s. Any effort to attract someone of the opposite sex is meant to build a bridge to marriage, although this bridge of courtship has become much extended and widened by the standards of earlier generations. 23 See James Lull, China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance (London: Routledge. 1991); and Zha Jianying, China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture (New York: The New Press, 1995). 37