The dialectic of human-object relations in Chinese urban television drama: a reification-theoretical reading.

BACKGROUND

Lukács's theory of reification describes a social order in which relations among people appear as relations among things. It offers a productive way to read urban television narratives, where housing, consumption, professional performance, and intimate life regularly become measures of social worth.

OBJECTIVE

This article examines how Chinese television dramas make reification visible through objects, space, and the body. It also asks how people-centered narration is constructed as a textual possibility for questioning those relations.

METHODS

The study uses qualitative close reading of three urban dramas - Fake It Till You Make It, Nothing But Thirty, and Women in Beijing - and Meet Yourself, a contrastive case that begins with urban workplace pressure before relocating its protagonist to a rural community. Plot events, dialogue, character action, settings, and recurring motifs are examined through object alienation, reified space, the reified body, and dereifying practice.

RESULTS

Across the urban cases, luxury goods, exclusive residences, professional schedules, and intimate calculations turn social value into visible and comparable signs. The contrastive case frames a partial interruption of that logic through care, shared activity, and a changed relation to work. These are narrative resolutions, not demonstrations of institutional transformation.

CONCLUSION

The article connects reification theory to the close analysis of Chinese television narrative. It argues that people-centered narration is most useful as an analytical term when it names concrete formal and relational practices rather than a general moral quality.