In recent years, “fuhao” (sign) has become a buzz word in Chinese cultural life, which itself has been undergoing rapid transformation, from a more or less pre-modern society not long ago to a highly hybridized one with salient postmodernistic characteristics. To this rapid change, cultural studies is a natural academic response that has lead to the flourishing of semiotics. Though semiotics has not been new to China, the development of the discipline in the last decade is still highly impressive. What has emerged in China today could be called a fevor of semiotics. Zhuoyue Net (the Chinese branch of Amazon.com) lists more than 200 new books on “fuhao” or “fuhao xue” (semiotics), mostly published in the last five years. On the Baidu Search (the dominant search engine in China), one can find 2.75 million items for “semiotics” (whereas “narratology” which also had prospered in China reaches 0.6 million items, less than one fourth).
