Media Power And Its Control In Contemporary China

This book takes an ethnographic approach to discuss the policy practices within China’s broadcasting industry. Exploring the gap between the contemporary policy regime and its implementation in national broadcasters and streaming services, taking into account the interplay between broadcasters, political bodies, producers and audiences, Zhu explains the contemporary role of Chinese national broadcasters in mediating the public discourse, the collective reimagining of China’s national identity, and the newly-found policy initiative of using state media as a means of nation branding. Cases investigated include China Central Television (CCTV) Documentary, China Global Television Network (CGTN), and the Shanghai Media Group (SMG), as well as co-productions made by CCTV and international media firms, including the BBC, Discovery and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), in a book that will interest scholars of Chinese politics, media studies, and sociology.

Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this volume examines socio-political transformations of contemporary Chinese society through a systematic account, analysis and assessment of its salient discourses and their production, circulation, negotiation, and consequences.

Using interviews, newspaper articles, online texts, official documents, and national surveys, Lei shows that the development of the public sphere in China has provided an unprecedented forum for citizens to organize, influence the public agenda, and demand accountability from the government.

Studies of Hong Kong media primarily examine whether China will crush Hong Kong’s media freedom. This book however traces the root problem of Hong Kong media back to the colonial era, demonstrating that before the resumption of Chinese sovereignty there already existed a uniquely Hong Kong brand of hyper-marketized and oligopolistic media system. The system, encouraged by the British colonial government, was subsequently aggravated by the Chinese government. This peculiar system is highly susceptible to state intervention and structurally disadvantaged dissent and marginal groups before and after 1997. The book stresses that this hyper-marketized media system has been constantly challenged. Through a historical study of media stigmatization of youth, this book proposes that over the years various counter forces have penetrated the structurally lopsided Hong Kong media: independent, public, popular and news media all make occasional subversive alliances to disrupt the mainstream, and news media, with a strong liberal professionalism, provide the most subversive space for challenging cultural hegemony. The book offers an alternative and fascinating account of the dynamics between hegemonic closure and day-to-day resistance in Hong Kong media in both the colonial and post-colonial eras, arguing that the Hong Kong case generates important insights for understanding ideological struggles in capitalist media.

This book examines different dynamics such as marketisation, globalisation and new media technologies that have driven the transformation of China''s media industry OCo one of the primary battlegrounds where ideological, social and economic struggles are fought OCo against the backdrop of the growing tensions between economic growth, globalisation, and political control in China.

This book, the first of its kind, investigates the historical trajectory and current situation of popular journalism in the People's Republic of China. Taking a popular cultural perspective, the book redefines “popular journalism” as a particular journalistic genre and media form and applies it to conceptualize popular journalism in the Chinese context. In particular, it examines how the dynamic and complex interplay of politics, the market, culture, and communication technology in shifting contexts has shaped the changing landscape of popular journalism in contemporary China. Meanwhile, regardless of how these factors might have changed over time, the fundamental nature of popular journalism as a source of fun and a troublemaker against elite powers in China, as in other places, has remained. The book further argues that the historical development of popular journalism in China forms an important and integral part of the country's social-cultural fabric and ultimately illustrates the mediated ideological and cultural struggle between popular/public and elite/state discourses in the country’s everyday social life in its challenging and discursive transition to modernity.

This book offers an analytical account of the consensus and contestations of the politics of Chinese media at both institutional and discursive levels. It considers the formal politics of how the Chinese state manages political communication internally and externally in the post-socialist era, and examines the politics of news media, focusing particularly on how journalists navigate the competing demands of the state, the capital and the urban middle class readership. The book also addresses the politics of entertainment media, in terms of how power operates upon and within media culture, and the politics of digital networks, highlighting how the Internet has become the battlefield of ideological contestation while also shaping how political negotiations are conducted. Bearing in mind the contemporary relevance of China’s socialist revolution, this text challenges both the liberal universalist view that presupposes ‘the end of history’ and various versions of China exceptionalism, which downplay the impact of China’s integration into global capitalism.