ABSTRACT
Since 1978, China has witnessed structural transformations marked by doubledigit economic growth, technological innovation, ideological battles, social unrest and political crises. These transformations have produced new political and social formations, new identities and subjectivities, and new forms of citizenship and ethics. The media have played a central role in presenting and facilitating these transformations. In the process, Chinese media culture has also been transformed. The central role of the media in China’s structural transformations is exemplified in media spectacles. Media spectacles abound in the historical juncture of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Spectacular historical events (such as the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and Beijing’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games in July 2001) and ordinary – yet equally remarkable – everyday mediated experience (such as the use of the Internet and mobile phones to express and protest) are all media spectacles that have specific Chinese characteristics. As China enters the new millennium, these provide rich social texts for the examination of the post-socialist condition of Chinese modernity. This book investigates the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary
Chinese media culture – their position as sites of contestation over identity, citizenship and ethics. It uses a series of case studies – the new millennium celebration, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) reportage, urbanites’ uses of the new media around acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and SARS, and Falun Gong’s media campaign with the Chinese state – to illustrate contesting narratives of Chinese modernity. The chapters detail the complicated dynamics of contestation, conjunction and incorporation between the state and the non-state in their creative production and use of media in their old and new forms.1 Chinese post-socialist modernity is produced and explored at the interplay of such contesting narratives. Chinese media culture refers to a myriad of forces that shape Chinese
politics, economy, society and everyday life within the residual socialist system (albeit with capitalist tendencies). It describes a post-socialist media sphere organised around the production, consumption and circulation of media texts, images, symbols, stories and events. The media culture excels in producing spectacles that embody the contradictions and incoherence of post-socialism
in China. Television, newspaper, the Internet and mobile phones are all part of the post-socialist media culture. They produce spectacles that are not tools of pacification, but are sites of participation and contestation. As such, contemporary Chinese media culture is essential to discussions about Chinese politics, society, culture and everyday life – or the conjoining of these spheres as narratives of Chinese modernity. Studies of Chinese media culture have become increasingly popular and
more sophisticated over the last decade. There has been a marked change from a liberal view, which views Chinese media as equivalent to communist propaganda, to a more balanced perspective that views Chinese media as a combination of the ‘creative industries’ and ‘architect state model’ (Donald and Keane 2002; Keane 2006; Su 1994). Clearly, Chinese media are integral to China’s structural transformations in the age of globalisation; it is also part and parcel of the state and the project of national re-imagining under way in the reform era. In fact, the reach of the state in media discourse deserves special attention, as media and cultural transformation in post-Mao China has facilitated the modernisation of its propaganda system (Brady 2005, 2006). Meanwhile, the modernisation of media and communication technologies has enabled non-state players to engage creatively with the state. There is no doubt that an open discussion on the relationship between the state and the non-state, manifested through their contesting but also conjunctive narratives and representations of cultural transformation in contemporary China, is important and timely. While a socio-political economy approach is adopted, with a few excep-
tions (such as Lee 2003; Zhao 2007), current theoretical perspectives on Chinese media and communication have not fully interrogated their cultural and historical aspects. Moreover, existing studies on Chinese critical theory have not taken account of the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary Chinese media culture as key sites for examining the cultural logic of Chinese post-socialism. I address these gaps by integrating Chinese media and communication studies with critical theories about Chinese modernity, on the one hand, and problematising the interplay of the state and the non-state through a detailed elaboration of the dynamics and complications of such interplay, on the other. I adopt an interdisciplinary methodology that combines theories and methods from media studies and critical theory. These are complemented by those from Chinese studies, particularly cultural studies in and about China. This book locates critical cultural history and theory about Chinese media and culture within the framework of globalisation, using both Chinese and English sources. I use close textual and discursive techniques to analyse and contextualise media texts produced in the spectacles. These techniques point towards socio-historical issues of Chinese politics, culture and society in the new millennium. Textual analyses of media reports, television programmes, videos, newsletters, Internet postings, mobile phone text messages and onsite observations are used to study the discursive practices of the state, journalists, urbanites and Falun Gong.
