ABSTRACT
The agenda of ‘internationalizing media studies’ has been pursued by scholars of Chinese media and communication from a variety of angles. A growing body of literature has addressed different aspects of Chinese media institutions and communication processes from analytical frameworks ranging from the liberal conception of power to the Foucaultian notion of governmentality. Some of the main lines of enquiry have included: the Chinese system of propaganda and media control, especially internet control (e.g. Qiu, 1999; Tsui, 2003; Shambaugh, 2007; Brady, 2008); the fusion of party-state power and market rationality in the Chinese media (e.g. Barme, 1999; Lee, 2000; Bai, 2005; Lee, He and Huang, 2006; Zhao, 1998, 2000a); the prospects or lack thereof for political democratization, along with the localization of Western-style media professionalism and the emergence of Chinese ‘public sphere’ and ‘civil society’ in the context of media commercialization, globalization and the explosion of new technologies (e.g. Chan, Pan and Lee, 2004; Lynch, 1999; Pan and Ye Lu, 2003; Pan and Chan, 2003; Tai, 2006; Yang, 2003, 2007; Zhao, 2000b, 2001, 2005). The past few years have also witnessed the emergence of analyses that link
developments in the Chinese communication industries with the structural logic of transnationalizing capitalism, which, until the global financial crisis of 2008, had encompassed China and the broad terrain of information and communication as its ‘two poles of growth’ since the 1980s (Schiller, 2005), as well as studies that examine the accommodations and tensions between transnational capital and the Chinese state at the national and local levels in the transformation of media and communication industries (e.g. Chin, 2003; Fung, 2006; Lee, 2003; Xin, 2006; Zhao, 2003a, 2004; Zhao and Schiller, 2001). Building upon this literature and drawing on my own more recent work
(Zhao, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b; Zhao and Duffy, 2007; Chakravartty and Zhao, 2008), this chapter explores potentials for broadening and deepening Chinese media and communication research in the process of internationalization. Rather than focus on obvious ‘internationalizing’ issues centring on the transnational flows of media capital, forms, contents, and influences, including China’s recently accentuated efforts in projecting its own
‘soft power’ abroad, I foreground issues pertaining more closely to domestic Chinese social processes by arguing that there is an imperative for this area to re-root itself in history, re-embed itself in the Chinese social terrain, redefine agency, reengage with meaning and community, and, finally, reclaim utopian imaginations. I believe that these five ‘R’s – which are by no means mutually exclusive – will enable researchers not only to broaden and deepen the analysis of Chinese media and communication, but also to make theoretical contributions to the broader field of global media studies, enabling it to have a more productive dialogue with Western-centric conceptual frameworks, and also potentially enrich them and transcend their limitations.
