ABSTRACT
Changes in media Under Mao (1949-1976), the CCP had complete control of all public media (Link et al. 2002: 2) including journalism, which acted as the mouthpiece of the party (Cao 2005: 3). Despite continued efforts made by government officials to censor, there is now ‘a bewildering proliferation of new media’ (Link et al. 2002: 2). The audience for such diversified forms of media has also increased sharply. In 1980, less than 1 per cent of the population had access to television but by 1990 this had increased to over two-thirds, and television too began to be used as a propaganda tool (Redl and Simons 2002: 19).3 Now, however, the vast majority of the Chinese population has not only gained access to television, newspapers, magazines and radio stations but also, more recently, to websites, Internet bulletin boards, chat-rooms and SMS text messaging services. Such a ‘proliferation of media over the last two decades, in the PRC in particular but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan’ is, as Latham says, quite simply ‘breathtaking’ (2006: 14). Accordingly, commentators have come to see media as having a pivotal role in the remoulding of contemporary China in a global context of market capitalism (Latham 2006: 14). Rosen, in view of such changes and focusing primarily on youth, says that ‘China in 2002 is a far different place for youth than it was in
1989, with the Chinese media playing a major role in the transformation’ (2003: 113). Despite the magnitude of such changes, it must be acknowledged that relaxations in control over media are not complete. Although it is no longer possible to explain China’s media by referring solely to a propaganda model, media production in China simultaneously operates with two different logics – that of the Party and of the market (Zhao 1998: 84). For example, there are now two forms of press in contemporary China: party propaganda press4 and commercialized press.5 Further influencing the contemporary media environment is the increased presence of media and cultural products coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as Korea, Japan and Western countries. The influence of Hong Kong culture on the mainland is much documented. Gold (1993), for example, talks of the largely unidirectional influence of gangtai (港台, Hong Kong and Taiwanese) culture on the mainland while Fung and Ma, more recently, state that ‘Hong Kong, as a satellite metropolis of global capitalism, is “colonizing” the political centre of China with popular media filled with consumerist and capitalistic ideologies’ (2002: 76), luring audiences away from and changing audiences’ frames of reference in their evaluation of mainland Chinese media, and exerting pressures on the institutional practices of coastal media organizations (Chan, J. 2000, cited in Fung and Ma 2002: 76). Since the 1990s, rather than talking about the imposition of Hong Kong and Taiwan popular cultures on the mainland, commentators have emphasized the more frequent and reciprocal nature of cultural exchange between mainland China and Hong Kong. Fung and Ma, for example, state that such a dialectic interaction has made transborder cultural imaginations between Hong Kong and the mainland unstable and that such imaginations even exhibit postmodern features (2002: 77). In 2008, there was an increasing number of media constructions of pan-Chineseness with the boundaries between previously separate Hong Kong and Chinese cinemas becoming more fluid: Perhaps Love (Ruguo Ai) (2005) and Curse of the Golden Flower (Man Cheng Jin Dai Huang Jin Jia) (2006) featured pan-Chinese casts. Director Wong Kar Wai (Wang Jiawei) and actor Takeshi Kaneshiro are, perhaps, archetypal and emblematic of this fluidity: Tsai, for example, talks of Kaneshiro (who has appeared in several of Wong’s films) as a transnational Asian superstar (2005). What is most startling about the contemporary media environment is the multiplicity of mediated voices which attempt to impose their own versions of reality upon the social entirety that surround youths and which contribute to what Link et al. refer to as a ‘chaotic mix of contradictory ideas, symbols and practices, all of which are constantly changing in the cacophony of popular conversation’ (2002: 3). Participating in such a mêlée are governmental, local, national and international media agencies, as well as individual online contributors. Due to the impact of globalization and commercialization, ‘thought work’ (sixiang gongzuo, 思想工作) is as Lynch notes, no longer monopolized by the central leadership (1999, cited in Donald and Keane 2002: 14). The proliferation of mediated voices both inside and outside China, online and offline, has meant that
youths are subject to many competing texts and discourses. Yang ([1997] 2002), for example, has argued that imported media from Hong Kong and Taiwan has exposed subjects to overseas Chinese culture, thus making it possible for them to construct alternate ways of being Chinese that are not prescribed by the State.