ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of audience research in the People's Republic of China (PRC), with specific regard to media use by senior citizens. This choice of illustrative data brings sociality and politics into alignment with media use through attention to the longue durée of modern Chinese lives. Accessed through the particular capacity of older people to illuminate social experience over time, the chapter is particularly concerned with the concept of the subject-as-audience in a geo-politics that emphasizes the recruitment of subjects to policy, rather than to debate and determine politics in advance of policy construction. To this end, the chapter first summarizes how the mass audience in China has been understood since the founding of the PRC in 1949, and gives examples of the ways in which the audience as a concept has been approached, albeit noting that in most cases research has been predominantly theoretical — it has been unusual for theorists to undertake fieldwork to support ambit claims. Second, the chapter refers to recent sociological attention to particular demographic groupings — here exemplified by the senior population — where the possibility of being part of “an audience” is increasingly recognized as a defining factor in people's lives and wellbeing (Shan 2006).
