ABSTRACT
In thinking about the history of the Roman Empire, Marshall McLuhan noted that writing and paved roads brought about “the alteration of social groupings, and the formation of new communities” (McLuhan 1994, 90). They enabled the formation of an empire that broke down the old Greek city-states and feudal realms in favor of centralized control at a distance. A similar process can be seen in the history of the Chinese empire, where writing enabled the bureaucracy to hold together diverse ethnic and linguistic groupings. However, it is with modernity and its new mass media that local and kinship identities come to be radically dissolved by a more powerful national space of identity. Anthony Giddens has noted that an important feature of modernity is the “disembedding of social systems,” or the “‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across infinite spans of timespace” (Giddens 1990, 21). In twentieth-century China, the mass media’s disembedding operations have constituted first a new national community and then a powerful state subjectivity. This essay is an initial inquiry into a third disembedding process: the reemergence of a transnational Chinese global media public and its effects on the modernist project of the nation-state.
