ABSTRACT
With television becoming the most popular and influential medium in today's China, Chinese television has emerged as a new field of study in recent years. A small but increasing number of scholars in English-language academia have effectively explored various aspects of Chinese television, such as the institutional evolution and development of TV in China, ideological control and censorship by the state, transnational circulation of Chinese television, and a variety of television genres, such as news, documentaries, dramas, and entertainment shows (Lull 1991; Lu 2001; Keane 2001b, 2003, 2005, 2007; Donald et al. 2002; Moran and Keane 2004; Keane et al. 2007; Zhu 2008; Zhu et al. 2008; Zhu and Berry 2009; Sun and Zhao 2009; Song 2010; Zhong 2010). This book seeks to update the field of Chinese television studies by focusing on television entertainment. It approaches television entertainment in contemporary China as a site of evolving hegemonic struggles among various political, economic, institutional, and ideological forces in the context of media commercialization and technological convergence. Specifically, it looks at an array of television programs, from drama serials to reality shows. At the same time, it is attentive to the contexts of production and distribution, focusing on the changing dynamics of regulation and censorship of television entertainment on the one hand and emerging forms of digital distribution on the other.
