ABSTRACT
This chapter examines television on public transportation (yidong dianshi) in contemporary China. Screens on buses, subways, and sidewalks offer an alternative lens to consider the entangled explosion of entertainment TV, official practices, and newly urbanized or mobile populations. These emergent electronic encounters stitch together experiential itineraries that are defined by seamless televisual address, aiming to reconnect populations that increasingly tune out CCTV and related transmissions. This includes both the technologically savvy, who self-program on personal devices (torrents, DVDs, alternative, regional, or international media, etc.), as well as displaced or floating populations – the commuter, the migrant, the vagrant – whose dwellings are ephemeral, shifting, or lost.
