ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a direct route by 'dipping' into the televisual imagination of the Guangzhou TV audience which consumes Hong Kong TV programmes regularly. It focuses on a central theoretical construct that can be applied across China, but which must be researched in 'micro' case studies to carry weight. The chapter applies the case studies to a situation of trans-border programming and reception. It builds on previous work on the transborder imagination, and on the reception of factual and fictional programming. The chapter interrogates the meanings attached to fictional TV characters, as they were received, reconstructed and understood within the informants' imaginations. It generalizes dominant interpretive modes of transborder televisual imagination from concrete audience cases. The chapter theorizes the dynamics of modernity and postmodernity embedded within the disjunctive socio-mediascape of Guangzhou. 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.
