ABSTRACT
Since the arrival of television, radio has largely been an underappreciated and understudied medium internationally. Radio in China is no exception. In comparison with Chinese television and the Internet, ‘radio in China’ has been a poor cousin, invisible and largely unheard of in English-language scholarship. It is now an urgent task to fill the gaping hole that this leaves in our understanding of a whole dimension of the media landscape – both historically and in contemporary life; both locally and internationally. This chapter begins by reviewing the existing research literature on radio and Chinese media in order to substantiate the claim that radio in China has hitherto been largely overlooked as a subject for sustained scholarship. With a focus on the interaction between radio and social change, it then moves on to present a carefully structured narrative about social change in China’s modernization process, thereby identifying three crucial social processes – privatization, globalization and individualization – that characterize the post-Mao era. Taking this as its starting point, the chapter then lays out the range of questions each subsequent chapter investigates, and outlines the research methods adopted throughout the book.
