ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 considers late night talkback radio dealing with personal issues, which was one of the earliest examples of the advice genre to emerge in the post-Mao media landscape, and was at one time an especially popular programme type. The decades of the 1990s and 2000s saw the emergence, peak and decline of late night talkback in China, as Chinese people experienced increasing privatization and individualization in everyday life. This chapter links talkback radio to the notion and practice of intimacy as a means to explore the role of radio as a technology of intimacy in catering to the needs and desires of Chinese individuals, and presents a number of case studies that help us to understand the mass production of intimacy on radio. It demonstrates how this cultural form facilitated the relocation and reorientation of Chinese individuals in their personal lives at a time when they were caught up in a quest for individual survival, existential meaning and social mobility in post-Mao China.
