ABSTRACT
Moving from matters of the heart to matters of the body, this chapter discusses health infomercial radio, examining the role of radio as an advice medium catering to citizens’ physical health needs in post-Mao China. Health infomercial radio emerged in the early 1990s, when both radio and healthcare domains began to be commercialized in China. It features the on-air promotion of medical products packaged and presented under the guise of providing medical information. This chapter revisits China in the 1990s to identify the specific circumstances in which the commercialization of Chinese radio rapidly came to rely on substantial medical advertising. It studies the transformation of health as a primary site for cultivating the discourse of self-responsibility, the elevation of the ‘expert’ as an authority figure and the democratization of medical knowledge production in post-Mao China. In doing this, the author scrutinizes how health infomercial radio contributes to the production of additional risks, and to the privatization of responsibility for the regime of healthy living in contemporary China.
