The internationalization of television in China: the evolution of ideology, society, and media since the reform

Abstract

The Internationalization of Television in China: The Evolution of Ideology, Society, and Media since the Reform. Junhao Hong. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.192 pp. $55 hbk. The year 1999 marks several anniversaries for China, the world's most populous nation with emerging power of influences in the global geopolitical landscape. Fifty years ago, the Communist Party founded the People's Republic of China by defeating the U.S.-backed Nationalist Party in a bloody civil war. Thirty years later in 1979, the United States and China established formal diplomatic relations, ending the latter's long quest for international recognition of its legitimacy in the community of nations. In 1989, a massive student democratic movement at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing and its subsequent crackdown by the heavy-handed Chinese government on live television sent shock waves around the world. Among foreign observers, this tragic incident has raised serious questions regarding China's commitment to economic reform and external openness that began in 1978. In various fields of social inquiry, including mass communication and journalism research, numerous books and articles have since attempted to explicate the pace and direction of China's changing social fabric, especially its reaction to and interaction with the outside world. Of significant concern, either political or intellectual, is how and to what extent China is being integrated into the process of globalization that has swept many developing and underdeveloped countries following the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A major clue comes from the form and content of China's international communication, of which television constitutes the best indicator of its parameter because of TV's far-reaching and wide penetration into the Chinese society. From a longitudinal point of view, this book by Junhao Hong presents a perceptive, prescriptive, and predictive overview of an often neglected area in research about the processes and structure of Chinese mass communication-the internationalization of television in China. A native of China, Hong is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Buffalo. With his extensive professional experience in both print and broadcast media, he approached the internationalization of Chinese television through a combination of an insider's keen observation, strategic interviews of key TV and governmental officials, and a smooth synthesis of related literature. …