Contemporary Chinese Media Research Articles

Re-inventing Confucian subjects: politics of subject-making in Chinese dating with the parents

ABSTRACT This article delves into the relationship between reality television and the politics of subject-making in contemporary Chinese media culture. Offering a critical discourse analysis of the recent hit reality TV/game show Chinese Dating with the Parents (2017–2018), the case-study explicates how the show’s inclusion of a normalized transgender celebrity host and its Confucianized approaches to dating, marriage, and family relations are connected to the re-packaging and re-articulation of Confucianism at the state and personal levels in China. By shedding light on the interconnectedness of state ideology, celebrity culture, and subject-making in reality television, the discussion points out television functions in creating and circulating new state-sanctioned subjectivities.

Towards a queer affective economy of boys’ love in contemporary Chinese media

ABSTRACT This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL) cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments. Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in contemporary China.

Gender, media, and myth-making: constructing China’s leftover women

ABSTRACTIn the last 10 years, the term ‘leftover women’ (剩女)—educated, unmarried women over the age of 27—has emerged as a visible stereotype in popular consciousness in China. Despite the surplus of men that is a result of China’s One Child Policy, women are blamed for marriage market challenges through sexist narratives and terminology. While some scholarship treats ‘leftover women’ as an accepted demographic phenomenon with clear causes and impacts, it can also be viewed as an artificial construct created through socially generated gender stereotypes and furthered through media messaging. This article examines and compares sociological research on Chinese marriage patterns, presentations of ‘leftover women’ in contemporary Chinese media, and independent interview findings to understand the role of media in the construction of gender discourse and the perpetuation of gender stereotypes. These rigid concepts of gender roles and ideal womanhood have far-flung consequences, both for women who internalize these misperceptions and for the social hierarchies supported by antiquated gender constructs.

A mission beyond journalism: advocacy and media practices of award giving in China

Chinese media organizations do not yet have an established and widely adopted journalistic paradigm. Thus, some journalists believe they should go beyond journalism's conventional roles and participate directly in social advocacy. They practice not only advocacy journalism but also social advocacy by hosting public forums, organizing journalism training camps, and giving various awards to social activists, cultural elites, celebrities, business people, and fellow journalists. This research explores the award-giving practices of several influential Chinese media organizations. It contends that a complex array of forces and factors interact to shape the award-giving practices of contemporary Chinese media. In contemporary China, the marketized and mission-burdened media tend to use the award-giving practice as a means to build their brand image and fulfill their social mission (i.e. advocacy of values). Award giving is also intended to help media organizations network with like-minded representatives of civil society. This analysis thus demonstrates that award-giving practices help build mutual recognition between the media and a specific group of social elites in China and lead to the formation of an alliance of “the weak” when confronting the authoritarian state machine.

How the Steel Was Tempered: The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media

Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski's novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) provided generations of Chinese youth with a widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodoxy revolutionary education and literary imagination during Mao's era. Over the past decade, Pawel Korchagin has regained his popularity in Chinese media, his name and image have been appropriated by numerous artists and filmmakers to help in portrayals of the new generation's self-fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel's heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. This paper looks into the intricate relationships between Pawel Korchagin's revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations. By doing so, I hope to gain a better understanding of the cultural politics of appropriating Mao's legacy to create new meanings for a changing Chinese society. One example on which this paper focuses is the sixth-generation director Lu Xuechang's film Becoming a Man (1997), which rewrites the revolutionary Bildungsroman of Pawel in a startling different context.

Becoming global, remaining local: the discourses of international news reporting by CCTV-4 and Phoenix TV Hong Kong

In an attempt to examine the issue of glocalisation in contemporary Chinese media practice, the article develops a tripartite framework which examines the discourses of global/Western vs. local/Eastern interactions in news reporting along three dimensions: the nature of the news event reported, the stance adopted in reporting the news, and the move structure involved in the reporting. The projection and discursive management of the international news reports by two prominent broadcast media channels in Cultural China, i.e. the Chinaowned and Beijing-based station, CCTV-4, and the Hong Kong-based channel station, Phoenix TV, have been selected for the investigation. It is found that globalisation in these two pan- or pro-Chinese government broadcasting practices has taken place only marginally. In trying to demonstrate a global vision and readiness for change and challenges, the Chinese broadcasters no longer evade news of a negative nature, and have also largely adopted the globally prevalent pattern of a dialogic news story-telling structure, most evident in the news construction done by Phoenix TV, though less so by CCTV-4. Nonetheless, the value of harmony, the normative Chinese value of journalistic practice, has a strong presence in the media practice of both channels, as is evidenced particularly in the use of a supportive reporting stance, rather than the critical reporting stance favoured by Western journalism.

Negotiating fragmented women's news: state, market and feminism in contemporary Chinese media

This study aims to explain the reasons for the transformation of women's news in contemporary China. It concludes that in comparison with women news's in the Maoist period, present-day women's news is represented in a fragmented way. This article analyses the differences among the individual, professional, and institutional aspects in news production, while emphasizing the complicated interaction among feminism, state, and market to illuminate the reasons behind women's news transformation. Due to the immanent masculinity of both state and market, feminism in China has to face a state–market complex, that is, double pressure. Comparing with state and market, the influence from feminism to journalism is quite weak and there is a long way to go before feminism realizes its own agenda for media transformation.

Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Chinese Media: An Investigation

Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Chinese Media: An Investigation

Introduction to Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media and Literature

早在中国古代,就有学者开始了对于方言的关注与探索。任何一种地域性的语言实践活动都是特定文化及其惯例习俗的折射与反映。前人对官方语为主、地方方言为辅的语言分布格局多持批判立场;然而,无论何种方言,它都参与建构了当地特权阶级和主导文化的权力与身份。因此,在对主体建构的理解与阐释当中,应将方言也视作文化必不可少的构成要素来加以分析。研究者置方言于中国港台地区和内地的地域背景中,以社会语言学、文化社会学、媒介研究和文学批评理论为分析方式,考察方言在当代大众媒介和文学当中的角色设定、地位流变的过程并揭示它在文化实践中的生成与演变、传播和接受。

Rendering the regional: local language in contemporary Chinese media

For centuries the sub-national languages of China have been a fundamental feature in daily life and popular culture, while a standardized form of Mandarin has been adopted as the language of the state (including education). Suppressed during powerful movements to establish a modern, national culture, these local languages or dialects have nevertheless survived, and their resurgence in the media and literature has caused tensions to surface. Concerns for education, law, and commerce have all promoted a standard national language, yet, at the same time, as local societies have undergone massive transformations, the need to re-imagine communities has repeatedly challenged the adequacy of a single language to represent them. This ground-breaking study surveys in detail the sweep of local languages in television, radio, film, and print culture of late twentieth-century mainland China, especially Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Chengdu, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Focusing on these regions, the analysis contrasts and compares these distinct communities to each other and to the ways in which they mediate culture as a national institution. It draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and media studies and explores how varied genres and media have sought to represent the tensions and assertions within these societies and how they construct the local in an age of globalization.