Title: Chinese television in the twenty-first century : entertaining the nation /
Authors: Bai, Ruoyun,; Song, Geng; Bai, Ruoyun,; Song, Geng.
Year: 2015
Subjects: Television Social aspects China History; Television broadcasting China History; Visual communication Social aspects China History; Mass media Social aspects China History; Social change China History; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Communication Studies.; PERFORMING ARTS / General.; PERFORMING ARTS / Television / General.; China Intellectual life; China Civilization
Abstract: "Television is arguably the most influential medium in contemporary China. Although television networks are still state-owned and Party-controlled in China, the ideological landscape of television programs has become increasingly diverse and even paradoxical, simultaneously subservient and defiant, nationalistic and cosmopolitan, moralistic and fun-loving, extravagant and mundane. Studying Chinese television as a key node in the network of power relationships, therefore, provides us with a unique opportunity to understand the tension-fraught, paradox-permeated, and highly unpredictable conditions of Chinese post-socialism. This book argues for a rethinking of Chinese television and a re-conceptualization of entertainment as a fluid landscape. Specifically, the book addresses the following questions. How is entertainment television politically and culturally significant in the Chinese context? How have political, industrial and technological changes in the 2000s affected the way Chinese television relates to the state and society? How can we think of media regulation and censorship without perpetuating the myth of a self-serving authoritarian regime vs. a subdued cultural workforce? What do popular televisual texts tell us about the unsettled and reconfigured relations between commercial television, audiences and the state? And finally, how does the fluidity of the entertainment-scape impact our understanding of key concepts in critical media and cultural studies, such as power, hegemony and ideology?"--
Contents: Introduction / Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song -- Part I: Entertaining TV -- A New Territory of Significance -- 1. Teaching People How to Live: Shenghuo Programs on Chinese Television / Wanning Sun -- 2. "The New Family Mediator": TV Mediation Programs in China's "Harmonious Society" / Shuyu Kong and Colin S. Howes -- 3. The Long Commute: Mobile Television and the Seamless Social / Joshua Neves -- Part II: "Curbing Entertainment" -- 4. "Clean Up the Screen": Regulating Television Entertainment in the 2000's / Ruoyun Bai -- 5. Rethinking Censorship in China-The Case of Snail House / How Wee Ng -- Part III: Commercial Television and the Reconfiguration of History, Memory, and Nationalism -- 6. Imagining the Other: Foreigners on the Chinese TV Screen / Geng Song -- 7. When Foreigners Perform the Chinese Nation: Televised Global Chinese Language Competitions / Lauren Gorfinkel and Andrew Chubb -- 8. Make the Present Serve the Past: Restaging On Guard beneath the Neon Lights in Contemporary China / Rong Cai -- 9. Remoulding Heroes: The Erasure of Class Discourse in the Red Classics Television Drama Adaptations / Qian Gong -- 10. Tianxia Revisited: Family and Empire on the Television Screen / Kun Qian.