Our aim was to produce an account of citizenship formation amongst the young in contemporary China. We are exploring the degree to which dedicated children's media products contribute to a sense of belonging within a national community. We also aim to identify the direct and indirect ways in which Chinese media policy confronts this issue in a transnational media marketplace. Our results from 1999 centred around film history and contemporary film production for children. We discovered that, whilst many adults dedicate themselves to the production of morally acceptable films for the young, they also admit that their own children are not inspired by their work.
Children prefer television.
In 2000 I spent time with children at two primary schools in Beijing, and they confirmed this view. In the ensuing stages of the project we will be tracing the extent to which children's preferences and adult intentions conflict, and the ramifications this has for the maintenance of a national concept of citizenship. Future research will analyse how key aspects of media policy and media content are mobilised to enable the subjective formation of children as citizens in China. The emphasis will be on the textual analysis of media content in relation to stated aims of citizen formation in China. Implicit and explicit descriptions of a good citizen will be extracted from media content outside the world of children's media, in order to adequately contextualise the comparative position of children as political subjects.