Mapping Media in China is the first book-length study that goes below the 'national' scale to focus on the rich diversity of media in China from local, provincial and regional angles. This book explores the media as both a reflection of the diversity within China and as an active agent behind these growing differences. It will be invaluable to both students and scholars of Chinese and Asian studies, media and communication studies, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.

This volume focuses on the intersection of religion and media in China, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear on the role of religion in the lives of individuals and greater shifts within Chinese society in an increasingly media-saturated environment. With case studies focusing on Mainland China (including Tibet), Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities outside Asia, contributors consider topics including the historical and ideological roots of media representations of religion, expressions of religious faith online and in social media, state intervention (through both censorship and propaganda), religious institutions’ and communities’ use of various forms of media, and the role of the media in relations between online/offline and local/diaspora communities. Chapters engage with the major religious traditions practiced in contemporary China, namely Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and new religious movements. Religion and the Media in China serves as a critical survey of case studies and suggests theoretical and methodological tools for a thorough and systematic study of religion in modern China. Contributors to the volume include historians of religion, sinologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and media and communication scholars. The critical theories that contributors develop around key concepts in religion—such as authority, community, church, ethics, pilgrimage, ritual, text, and practice—contribute to advancing the emerging field of religion and media studies.

This book examines the use and culture of digital media in Chinese cities. By examining examples and data from Chinese and global social media platforms, the book argues that digital media facilitate Chinese people’s sense of local self and local identity. In doing so, the book moves on from the polarised debate regarding the democratic function of Chinese internet to instead examine the connection between digital technologies and the country’s history, culture and eventually, people and their everyday lives. It offers a rich analysis of a Chinese city in the digital age, and challenges the nationalistic approach to study China’s digital media culture.

Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.

Studies of Hong Kong media primarily examine whether China will crush Hong Kong’s media freedom. This book however traces the root problem of Hong Kong media back to the colonial era, demonstrating that before the resumption of Chinese sovereignty there already existed a uniquely Hong Kong brand of hyper-marketized and oligopolistic media system. The system, encouraged by the British colonial government, was subsequently aggravated by the Chinese government. This peculiar system is highly susceptible to state intervention and structurally disadvantaged dissent and marginal groups before and after 1997. The book stresses that this hyper-marketized media system has been constantly challenged. Through a historical study of media stigmatization of youth, this book proposes that over the years various counter forces have penetrated the structurally lopsided Hong Kong media: independent, public, popular and news media all make occasional subversive alliances to disrupt the mainstream, and news media, with a strong liberal professionalism, provide the most subversive space for challenging cultural hegemony. The book offers an alternative and fascinating account of the dynamics between hegemonic closure and day-to-day resistance in Hong Kong media in both the colonial and post-colonial eras, arguing that the Hong Kong case generates important insights for understanding ideological struggles in capitalist media.

This open access book contains a collection of rare geologic maps and figures made by Chinese geologists in the last century. Preserved in National Geological Archives of China, these artworks demonstrate the development and innovation of geological mapping technology in China in the past 100 years. The collections are highly scientific and artistic, with most of the hand-drawn maps featured with traditional Chinese painting techniques, while the newer ones being more accurate and embedded with more scientific information with the aid of computer techniques.

The contributors to this volume theorize Asian video cultures in the context of social movements, market economies, and local popular cultures to complicate notions of the Asian experience of global media. Whether discussing video platforms in Japan and Indonesia, K-pop reception videos, amateur music videos circulated via microSD cards in India, or the censorship of Bollywood films in Nigeria, the essays trace the myriad ways Asian video reshapes media politics and aesthetic practices. While many influential commentators overlook, denounce, and trivialize Asian video, the contributors here show how it belongs to the shifting core of contemporary global media, thereby moving conversations about Asian media beyond static East-West imaginaries, residual Cold War mentalities, triumphalist declarations about resurgent Asias, and budding jingoisms. In so doing, they write Asia's vibrant media practices into the mainstream of global media and cultural theories while challenging and complicating hegemonic ideas about the global as well as digital media. Contributors. Conerly Casey, Jenny Chio, Michelle Cho, Kay Dickinson, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Feng-Mei Heberer, Tzu-hui Celina Hung, Rahul Mukherjee, Joshua Neves, Bhaskar Sarkar, Nishant Shah, Abhigyan Singh, SV Srinivas, Marc Steinberg, Chia-chi Wu, Patricia Zimmerman

Winner of the 2014 Bonnie Ritter Book Award Winner of the 2013 James W. Carey Media Research Award As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to “see the world” and gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. Based on immersive fieldwork, Cara Wallis provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time. While simultaneously situating her work within the fields of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, Wallis explores the way in which the cell phone has been integrated into the transforming social structures and practices of contemporary China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women—a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as “backward” and “other”—to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity. In this theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis, Wallis provides original insight into the co-construction of technology and subjectivity as well as the multiple forces that shape contemporary China.

Mapping Media in China is the first book-length study that goes below the ‘national’ scale to focus on the rich diversity of media in China from local, provincial and regional angles. China’s media has played a crucial role in shaping and directing the country’s social and cultural changes, and whilst these shifts have often been discussed as a single and coherent phenomenon, this ignores the vast array of local and regional variations within the country’s borders. This book explores media as both a reflection of the diversity within China and as an active agent behind these growing differences. It examines the role of media in shaping regional, provincial and local identities through the prism of media economics and technology, media practices, audiences, as well as media discourses. The book covers a wide range of themes, including civil society, political resistance, state power and the production and consumption of place-specific memory and imagination. With contributions from around the world, including original ethnographic material from scholars based in China, Mapping Media in China is an original book which spans a broad range of disciplines. It will be invaluable to both students and scholars of Chinese and Asian studies, media and communication studies, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.

The first systematic, comprehensive and critical English-language study of radio in China, this book documents a historical understanding of Chinese radio from the early twentieth century to the present. Covering both public matters and private lives, Radio and Social Transformation in China analyses a range of themes from healthcare, migration and education, to intimacy, family and friendship. Through a concentrated and thorough scrutiny of a variety of new genres and radio practices in post-Mao China, it also investigates the interaction between radio and social change, particularly in the era of economic reform. Building on the core theoretical concept of ‘compressed modernity’, each of the radio genres explored is shown to embody China’s efforts to achieve modernity, while simultaneously exemplifying radio’s capacity to manage the challenges that have arisen from the country’s distinctive and perhaps unique process of modernization. Written in an engaging style, this book makes an important contribution to radio history internationally. As such, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of broadcast media, radio and Communication Studies, as well as Chinese culture and society.