Television and the Modernization Ideal in 1980s China: Dazzling the Eyes explores Chinese television history in the pivotal decade of the 1980s and explains the intellectual reception of television in China during this time. While the Chinese media has often been a topic within studies of globalization and the global political economy, scholarly attention to the history of Chinese television requires a more extensive and critical view of the interaction between television and culture. Using theories of media technology, globalization, and gender studies supplemented by Chinese periodicals including Life Out of 8 Hours, Popular TV, Popular Cinema, Modern Family, and Chinese Advertising, as well as oral history interviews, this book re-examines how Western technology was introduced to and embedded into Chinese culture. Wen compares and analyzes television dramas produced in China and imported from other nations while examining the interaction between various ideologies of Chinese society and those of the international media. Moreover, she explores how the hybridity between Western television culture and Chinese traditions were represented in popular Chinese visual media, specifically the confusions and ambitions of modernization and the negotiation between tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism, in the intellectual reception of television in China.

This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation’s technological achievements.

The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices, and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal society. Through examining nine cases contesting the ideals of gender, sexuality, Chineseness, and TV production and consumption, the book also reveals the generative, negotiative ways in which queerness works productively within and against mainstream, seemingly heterosexual-oriented, televisual industries and fan spaces. “This cornucopia of fresh and original essays opens our eyes to the burgeoning queer television culture thriving beneath official media crackdowns in China. As diverse as the phenomenon it analyses, Queer TV China is the spark that will ignite a prairie fire of future scholarship.” —Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London “This timely volume explores the various possibilities and nuances of queerness in Chinese TV and fannish culture. Challenging the dichotomy of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ representations of gender and sexual minorities, Queer TV China argues for a multilayered and queer-informed understanding of the production, consumption, censorship, and recreation of Chinese television today.” —Geng Song, Associate Professor and Director of Translation Program, University of Hong Kong

China is at the crux of reforming, professionalising, and internationalising its cultural and creative industries. These industries are at the forefront of China's move towards the status of a developed country. In this comprehensive Handbook, international experts including leading Mainland scholars examine the background to China's cultural and creative industries as well as the challenges ahead. The chapters represent the cutting-edge of scholarship, setting out the future directions of culture, creativity and innovation in China. Combining interdisciplinary approaches with contemporary social and economic theory, the contributors examine developments in art, cultural tourism, urbanism, digital media, e-commerce, fashion and architectural design, publishing, film, television, animation, documentary, music and festivals. Students of Chinese culture and society will find this Handbook to be an invaluable resource. Scholars working on topics related to China's emergence and its cultural aspirations will also find the themes discussed in this book to be of interest. Contributors:R. Bai, M. Cheung, Y. Chu, P. Chung, J. Dai, J. De Kloet, A.Y.H. Fung, L. Gorfinkel, M. Guo, E.C. Hendriks, C.M. Herr, V. Ho, Y. Huang, M. Keane, W. Lei, H. Li, W. Li, Y. Li, W. Lei, B. Liboriussen, T. Lindgren, R. Ma, L. Montgomery, E. Priest, Z. Qiu, X. Ren, F. Schneider, W. Sun, M.A. Ulfstjerne, J. Wang, Q. Wang, C. Hing-Yuk Wong, H. Wu, B. Yecies, L. Yi, N. Yi, X. Zhang, E.J. Zhao, J. Zheng

The serial narrative is one of the most robust and popular forms of storytelling in contemporary China. With a domestic audience of one billion-plus and growing transnational influence and accessibility, this form of storytelling is becoming the centerpiece of a fast-growing digital entertainment industry and a new symbol and carrier of China’s soft power. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. The book addresses a conspicuous paradox in Chinese popular culture today: the coexistence of increasingly diverse gender presentations and conservative gender policing by the government, viewers, and society. Using first-hand data collected through interviews and focus group discussions with audiences comprising viewers of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds, Televising Chineseness sheds light on how television culture relates to the power mechanisms and truth regimes that shape the understanding of gender and the construction of gendered subjects in postsocialist China.

Whether willingly or unwillingly, public celebrities are often the focus of discussion of moral matters and political causes, but how does this sort of celebrity culture function in a country such as China with a powerful central state? Contemporary Chinese Celebrities explores how in today's China, celebrity figures embody, conflict with and engage with social, civil, moral and economic issues. Shenshen Cai examines the state's governance of celebrity activism and the interplay between the propaganda machine and the stars. Analyzing examples of scandalous celebrities who act as activists in a moral domain which is tightly governed by the state, Cai also studies several sports stars who have emerged in recent years as political activists in China, and their open defiance of the Chinese political system that poses unprecedented challenge to the Party's rule.

Brightly coloured prints, portraying model behaviour or a better future, have been a ubiquitous element of Chinese political culture from Imperial times until present. As economic reform swept the People's Republic in the 1980s, visual propaganda ceased to depict the tanned and muscular labourers in a proletarian utopia, so typical of preceding decades. Instead, Western icons of progress and development were employed: high-speed bullet trains, spacecraft, high-rise buildings, gridlocked free-ways and projections of general affluence. Socialist Realism was phased out by design and mixed- media techniques that were influenced by Western advertising. This lavishly illustrated study traces the development of the style and content of the Chinese propaganda poster in the decade of reform, from its traditional origins to its use as a tool for political and economic purposes.

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 collection of essays brings together the first comprehensive study of TV drama in China. Examining in depth the production, distribution and consumption of TV drama, the international team of experts demonstrate why it remains the pre-eminent media form in China. The examples are diverse, highlighting the complexity of producing narrative content in a rapidly changing political and social environment. Genres examined include the revisionist Qing drama, historical and contemporary domestic dramas, anti-corruption dramas, "pink" dramas, Red Classics, stories from the Diaspora, and sit-coms. In addition to genres, the collection explores industry dynamics: how TV dramas are marketed and consumed on DVD, and China's aspirations to export its television drama rights. The book provides an international and cross-cultural perspective with chapters on Taiwanese TV drama in China, the impact of South Korean drama, and trans-border production between the Mainland and Hong Kong.

In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. Featuring a villainous high-ranking government official, it was the first in a series of wildly popular corruption dramas that riveted the nation. Staging Corruption looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of corruption dramas and the ways in which they express the collective dreams and nightmares of China in the market-reform era. It also considers how these dramas - as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political censorship - unveil complicated relationships between power, media, and society. This book will be essential reading for those following China's ongoing struggles with the highly volatile socio-political issue of corruption.