Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century ─ Entertaining the Nation

"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 relatesto 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?"--

Ruoyun Bai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and MediaHumanities and Centre of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Geng Song is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.