Kevin Latham

Nothing but the Truth: News Media, Power and Hegemony in South China

The post-Mao reform era in China has seen the demise of utopianism. Where once the rhetoric of an unfolding socialist utopia worked to spur on the masses in their subjugation to a national cause, since the 1980s the rhetoric has entailed varying degrees of hedonism with the proliferation of consumerism, individualism, self-reliance and personal responsibility devolved to the individual or family. This has produced Chinese worlds increasingly riven with anachronisms represented by the apparent contradictions of a “planned market” or “socialist market” economy. The realm of media production in the 1990s has found itself caught in the middle of this sphere of social and rhetorical contention, engendering its own contradictions. Indeed the contradictions exhibited there may be more exaggerated than elsewhere; most notably in how Party control of the media has continued alongside increasing pressures on media organizations to compete for readerships, audiences and advertisers on an open market. Characteristic of this situation has been the emergence of new forms of media populism.

Sms, Communication, And Citizenship In China's Information Society

ABSTRACT China has entered a new information age that calls for a reconsideration of some key presuppositions about the relationship between Chinese media, communication, society, and culture. These include stereotypes that dominate representations and understandings of China such as the appealing, though too simple, model of propaganda versus free speech and political repression versus democracy or those anticipating the emergence of a more or less Habermasian “public sphere.” Taking the example of mobile phone short messaging services (SMS), this article investigates the transforming relationships between Chinese media, power, political subjectivity, and citizenship. SMS now constitutes an important new set of communication practices in China. It is more widely used than the Internet and by a more diverse section of the population. In early 2005 per person, fifteen times more SMS messages than emails were being sent in China. Putting forward the idea of “orderly” and “disorderly” media it is suggested that while the Party voices its own rhetorics from the past, many people, particularly in the large metropolitan centres, are driving their own alternative visions of the future and forcing the authorities to engage with entirely new kinds of media practices that pose quite different challenges to those of the past.

Migration from China to the EU: the challenge within Europe

At the beginning of the 21st Century, we have witnessed a rapid growth in Chinese immigration to the European Union (EU), which has had a profound impact on local Chinese communities in various ways. This chapter aims to reveal the latest developments in Chinese immigration in the EU, as well as the new dynamics, features and impacts on local Chinese communities. The above questions are addressed by a combination of secondary data analysis and our own observation in Italy and the UK in recent years. Some challenging issues facing Chinese communities are highlighted.

China's media viewed through the prism of the Beijing Olympics

The Beijing Olympics made visible, through various media practices and events associated with them, a range of different component parts of the constantly and rapidly changing Chinese media landscape. By following the Chinese, and to some degree foreign, media coverage of the Olympics this paper presents a range of clear examples that draw our attention to some of the key ways in which Chinese media work and some of the important changes and developments that are currently taking place in this area of Chinese social life. The paper identifies the more important of these developments treating them under three broad interrelated headings. The first is the relationship of the media to the government and the paper argues that this relationship requires reconceptualisation in ways that avoid the stereotypical polarities of state control and resistance. The second area for discussion relates to the relationship between Chinese and foreign media. I will argue that coverage of Olympics-related events in both Chinese and foreign media reveal important transformations in this relationship. The third issue relates to the rapid growth of new media use in contemporary China. To understand contemporary developments in Chinese media it is impossible to ignore the emergence of new media and new technologies – the Internet, mobile phones, digital television and mobile television in particular. However, the emphasis will not only be on what is new. It is also important to consider how old media habits continue to shape new media agendas and transformations. The paper argues that these developments require us to reconceptualise the Chinese media landscape in ways that break with the established frames of reference.

Unimagined China: Media, Technologies and the Fragmentation of National Olympic Audiences

The Beijing Olympics were a global media event that marked Chinas arrival on international political and economic stages. The Chinese authorities made great efforts, and with much success, to present to the world the face of a strong, competent, efficient, welcoming and unified China. Political dissent was suppressed, although not eliminated, Beijing residents and taxi drivers were issued with guidelines of acceptable behaviour and dress, and broadcasters throughout the country celebrated the countrys outstanding sporting achievements in the Games. However, although centripetal forces of national unification behind the spirit of the Games were undeniably strong, there were nonetheless countless centrifugal forces arising through media practices that disturbed this sense of imagined national unity. With new media in particular, audience fragmentation has become an established feature of Chinas media landscape. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted before and during the Beijing Olympics to demonstrate the tension between these two opposing sets of forces. Through discussion of various media examples it suggests that both the notion of a China unified behind the forceful media representations of the Games and the notion of straightforward audience fragmentation need careful rethinking to take account of the complex interrelations between pressures encouraging national identification on the one hand and those of social, technological and mediated division and diversification on the other hand.

Book Review: Jing WANG, Brand New China: Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. xiii + 411 pp., with index. ISBN: 978-0-674-02680-3 (hc). Price: US

Brand New China is a unique volume in many ways. For one thing, it tackles in detail the changing landscape of advertising in China with particular attention to an industry perspective that derives from first-hand working experience. There is surprisingly little literature on advertising in China and this book usefully addresses that lack. Yet this is not just a book on advertising in China. Jing Wang rightly seeks to complicate the topic of advertising by pointing to some of the ways in which to understand advertising, you first have to understand China’s media landscape more generally as well as something of China’s diverse and rapidly evolving popular cultural scenes. The author also examines relationships often oversimplified in writing of all sorts on Chinese media: the relationship between “state-controlled media” and audiences, between the market and the state, between commercialism and creativity, individualism or youth culture, to name but a few. This position is best elaborated in the concluding chapter of the volume. For all of this, this volume is very welcome and offers some much-needed insights into the complex world of Chinese media production and consumption. However, that said, the volume also falls victim to its own ambition and does not always deliver on the promises it purports to offer. For example, the book appears to be aimed at two usually distinct audiences: media, cultural, and China Studies scholars on the one hand and advertisers, marketers, and business people with an interest in China on the other. For sure there are potentially fruitful collaborations to be formulated between these two groups, but this volume, on the whole, fails to achieve such ends. The volume therefore seems to display a rather schizophrenic character that is likely to appeal to one readership at one moment, while possibly losing the attention of the other, only to reverse this appeal a moment later—particularly in the earlier chapters of the book. Indeed, in one chapter, Jing Wang even acknowledges this by suggesting business readers might be advised to skip the last section and move on directly to the next chapter. In the earlier chapters the balance lies perhaps more with the business readership, while the later chapters deal with issues and debates more likely of interest to social scientists. C hina Inform aion X X I(2)