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

ISBN-13: 9780415745123 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 200 str.

Ruoyun Bai; Geng Song

Opis

Television is arguably the most influential medium in contemporary China. The past two decades witnessed the rise of television entertainment in 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 and, paradox-permeated, and highly unpredictable conditions of Chinese post-socialism. This book argues for a serious engagement with television entertainment. rethinking of Chinese television and a re-conceptualization of entertainment as a fluid landscape. Specifically, the bookIt 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 relates to 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? The book presents a number of studies of popular television programs that are sensitive to the changing production and regulatory contexts for Chinese television in the twenty-first century.nd 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? As an interdisciplinary study of the television industry, this book covers a number of important issues in China today, such as censorship, nationalism, consumerism, social justice and the central and local authorities. As such, it will appeal to a broad audience including students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.

Recenzje

Contributors used various techniques―textual analysis, interviews, correspondence--to gather data, and they support their arguments with interesting examples of particular shows, copious endnotes, and full bibliographies. - J. A. Lent, independent scholar

Spis treści

Introduction  Part I: Entertaining TV - A New Territory of Significance 1, Teaching People How to Live: Shenghuo Programs on Chinese Television 2. "The New Family Mediator": TV Mediation Programs in China’s "Harmonious Society" 3. The Long Commute: Mobile Television and the Seamless Social  Part II: "Curbing Entertainment" 4. "Clean Up the Screen": Regulating Television Entertainment in the 2000’s 5. Rethinking Censorship in China—The Case of Snail House  Part III: Commercial Television and the Reconfiguration of History, Memory, and Nationalism 6. Imagining the Other: Foreigners on the Chinese TV Screen 7. When Foreigners Perform the Chinese Nation: Televised Global Chinese Language Competitions 8. Make the Present Serve the Past: Restaging On Guard beneath the Neon Lights in Contemporary China 9. Remoulding Heroes: The Erasure of Class Discourse in the Red Classics Television Drama Adaptation 10. Tianxia Revisited: Family and Empire on the Television Screen