This thesis investigates the centrality of media spectacles in contemporary Chinese media culture, as sites of contestation over identity, citizenship and ethics. It examines four media spectacles - the media event of the new millennium celebrations, the news event of SARS reportage, the media stories about AIDS and SARS by new media users, and the media campaign war between Falun Gong and the Chinese state - to show how such contestation occurs in the interplay between the state and the non-state. It argues that the praxis to define identity, citizenship and ethics is not only in contestation (featuring resistance and opposition), but also in conjunction (characterized by mutual accommodation and appropriation) between the state and the non-state. Chinese modernity is produced in such interplay. / This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of Chinese media culture, which combines theories from media studies and critical theory with those from China studies, particularly cultural studies in and about China. Chapter One examines trajectories of studies on Chinese media and culture within the context of China's structural transformations in the post-Mao era. It also offers conceptual discussions of counter narratives of modernity as a tripartite concept and Chinese media spectacles in relation to the thematic structure of the thesis. Chapter Two examines the interplay of the state and the non-state through a case study of the new millennium celebrations. It argues that the interplay produces a rejuvenation millennialism that harbingers China's second coming in the third millennium. This rejuvenation millennialism is a hybrid discourse of nostalgia, nationalism, and utopianism, all of which require a post as their signifier. Chapter Three uses SARS reportage as a case study to examine the intellectual politics of Chinese journalists in their interplay with the state and the society. It shows how journalists use strategies of double-time narration to mediate the different logics that are imposed upon them. It argues that mediation journalism defines and confines contemporary Chinese journalism. / Chapter Four studies media stories about AIDS (the case of Li Jiaming) and SARS (the cases of Sun Zhigang and SMS rhymes about SARS) that are produced, circulated and consumed by Internet and mobile phone users in urban China. It shows how new media users are able to re-configure their subjectivities through the interplay with the state and intellectual/journalist communities. It argues that by allowing the reformation of political subjectivities, talking, linking and clicking has become an important means of exercising citizenship for the subjects of postsocialist China. Chapter Five examines Falun Gong's media campaign war with the state, with the focus on their representations of the body, in order to argue that the contestation between the state and the non-state constitutes a crisis not only for body politics but also for ethics. Falun Gong represents an historical force to split the ethics of the self and the nation from the politics of the state. Representing four aspects of counter narratives of modernity in China, these four media spectacles will inform Chinese politics, culture, society and everyday life in the 21st century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245710 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Yu, Haiqing |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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