1

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media

Edited by
Professor Gary D. Rawnsley and
Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley

CONTENT

List of tables
List of figures
List of contributors
Members of the Editorial Board
Editorial Note
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Gary D. Rawnsley & Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley

Part I: The Development of the Study and the Structure of Chinese Media

1. (Re)-Focusing on the Target: Reflections on a Trajectory of Studying the Chinese

Media
Yuezhi Zhao

2. China, Soft Power and Imperialism

Colin Sparks

3. Evaluating Chinese Media Policy: Objectives and Contradictions

Rogier Creemers

Part II: Journalism, Press Freedom and Social Mobilisation

4. Western Missionaries and Origins of the Modern Chinese Press

Yuntao Zhang

5. Setting the Press Boundaries: The Case of the Southern (Nanfang) Media Group
Chujie Chen

6. Chinese Investigative Journalism in the Twenty-First Century

Hugo de Burgh

7. From Control to Competition: A Comparative Study of the Party Press and

Popular Press
Hsiao-wen Lee

8. Press Freedom in Hong Kong: Interactions between State, Media and Society
Francis L. F. Lee
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9. Media and Social Mobilisation in Hong Kong

Joseph M. Chan and Francis L. F. Lee

10. Citizen Journalists as an Empowering Community for Change: A Case Study of a

Taiwanese Online Platform ‘PeoPo’
Chen-ling Hung

Part III: The Internet, Public Sphere and Media Culture

11. Politics and Social Media in China

Lars Willnat, Lu Wei and Jason A. Martin

12. Online Chinese Nationalism and Its Nationalist Discourses

Yiben Ma

13. A Cyberconflict Analysis of Chinese Dissidents Focusing on Civil Society, Mass

Incidents and Labour Resistance
Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson

14. Workers and Peasants as Historical Subjects: The Formation of Working Class
Media Cultures in China
Wanning Sun

15. An Emerging Middle Class Public Sphere in China? Analysis of News Media
Representation of ‘Self Tax Declaration’
Qian (Sarah) Gong

16. Expressing Myself, Connecting with You: Young Taiwanese Females’

Photographic Self-Portraiture on Wretch Album
Yin-han Wang

17. Against the Grain: The Battle for Public Service Broadcasting in Taiwan
Chun-wei Daniel Lin

18. Public Service Television in China

Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Chien-san Feng

Part IV: Market, Production and the Media Industries

19. The Changing Role of Copyright in China’s Emergent Media Economy

Lucy Montgomery and Xiang Ren

20. Gamers, State and Online Games

Anthony Y. H. Fung

21. The Geographical Clustering of Chinese Media Production

Michael Keane
 3

22. The Politics and Poetics of Television Documentary in China

Qing Cao

23. Contemporary Chinese Historical TV Drama as a Cultural Genre: Production,

Consumption and the State Power
George Dawei Guo

24. Live Television Production of Media Events in China: The Case of the Beijing
Olympic Games
Limin Liang

25. Negotiated Discursive Struggles in Hyper-Marketised and Oligopolistic Media

System: The Case of Hong Kong
Charles Chi-wai Cheung

Part V. Chinese Media and the World

26. Internationalisation of China’s Television: History, Development and New

Trends
Junhao Hong and Youling Liu

27. Decoding the Chinese Media in Flux: American Correspondents as an Interpretive

Community
Yunya Song

28. Chinese International Broadcasting, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

Gary Rawnsley

Chinese Glossary: Selected Chinese Names and Terms

Chinese Dynasties at a Glance
Index
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ABSTRACT OF EACH CHAPTER

1. (Re)-Focusing on the Target: Reflections on a Trajectory of Studying the

Chinese Media

Yuezhi Zhao

In the context of China’s rapid transformation in a turbulent global system since the

late 1970s, to study the Chinese media is to shoot at a target that appears easy to focus

on at first sight, but is in actuality rather elusive. On the surface, the target appears

static as there has not been any radical transformation in the basic structure of the

Chinese media system after more than thirty years of reform. Upon closer

examination, however, the target has both undergone dramatic mutations in its shape

and shed much of its original colour. Moreover, in the context of a highly unstable

and rapidly evolving global order, the target has not only repeatedly defied

conventional expectations in terms of the direction of its movement, but also is

realigning its geopolitical relations with other objects and streams of flow in the

global media universe. Which direction to look at? What does the target look like at a

particular moment? What lenses to use and how to aim? What kind of shooting guns

do we have in hand and are they adequate for the purpose? No less important, isn’t it

the case that the shape and colour of the target, our ways of approaching it, even the

very language we use to define and describe it, very much depends on who we are and

where we stand as scholars? Finally, beyond the imperative of surviving the academic

curse of publishing or perishing, what is this analysis for? This chapter re-examines

the author’s own academic endeavour in the field. It is an exercise of intellectual self-
 5

reflectivity and it discusses both the substantive and methodological issues involved

in studying the Chinese media.

2. China, Soft Power and Imperialism

Colin Sparks

This chapter is primarily concerned with developing an approach that facilitates the

understanding of the international cultural impact consequent upon China’s rise. The

author compares two major approaches — soft power vs. cultural imperialism — from

the point of view of their utility in helping us understand current developments. It

begins with a brief statement of the two positions and makes some comparisons

between their claims. It then considers them from the point of view of their ability to

illuminate a number of key problems raised by the role of culture in international

relations. These approaches, both developed with the US experience very much in

mind, are shown to be lacking in some important dimensions necessary to explain

current developments. Neither on its own is sufficiently developed as to provide an

adequate theoretical framework to study the contemporary situation. In response to

these shortcomings, an attempt is made to use these insights to develop a theoretical

framework that is adequate to solving the problems presented by the distinctive

features of the Chinese case.

3. Evaluating Chinese Media Policy: Objectives and Contradictions

Rogier Creemers
 6

In recent years, there have been great changes in the Chinese media environment

which have been mainly driven by technological and commercial developments.

Social media have flourished, the film sector has expanded and commercial television

stations have grown ever more successful. However, in China’s particular political-

legal environment, these developments pose challenges to government and policy

making, as the media administration aims to reconcile political objectives, such as

maintaining legitimacy, social objectives, such as youth protection, and economic

objectives. Furthermore, the party’s supremacy in political and legal matters has

created a situation where overarching constitutional notions, which can underpin the

structure of governance, are absent. At the same time, it is clear that there is a strong

institutional structure to govern the sphere of public communication which has its

own underpinnings and dynamics. How then can we make sense of the content and

structure of this Chinese media governance apparat? This chapter answers a double

question. First, it will analyse the central philosophical underpinnings of the current

Chinese communication order as well as their historical origins. Second, it will

illustrate how the current governance structure — both in terms of institutional

structuring and content of media rules — is set up in order to implement these

objectives. Finally, it will briefly analyse the severe problems the government faces

implementing media regulation in the rapidly shifting Chinese environment.

4. Western Missionaries and Origins of the Modern Chinese Press

Yuntao Zhang

China can lay claim to being the oldest print civilization in the world. However a

modern culture of journalism and publishing was in fact a relatively late arrival,
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coinciding with the import of modern printing technology from the west. For over a

thousand years, Chinese journalism was dominated by the official gazette called

DiBao (Peking Gazette). This organ of the imperial state comprised edicts, news of

government appointments and court affairs, and served a small privileged readership.

It was not until 1815 that what could be considered the first modern periodical

(though not strictly speaking a Chinese publication) was to appear in China. This was

the work of two British missionaries, Robert Morrison and William Milne, and it

marked the beginnings of a process, spanning the nineteenth century, in which a group

of predominantly British and American Protestant missionaries pursued a strategy of

evangelism centred on the development of journalism, publishing and printing

enterprises in China. This chapter provides a short outline of this process and some

reflections on its wider cultural consequences.

5. Setting the Press Boundaries: The Case of the Southern (Nanfang) Media Group

Chujie Chen

This research is concerned with the dialectic relationship between political-economic

constraints and journalistic agency that contribute to the transformation of journalism.

We should ask what kind of factors gave rise to the outspokenness of the Nanfang

subsidiary papers and how their journalists pushed the limits of the permissible in

China. Though much attention has been paid to the Nanfang newspapers, relatively

few consider Nanfang as a whole and the intra-organisational relations within the

group. This chapter synthesises existing studies on journalistic practices at Nanfang

and its maverick subsidiary papers in particular. Overall, this chapter attempts to

examine (1) the political-economic settings where Nanfang is located; (2) the
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relationship between the parent newspaper Nanfang Daily and its maverick

subsidiaries in terms of organisational culture, division of labour, and the flow of

human resources; (3) the strategic rituals used by the press to cope with or even

bypass the severe restrictions imposed by power holders; and (4) the implications of

strategic rituals for media autonomy.

6. Chinese Investigative Journalism in the Twenty-First Century

Hugo de Burgh

Rather than trying to define investigative journalism by its motivations and heroics,

this chapter defines investigative journalism in China according to its method of

approach and by the techniques associated with it, techniques that are not necessarily

peculiar to investigative journalism, but which are characteristic of them. Some

investigative journalists reject the very category, claiming that all journalism is or

ought to be investigative, in the sense that checking and digging are intrinsic to good

journalism. In general, however, Chinese investigative journalists are expected to

display specific characteristics. They should be revelatory (provide new information,

i.e. qishi xing, and expose hidden things, that is, jiefa xing); accusatory of bad

people/organisations (qianze xing), and moralistic (implying that journalists apply

higher moral standards, i.e. shuojiao xing); and finally, willing to take risks (fengxian

xing). This chapter explains these characteristics in detail and discusses the particular

skills and techniques employed by journalists to achieve their aims.

7. From Control to Competition: A Comparative Study of the Party Press and

Popular Press
 9

Hsiao-wen Lee

This chapter looks at how the newspaper industry in China has changed from being a

party and government-led propaganda tool to become a more commercially market-

oriented product. This will be achieved by first looking at four key influencing

factors: (1) circulation, (2) advertising revenue, (3) distribution and (4) organisation of

press groups. Second, the chapter explores how different variables impact on the news

media: political control, market competition and professional performance. Then

finally through the analysis of four news events during the period between 2005 and

2007, the discussions identify the various ways news coverage has been influenced.

This chapter will argue that the popular market-oriented newspapers not only try to

touch the party line when doing their reports, but also surrender themselves to wider

commercial considerations.

8. Press Freedom in Hong Kong: Interactions between State, Media and Society

Francis L. F. Lee

This chapter reviews the politics of press freedom in Hong Kong by focusing on the

interaction between the state, the local media and civil society. Without dismissing the

importance of structural constraints, the interactional perspective emphasises the

capability of actors to influence outcomes — the quality and quantity of press

freedom in the present case — through negotiating, contesting, and/or collaborating

with each other. Each player in the state-media-society triad has its own basic

concerns and goals. Given their respective aims and perspectives, the players develop

strategies to interact with each other. At the same time, the players also need to
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respond to changing social and political contexts. In particular, major political events

may lead to changing perceptions of reality, and the players may alter their strategies

as a result. Consistent with recent research on political developments in Hong Kong,

this chapter treats the 1 July protest in 2003, in which 500,000 people protested

against the Special Administrative Region (SAR) government, as a critical event that

had significant repercussions on the China-Hong Kong relationship. Before 2003,

China was largely willing to grant an ‘exceptional’ degree of press freedom to the

city’s media. It relied on an informal system of politics marked by self-censorship and

inducement to contain the Hong Kong press. While these elements persisted after

2003, the state developed new strategies to control and co-opt the Hong Kong press as

the government began to intervene more openly in Hong Kong society. Yet civil

society has also become more active in monitoring press performance, so that by 2013,

Hong Kong’s press is more polarised and more proactive in voicing its concerns.

9. Media and Social Mobilisation in Hong Kong

Joseph M. Chan and Francis L. F. Lee

This chapter provides a conceptual overview of the roles played by the mass media

and new media platforms in the formation of social movements and specific instances

of collective actions in Hong Kong. It first discusses the characteristics and

development of contentious collective actions in contemporary Hong Kong in order to

provide the broader background against which the roles of media communications can

be understood. It then examines important issues in the relationship between media

and social mobilisation, such as how the professional news media cover social

protests.
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10. Citizen Journalists as an Empowering Community for Change: A Case Study of

a Taiwanese Online Platform ‘PeoPo’

Chen-ling Hung

In 2007, Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS) established the PeoPo Citizen

Journalism Platform to encourage public participation in news production. As a

friendly web2.0 platform, PeoPo was designed for citizens to report and share news

stories online. In addition, training curricula and courses are provided to empower

Taiwanese citizens and organisations so that they are capable of reporting on

important environmental, socio-economic and cultural issues. PeoPo’s efforts

attracted attention from the mainstream media and international news organisations.

Philipe Harding of BBC World News has commented that PeoPo could be a model for

citizen journalism and ‘one of the best strategies for extending public media service in

the digital era’. Why can PeoPo be influential? How is the platform designed and

operated? What are the impacts on participants from the viewpoint of empowerment?

What implications does it have on our understanding of the media, online journalism

and citizen participation? To answer these questions, this chapter applies the concepts

of participatory communication and citizen journalism to examine the development

and influences of PeoPo. The discussion includes a brief analysis of this platform and

interviews with the platform manager and its citizen reporters. This study thus aims to

analyse the practice and influences of PeoPo and how this model would advance our

understanding of citizen journalism.

11. Politics and Social Media in China

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Lars Willnat, Lu Wei and Jason A. Martin

This chapter takes stock of the current state of the internet in China by analysing what

digital media are available, how they are used within China’s unique political and

social environment, and what effects they might have on political engagement among

ordinary Chinese. In doing so, the authors rely on as much empirical evidence as

possible, even though they realise that this is a fairly new and unexplored topic among

China’s scholars. The chapter begins with a description of internet access in China,

followed by a more detailed look at the availability and use of social media and

blogging. It then discusses the growing significance of online video in China’s public

sphere and how this medium has become an important tool for undermining the

government’s efforts at controlling social media. Finally, the chapter reviews the

current literature on the potential link between social media and political engagement

in China.

12. Online Chinese Nationalism and Its Nationalist Discourses

Yiben Ma

No matter how online Chinese nationalism is studied, whether seeing its outgrowth as

a signal of an emerging civil society or as a form of public opinion shaping Chinese

foreign policies, the phenomenon can hardly be understood without taking two

perspectives into account. Firstly, while investigating the potentials of the internet to

bring changes to various aspects of Chinese nationalism, equal attention should be

paid to the historical, social and institutional context out of which online Chinese

nationalism comes into shape. Secondly, any study related to nationalism concerns
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two indispensable parts, namely the state, with which the masses identify their

loyalty; and the masses who translate their nationalist consciousness ‘into deeds of

organised action’. Taking both facts into consideration, this chapter aims to first of all

embed the concept of Chinese nationalism into a historical, social and institutional

context and explain how the concept has evolved and transformed over time in both

official and popular discourses. Then it sheds light on the ‘Chinese internet’ per se -

the immediate soil where online Chinese nationalism grows. It inspects the

peculiarities of the internet that configure the production, dissemination and

discussion of online Chinese nationalism. Finally, it endeavours to set up

interrelations between Chinese nationalism and the internet by examining the extent to

which the internet brings changes to the expression and discussion of Chinese

nationalism, and challenges the relations between official and popular players over

nationalism issues.

13. A Cyberconflict Analysis of Chinese Dissidents Focusing on Civil Society, Mass

Incidents and Labour Resistance

Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson

This chapter employs the cyberconflict perspective to offer an in-depth analysis of

Chinese dissidents in the People’s Republic of China focusing particularly on the

2000s. A distinction is drawn between socio-political (or active) social movement

uses of the internet — which focus on organisation, mobilisation and the networked

form of the medium itself — and ethno-religious (or reactive) social movement uses,

which subordinate the medium to vertical logics. These are often expressed in terms
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of ad hoc mobilisations and tit-for-tat defacements and cyberattacks adhering to

closed and fixed identities, such as nationality, religion and ethnicity.

14. Workers and Peasants as Historical Subjects: The Formation of Working

Class Media Cultures in China

Wanning Sun

Economic reforms, industrialisation, urbanisation and migration since the 1980s have

given rise to what is now often described as the ‘new working class’ in China. But is

there such a thing as a working class media culture, and if so, what shape and form

does a working class media culture take? What are the political, social and economic

contexts in which a working class media culture comes to exist? And finally, if there

is such a thing as the working class media culture, then what is the relationship

between class analysis and media studies in China, and indeed how should future

research agendas be shaped by these concerns? This chapter addresses these

questions.

15. An Emerging Middle Class Public Sphere in China? Analysis of News Media

Representation of ‘Self Tax Declaration’

Qian (Sarah) Gong

This chapter draws on the concept of the public sphere to analyse the democratic

potential of the news media in China. It emphasises that in addition to media

autonomy, public deliberation based on plural social interests is another major

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dimension of media democracy. It analyses three news media that represent diverse

social interests as well as the ‘journalism domain’ and ‘civic forum’ sectors of the

public sphere. Through analysing their representation of a recent tax policy which

aims to reduce income inequality, this chapter examines their autonomous civic

deliberative function as well as their representative function of plural social interests,

drawn from the revisited public sphere concept. It then critically discusses the

potential of an emerging middle-class media public sphere in China, which falls short

in its inclusion of a wider range of diverse and pluralistic social interests.

16. Expressing Myself, Connecting with You: Young Taiwanese Females’

Photographic Self-Portraiture on Wretch Album

Yin-han Wang

This chapter is part of a broader research project that examines Taiwanese girls’

identity through internet self-portraiture. The empirical data presented in this chapter is

based on interviews with forty-two girls aged 13–20 who post self-portraits on Wretch,

the most popular social networking site in Taiwan when this project commenced.

Interviews were conducted between February and November 2010, mostly through

online instant messaging but also a few conducted face-to-face in southern Taiwan.

While self-portraiture can be explored from many perspectives, and is sometimes

hastily dismissed as pure narcissism, this chapter takes an approach that seeks to

understand online self-portraiture as a form of mediated interpersonal communication.

The author brings together perspectives on personal photography, mobile

communication, and personal relationships in offline and online contexts, and examines
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the role of self-portraiture — as a kind of visual self-disclosure — in girls’ online and

offline interpersonal communication.

17. Against the Grain: The Battle for Public Service Broadcasting in Taiwan

Chun-wei Daniel Lin

This chapter engages with the debate around the expansion of Taiwanese Public

Service Broadcasting (PSB) in three main areas of inquiry and conceptualisation: (1)

the role of PSB from the perspective of critical political economy, (2) the media in

transitional societies with specific reference to Taiwan, and (3) the politics of media

representation in the Taiwanese context. One strand in the classic arguments in favour

of PSB is particularly addressed in this chapter, that is, the question of what role (if

any) PSB can and should play in a televisual environment where consumer choice has

been extended by the proliferation of cable and satellite channels. This chapter

examines if channel plurality addresses market failures and what distinctive role PSB

can play in a multi-channel age. While political and market forces threaten ‘the cultural

citizenship’ which stands for citizens’ rights of ‘access to the information and social

participation’, one important focus of this study is on the alliances and networks formed

by civil society groups or by business interests, and the ways these formations attempt

to intervene in the policy marking process by building public and media support and

influencing legislators. The competing claims of various groups about the expansion of

PSB are the central focus of this chapter.

18. Public Service Television in China

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Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Chien-san Feng

This chapter traces the development of public service television in the People’s

Republic of China (PRC). It unravels the endeavours by Chinese elites to reconcile

competing concerns from different sections of the society in implementing Public

Service Broadcasting (PSB) within the Chinese context. The authors use the term

public service television to include both Chinese public television channels and public

interest television. A study on the development of public service television in the PRC

reveals to a certain extent how China actually functions, that is, not necessarily as a

single-minded and highly efficient unit but as a fragmented entity within which lie

multiple, and often self-conflicting, interests and directions. Moreover, while an

examination of China’s internal debate on public service television may reaffirm a

universal value of PSB in modern public life, it also raises fundamental questions:

does PSB only exist in democracies? Can a non-democratic country such as the PRC

creates its own version of public service television and if so, how will the Chinese

audiences benefit from it?

19. The Changing Role of Copyright in China’s Emergent Media Economy

Lucy Montgomery and Xiang Ren

This chapter introduces the changing role of copyright in China from a historical

perspective. It begins by briefly tracing the history of copyright, from a censorship

related system associated with the emergence of the printing press in imperial China,

through modernisation during the Republican period, abolition under communism,

and finally to the introduction of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) first
 18

copyright law in 1990 and the nation’s entry into the World Trade Organisation

(WTO) in 2001.

20. Gamers, State and Online Games

Anthony Y. H. Fung

Freedom of the press and plurality of ideas have been enduring issues in the study of

the media. Recently, attention has turned to the cultural industries, sometimes also

known as creative industries. Broadcasting industries, music industries, film industries,

animation, online game industries and other internet-platform run industries are

examples of cultural industries. All these cultural industries in total have started to

accumulate huge profits and achieved considerable growth. In view of the economic

potential and market, and hence strong cultural influence, the state realises that its

influence and control should be extended to these industries. This chapter explains

how the Chinese authorities attempted to extend their manipulative logic over the

emerging creative or cultural industries. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the

government’s effort to (re)gain control over the online game industry, a rapidly

growing and highly profitable new media platform in which the state has had no

experience in terms of both content production and control.

21. The Geographical Clustering of Chinese Media Production

Michael Keane
 19

This chapter examines the geography of audio-visual media production against the

backdrop of China’s attempt to modernise and professionalise its media institutions.

The author begins with a brief summary of key changes that have transpired before

asking what these changes mean for researchers of China’s media. In contrast to many

accounts of China’s media that begin with the political imperative, the chapter argues

that commercial reforms of the media system are the key driver of change. The

chapter then looks at examples of the realignment of regional media production in

television, film and animation before focusing on how Beijing and Shanghai have

competed to be media industry centres.

22. The Politics and Poetics of Television Documentary in China

Qing Cao

The roots of documentary film run deep in China’s political history. However, the

commercialisation drive of the media industry in the 1990s dislodged documentary

film from state monopoly. Since then it has expanded substantially in function,

subject matter, style and voice. The partial de-politicisation of the media industry has

released the pent-up creative energy of media professionals. The current popularity of

TV documentary, in contrast to the tired dogmatic propagandist films, signifies a

structural change in political communication, in state-society relations and in the

dynamics of socio-political transformation. Nonetheless, documentary films like all

other forms of media are centrally controlled, and subject to the direct administrative

supervision of the State Administration of Press, Publications, Radio, Film and

Television (SAPPRFT). In early 2013, in an attempt to tighten its control of

proliferating documentaries, the SAPPRFT issued a new regulation centralising the

 20

management of topics by publishing an officially proved list every six months. These

developments over time reveal both the dynamics of change in the Chinese media and

the evolving relationships between political control, market forces and socio-

economic transformations. This chapter documents and discusses this development

through a chronological and thematic account of the history, structure and key issues

of documentaries. Emphasis is given to intrinsic linkages between TV documentaries,

their roles and functions and the political, historical and socio-economic context.

23. Contemporary Chinese Historical TV Drama as a Cultural Genre: Production,

Consumption and the State Power

George Dawei Guo

This chapter examines the genre of the historical television drama from both the

production and the consumption perspectives. The first section focuses on the Chinese

television drama industry. The aim of this section is to look at how the Chinese

television drama industry has been categorising and evaluating historical drama since

the 1980s. The author divides the evolution of Chinese historical drama into three

stages: 1984–1992, 1992–2004, and 2004–present. At each stage, the meaning of ‘the

historical’ has been conditioned by certain literary, production, scheduling and

regulatory circumstances. The discussion on the audience response is based on

empirical audience research that the author conducted between 2007 and 2008. The

author argues that to a large extent the three audience types — conservatives,

culturalists and realists — reveal the respondents’ awareness and perception of state

power in their cultural practices of watching the historical drama.

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24. Live Television Production of Media Events in China: The Case of the Beijing

Olympic Games

Limin Liang

The countdown to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, widely seen as China’s ‘coming out

party’, started almost as soon as the city won the Olympic bid in 2001. An important

component of this countdown was the media planning within China Central

Television (CCTV), which is the state broadcaster and the Olympic TV rights holder

in mainland China. The coverage would eventually amount to approximately 3,000

hours of programming across nine TV channels. Drawing from literature on media

events and cultural production, this chapter engages with an understudied topic in

media events scholarship: the relationship between plans and improvisation at

different stages of live broadcasting of a mega event. Related to this, the chapter looks

at the perception of ‘uncertainty’ in live television production as well as the strategies

developed by media agents to cope with it. Regarding the component of

‘improvisation,’ in particular, the chapter revisits the concept of ‘what-a-story’ in

news reporting and uses as a case study, sprinter Liu Xiang’s unexpected withdrawal

from the race, as an example to illustrate the dialectic relationship between plan and

improvisation.

25. Negotiated Discursive Struggles in Hyper-Marketised and Oligopolistic Media

System: The Case of Hong Kong

Charles Chi-wai Cheung

 22

This chapter investigates how the extreme marketisation and oligopolisation of the

Hong Kong media constrain and enable representational struggles over youth across

different media sectors and theorise the counter-hegemonic potentials, influences

and limitations of the counter discursive forces involved. The case study has wider

relevance to understanding media pluralism in capitalism. First, discursive struggles

over Hong Kong youth are rather unequal. This context of an unequal power

struggle is not peculiar to youth, but to different degrees is shared by other

powerless groups in Hong Kong and by other capitalist societies. Many scholars

have expressed serious concerns about how extreme media marketisation and

oligopolisation would disadvantage powerless groups. The case of Hong Kong youth

can shed light on ‘what would be’ for powerless groups in such a media environment.

Second, the Hong Kong case suggests that representational struggles may be neither

intense nor insignificant, but are situated between these two extremes at a location

termed by the author ‘negotiated representational struggles’. Negotiated

representational struggles should not be dismissed as trivial resistance, as they

periodically and sporadically pose challenges to the mainstream with strong and

lasting counter-hegemonic effects.

26. Internationalisation of China’s Television: History, Development and New

Trends

Junhao Hong and Youling Liu

China’s television represents a highly complicated media system. Not only is it one of

the largest television systems in the world and one of the world’s most powerful

political and ideological machines, but more importantly it is also a very unique social
 23

manifestation. This chapter examines Chinese TV’s internationalisation and the

various approaches used by the Chinese government for the internationalisation of

television over time. The authors divide the internationalisation of China’s television

into four intertwined paths: (1) importing media and cultural products from other

countries; (2) co-producing television products with foreign media; (3) exporting

television dramas to other countries; and (4) the new trend of internationalisation of

China’s television, which is an aggressive strategy of expanding China’s media outlets

and their informational and cultural products abroad.

27. Decoding the Chinese Media in Flux: American Correspondents as an

Interpretive Community

Yunya Song

American journalists constantly experience tight constraints in China. However, very

few academic studies have focused on how American journalists seek the information

from the Chinese media, and how they interpret the messages encoded by their Chinese

counterparts. The interpretive response of American journalists is not a matter of

individual perception alone. While foreign correspondents are typically viewed as

loners who set their own agenda, nowhere had the US press corps consorted as much as

they did in post-Mao China. This chapter aims to identify what information sources are

preferred by the US press corps in their use of Chinese media, and paints a longitudinal

portrait of the Chinese media landscape ‘recoded’ by these American journalists. With

the view that information seeking does not exist only in the incipient location of

information, but also its ensuing ‘relocation’, the concern of this study has been not

only with the initial retrieval of facts, but also with shared decoding strategies, to wit,
 24

the ways in which American journalists as an interpretive community evaluate and

decode local media messages throughout the wider constructive task. Their choice of

decoding strategies is not the result of individual self-serving, idiosyncratic renderings

of texts but a collective appropriation of texts by virtue of dominant cultural

assumptions to suit group interests.

28. Chinese International Broadcasting, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

Gary Rawnsley

This chapter evaluates the relationship between China’s soft power strategy, its public

diplomacy and its international broadcasting capacity. Understanding the connection

between these three activities is important for public diplomacy, with international

broadcasting as one of its instruments, represents the mobilisation and

instrumentalisation of soft power resources: It helps us to understand how soft power

resources are converted into behavioural outcomes. The principal themes of this chapter

are: (1) the discrepancy between the messages disseminated by China’s international

broadcasting stations and the perceptions of China by their audience; (2) the reactive

strategy that has determined China’s international broadcasting must be a corrective to

both western media reporting about China and the dominance of western media

organisations in global news flows; and perhaps most importantly, (3) the question of

trust and credibility that surfaces because China’s international broadcasting remains

fully embedded within the state system.