General Media
@Asiamedia (Asia Pacific Media Network; UCLA) [news on the media in Asia]
Asian Media Access [a non-profit organization dedicated to using media arts as tools for social betterment. Centrally located on the Minneapolis campus of Metropolitan State University, AMA is one of only five national media organizations devoted to serving Asian American media needs].
Barme, Geremie and Sang Ye. “The Great Firewall of China.” Wired 5, 6 (June 1997): 138-50, 174-78. [on the development of the Internet in China]
Bishop, Robert. Qilai: Mobilizing a Billion. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989.
Chang, Won Ho. Mass Media in China: The History and the Future. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989.
Chen, Xueyi and Tianjian Shi. “Media Effects on Political Confidence and Trust in the People’s Republic of China in the Post-Tiananmen Period.” East Asia 19, 3 (2001): 84-118. [available online through Ingenta Select]
China Media Network Information (CMNI, or Zhongguo meiti zixun)
Chinese Media Guide [A Complete List and Descriptions of Major Chinese Newspapers, Chinese TV Stations, Chinese Radio Stations, and Chinese Websites Outside of China.]
Chu, Godwin C., ed. Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978.
—–. “Popular Media: A Glimpse of the New Chinese Culture.” In Chu, ed., Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978, 1-15.
Chu, Godwin C. and Yanan Jun. The Great Wall in Ruins: Communication and Cultural Change in China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Chu, Rodney Wai-chi, et al. eds.. Mobile Communication and Greater China. Routledge, 2011.
Danwei.org [Danwei.org is a frequently updated website about media and advertising in the People’s Republic of China. It is maintained and edited by Jeremy Goldkorn].
Donald, S. H., Keane, M. and Yin Hong, eds. Media in China: Consumption, Content, and Crisis. Curzon Press, 2001.
Donald, S.H. and Keane M. “Media Futures in China: Rethinking Approaches.” In Donald, S, Keane, M. and Yin Hong eds, Media in China: Consumption, Content, and Crisis. Curzon Press, 2001.
Hartley, John and Michael Keene, eds. “Creative Industries and Innovation in China,” a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, 3 (2006).
Hong, Junhao. “Penetration and Interaction of Mass Media Between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Mainland China.” In Bin Yu and Tsung-ting Chung eds.,Dynamics and Dilemma: Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a Changing World. NY: Nova Science, 1996, 185-208.
—–. “Opportunities, Needs, and Challenges: An Analysis of Media/Cultural Interactions and China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 4, 2 (1997): 185-97.
—–. “Reconciliation between Openness and Resistance: Media Globalization and New Policies of China’s Television in the 1990s.” In Georgette Wang, Jan Sevaes and Anura Goonasekera, eds. The New Communicative Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization. London: Routledge, 288–306.
He, Qinglian. The Fog of Censorship: Media Control in China. NY: Human Rights in China, 2008. [download free copy from HRIC]
Howkins, John. Mass Communication in China. NY: Annenberg/Longman Communications Books, 1982.
Jakobsen, Linda. “Lies in Ink, Truth in Blood: The Role and Impact of the Media During the Beijing Spring of 1989.” The Joan Shorenstien Barone Center, Harvard University, August 1990.
Keane, M. and Donald S.H. “Responses to Crisis: Convergence, Content Industries and Media Governance.” In Donald, S, Keane, M. and Yin Hong, Media in China: Consumption, Content, and Crisis. Curzon Press, 2001, 200-210.
—–. “Media Futures in China: Rethinking Approaches.” In Donald, S, Keane, M. and Yin Hong, Media in China: Consumption, Content, and Crisis. Curzon Press, 2001, 3-17.
Kong, Shuyu. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London & New York: Routledge, 2014.
[Abstract: Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.
Lai, Carol P. Media in Hong Kong: Press Freedom and Political Change, 1967-2005. NY: Routledge, 2007.
Lee, Chin-chuan, ed. Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Journalism. NY: Guilford Press, 1990.
—–, ed. China’s Media, Media’s China. Boulder: Westview, 1994.
—–, ed. Chinese Media, Global Contexts. NY: Routledge, 2003.
Lee, Yuan-chen. “How the Feminist Movement Won Media Space in Taiwan: Observations by a Feminist Activist.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 95-115.
Lin, Hao. “China Takes the Plunge into the Digital Age.” The Book and the Computer: The Future of the Printed Word (Aug 1998).
Liu, Alan. The Use of Traditional Media for Modernization in Communist China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for International Studies, 1965.
—–. Communication and National Integration in Communist China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Liu, Kang. “Searching for a New Cultural Identity: China’s Soft Power and Media Culture Today.” Journal of Contemporary China 21 (78) (Nov. 2012): 915-31.
[Asbtract: The paper argues that China’s global expansion and calls for its use of soft power are provoking an ideological crisis which is becoming one of the most critical challenges of the present time. Revolutionary ideology legitimated the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for 60 years, but it has become increasingly at odds with the rapid socio-economic development that began 30 years ago. This paper examines four aspects of contemporary Chinese culture: first the discrepancy between the CCP’s ideological rhetoric and its pragmatic policies; second, the fragmentation of the state, the intellectual elite, and the grassroots population in terms of cultural expressions and values; third, the consumer culture which has unleashed materialistic desires; and finally, the emergence of a ‘post-80s’ generation urban youth culture amidst these tension and contradictions.]
Liu, Zhiming. “Electronic Books and Reading.” Part of a roundtable discussion “What is the Future of the Book in the Digital Era?” In The Book and the Computer: The Future of the Printed Word (Aug 1998).
Lu, Ding and Chee Kong Wong. China’s Telecommunications Market: Entering a New Competitive Age. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004.
Lu, Jie. “Acquiring Political Information in Contemporary China: Various Media Channels and their Respective Correlates.” Journal of Contemporary China22 (83): 828-489.
[Abstract: Using complementary information from two national surveys conducted in 2008, i.e. the China Survey and the ABS II Mainland China Survey, this paper presents a comprehensive picture of the media channels that Chinese citizens use for political information, as well as their relative importance as assessed by the Chinese people. Moreover, assisted by multiple regressions, this paper also identifies which groups of Chinese are more likely to use each of these channels for political information. This paper contributes to our understanding on (1) the relative significance of various media channels in contemporary China’s political communication; and (2) how Chinese citizens select themselves into specific channels for political information, given their increasing autonomy in acquiring such information from China’s changing media.]
Lull, James. China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance. London: Routledge, 1991.
Luo, Jun. “Media System in China: A Chinese Perspective.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 2, 1 (2015): 49-67.
Lynch, David. After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and ‘Thought Work’ in Reformed China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Media Activism Research Collective [The Media Activism Research Collective is an interdisciplinary network of students, faculty, and activists working at the intersection of social movements and media.]
MediaChina.net [website devoted to Chinese media, run by private Sichuan-based media company; “MediaChina.net was established on March 1, 2000. It is positioned for the professional and integrated development of China’s media including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and websites.It is aimed at becoming one of the most authoritative sources of advertising, marketing consultancy, statistical analyses, and strategies in China].
Moeran, Brian, ed. Asian Media Productions. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001.
Moses, Charles, and Crispin Maslog. Mass Communication in Asia: A Brief History. Singapore: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre, 1978.
Pan, Zhongdang. “Bounded Innovations in the Media.” In Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing, eds. Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism. London: Routledge, 2009, 184-206.
Rawnsley,Gary D. and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, eds. Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media. Routledge, 2015.
[Abstract: reference work providing an overview of the study of Chinese media. Gary and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley bring together an interdisciplinary perspective with contributions by an international team of renowned scholars on subjects such as television, journalism and the internet and social media. Locating Chinese media within a regional setting by focusing on ‘Greater China’, the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese communities; the chapters highlight the convergence of media and platforms in the region; and emphasise the multi-directional and trans-national character of media/information flows in East Asia.]
Repnikova, Maria. Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
[Abstract: Who watches over the party-state? In this engaging analysis, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has defined this volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era.]
Schnell, James A. Perspectives on Communication in the People’s Republic of China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Shih, Shu-mei. “The Trope of ‘Mainland China’ in Taiwan’s Media.” positions: east asia cultures critque 3, 1 (Spring 1995).
Shirk, Susan L., ed. Changing Media, Changing China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Song, Mingwei. “How the Steel Was Tempered: The Rebirth of Pawel Korchagin in Contemporary Chinese Media.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 6, 1 (2012): 95-111.
[Abstract: Russian writer Nicholas Ostrovski’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) provided generations of Chinese youth with a widely admired role model: a young devoted communist soldier, Pawel Korchagin, whose image occupied a prominent place in the orthodoxy revolutionary education and literary imagination during Mao’s era. Over the past decade, Pawel Korchagin has regained his popularity in Chinese media, his name and image have been appropriated by numerous artists and filmmakers to help in portrayals of the new generation’s self-fashioning. The various (unorthodox) interpretations recently attached to Pawel’s heroic story reveal a huge gap between Maoist ideology and the post-Mao ideas. This paper looks into the intricate relationships between Pawel Korchagin’s revolutionary past and his varied contemporary representations. By doing so, I hope to gain a better understanding of the cultural politics of appropriating Mao’s legacy to create new meanings for a changing Chinese society. One example on which this paper focuses is the sixth-generation director Lu Xuechang’s film Becoming a Man(1997), which rewrites the revolutionary Bildungsroman of Pawel in a startling different context.]
Tan, Felix B., P. Scott Corbett, and Yuk Yong Wong, eds. Information Technology Diffusion in the Asia Pacific: Perspectives on Policy, Electronic Commerce and Education. Hershey, Pennsylvania: Idea Group Publishing, 1999.
Voci, Paola. “Quasi-Documentary, Cellflix and Web Spoofs: Chinese Movies’ Other Visual Pleasures.” Senses of Cinema 41 (Oct.-Dec. 2006).
—–. China on Video: Small Screen Realities. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: China On Video is the first in-depth study that examines smaller-screen realities and the important role they play not only in the fast-changing Chinese mediascape, but also more broadly in the practice of experimental and non-mainstream cinema. At the crossroads of several disciplines—film, media, new media, media anthropology, visual arts, contemporary China area studies, and cultural studies–this book reveals the existence of a creative, humorous, but also socially and politically critical “China on video”, which locates itself outside of the intellectual discourse surrounding both auteur cinema and digital art. By describing smaller-screen movies, moviemaking and viewing as light realities, Voci points to their “insignificant” weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world. The author proposes that lightness is a concept that can usefully be deployed to describe the moving image, beyond the specificity of recent new media developments and which can, in fact, help us rethink previous cinematic practices in broad terms both spatially and temporally.]
Wen, Huike. “Diversifying Masculinity: Super Girls, Happy Boys, Cross-dressers, and Real Men on Chinese Media.” ASIANetwork Exchange 21, 1 (2013): 16-26.
Womack, Brantly, ed. Media and the Chinese Public: A Survey of the Beijing Media Audience. Special issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 18, 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1986).
Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis.” In Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, eds., Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. NY: Routledge, 1997, 287-321.
Yu, Haiqing. Media and Cultural Transformation in China. NY: Routledge, 2008.
Yu, Frederick. Mass Persuasion in Communist China. NY: Praeger, 1964.
Zhao, Yuezhi. Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Internet and Digital Culture, Social Media, Internet Literature, Games
Adams, Matthew James. “Tech Otakus Save The World? Gacha, Genshin Impact, and Cybernesis.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 1, 2 (2022): 188-208.
Ang, Peng Hwa. “Why The Internet Will Make Asia Freer.” Harvard Asia Quarterly 3 (Summer 2001): 48.
Arsène, Séverine. “Internet Domaine Names in China: Articulating Local Control with Global Connectivity.” China Perspectives 4 (2015): 25-34.
—–. “Asia’a Piece of the Pie: A Region’s Entry into Dot-com Universe.” Harvard Asia Pacific Review 4, 2 (2000): 6-10.
Asiascape: Digital Asia (Editor Florian Schneider, Leiden University) (journal)
[Abstract: Asiascape: Digital Asia explores the political, social, and cultural impact of digital media in Asia through both critical, theoretically-minded research and innovative digital methods. Bringing together inter- and multi-disciplinary research in the area studies, arts, communication and media studies, information and computer sciences, and social sciences, this peer-reviewed journal examines the role that information, communication, and digital technologies play in Asian societies, as well as in intra-regional and transnational dynamics.
Austin, Hailey J and Robin J. S. Sloan. “Through the Shanzhai Lens: Reframing the Transmedial Copying and Remaking of Games.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 133-53.
Barme, Geremie and Gloria Davis. “Have We Been Noticed Yet? Intellectual Contestation and the Chinese Web.” In Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, eds.,Chinese Intellectuals Between State and Market. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, 75-107.
Beadle, Joseph J. J. “Of Horror Games and Temples: Religious Gamification in Contemporary Taiwan.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 11-45.
Benney, Jonathan. “The Aesthetics of Chinese Microblogging: State and Market Control of Weibo.” Asiascape: Digital Asia 1, 3 (2014): 169-200.
[Abstract: Microblogs, epitomized by Twitter in the West and Weibo in China, have attracted considerable attention over the past few years. There have been a number of optimistic accounts about their potential to stimulate political activism and social change, juxtaposed with suggestions that their networks are too weak and that they are too easily censored for such change to occur. Yet, in this debate, little attention has been paid to the medium itself; microblogs have too often been treated as mere conduits for information, and the practical and aesthetic experience of microblogging has been marginalized. This article addresses this imbalance in two ways. First, it argues that the microblog is a distinctive medium with special potential for political communication. It applies Rancière’s ‘politics of aesthetics’ and Baudrillard’s ‘private telematics’ to microblogs, suggesting that the particularly immersive quality of microblogs provides new and distinct opportunities for the promotion of opinions and social movements. Second, it argues that by allowing, re-modelling, monitoring and censoring the Weibo service, the Chinese party-state, acting collaboratively with the key microblog companies and the market as a whole, is consciously manipulating the medium of the microblog to reduce the risk of activism, controversial use, and network formation. Thus, the medium of Weibo differs from other microblogs – of which Twitter is the key example – in several important ways, each of which, the article argues, are intended to maximize the cacophonous spectacle of entertainment and to minimize reasoned discussion and debate. Furthermore, while pure censorship of information can be evaded in many ways, it is more difficult for dissenters to evade state control when it is applied to the medium itself.]
Berg, Daria. “A New Spectacle in China’s Medisphere: A Cultural Reading of a Web-Based Reality Show from Shanghai.” The China Quarterly 205 (March 2011): 133-51.
[Abstract: This study offers a cultural reading of the web-based reality show Soul Partners (2007) from Shanghai. Soul Partners serves as a case study to explore how 21st-century Chinese cultural discourse debates the transformation of urban society in China, providing insight into the Chinese cultural imagination, perceptions of the globalizing metropolis and the impact of consumer culture. This reading positions Soul Partnerswithin the discursive context of Chinese popular, postmodern and postsocialist culture and in relation to the cultural import of the reality show genre into China’s mediasphere. Analysis focuses on the quest for authenticity in the Chinese discourse on perceived reality and the waySoul Partners generates new urban dreams for China’s Generation X. The analysis of Soul Partners sheds new light on the dynamics of transcultural appropriation in a globalizing China and the social and political implications.]
Berry, Michael. Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
[Abstract: During the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary provided an important portal for people around the world to understand the outbreak, local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. But when news of the international publication of Wuhan Diary appeared online in early April of 2020, Fang Fang’s writings became the target of a series of online attacks by “Chinese ultra-nationalists.” Over time, these attacks morphed into one of the most sophisticated and protracted hate Campaigns against a Chinese writer in decades. Meanwhile, as controversy around Wuhan Diary swelled in China, the author was transformed into a global icon, honored by the BBC as one of the most influential women of 2020 and featured in stories by dozens of international news outlets. This book, by the translator of Wuhan Diary into English, alternates between a first-hand account of the translation process and more critical observations on how a diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate and the target of a sweeping online campaign that many described as a “cyber Cultural Revolution.” Eventually, even Berry would be pulled into the attacks and targeted by thousands of online trolls. This book answers the questions: why would an online lockdown diary elicit such a strong reaction among Chinese netizens? How did the controversy unfold and evolve? Who was behind it? And what can we learn from the “Fang Fang Incident” about contemporary Chinese politics and society? The book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, as well as anyone with special interest in translation, US-Chinese relations, or internet culture more broadly.]
Bibliography on the Internet in China. Prepared by Randy Kluver. National University of Singapore.
Braester, Yomi. “From Real Time to Virtual Reality: Chinese Cinema in the Internet Age.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 38 (Feb. 2004): 89-104. Rpt. in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 139-54.
[Abstract: What has become of the collective memory in the years between the Tian’anmen incident of 1989 and the PRC joining the WTO in 2001, a period that witnessed the proliferation of McDonalds restaurants and Internet bars in Chinese cities? This paper explores the changing values through three works that take the World Wide Web as their subject, namely Love in the Internet Age, also known as Love in Cyberspace(Wanglu shidai de aiqing, 1999), Q3 (1999), and First Intimate Encounter, also known as Flyin’ Dance (Diyici de qinmi jiechu, 2001). The films do not offer a single vision of cyberspace, nor do they ascribe to the same filmic aesthetics or genre. Yet as a whole they provide a glimpse of China in the Internet age. They suggest that from a repository of collective memory, cyberspace has become the arena for an alternative existence free of the limitations of time and space. They trace the trajectory from a culture insistent on collective commemoration to a society willing to suspend its consciousness outside historical memory.
Broadhurst, Rod and Peter Grabosky, eds. Cyber-Crime: The Challenge in Asia. HK: HK University Press, 2005.
Chao, Shih-Chen. “The Re-institutionalisation of Popular Fiction–The Internet and a New Model of Popular Fiction Prosumption in China.” Journal of the British Association of Chinese Studes 3 (Dec. 2013).
Chase, Michael S. and James C. Mulvenon. You’ve Got Dissent! Chinese Dissident Use of the Internet and Beijing’s Counter-Strategies. Rand, 2002.
Chen, Dody M. H. “Issues and Strategies of Localising Sensitive Audiovisual Elements in Game Streaming: A 154 Case Study on Overwatch League (OWL) Chinese Streaming.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 154-79.
Chen, Jing. “Refashioning Print Literature: Internet Literature in China.” Comparative Literature Studies 49, 4 (2012): 537-546.
China Digital News (Journalism, UC Berkeley)
China Internet Network Information Center (issues semi-annual reports on the state of internet use in China)
China: Journey to the Heart of Internet Censorship. Reporters Without Borders. (October 2007)
The China Matrix (news and analysis on the China Net)
China Web 2.0 Review [a blog dedicated to track web2.0 development, review and profile web2.0 applications, business and services in China.]
Chinese Communication Research Archives (Chinese Communication Association) [this site has a truly excellent bibliography]
China Digital Times, ed. Decoding the Chinese Internet: A Glossary of Political Slang. E-Book. China Digital Times, 2014.
[Abstract: In 2009, a strange creature emerged on the Internet from China. It was the grass-mud horse, a dopey alpaca frolicking in the Mahler Desert. It starred in a popular music video, staring buck-toothed into the camera while a chorus of children sang about the grass-mud horse’s defeat of the river crabs. It seemed innocent enough. But the grass-mud horse was actually a subterfuge of Chinese Internet censorship. For the past four years, China Digital Times has built a wiki dedicated to “grass-mud horse language,” inspired by an imaginary creature whose name invokes a curse word. Our Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon continues to evolve as Chinese netizens create new terms and give new meaning to older ones. This emerging “resistance discourse” steadily undermines the values and ideology that reproduce compliance with the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian regime, and force an opening for free expression and civil society in China. This eBook distills the most time-tested and ubiquitous terms in our lexicon. Organized by broad categories, Decoding the Chinese Internet will guide readers through the colorful, raucous world of China’s online resistance discourse. Students of Mandarin will gain insight into word play and learn terms that are key to understand Chinese Internet language. But no knowledge of Chinese is needed to appreciate the creative leaps netizens make in order to keep talking. This book is a revised and updated version of Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon: Classic Netizen Language published in August 2013.]
Chinese Internet Research Group (sponsors a listserv)
Ciolek, T. Matthew. “Asian Studies and the WWW: A Quick Stocktaking at the Cusp of Two Millenia.”
Creemers, Rogier. “The Pivot in Chinese Cybergovernance: Integrating Internet Control in Xi Jinping’s China.” China Perspectives 4 (2015): 5-14.
Damm, Jens. “Internet and the Fragmented Political Community.” IIAS Newsletter 33 (March 2004): 10.
—–. “The Internet and the Fragmentation of the Chinese Society.” Critical Asian Studies 39, 2 (2006): 273-94.
Davies, Hugh. “The Revolution Will Not Be Gamified: Videogame Activism and Playful Resistance across the 76 Sinophone.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 76-100.
Day, Michael. “Poetry.” Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS), Leiden Division. [study of contemporary Chinese poetry websites]
Deklerch, Stijn and Xiaogang Wei. “Queer Online Media and the Building of China’s LGBT Community.”
In Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Willam F. Schroeder, and Hongwei Bao, eds., Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2015, 18-34.
Douay, Nicolas. “Urban Planning and Cyber-Citizenry in China: How the 2.0 Opposition Organizes Itself.” Tr. Jonathan Hall. China Perspectives 1 (2011): 77-79.
Feng, Jin 冯进. “‘Addicted to Beauty’: Consuming and Producing Web-based Chinese Danmei Fiction at Jinjiang.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 1-41.
—–. “Cong Jinjiang danmei wen kan Zhongguo dangdai nuxing xingbie shenfen de goucheng” 从晋江耽美文看中国当代女性性别身份的构成 (Constructing female gender identities through Danmei at Jinjiang). Zhongguo xing yanjiu 30, 3 (2009): 132-153.
—–. Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
[Abstract: In Romancing the Internet, Jin Feng examines the evolution of Chinese popular romance on the Internet. She first provides a brief genealogy of Chinese Web literature and Chinese popular romance, and then investigates how large socio-cultural forces have shaped new writing and reading practices and created new subgenres of popular romance in contemporary China. Integrating ethnographic methods into literary and discursive analyses, Feng offers a gendered, audience-oriented study of Chinese popular culture in the age of the Internet.]
—–. “The Superhero and the Salted Fish: The Aesthetic of the Ordinary in “Doomsday” Chinese Web Fiction.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 78-87.
[Abstract: In this article I take a close look at several representative Chinese web novels that apparently tell “ordinary tales of ordinary people” set in an apocalyptical universe. By examining their shared characteristics in setting, plot arc, and character development, I show that the current pandemic shapes the liminal space created in these “doomsday” (mori or moshi) novels and generates through them an aesthetic of the ordinary. This unique aesthetic follows decades-long trends in Chinese web fiction on the one hand, while on the other finding inspiration in the extraordinary historical moment we live in, as rising popularism in China wages war against “pandemic orientalism” abroad. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has become both the background and staging ground for these Chinese web authors and readers to perform self-maintenance and explore the meaning of life, the essence of their identity, and even the boundary between human and non-human forms. Given Chinese web fiction’s immediacy to lived experiences, responsiveness to contemporary socio-cultural events, and the speed and scope of self-reproduction and proliferation in Chinese cyber space, these works can also offer some clue to the trauma wrought by and still unfolding in the current pandemic.]
Feiyu Net Cafe (one of the largest Internet cafes in Beijing)
Franda, Marcus. China and India Online: Information Technology Politics and Diplomacy in the World’s Two Largest Nations. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Fumian, Marco. “The Temple and the Market: Controversial Positions in the Literary Field with Chinese Characteristics.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 2 (Fall 2009): 126-66.
Ge, Liang. “Problematizing Heteronormativity: Performativity, Resignification and A/B/O Fiction in Chinese Danmei Literature.” East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 7, 2 (2021): 241-254.
[Abstract: The literary form of danmei, in which male–male romance and/or erotica is portrayed, is a flourishing genre in China which has received significant attention from academia in recent years. This article focuses on a notorious subgenre of danmei, A/B/O fiction, which introduces three additional sexes, alpha, beta and omega, into mankind, alongside the male/female binary sex/gender system. By focusing on a popular but atypical example of this subgenre, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of how female danmei writers constantly question the hierarchical and heteronormative system in the A/B/O world and interrogate the fixed identities of gender, sexuality and class, by imagining love, sex and intimacy among male protagonists. Drawing on Judith Butler’s gender performative theory and resignification politics, this article suggests that the behaviour of the characters in these texts engenders reciprocal and equal relationships, reverses the various heteropatriarchal norms through the employment of technology, and questions the compulsory regulatory power embodied in the biological pheromone in A/B/O. Simultaneously, this study also identifies the notion of ‘love’ itself as a limiting factor of this genre of male–male romantic and/or erotic writing.]
Giese, Karsten. “Construction and Performance of Virtual Identity in the Chinese Internet.” In K.C. Ho, Randolf Kluver, and Kenneth Yang, eds. Asia.co–Asia Encounters the Internet. NY: RoutledgeCourzon: 2003, 193-210.
Gleiss, Marielle Stigum. “Speaking Up for the Suffering (Br)other: Weibo Activism, Discursive Struggles, and Minimal Politics in China.” Media, Culture and Society 37 (May 1, 2015): 513-529.
[Abstract: More than two decades after China was first connected to the Internet, scholars still debate the political impact of online media. Yet, the debate is stalled by a limited view of both politics and the media’s role in political contestation. In order to offer a more nuanced account of the relationship between online media and politics, this article proposes a theoretical framework that pays attention to discursive struggles, identifies strategies to contest hegemonic discourses, and employs a broadened notion of politics, referred to as minimal politics. The framework is then used to analyze a corpus of Weibo (microblog) posts published by the charity organization, Love Save Pneumoconiosis (LSP). LSP activists use Weibo to campaign for medical treatment for workers with pneumoconiosis, and the article identifies two strategies of contestation in LSP activists’ online activism. First, LSP activists articulate alternative discourses that challenge the hegemony of official discourses. Second, LSP activists’ discourses are polyphonic expressions that legitimize the organization’s work, while subtly politicizing the problem of pneumoconiosis. The strategies of contestation used by LSP activists exemplify how political contestation is possible in repressive contexts and illustrate the need to refine the theories used to study the political impact of online media.]
Gong, Haomin and Xin Yang. “Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China.” China Information 24, 1 (2010): 3-26.
—–. “Circulating Smallness on Weibo: The Dialectics of Microfiction.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, 1 (March 2014): 181-202.
[Abstract: The focus of this essay is microfiction (wei xiaoshuo), a form of Weibo-based fiction writing. From the perspective of its most prominent feature—microness—the authors investigate the dialectical relationship between microness and largeness embodied in its form, the context of its emergence, the conditions of its existence, as well as the issues reflected in its content. Studying three disparate cases of microfiction writing, namely microfiction selected from contests hosted by Sina, Chen Peng’s personal Weibo posts, and Wen Huanjian’s Weibo novel, Love in the Age of Microblogging (Weibo shiqi de aiqing), we explore the cultural status of microfiction as a reflection of the combination of literary writing and online activities; and its aesthetic, literary, and cultural characteristics. Reading microfiction in both a literary and a sociocultural text, we argue that the smallness is an intrusion upon the largeness and hegemony of grand narratives on the one hand, and a reflection of a boradly changing reality on the other.]
—–. Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture. London: Routledge, 2017. [MCLC Resource Center review by Jamie J. Zhao]
[Abstract: This book investigates the ways in which class, gender, ethnicity and ethics are reconfigured, complicated and enriched by the closely intertwined online and offline realities in China. It combs through a wide range of theories on Internet culture, intellectual history, and literary, film, and cultural studies, and explores a variety of online cultural materials, including digitized spoofing, microblog fictions, micro-films, online fictions, web dramas, photographs, flash mobs, popular literature and films. These materials have played an important role in shaping the contemporary cultural scene, but have so far received little critical attention. Here, the authors demonstrate how Chinese Internet culture has provided a means to intervene in the otherwise monolithic narratives of identity and community.]
Gross, Jennifer and Hanno E. Lecher. “Everything Is Not Lost: The Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS).” IIAS Newsletter (March 2004): 11.
Guo, Liang. Surveying Internet Usage and Impact in Twelve Chinese Cities. Markle Foundation.[pdf file, 437k]
—–.. “The Internet: China’s Window to the World.” YaleGlobal Online (Nov. 18, 2002).
Guo, Shaohua. “Startling by Each Click: ‘Word-of-Mouse’ Publicity and Critically Manufacturing Time-Travel Romance Online.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (2015): 82-91.
—–. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet: Creative Visibility in the Digital Public. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
[Abstract: Despite widespread consensus that China’s digital revolution was sure to bring about massive democratic reforms, such changes have not come to pass. While scholars and policy makers alternate between predicting change and disparaging a stubbornly authoritarian regime, in this book Shaohua Guo demonstrates how this dichotomy misses the far more complex reality. The Evolution of the Chinese Internet traces the emergence and maturation of one of the most creative digital cultures in the world through four major technological platforms: the bulletin board system, the blog, the microblog, and WeChat. Guo transcends typical binaries of freedom and control, to argue that Chinese Internet culture displays a uniquely sophisticated interplay between multiple extremes, and that its vibrancy is dependent on these complex negotiations. In contrast to the flourishing of research findings on what is made invisible online, this book examines the driving mechanisms that grant visibility to particular kinds of user-generated content. Offering a systematic account of how and why an ingenious Internet culture has been able to thrive, Guo highlights the pivotal roles that media institutions, technological platforms, and creative practices of Chinese.]
—–. “Tracing the Bunny: Animating Propaganda Work Online.” Journal of Asian Studies 82, 3 (2023): 407-26.
[Abstract: Since the 2010s, “we, the rabbit” has gained currency as an internet slang term referring to China, Chinese ethnicity, and the Chinese Communist Party. The recent popularity of the rabbit as a metonym for the nation is boosted by the varied multimedia forms of bunny characters appearing in historical narratives, web comics, games, and most important, the patriotic animated series Year Hare Affair. Juxtaposing commercial ambitions with a nationalist agenda, Year Hare Affair narrates historical events by personifying countries as anthropomorphic animals. Taking the viral rise of Year Hare Affair as a case study, this article delineates a genealogy of the bunny characters in Chinese popular culture. The transmedia forms of bunny characters, including those appearing in texts, comics, animated programs, and games, provide room for the construction of unstable meanings revolving around the bunny. Consequently, while such animated series align with official narratives of history, they also tone down the weight of those narratives by employing a variety of narrative devices, including parody, game-related motifs, and space-time manipulation. Through these diverse representations, the political message is sometimes enhanced and sometimes playfully challenged. Read in this light, the bunny’s evolving trajectory in contemporary popular culture speaks volumes about the dynamics between digital aesthetics and politics, as well as the multiplicity of discourses generated as they meet.]
Han, Rongbin. Contesting Cyberspace in China: On Expression and Authoritarian Resilience. NY: Columbia University Press, 2018.
[Abstract: The Internet was supposed to be an antidote to authoritarianism. It can enable citizens to express themselves freely and organize outside state control. Yet while online activity has helped challenge authoritarian rule in some cases, other regimes have endured: no movement comparable to the Arab Spring has arisen in China. . . Han offers a powerful counterintuitive explanation for the survival of the world’s largest authoritarian regime in the digital age. Han reveals the complex internal dynamics of online expression in China, showing how the state, service providers, and netizens negotiate the limits of discourse. He finds that state censorship has conditioned online expression, yet has failed to bring it under control. However, Han also finds that freer expression may work to the advantage of the regime because its critics are not the only ones empowered: the Internet has proved less threatening than expected due to the multiplicity of beliefs, identities, and values online. State-sponsored and spontaneous pro-government commenters have turned out to be a major presence on the Chinese internet, denigrating dissenters and barraging oppositional voices. Han explores the recruitment, training, and behavior of hired commenters, the “fifty-cent army,” as well as group identity formation among nationalistic Internet posters who see themselves as patriots defending China against online saboteurs. Drawing on a rich set of data collected through interviews, participant observation, and long-term online ethnography, as well as official reports and state directives, Contesting Cyberspace in China interrogates our assumptions about authoritarian resilience and the democratizing power of the Internet.]
Hao, X., Zhang, K., & Huang, Y. “The Internet and Information Control: The Case of China.” The Public 3 (1996): 117-130.
Harrington, Johnathan and Zimu Zhang. “Negotiating Chinese Youth Cyber Nationalism through Play Methods.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 114-32.
Herold, David Kurt and Peter Marolt, eds. Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating, and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival. Routledge, 2011.
[TOC: Introduction: Noise, Spectacle, Politics – Carnival in Chinese Cyberspace – David Kurt Herold; Ch. 1. Cultural Convulsions – Examining the Chineseness of Cyber China – Wai-chi, Rodney Chu and Chung-tai Cheng; Ch. 2. The Internet Police in China: Regulation, Scope and Myths – Xiaoyan Chen and Peng Hwa Ang; Ch. 3. Grassroots agency in a civil sphere? Re-thinking Internet Control in China – Peter Marolt; Ch. 4. Parody and resistance on the Chinese Internet – Hongmei Li; Ch 5. China’s many Internets: Participation and digital game play across a changing technology landscape – Silvia Lindtner and Marcella Szablewicz; Ch. 6. Lost in virtual carnival and masquerade: In-game marriage on the Chinese Internet – Weihua Wu and Xiying Wang; Ch. 7. Human Flesh Search Engines: Carnivalesque Riots as components of a ‘Chinese Democracy’ – David Kurt Herold; Ch. 8. In search for motivations: Exploring a Chinese Linux user group – Matteo Tarantino; Ch. 9. Identity vs. anonymity: Chinese netizens and questions of identifiability – Kenneth Farrall and David Kurt Herold; Ch. 10. Taking urban conservation online: Chinese civic action groups and the Internet – Nicolai Volland; Conclusion: Netizens and Citizens, Cyberspace and Modern China – David Kurt Herold]
Ho, Christopher J. H. “Civil Disobedience in the Era of Videogames: Digital Ethnographic Evidence of the 101 Gamification of the 2019-20 Extradition Protests in Hong Kong.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 101-13.
Ho, K. C., Randy Kluver, and C. C. Yang, eds. Asia.com: Asian Encounters the Internet. London, NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
Hockx, Michel. “Links with the Past: Mainland China’s Online Literary Communities and their Antecedents.” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 38 (Feb. 2004): 105-27. Rpt in Jie Lu, ed., China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. NY: Routledge, 2008, 155-78.
[Abstract: This article compares Chinese literary journals from the early twentieth century with a Mainland Chinese literary website from the early twenty-first century. In both these periods, literary practice underwent significant changes as a result of major changes in the technological processes involved in the production and distribution of texts. Five aspects of these changes are examined: the mixed media environment, the provision of information about authors’ identities, engagement with social issues, community building, and the relationship with serious literature. The article argues that a very traditional Chinese view of literature as a socially embedded act of communication continued to play a significant role in both periods, and was even further enhanced through interaction with the new technologies. Despite the fact that both types of publication appeal(ed) to large readerships, it is argued that it is not helpful simply to consider them as ‘popular literature’. Both the journals from 100 years ago and the website of today represent literary communities that share a serious view of literature, albeit one that is not compatible with the familiar New Literature paradigm]
—–. “Virtual Chinese Literature: A Comparative Case Study of Online Poetry Communities.” The China Quarterly 183 (Sept. 2005): 670-691.
—–. “Master of the Web: Chen Cun and the Continuous Avant-Garde.” In Maghiel van Crevel, Tian Yuan Tan, and Michel Hockx, eds. Text, Performance, and Gender in Chinese Literature and Music: Essay in Honor of Wilt Idema. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009, 413-430.
—–. Internet Literature in China. NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, this book presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still attempting to draw a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Readers interested in encountering these new forms of writing, some of which are no longer available online, will value this book. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China–and across Asia.]
—–. “From Writing to Roaming: World Literature and the Literary World of Black and Blue.” In Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 203-16.
Hu, Andy Yinan. Swimming Against the Tide: Tracing and Locating Chinese Leftism Online. MA Thesis. Simon Fraser University, 2006.
Huang, Wang. “China’s Happy Farm and the Impact of Social Gaming.” Education about Asia 18, 2 (Fall 2013): 21-25.
Huang, Xiang. “The Internet Helps Chinese Publisher to Plan Strategy.” The Book and the Computer (Dec. 1998).
Huang, Yunying. “On Sinofuturism: Resisting Techno-Orientalism in Understanding Kuaishou, Douyin, and Chinese A.I..” Screen Bodies 5, 2 (2020).
[Abstract: Dominant design narratives about “the future” contain many contemporary manifestations of “orientalism” and Anti-Chineseness. In US discourse, Chinese people are often characterized as a single communist mass and the primary market for which this future is designed. By investigating the construction of modern Chinese pop culture in Chinese internet and artificial intelligence, and discussing different cultural expressions across urban, rural, and queer Chinese settings, I challenge external Eurocentric and orientalist perceptions of techno-culture in China, positing instead a view of Sinofuturism centered within contemporary Chinese contexts.]
Hughes, Christopher and Gudrun Wacker, eds. China and the Internet: Politics and the Digital Leap Forward. London, New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
Hung, Chin-fu. “The Internet and Taiwan’s New Civic Movement in the Information Age: Hung Chung-chiu’s Case (2013).” Asiascape: Digital Asia 1, 1/2 (2014): 54-77.
[Abstract: Using the case of the death of a 24-year old Taiwanese soldier, Hung Chung-chiu, this article investigates the evolving phenomenon of Taiwan’s new civic movement that is highly mediated and empowered by Information and Communications Technologies (icts). Examining the case of a tragic death of Army Corporal Hung, this article argues that enhanced public engagement and awareness of citizens’ rights in the military will ultimately further strengthen Taiwan’s civil society and will eventual help consolidate Taiwan’s young democracy.]
Imbach, Jessica, ed. Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024.
[Abstract: Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere – the networked spaces across the globe that not only operate on the Chinese script, but also imaginatively negotiate the meanings of Chinese culture in the digital age. Instead of asking what makes the internet or new media “Chinese,” the chapters situate contemporary entanglements of cultural and digital practices within specific historical, social, and discursive contexts. Covering topics as diverse as live-streaming, AI poetry, online literature, poetry memes, cyberpunk fiction, virtual art exhibitions, cooking videos, censorship, and viral translations, the collection as a whole not only engages with a wide range of Chinese new media phenomena, but also demonstrates their relevance to our understanding of contemporary digital culture.]
Internet Filtering in China, 2004-2005: A Country Study (OpenNet Initiative, or ONI, funded by Soros’ Open Society) [you can download the whole study in pdf format from this site]
The Internet in Asia (Published by the Singapore Internet Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University. We post news items and academic research concerning the social, cultural, economic, and political impact of the Internet and other new media technologies in Asia)
“The Internet in China: A Symposium.” IIAS Newsletter 33 (March 2003). [includes essays by Yang Guobin, Tsui Lokman, Ian Weber ad Lu Jia, Jens Damm, etc.]
“The Internet Under Surveillance Report: China” (2003) Reporters Without Borders Website.
Inwood, Heather. On the Scene of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Ph. D. dissertation. London: SOAS, 2008. [deals in part with poetry websites]
—–. Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
[Abstract: examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of death, poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule.]
—–. “Poetry for the People? Modern Chinese Poetry in the Age of the Internet.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (Jan. 2015): 44-54.
—–. “Towards Sinophone Game Studies.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 1-10.
Inwood, Heather, ed. “Games and Gaming in China and the Sinophone World.” Special of British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022).
Jacob, Katrien. People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[Abstract: Since its establishment in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has upheld a nationwide ban on pornography, imposing harsh punishments on those caught purchasing, producing, or distributing materials deemed a violation of public morality. A provocative contribution to Chinese media studies by a well-known international media researcher, People’s Pornography offers a wide-ranging overview of the political controversies surrounding the ban, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the many distinct media subcultures that have gained widespread popularity on the Chinese Internet as a result. Rounding out this exploration of the many new tendencies in digital citizenship, pornography, and activist media cultures in the greater China region are thought-provoking interviews with individuals involved. A timely contribution to the existing literature on sexuality, Chinese media, and Internet culture, People’s Pornography provides a unique angle on the robust voices involved in the debate over about pornography’s globalization.
—–. The Afterglow of Women’s Pornography in Post-Digital China. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.
[Abstract: Chinese artists, activists, and netizens are pioneering a new order of pornographic representation that is in critical dialogue with global entertainment media. Jacobs examines the role of sex-positive feminisms as well as queer communities and aesthetics in various types of sexually explicit media in both mainland China and Hong Kong to investigate pornography’s “afterglow” (a state of crisis and decay within digital culture) by focusing on a new generation of artists and scholars who have made statements about gender and body politics.]
Ji, Xianglei. “Obstacles to the Internet Age.” The Book and the Computer (July 1999).
Jiang, Min. “Spaces of Authoritarian Deliberation: Online Public Deliberation in China.” In Ethan J. Leib and Baogang He, eds., The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, 261–287.
Kong, Shuyu. “The ‘Affective Alliance’: Undercover, Internet Media Fandom, and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption in Postsocialist China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 1-47.
—–. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hui Faye Xiao]
[Abstract: Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Contents: Introduction 1. Aftershock: The Sentimental Construction of Family in Post-Socialist China 2. Crying your Heart Out: Laid-off Women Workers, Kuqingxi,and Melodramatic Sensibility in Chinese TV Drama 3. Magic Cube of Happiness: Managing Conflicts and Feelings on Chinese Primetime Television 4. Are You the One? The Competing Public Voices of China’s Post-1980s Generation 5. Undercover: Internet Media Fandom and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption 6. Let the Bullet Fly: Film Discussions and the Cultural Public Sphere]
Kozar, Seana. 2002. “Leaves Gleaned from the Ten-Thousand-Dimensional Web in Heaven: Chinese On-Line Publications in Canada.” Journal of American Folklore 115(456): 129-153.
Li, Angela Ke. “Towards a More Proactive Method: Regulating Public Opinion on Chinese Microblogs under Xi’s New Leadership.” China Perspectives 4 (2015): 15-24.
Li, Henry Siling. “Narrative Dissidence, Spoof Videos and Alternative Memory in China.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 19, 5 (2016): 501-17.
Li, Hongmei. “Parody and Resistance on the Chinese Internet.” In David Herold and Peter Marolt, eds., Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating, and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival. New York: Routledge, 2011, 71-88.
Li, Li and Trisha T.C. Lin. “Examining Weibo Posting Anxiety among Well-educated Youth in China: A Qualitative Approach.” Information Development 32 (Sept. 1, 2016): 1240–1252.
Liao, Han-Teng. “Harnessing the Power of Collaborative Filtering: Comparing the Network Gatekeeping of Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia.” China Perspectives 4 (2015): 35-49.
Lin, Hao. “China Takes Plunge Into the Digital Age.” The Book and the Computer (Aug. 1998).
Liu, Fengshu. Urban Youth in China: Modernity, the Internet, and the Self. NY: Routledge, 2011.
[Abstract: Fengshu Liu situates the lives of Chinese youth and the growth of the Internet against the backdrop of rapid and profound social transformation in China. In 2008, the total of Internet users in China had reached 253 million (in comparison with 22.5 million in 2001). Yet, despite rapid growth, the Internet in China is so far a predominantly urban-youth phenomenon, with young people under thirty (especially those under twenty-four), mostly members of the only-child generation, as the main group of the netizens’ population. As both youth and the Internet hold the potential to inflict, or at least contribute to, far-reaching economic, social, cultural, and political changes, this book fulfills a pressing need for a systematical investigation of how youth and the Internet are interacting with each other in a Chinese context. In so doing, Liu sheds light on what it means to be a Chinese today, how ‘Chineseness’ may be (re)constructed in the Internet Age, and what the implications of the emerging form of identity are for contemporary and future Chinese societies as well as the world.]
Liu, Jin. “Subversive Writing: Li Xiaoguai’s Newly Coined Chinese Characters and His Comic Blogging.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 40 (2018).
[Abstract: This paper examines the emerging phenomenon of creating new Chinese characters on the internet with a case study of the artist Li Xiaoguai’s work. First, it analyzes the aesthetics and sociopolitical significance of Li’s new characters and neologisms. It explores how the new characters, as an alternative translation, achieve their Austinian performative force through an iteration of the original official language, which is thus displaced and subverted; how the puns become double-voiced and double-signified utterances in the Bakhtinian sense of folk humor; and how the vulgarities are pervasively used as interjections and intensifiers to vent strong emotions in the struggle against the state’s anti-vulgarity and internet censorship campaigns. Second, it studies how Li’s characters are integrated into his artistic creations via comic blogging. It explores how his comic strips evoke carnivalesque laughter by satirizing social ills, officialdom, and the increasing gap between the Communist Party (CCP) and the people, the state and the family, and the privileged and the underprivileged.]
Liu, Jun. “Mobile Communication and Relational Mobilization in China.” Asiascape: Digital Asia 1, 1/2 (2014): 14-38.
[Abstract: Recent studies have shown what indispensable role mobile phones play as means of mobilization in contentious politics around the world. Nevertheless, there has been no clear elaboration of how mobile phone uses translate into mobilization in contentious politics. To fill this gap, the current study employs Passy’s (2003) framework of the threefold function of social ties as channels of mobilization to examine how mobile communication, embedding the dynamics of social ties, influences protest mobilization. It investigates two cases in rural and urban China in which Chinese people employed their mobile phones to mobilize participants for protests, and conducts 24 in-depth interviews with participants in these protests. Findings suggest that using mobile phones for mobilization registers the relational dynamics of social ties, which shapes participants’ perceptions of given protest issues, ensures the safety of protest recruitment and mobilization in a repressive context, and generates pressure on participation, all of which contributes to the mechanism of mobilization. This study concludes with the concept of ‘relational mobilization’, which addresses the embedment and relevance of social ties in the process of mobile-phone-mediated mobilization and its implication for Asian countries.]
Liu, Kang. “The Internet in China: Emergent Cultural Formations and Contradictions.” In Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2004, 127-61.
Liu, Shih-Diing. “Undomesticated Hostilities: The Affective Space of Internet Chat Rooms across the Taiwan Straits.” positions: east asian cultures critique16, 2 (Fall 2008): 435-57.
Luo, Haoxi. “Games as Heterotopia: Realist Games in China.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 180-87.
Ma, Li. #MeToo and Cyber Activism in China: Gendered Violence and Scripts of Power. Routledge, 2022.
[Abstract: This book focuses on the #MeToo movement in China, critically examining how three competing ideologies have worked in co-opting #MeToo activism: China’s official communism, Western neoliberalism, and an emerging Chinese cyber feminism. In 2018, China’s #MeToo cyber activism initially maintained its momentum despite strict censorship, presenting women’s voices against gendered violence and revealing scripts of power in different sectors of society. Eventually though it lost impetus with sloganization and stigmatization under a trio of forces of pressures: corporate corruption, over-politicization by Western media, and continued state censorship. The book documents the social events and gendered norms in higher education, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business, and religious circles that preceded and followed high-profile cases of alleged sexual abuses in mainland China, engaging with sociological scholarship relating to demoralization and power, media studies, and gender studies. Through these entwined theories the author seeks to give both scholars and the general audience in gender studies a window into the ongoing tension in the power spheres of state, market, and gendered hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society.]
Marolt, Peter and David Kurt Herold, eds. Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival. NY: Routledge, 2011.
—–. China Online: Locating Society in Online Spaces. NY: Routledge, 2015.
[Abstract: The Chinese internet is driving change across all facets of social life, and scholars have grown mindful that online and offline spaces have become interdependent and inseparable dimensions of social, political, economic, and cultural activity. This book showcases the richness and diversity of Chinese cyberspaces, conceptualizing online and offline China as separate but inter-connected spaces in which a wide array of people and groups act and interact under the gaze of a seemingly monolithic authoritarian state. The cyberspaces comprising “online China” are understood as spaces for interaction and negotiation that influence “offline China”. The book argues that these spaces allow their users greater “freedoms” despite ubiquitous control and surveillance by the state authorities. The book is a sequel to the editors’ earlier work, Online Society in China: Creating, Celebrating and Instrumentalising the Online Carnival]
Media Activism Research Collective [The Media Activism Research Collective is an interdisciplinary network of students, faculty, and activists working at the intersection of social movements and media.]
Meeker, Mary. “The China Internet Report.” Morgan Stanley, 2004. [downloadable as pdf file from Morgan Stanley website]
Meng, Bingchuan. “Regulating Online Spoofs: Futile Efforts of Recentralization.” In Zheng Yongnian and Zhang Xialoing, eds., China’s Information and Communications Technology Revolution: Social Changes and State Responses. London: Routledge, 2009, 52-67.
Mengin, Françoise, ed. Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
[Abstract: The essays in this volume explore the new power struggles created in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through information technology. The contributors analyze the interaction between the development of information technologies and social logic on the one hand and processes of unification and fragmentation on the other. They seek to highlight the strategies of public and private actors aimed at monopolizing the benefits created by the information society – whether for monetary gain or bureaucratic consolidation – as well as the new loci of power now emerging. The book is organized around two main themes: One exploring societal change and power relations, the second examining the restructuring of Greater China’s space. In so doing, the book seeks to shed light on both the state formation process as well as international relations theory. Contents: “Introduction: China in the Age of Globalisation,” by F.Mengin; “Speaker’s Corner of Virtual Panopticon: Discursive Construction of Chinese Identities Online,” by K.Giese; “Information Technologies and the Emerging Chinese Religious Landscape,” by D.Palmer; “The Changing Role of the State in Greater China in the Age of Information,” by F.Mengin; “Controlling the Internet Architecture within Greater China,” by C.R.Hughes; “The Internet and the Changing Beijing Taipei Relations: Towards Unification or Fragmentation?,” by C.Hung; “Government Online and Cross Straits Relations,” by P.Batto; “New Information Technologies and Economic Interactions Among China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong,” by B.Naughton; “Cyber-Capitalism and the Remaking of Greater China,” by N.Sum; “Urban Assemblages: An Ecological Sense of the Knowledge Economy,” by A.Ong; “Global Networking and the New Division of Labor Across the Taiwan Straits,” by T.K.Leng]
MFC Insight (Beijing-based company MFC Insight presents information on the Internet industry in China; one can subscribe to email newsletters)
Munson, Todd. “Selling China: www.cnta.com and Cultural Nationalism.” The Journal of Multimedia History 2, 1 (1999).
Na, Yuqi. The Chinese Internet: Political Economy and Digital Discourse. Routledge, 2024.
[Abstract: This book explores China’s digital discourse and how the Internet influences social and ideological changes to the country’s political economy, within China’s historical context and through a variety of social and political actors. Analysing discourses as diverse as policy papers, addresses from the Xi-Li Administration, and speeches from CEOs of the dominant Internet companies in China, as well as those of Chinese Internet Users, this book illuminates the dynamics, complexity, and structural contradictions in China’s current network technology-enabled developmental path through the lens of ideology and discourse. The book proposes a multi-dimensional model to understand Marxist ideologies under capitalism, emphasizing the relevance of alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification in contemporary discussions of ideology and discourse. This insightful study offers fresh insights into Chinese digital discourse and will be of interest to upper-level students and scholars of communication studies, digital media, sociology, political science, and Internet and technology studies.]
Negro, Gianluigi. The Internet in China: From Infrastructure to a Nascent Civil Society. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
[Abstract: This book aims to identify the most important political, socio-economic, and technical determinants of Internet development in China, through a historical approach that combines political economy, cultural, and public studies. Firstly, the book looks at the most important strategies that compelled the Chinese government to invest in the construction of the Internet infrastructure. Secondly, it examines the relationships between the development of the Internet in China and the emergence of a nascent civil society. Finally, attention is given to three different Chinese online platforms in three different historical periods. This three-pronged approach presents a coherent set of analyses and case studies which are committed to the investigation of the complex process of change undergone by Internet development in China.]
Nie, Hongping Annie. “Gaming, Nationalism, and Ideological Work in Contemporary China: Online Games Based on the War of Resistance Against Japan.”Journal of Contemporary China 22 (81) (May 2013): 499-517.
O’Krent, Michael. “Gaming Sinographs beyond the Ludic: Word Game and the Digital Sinophone.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 367-94.
[Abstract: This article rethinks the notion of the Sinophone through digital technology by using the Taiwanese videogame Word Game (Wenzi youxi, Team9, 2022) as a case study. The digital Sinophone sees Chineseness as an act of positive identification claimed by engaging with digital artifacts; it defines a single mass audience coterminous with the Sinophone cultural sphere. Word Game constructs a two-dimensional space in which all objects are composed of sinographs, requiring the player to possess extensive knowledge of the construction of and relationship between sinographs according to Chinese grammatical and semiotic uses in order to progress in the game. Contrary to the internationalizing tendencies of the videogame market and the long history of tension between sinographic writing and the typographical technologies of technological modernity, the result is a uniquely Sinophone videogame. In Word Game, the logic of gameplay mechanics consists not of mathematical universals but culturally determined relationships between sinographs. The article concludes by examining the implications for the interdisciplinary study of videogames. Whereas contemporary videogame studies seeks to situate video gaming in broader cultural discourses, a culturalist view of videogames sees game mechanics as cocreators of culture rather than a mirror of culture.]
OpenNet Initiative [University of Toronto, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge collaboration. ONI mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices. Our approach applies methodological rigor to the study of filtration and surveillance blending empirical case studies with sophisticated means for technical verification. Our aim is to generate a credible picture of these practices at a national, regional and corporate level, and to excavate their impact on state sovereignty, security, human rights, international law, and global governance]
Ouyang Youquan 欧阳友权. Wangluo wenxue lungang 网络文学论纲 (Thesis on internet literature). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 2003.
Qiu, Jack [Linchuan]. “China Internet Studies: A Review of the Field.” In Helen Nissenbaum and Monroe E. Price, eds., Academy & the Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2004, 275-307.
—–. “A City of Ten Years: Public/Private Internet Development in Nanhai.” positions: east asian cultures critique 18, 1 (Spring 2010): 253-77.
Rea, Christopher G. “Spoofing (E’gao) Culture on the Chinese Internet.” In Jessica Milner Davis and Jocelyn Chey, eds., Humor in Chinese Life and Letters: Volume 2, Modern and Contemporary Approaches. Hong Kong: HK University Press, 2013, 149-72.
Roberts, I. D. “China’s Internet Celebrity: Furong Jiejie.” In Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys, eds., Celebrity in China. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 217-36.
Roberts, Margaret E. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
[Abstract: As authoritarian governments around the world develop sophisticated technologies for controlling information, many observers have predicted that these controls would be ineffective because they are easily thwarted and evaded by savvy Internet users. In Censored, Margaret Roberts demonstrates that even censorship that is easy to circumvent can still be enormously effective. Taking advantage of digital data harvested from the Chinese Internet and leaks from China’s Propaganda Department, this important book sheds light on how and when censorship influences the Chinese public. Roberts finds that much of censorship in China works not by making information impossible to access but by requiring those seeking information to spend extra time and money for access. By inconveniencing users, censorship diverts the attention of citizens and powerfully shapes the spread of information. When Internet users notice blatant censorship, they are willing to compensate for better access. But subtler censorship, such as burying search results or introducing distracting information on the web, is more effective because users are less aware of it. Roberts challenges the conventional wisdom that online censorship is undermined when it is incomplete and shows instead how censorship’s porous nature is used strategically to divide the public. Drawing parallels between censorship in China and the way information is manipulated in the United States and other democracies, Roberts reveals how Internet users are susceptible to control even in the most open societies. Demonstrating how censorship travels across countries and technologies, Censored gives an unprecedented view of how governments encroach on the media consumption of citizens.]
Schleep, Elisabeth. “‘Steady Updating Is the Kingly Way’: The VIP System and Its Impact on the Creation of Online Novels.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (Jan. 2015): 65-73.
Scott, Gregory Adam and Katherine Alexander. “Teaching through the Uncanny: Red Candle Game’s Devotion.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 70-75.
Sh-Chen, Yedong. “China in the Skin: In Search of a Chinese Video Game.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 395-416.
[Abstract: How do video games tell “the good China story”? In reviewing Chinese official media’s months-long criticism of the mobile MOBA game, Honor of Kings (Wangzhe rongyao 王者榮耀), and the game’s rounds of responses in 2017 and 2018, this article investigates a unique digital object that affords storytelling in video games: skin (pifu 皮膚). Neither a playable character per se nor a player’s avatar, skin constitutes a special digital milieu where China stories are told, debated, and their “goodness” performed. It traverses various composing strata of video games and distributes narrative into a game’s mechanics, procedure, representation, playing experience, and more. Skin, the author argues, is a yet-theorized differentiator that anchors “Chineseness” in the world of video gaming. It is a new site in a digital age in which the theoretical problem of Chineseness manifests different kinds of difficulty. The article ends with a discussion of the significance of researching skin to our understanding of what a Chinese video game is. The author calls for a new conceptualization of a Chinese video game that accounts for video game’s medium specificity. Speaking to scholars of both Chinese studies and digital game studies, this article anticipates more scholarly interest in the intersection of the two fields.]
Singapore Internet Research Centre
Sullivan, Jonathan. “A Tale of Two Microblogs in China.” Media, Culture & Society 34 (Sept. 2012): 773-78.
—–. “China’s Weibo: Is Faster Different?” Media, Culture & Society 16 (Feb. 1. 2014): 24-37.
Sun, Helen. Internet Policy in China: A Field Study of Internet Cafes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
Sun, Wanning and Haiqing Yu. WeChat and the Chinese Diaspora: Digital Transnationalism in the Era of China’s Rise. London: Routledge, 2022.
[Abstract: WeChat (the international version of Weixin), launched in 2012, has rapidly become the most favoured Chinese social media. Globally available, equally popular both inside and outside China and widely adopted by Chinese migrants, WeChat has fundamentally changed the ways in which Mandarin-speaking migrants conduct personal messaging, engage in group communication and community business activities, produce and distribute news, and access and share information. This book explores a wide range of issues connected to the ways in which WeChat works and is used, across the world among the newest members of the Chinese diaspora. Arguing that digital/social media afford a great degree of individual agency, as well as a collective capacity for sustaining an ‘imagined community’, the book shows how WeChat’s assemblage of infrastructure and regulatory frameworks, technical capabilities, content and sense of community has led to the construction of a particular kind of diasporic Chinese world, at a time marked both by China’s rise, and anxiety about Chinese influence in the West.]
Tai, Zixue. The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society. NY: Routledge, 2006.
[Abstract: examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China–for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?]
Tan, Jia. “Digital Masquerading: Feminist Media Activism in China.” Crime, Media, Culture 13, 2 (2017): 171–186.
Tian, Xi. “More than Conformity or Resistance: Chinese “Boys’ Love” Fandom in the Age of Internet Censorship.” The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 1 (2020).
[Abstract: One of the most popular literary and cultural practices particularly in the digital age, “boys’ love” (BL, danmei 耽美) manga and fictional works are fantasies on romantic or homoerotic male-male relationships, and therefore are often naturally associated with homosexuality and pornography, two “morally” suspicious targets of government censorship in the heteronormative Chinese culture. This article aims to examine the various, indeed often opposite, strategies and tactics taken by BL participants and by some conscientious netizens on popular social media to illustrate how those who are under the threat of censorship grapple with harsh reality. In this article I argue that the BL practitioners’ responses to Chinese government’s anti-pornography campaigns are not simply a passive or reluctant “reaction.” I will first study the web adaptation of Priest’s BL story Zhenhun, demonstrating Priest’s as well as her fans’ tactful collaboration with the consumer culture and willing conformity to official discourse. Forming a sharp contrast with Priest’s commercial success, the controversial ten-year jail sentence of another BL writer, Gouwazi Tianyi, for profiting from producing and selling BL fiction has caused widespread outcry from both BL fans and ordinary netizens on Chinese social media. This case not only questions the dated criminal laws on obscene articles, but also challenges the patriarchal and problematic social institutions.]
Tian, Xiaofei. “Slashing the Three Kingdoms: A Case Study of Fan Production on the Chinese Web.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, 1 (Spring 2015): 224-77.
—–. “The Thrill of Becoming: Writing Poetry in Digital Times.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 315-40.
[Abstract: What is the politics of form in the changing political climate? How does the writing of old-style poetry (jiuti shi) and new-style or modern vernacular poetry (xin shi) fare in digital times? As the internet, computers, smartphones, and Chinese internet poetry continue to evolve, how do these ongoing manifestations and technological transformations impact the landscape of poetry writing, and how do researchers answer these new challenges? This essay sketches the trajectory of change of modern old-style poetry and new-style poetry in response to the changing times and to each other, discusses how these changes embody larger cultural shifts, and addresses the role played by scholars and critics in the process. It argues that the gap between old-style poetry and new-style poetry is closing in interesting ways, and that scholarship on modern poetry is not about deciding the literary canon or predicting what comes next, but about constantly adjusting our understanding in the eternal process of becoming and realizing that the past is also changing owing to the changing perspective of the present.]
Tong, Yanqi and Shaohua Lei. “War of Position in Chinese Microblogging.” Journal of Contemporary China 22/80 (March 2013): 292-311.
[Abstract: examines the nature and development of microblogging in China. By adopting a Gramscian thesis of `hegemony’, we argue that the Chinese regime is facing a crisis of hegemony and the emergence of the microblogosphere has provided a platform for the war of position to establish counter-hegemony. The main features of microblogging in China are the emergence of opinion leaders, the close involvement of traditional media, and a more passive role of the state in the microblogosphere. The predominant liberal leaning of the microblogosphere has illustrated the emergence of counter-hegemony, where government connection is an instant negativity. The regime can exercise censorship but has lost ideational leadership.]
Tse, Jamie Wing Tung. “Games as Historical Representations: The Present/Presence in the Past.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 63-69.
Tsui, Lokman. “The Panopticon as the Antithesis of a Space of Freedom: Control and Regulation of the Internet in China.” China Information 17, 2 (2003): 65-82.
—–. “The Taste of Information: State Attempts to Control the Internet.” IIAS Newsletter 33 (March 2004): 8.
US Embassy Report. “Kids, Cadres And “Cultists” All Love It: Growing Influence Of The Internet In China.” (March 2001).
Voci, Paola. “Quasi-Documentary, Cellflix and Web Spoofs: Chinese Movies’ Other Visual Pleasures.” Senses of Cinema 41 (Oct.-Dec. 2006).
Wacker, Gudrun. “Resistance Is Futile: Control and Censorship on the Internet in China.” In Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008. Leiden, Brill, 2010, 353-81.
Wang, Gan. “‘Net-Moms’–a New Place and a New Identity: Parenting Discussion Forums on the Internet in China.” In Tim Oakes and Lousa Schein eds.,Translocal China: Linkages, Identities, and the Reimagining of Space. London: Routledge, 2006, 155-65.
Wang, Jing. The Other Digital China: Non-Confrontational Activism on the Social Web. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: The Chinese government has increased digital censorship under Xi Jinping. Why? Because online activism works; it is perceived as a threat in halls of power. In The Other Digital China, Jing Wang, a scholar at MIT and an activist in China, shatters the view that citizens of nonliberal societies are either brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear. Instead, Wang shows the impact of a less confrontational kind of activism. Whereas Westerners tend to equate action with open criticism and street revolutions, Chinese activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society. Many Chinese change makers practice nonconfrontational activism. They prefer to walk around obstacles rather than break through them, tactfully navigating between what is lawful and what is illegitimate. The Other Digital China describes this massive gray zone where NGOs, digital entrepreneurs, university students, IT companies like Tencent and Sina, and tech communities operate. They study the policy winds in Beijing, devising ways to press their case without antagonizing a regime where taboo terms fluctuate at different moments. What emerges is an ever-expanding networked activism on a grand scale. Under extreme ideological constraints, the majority of Chinese activists opt for neither revolution nor inertia. They share a mentality common in China: rules are meant to be bent, if not resisted.]
Wang, Qingning. The Chinese Internet: The Online Public Sphere, Power Relations and Political Communication. NY: Routledge, 2021.
Wang, Wilfred Yang. “Remaking Guangzhou: Geo-Identity and Placing-Making on Sina Weibo.” Media International Australia 156 (August 1, 2015): 29–38.
[Abstract: This study uses the concept of ‘place-making’ to consider the formation of geo-identity on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging services in China. Besides articulating state-public confrontation during major social controversies, Weibo has been used to recollect and re-narrate the memories of a city, such as Guangzhou, where dramatic social and cultural changes took place during the economic reform era. This study aims to explore how Weibo sustains political engagement through maintaining Guangzhou people’s sense of belonging to their city. By collecting data from a Weibo group over a period of twelve months, I argue that Weibo politics not only takes place during a contentious events, but is sustained within the realm of everyday life. This study has the potential to contribute to the limited knowledge of Weibo use during non-contentious period in China, hence broadening the notion of popular polity in the age of social media.]
Wang, Yiwen. “Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature. NY: Routledge, 2023, 377-87.
Weber, Ian and Lu Jia. “Handing over China’s Internet to the Corporations.” IIAS Newsletter 33 (March 2003): 9.
[What’s on Weibo is an independent news site reporting social trends in an ever-changing China. What’s on Weibo sheds light on China’s social media and dynamic digital developments. With a strong focus on China’s society and online media environment, What’s on Weibo aims to explain the story behind the hashtag. It is meant for people and (marketing) companies to create a deeper understanding of the Internet, social media, and brands in Chinese society today. What’s on Weibo is fully independent, and is not affiliated with Sina Weibo or other social media companies in any way. For an explanation of the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo, please go to our Short Introduction of Sina Weibo. Based in Amsterdam & Beijing, What’s on Weibo is managed by sinologist and editor-in-chief Manya Koetse.]
Woodworth, Max D. “Inner City Culture Wars.” In Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing, eds. Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism. London: Routledge, 2009, 207-224.
[Abstract: analyzes and compares Zhang Dali’s graffiti art project and the Internet virtual debate on the redevelopment project of the Qianmen neighborhood.]
Wu, Chia-rong. “From Detention to Devotion: Historical Horror and Gaming Politics in Taiwan.” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, 2 (2022): 46-62.
Wu, Xu. Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.
Xiao, Qiang. “The Internet: A Force to Transform Chinese Society?” In Lional M. Jensen and Timothy B. Weston, eds., China’s Transformations: The Stories beyond the Headlines. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Xu, Shuang. “Traveling through Time and Searching for Utopia: Utopian Imaginaries in Internet Time-Travel Fiction.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10, 1 (2016): 113-32.
[Abstract: The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.]
Yang, Dali. “The Great Net of China.” MadeforChina.com.
Yang, Fan. “From Bandit Cell Phones to Branding the Nation: Three Moments of Shanzhai in WTO-era China.” positions: asia critique 24, 3 (August 2016): 589-619.
Yang, Guobin. “The Internet and the Rise of a Transnational Chinese Cultural Sphere.” Media, Culture & Society 25, 4 (2003): 469-490.
—–. “The Co-evolution of the Internet and Civil Society in China.” Asian Survey 43, 3 (2003): 405-22.
—-. “The Internet and Civil Society in China: A Preliminary Assessment.” Journal of Contemporary China 12 (36) (Aug. 2003): 453-75.
[Abstract: This article assesses the preliminary impact of the Internet on civil society development in China. Based on survey data and in-depth case studies, three areas of impact are identified and analysed. First, with respect to China’s public sphere, the social uses of the Internet have fostered public debate and problem articulation. The Internet has demonstrated the potential to play a supervisory role in Chinese politics. Second, the Internet has shaped social organizations by expanding old principles of association, facilitating the activities of existing organizations and creating a new associational form, the virtual community. Finally, the Internet has introduced new elements into the dynamics of protest. The article concludes after discussing the conditions and obstacles that influence the social uses of the Internet in China, cautioning against an overoptimistic view of the role of the Internet in civil society development while stressing the importance of the Internet as a new social phenomenon in China.]
—–. “Mingling Politics with Play: The Virtual Chinese Public Sphere.” IIAS Newsletter 33 (March 2004): 7.
—–. “How Do Chinese Civic Associations Respond to the Internet? Findings from a Survey.” The China Quarterly 189 (2007): 122-43.
[Abstract: Based on survey data collected from October 2003 to January 2004, this article provides the first systematic empirical analysis of how civic associations in urban China have responded to the internet. It shows, first, that urban grassroots organizations are equipped with a minimal level of internet capacity. Secondly, for these organizations, the internet is most useful for publicity work, information dessemination, and networking with peer and international organizations. Thirdly, social change organizations, younger organizations and organizations in Beijing report more use of the internet than business associations, older organizations and organizations outside Beijing. Finally, organizations with bare-bone internet capacity report more active use of the internet than better-equipped organizations. These findings suggest that the internet has had special appeal to relatively new organizations oriented to social change and that a “web” of civic associations has emerged in China.]
—–. “‘A Portrait of Martyr Jiang Qing’: The Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Internet.” In Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, eds., Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007, 287-316.
—–. The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. NY: Columbia University Press, 2009.
[Abstract: Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang’s pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argues, Chinese online activism derives its methods and vitality from multiple and intersecting forces, and state efforts to constrain it have only led to more creative acts of subversion. Transnationalism and the tradition of protest in China’s incipient civil society provide cultural and social resources to online activism. Even Internet businesses have encouraged contentious activities, generating an unusual synergy between commerce and activism. Yang’s book weaves these strands together to create a vivid story of immense social change, indicating a new era of informational politics.]
—–. “Chinese Internet Literature and the Changing Field of Print Culture.” In Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008. Leiden, Brill, 2010, 333-52.
Yang, Guobin, ed. “Thirty Years of the Internet in China.” Special issue of Communication and the Public 9, 3 (2024).
[Abstract: Essays by Kaiping Chen, Shaohua Guo, Rongbin Han, Michel Hockx Gianluigi Negro, Jack Qiu, Matt DeButts and Jenn Pan, Gabriele de Seta, Jingyi Gu, Angela Li, Sara Liao, Jun Liu, Junyi Lv, Florian Schneider, Yunya Song, Jiarui Li and Sheng Zou, Cara Wallis, Wei Wang and Huxin Guan, Angela Xiao Wu, Jian Xu, Elaine Yuan, Ge Zhang, Zhang Lin, and Weiyu Zhang]
Yang, Ling. “‘The World of Grand Union’: Engendering Trans/nationalism via Boys’ Love in Online Chinese Hetalia Fandom.” In Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds., Boys; Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017, 45-62.
Yang, Ling and Yanrui Xu. “Queer Texts, Gendered Imagination, and Grassroots Feminism in Chinese Web Literature.” In Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, Willam F. Schroeder, and Hongwei Bao, eds., Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2015, 131-52.
—–. “Chinese Danmei Fandom and Cultural Globalization from Below.” In Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds., Boys; Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017, 3-19.
Yang, Zhiyi. “Writing in the Digital Sand: Technological Transformation and Classicist Poetry Writing in China’s Fluid Cyberspace.” Prism 20, 2 (2023): 341-66.
[Abstract: This article examines the interface, power structure, and media technology of the digital platforms that have enabled the production and dissemination of Chinese internet classicist poetry, born in the late 1990s, as well as the impact that technological evolution bears on its aesthetics, economics, and ecosystem. The rapid transformations of Chinese cyberspace make it a digital sand beach in which the poets write. This situation creates a curious paradox: while the internet is supposed to “remember forever” words indifferently, the death of platforms and digital censorship can also erase words thoroughly and forever. On the digital sands thus arises a phantasm of literary immortality, which, in ways unprecedented in human history, is conjured by capital, technology, and political authority.]
Yang, Zhiyi and Ma Dayong. “Classicism 2.0: The Vitality of Classicist Poetry Online in Contemporary China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 12, 3 (2018): 526-57.
[Abstract: In this paper, we examine the various approaches toward literary classicism among contemporary Chinese poets. If “poetry of the establishment” features ideological conservatism and aesthetic populism, then its opposite is the online scene of classicist poetry which represents an innovative continuation of the poetic tradition. Here such innovations are discussed in terms of theme, language, and form. Thematic innovations include further that of ideology, worldview, and urbanity. In particular, we argue that a major distinction between contemporary online classicist poets and their premodern predecessors is in their cultural identity. Unlike a traditional literatus who is a poet, scholar, and bureaucrat, contemporary poets often endure economic, intellectual, or political marginalization; or at the very least, writing in the marginalized genre of classicist poetry is a skill that can no longer be readily translated into career success. This new type of poetic identity, in addition to their modern education, has given rise to fresh interpretations of our living world unseen in premodern poetry. Despite their broad spectrum of intellectual persuasions and aesthetic preferences, most of the poets have demonstrated an audacity to experiment, which, coupled with full versatility and virtuosity in the classical poetry tradition, creates outstanding poems. The highly original works of a few leading classicist poets like Lizilizilizi (Zeng Shaoli), Xutang (Duan Xiaosong), and Dugu Shiroushou (Zeng Zheng) will be examined in depth.]
Yang, Zhiyi and David Der-wei Wang, eds. Classicism in Digital Times: Cultural Remembrance as Reimagination in the Sinophone Cyberspace (special issue). Prism 20, 2 (2023).
Yu, Haiqing. “Blogging Everyday Life in Chinese Internet Culture.” Asian Studies Review 31, 4 (2007): 423-33.
—–. “After the ‘Steamed Bun’: E’gao and Its Postsocialist Politics.” Chinese Literature Today 5, 1 (Jan. 2015): 55-64.
Yuan, Elaine J. The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.
[Abstract: Taking off at the height of China’s socio-economic reforms in the mid-1990s, the Internet developed alongside the twists and turns of the country’s rapid transformation. Central to many aspects of social change, the Internet has played an indispensable role in the decentralization of political communication, the expansion of the market, and the stratification of society in China. Through three empirical cases – online privacy, cyber-nationalism, and the network market – this book traces how different social actors engage in negotiation of the practices, social relations, and power structures that define these evolving institutions in Chinese society. Examining rich user-generated social media data with innovative methods such as semantic network analysis and topic modelling, The Web of Meaning provides a solid empirical base to critique for critiquing the power relationships that are embedded in the very fibre of Chinese society.]
Zhang, Chunyu. “Loving Boys Twice as Much: Chinese Women’s Paradoxical Fandom of ‘Boys’ Love’ Fiction.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, 3 (2016): 249-267.
Zhang, Lin and Anthony Fung. “The Myth of ‘Shanzai‘ Culture and the Paradox of Digital Democracy in China.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14, 3 (2013): 401-16.
[Abstract: analyzes the Internet-based campaign for the “shanzhai” Spring Festival Gala in connection with the rise of “digital democracy” and the burgeoning economy of grassroots culture in China. Emerging as a bottom-up challenge to the political and economic monopoly of CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala, the campaign rode on the popular myth of shanzhai culture, which captured people’s imagination for its associations with grassroots digital democracy. By depicting how different social players appropriate the narratives of shanzhai to construct a collective social imaginary of democracy, the article explores the specific formation of an Internet-facilitated shanzhai democracy, arguing that the myth of shanzhai currently enables and confounds political resistance in China. It nurtures a political subjectivity that encourages the instrumental marriage of affective emotion, populist anarchism, and commercial self-branding and publicity, and cultivates a “shanzhai” democracy that thrives on the commodification of politics and the monetization of the netizen’s and the public’s affective labor. The myth of shanzhai reflects the contested nature of digital democracy in contemporary China, marking a transitional space, a symbiotic relationship with power, and a fluid frontier to be constantly redefined and defended.]
Zhang, Weiyu. The Internet and New Social Formation in China: Fandom Publics and Netizens in the Making. NY: Routledge, 2015.
[Abstract: There are 5.13 billion Internet users in China, and this number is continually growing. This book looks at the various purposes of this Internet use, and provides a study about how the entertainment-consuming users form into publics through the mediation of technologies in the era of network society. It questions how individuals, mediated by new information and communication technologies (ICTs), come together to form new social categories. The book goes on to investigate how public(s) is formed in the era of network society, with particular focus on how fans become publics in a society that follows the logic of network. Using online surveys and in-depth interviews, this book provides a rich description of the process of constructing a new social formation in contemporary China.]
Zhao, Yong. “When a Red Classic Was Spoofed: A Cultural Analysis of a Media Incident.” In Tao Dongfeng, Yang Xiaobin, Rosemary Roberts, and Yang Ling, eds. Chinese Revolution and Chinese Literature. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009, 247-70.
Zheng, Yongnian. Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.
[Abstract: Will new information technologies, especially the Internet, bring freedom and democracy to authoritarian China? This study argue that the Internet has brought about new dynamics of socio-political changes in China, and that state power and social forces are transforming in Internet-mediated public space. Its findings are fourfold. First, the Internet empowers both the state and society. The Internet has played an important role in facilitating political liberalization, and made government more open, transparent, and accountable. Second, the Internet produces enormous effects which are highly decentralized and beyond the reach of state power. Third, the Internet has created a new infrastructure for the state and society in their engagement with (and disengagement from) each other. Fourth, the Internet produces a recursive relationship between state and society. The interactions between the state and society over the Internet end up reshaping both the state and society.]
Zhou, Shuyan. “From Online BL Fandom to the CCTV Spring Festival Gala: The Transforming Power of Online Carnival.” In Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao, eds., Boys; Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017, 91-110.
Zhou, Yongming. Historicizing Online Politics Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006.
[Abstract: It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes th manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics. Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.]
Zhu, Jonathan J. H. and Zhou He. “Information Accessibility, User Sophistication, and Source Credibility: The Impact of the Internet on Value Orientations in Mainland China.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 7, 2 (January 2002). Zhou, Yongming. Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2006.
Zittrain, Jonathan and Ben Edelman. “Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China.” IEEE Internet Computing 7, 2 (March/April 2003): 70-77.
Zuccheri, Serena. Letteratura web in Cina. Rome: Nuove Edizioni Romane, 2008. [111pp. ISBN 978-88-7457-071-3]
Radio
Benson, Carlton. From Teahouse to Radio: Storytelling and the Commercialization of Culture in 1930s Shanghai. Ph.D. diss. Berkeley: University of California, 1996.
—–. “Back to Business as Usual: The Resurgence of Commercial Radio Broadcasting in ‘Gudao’ Shanghai.” In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 279-301.
—–. “The Manipulation of ‘Tanci’ in Radio Shanghai during the 1930s.” Republican China 20, 2 (April 1995): 117-146.
Du Ying 杜英. “Shanghai guangbo diantaiye de jieguan yu gaizao” 上海广播电台业的接管与改造 (The takeover and reform of the broadcasting industry in Shanghai). Ershi yi shiji 115, no. 10 (2009): 65-74.
Guo, Z. “A Chronicle of Private Radio in Shanghai.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 30 (1986): 379–392.
Hamm, Charles. “Music and Radio in the PRC.” Asian Music 22, 2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 1-41.
Howse, Hugh. “The Use of Radio in China.” The China Quarterly 2 (1960): 59-68.
Lei, Wei. “Beyond Propaganda: The Role of Radio in Modernizing China in the Socialist Era, 1949-76.” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 7, 3, (Dec. 2016): 297-310.
[Abstract: When socialist China was founded in 1949, led by the Chinese Communist Party and with Mao Zedong as the leader, radio was the most technologically viable medium with little presence of television. As propaganda is the dominant conception mobilized to interpret the role of media in Mao-era China (1949–76), radio is no exception. However, we still do not fully understand how radio worked and the degree to which programming shaped both public and individual life during this era. Addressing these questions is crucial if we are to explore the involvement of radio in modernizing Mao-era China beyond propaganda. Drawing largely upon Chinese material available pertinent to radio in Mao-era China, this article starts by examining the circumstances in which a state-owned radio system was constructed. It then moves on to scrutinize the materiality and forms of listening exercised in Chinese everyday lived reality. It investigates: several radio genres that were prominent during the Maoist era; and; the multiple dimensions that guided radio’s production of a socialist subject. Taking the historical context and specific radio practices into account, this article aims to address issues – both theoretical and empirical – to localize the relationship between radio and modernization in socialist China.]
—–. Radio and Social Transformation in China. Ph. D. diss. Sydney: University of Technology, 2016.
Lei, Wei and Wanning Sun. “Radio Listening and the Changing Formations of the Public in China.” Communication and the Public 2, 4 (Sept. 2017): 320-34.
Li, Jie. “Revolutionary Echoes: Radios and Loudspeakers in the Mao Era.” Twentieth Century China 45, 1 (2020): 25–45.
Tang, Xiaobing. “Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China.” In Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang, eds., Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. London: Routledge, 2022, 128-47.
Wang, Yu. “‘Feminine Frequencies’: Gender, Radio, and the Auditory Culture of Revolution in 1940s China.” Women’s History Today 2 (2022).
—–. “Listening to the Enemy: Radio Consumption and Technological Culture in Maoist China.” Twentieth-Century China 47, 2 (2022): 154-70.
Documentary Film
Aitken, Ian. “Authoritarianism, the Struggle for Current Affairs Public Service Broadcasting and Radio Television Hong Kong.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 131-46.
Aitken, Ian and Michael Ingham. Hong Kong Documentary Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
[Abstract: Does Hong Kong have a significant tradition in documentary filmmaking? Until recently, many film scholars believed not. Yet, when Ian Aitken and Michael Ingham challenged this assumption, they discovered a rich cinematic tradition, dating back to the 1890s. Under-researched and often forgotten, documentary film-making in Hong Kong includes a thriving independent documentary film movement, a large archive of documentaries made by the colonial film units, and a number of classic British Official Films. Case studies from all three categories are examined in this book, including The Battle of Shanghai, The Sea and the Sky, Rising Sun and The Hong Kong Case. In-depth discussion and analysis of more recent Hong Kong independent documentaries focuses on works such as Cheung King-wai’s KJ: A Life in Music and films by Tammy Cheung and Evans Chan. With a particular focus on how these films address the historico-political dimension of their time, Hong Kong Documentary Film introduces students and scholars in Film Studies to this fascinating and largely unexplored cinematic tradition.]
Bergthaller, Hannes. “Agrarian Origin Stories, National Imaginaries, and the Ironies of Modern Environmentalism: On Chi Po-lin’s Kanjian Taiwan (Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above).” In Chia-ju Chang and Scott Slovic, eds., Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, 55-66.
Berry, Chris. “On Top of the World: An Interview with Duan Jinchuan, Director of 16 Barkhor South Street.” Film International 5, 2 (1997): 60-62.
—–. “Facing Reality: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism.” In Wu Hung, ed., The First Guangzhou Triennial: Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000). Guangzhou: Zhuangzhou Museum of Art/ Chicago: Art Media Resources, 2002, 121-31.
—–. “Independently Chinese: Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, and Chinese Documentary.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 109-22.
—–. “Wu Wenguang: An Introduction.” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 133-136.
—–. “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism.” In Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 115–36.
—–. “Chris Berry on New Chinese Documentary.” dGenerate Films (Nov. 14, 2013).
—–. “Being a Woman Documentary Filmmaker in Taiwan: An Interview with Singing Chen and Wuna Wu.” In Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers, eds., Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018,
Berry, Chris and Lisa Rofel. “Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture.” In C. Berry, Xinyu Lü and Lisa Rofel, eds., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 135–54.
Berry, Michael and Travis Fan. “Ethics and Experience in the Making of Still Tomorrow: In Conversation with Travis Fan.” Chinese Literature Today 7, 2 (2018): 18–23. (On Fan Jian 范剑 and Yu Xiuhua 余秀华.)
Berry, Chris, Lü Xinyu, Lisa Rofel, eds. The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. HK: Hong Kong UP, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center review by Matthew D. Johnson]
[Abstract: [The book] is a groundbreaking project unveiling recent documentary film work that has transformed visual culture in China, and brought new immediacy along with a broader base of participation to Chinese media. As a foundational text, this volume provides a much-needed introduction to the topic of Chinese documentary film, the signature mode of contemporary Chinese visual culture. These essays examine how documentary filmmakers have opened up a unique new space of social commentary and critique in an era of rapid social changes amid globalization and marketization. The essays cover topics ranging from cruelty in documentary to the representation of Beijing; gay, lesbian and queer documentary; sound in documentary; the exhibition context in China; authorial intervention and subjectivity; and the distinctive “on the spot” aesthetics of contemporary Chinese documentary. This volume will be critical reading for scholars in disciplines ranging from film and media Studies to Chinese studies and Asian studies.]
bjdoc.com [a site devoted to documentary film in China]
Braester, Yomi. “Excuse Me, Your Camera Is in My Face: Auteurial Intervention in PRC New Documentary.” In Chris Berry, Lü Xinyu and Lisa Rofel, eds., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 195–216.
—–. “For Whom Does the Director Speak? Identity Politics, Self-Reflexive Ethics, and Auteurist Cinephilia in Documentary Film Criticism.” In Yingjin Zhang and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First-Century China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, 33‒49.
Byrnes, Corey. “Men at Work: Independent Documentary and Male Bodies.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, 3 (2020): 157-80.
[Abstract: Much has been written about the evolution of the “New Chinese Documentary Film Movement”—its shift from public and implicitly political topics to a more private and politically agnostic position, its embrace of digital video, its relationship with narrative film. Throughout these changes and the academic discourses that interpret them, two themes have remained constant: First, a sense of reality as something occluded and difficult to access. Documentary image making, we are told, cuts through the layers of political and societal mediation that screen everyday life from view. And second, despite a general investment in the possibility of accessing reality or truth among those who practice and write about documentary film in China, the form is generally described in richly metaphorical terms, as an unveiling or laying bare. “Men at Work” explores how the literalization of these corporeal and sartorial metaphors shapes understandings of documentary film. It argues that nudity has become a generic trait in an important subset of documentary films, where it functions as both a figure for documentary practice and a metonym for the filmmaker, while also unlocking unpredictable and heretofore under-theorized desires.]
Cao, Qing. “Two Faces of Confucianism: Narrative Construction of Cross-Cultural Images in Television Documentaries.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30, 2 (July 2004).
Chang, Chia-ju. “Global Animal Capital and Animal Garbage: Documentary Redemption and Hope.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11, 1 (2017).
[Abstract: This article argues that, in dealing with contemporary prevalent, slow violence against nonhuman animals, film medium is more effective when perceived as an agent of redemption. The documentary genre in particular is capable of helping nonhuman animals break away from being trapped in the viscous loop of the capitalist production chain through its visual, investigative, and other cinematic apparatus. In developing the idea of documentary redemption and hope, I first trace, by way of Nicole Shukin’s work, the entanglements of animals in early film industry where animals are exploited materially by the film industry and conceptually exploited for the advancement of a capitalist manufacturing process. Here, I see filmic redemption as self-redemptive: to redress/make amends the malicious human-animal relationship, especially with the advent of digital film. The second idea of redemption is examined through animal activist documentaries: What narrative and aesthetic strategies do filmmakers use to prompt post-cinematic change or action? What affects are appropriate for an animal advocacy film? In recognizing the potential negatives of documentaries to traumatize, terrorize, and numb the audience by cataloging the cruel reality of animal violence and suffering, I contend that the documentary genre materializes its activist potential when it is conceived as a positive and affective technological apparatus of hope and aspiration. The following films (mostly documentaries) from multiple localities will be discussed: The Plastic Cow (India), Three Flower/Tri-Color (China), four Asian Black Bear rescue documentaries from Australia, China, and Vietnam, and finally, The Lost Sea (Taiwan).]
Chen, Pauline. “Screening History: New Documentaries on the Tiananmen Events in China.” Cineaste 21, 1 (Winter 1996): 18-22.
Chi, Robert. “The New Taiwanese Documentary.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15, 1 (Spring 2003): 146-96.
China Indepedent Documentary Film Archive [Mission: (a) create a platform for screening and discussing Chinese independent documentary films; (b) collect, catalog and research independent Chinese documentaries; (c) istribute and promote these films worldwide in order to convey the many realities they express. China Folk Memory Image Archives (CFMIA): an ongoing, long term archive powered by the community. It collects, organizes and preserves images from China’s folk history. It’s goal is to create a collection that can be used for research and study purposes, while at the same time engaging the community to document and preserve it is own history and Our base: CIDFA is based at Caochangdi Workstation, the studio of independent Chinese documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang.]
Chiu, Kit Fung Henry. “Going to the People: Community Screening, Documentary and the Plebeian Public Sphere in Hong Kong.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 209-24.
Chiu, Kuei-fen. “Taiwan and Its Spectacular Others: Aesthetic Reflexivity in Two Documentaries by Women Filmmakers from Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 98-107.
—–. “The Vision of Taiwan New Documentary.” In Darrell William Davis and Ru-Shou Robert Chen, eds., Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity and State of the Arts. NY: Routledge, 2007, 17-32.
—–. “The Subaltern Woman’s Voice and the (Film-)making of Modern Taiwan.” In Kwok-kan Tam and Terry Siu-han Yip, eds., Gender, Discourse and the Self in Literature: Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. HK: The Chinese University Press, 2010, 193-215.
—–. “‘Should I Put Down the Camera?’: Ethics in Contemporary Taiwanese Documentary Films.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds.,Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 138-54.
—–. “Documentary Power: Women Documentary Filmmakers and New Subjectivities in Contemporary Taiwan.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 169–181.
—–. “Documentary Filmmaking as Ethical Production of Truth.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 203–220.
—–. “The Ethical Turn in the Production and Reception of New Chinese-Language Documentary Films.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 27, 1 (Spring 2015): 44-74.
Chiu, Kuei-fen and Yingjin Zhang, eds. New Chinese-Language Documentaries. NY: Routledge, 2015.
[Abstract:Documentary filmmaking is one of the most vibrant areas of media activity in the Chinese world, with many independent filmmakers producing documentaries that deal with a range of sensitive socio-political problems, bringing to their work a strongly ethical approach. This book identifies notable similarities and crucial differences between new Chinese-language documentaries in mainland China and Taiwan. It outlines how documentary filmmaking has developed, contrasts independent documentaries with dominant official state productions, considers how independent documentary filmmakers go about their work, including the work of exhibiting their films and connecting with audiences, and discusses the content of their documentaries, showing how the filmmakers portray a wide range of subject matter regarding places and people, and how they deal with particular issues including the underprivileged, migrants and women in an ethical way. Throughout the book demonstrates how successful Chinese-language independent documentary filmmaking is, with many appearances at international film festivals and a growing number of award-winning titles.]
Chu, Yingchi. Chinese Documentaries: From Dogma to Polyphony. NY: Routledge, 2007.
Coe, Jason G. “Remembering the Losers: The Hopeful Politics of Memory in Raise the Umbrellas 撐傘.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 241-56.
Cornell, Christen. “The Affluent and the Effluent: Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste.” Senses of Cinema (July 2012).
Cui, Shuqin. “Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: A Multimedia Documentary in the Digital Age.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11, 1 (2017).
[Abstract: Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: Investigating China’s Smog presents an unprecedented model of how a multi-media documentary can turn an environmental crisis into a dynamic media event that achieves mass virality. The “going viral” came about because of the interplay between unconventional multimedia documentary modes and an extensive digital network characterized by a large number of users resorting to various technologies. While the rhetorical persuasion built upon multimedia assets encouraged viewers to interact with or navigate through the story of an environmentally alarming reality, the digital media enabled citizens alerted to deadly environmental conditions to tap into a channel of green discussion and diverse voices. The irony of the film’s initial virality provoking its short-lived circulation reveals once again the brute fact of media censorship and social-political constraints. In a polluted landscape and manipulated virtual space, open discussions and investigative exposures of environmental problems remain political and controversial.]
The Da Zha Lan Project (This project is about researching and filming the area of Da Zha Lan, which is a slum in Beijing.The Da Zha Lan Project is an extension of San Yuan Li (the village-in-city in Guangzhou), a project that was featured in the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Together with an upcoming project about Caoyang Xincun in Putuo District in Shanghai (a workers’ community in Shanghai, 2006), it will make up a series of research and creative practice concerning urbanization and impoverished communities in cities in China.)
de Villiers, Nicholas and Yongan Wu. “Readymade Mao: Impersonation and Affective Relations.” positions 24, 4 (Nov. 2016): 789-812. [concerns Zhang Bingjian’s 张秉坚 documentary Readymade (现成品, 2009)]
Denton, Kirk A. “Storm Under the Sun: An Introduction,” liner notes to the DVD version of the documentary Storm Under the Sun, directed by Peng Xiaolian and S. Louisa Wei. Hong Kong: Blue Queen Cultural Communication, 2007.
Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. “The Politics and Aesthetics of Seeing in Jump! Boys.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds., Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 112-37.
Deprez, Camille and Judith Pernin, eds. Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: In a post-1990 context of unrivaled creativity in documentary filmmaking, what does ‘independence’ really mean? This new anthology is the first collection of in-depth case studies (including Hong Kong and China) to cut across media, topics, purposes and national divides to better comprehend the radical transformations of the documentary form over the past twenty-five years. It provides an innovative interpretation of understudied subject matters and styles and rare analysis of different production, distribution and exhibition strategies. It not only helps to rethink the notion of independence, but also contributes to a fundamental change in our perception of documentary filmmaking. The book should be of interest to film scholars, students, practitioners and film enthusiasts alike.]
dGenerate Films [the leading distributor of contemporary independent film from mainland China to audiences worldwide. We are dedicated to procuring and promoting visionary content, fueled by transformative social change and digital innovation.]
Edwards, Dan. “Street Level Visions: China’s Digital Documentary Movement.” Senses of Cinema (July 2012).
—–. “Petitions, Addictions and Dire Situations: The Ethics of Personal Interaction in Zhao Liang’s Paper Airplane and Petition.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 1 (2013): 63-79.
—–. Independent Chinese Documentary: Alternative Visions, Alternative Publics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
[Abstract: Since the turn of the twenty-first century there has been an explosion in Chinese independent documentary filmmaking. But how are we to understand this vibrant burst of activity? Are these films brave expressions of dissidence, or do they point to a more complex attempt to expand the terms of public discourse in the People’s Republic? This timely study is based on detailed interviews with Chinese documentary makers rarely available in English, and insights gained by the author while working as a journalist in Beijing. It considers the relationship between independent documentaries and China’s official film and television sectors, exploring the ways in which independent films probe, question and challenge the dominant ideas and narratives circulating in the state-sanctioned public sphere. Detailed analyses of key contemporary documentaries reveal a sustained attempt to forge an alternative public sphere where the views and experiences of petitioners, AIDS sufferers, dispossessed farmers and the victims of Mao’s repression can be publicly aired for a small, but steadily growing, public.]
—–. “300 Million Clicks: Under the Dome and the Chinese Documentary Context.” Senses of Cinema 76 (Sept. 2015).
Fang Fang 方方. Zhongguo jilupian fazhan shi 中国纪录片发展史 (A history of the development of Chinese documentary film). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2003. [reviewed by Shan Wanli at Documentary Box]
The Folk Memory Project — Filmography (2010-2014)
[Abstract: The Folk Memory Project (FMP) is a multidisciplinary memory initiative launched in 2010 by filmmaker Wu Wenguang and choreographer Wen Hui at the Caochangdi Workstation (Beijing). Its main purpose is to produce textual and visual records of the historical experience of rural populations, especially during the Great Leap famine. This table presents the completed documentaries of the artists in residence participating in the FMP, as well as works of other filmmakers produced in the frame of this project. It also provides links to full-length written interviews transcripts of protagonists recorded during the shooting of these documentaries. This filmography is the first attempt to provide a full list of films made within the project, and it has been compiled with the help of Caochangdi Workstation’s artists in residence.–Judith Pernin]
Gao, Dan. “Chinese Independent Cinema in the Age of ‘Digital Distribution.'” In Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2015, 163-83.
He, Chang. “The Raw and the Real.” City Weekend (August 1, 2005).
Hong, Guo-Juin. “Voices and Their Discursive Dis/Content in Taiwan Documentary.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 7, 2 (2013): 183-193.
[Abstract: Instead of attempting to provide a survey of Taiwan documentary, this article focuses on a few critical moments in its long and uneven history and proposes a potentially productive site for understanding its formal manifestations of representational politics. By honing in on the uses of sounds and words, I show that the principle of a unitary voice–voice understood both as the utterances of sound and the politico-cultural meaning of such utterances–organizes the earlier periods of the colonial and authoritarian rules and shapes later iterations of and formal reactions to them. Be it voice-over narration or captions and inter-titles, this article provides a historiographical lens through which the politics of representation in Taiwan documentary may be rethought. Furthermore, this article takes documentary not merely as a genre of non-fiction filmmaking. Rather, it insists on documentary as a mode, and indeed modes, of representation that do not belong exclusively to the non-fiction. Notions of “documentability” are considered together with the corollary tendency to “fictionalize” in cinema, fiction and non-fiction. Taiwan, with its complex histories in general and the specific context within which the polyglossiac practices of New Taiwan Documentary have blossomed in recent decades in particular, is a productive site to investigate the questions of “sound” in cinematic form and “voice” in representational politics.]
Hsiung, Yuwen. “Competing with Urban Verticality: Cinematic Landscapes in Seediq Bale and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above.” International Journal of Taiwan Studies 4, 1 (2021): 33-53.
[Abstract: While buildings strive to reach higher and higher, cities are obsessed with a visible expression of verticality. Seediq Bale (2011) and Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013) represent a new development in Taiwan’s cinematic use of landscape that challenges the dominance of urban verticalism. Seediq Bale sets up an alternative vertical dimension of mountainous areas that puts into dialogical relationship the dichotomies of civilised/barbarous, advanced/primitive, and vertical/horizontal. Audiences no longer experience space in a traditional manner, as eventually Mona Rudao’s graveyard is undiscovered/undefined. Beyond Beauty, on the other, asks viewers to ‘go higher’, encouraging a break with ordinary experience for a more spiritual quest like aerial shots. As both offer a sense of disorientation and alienation, what does the spatial metaphor address to aesthetics, ecocriticism, politics of identity, and sovereignty in geography? What are the implications as cinematic landscapes extend into a real-life environment that is ready to be consumed?]
—–. “Limits of Visibility: Taiwan’s Tongzhi Movement in Mickey Chen’s Documentaries.” positions: asia critique 23, 3 (summer 2013): 683-701.
Hu, Lidan. “Self-Portraiture and Historical Memory: Zhang Mengqi’s Documentary Practice.” Critical Arts 33, no. 2 (2019): 29-41.
Huang, Erin. “Archaeologies of Post-socialist Temporalities: Documentary Experiments and the Rhetoric of Ruin Gazing.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 31, 1 (2019): 42-60.
[Abstract: Focusing on the independent documentary movement that is also a movement of digital filmmaking in China, this essay examines documentary’s mediation of post-socialist conceptions of time through digital filmmaking aesthetics, including ruin gazing, forwarding and reversing, and accelerating and decelerating film speed. In a comparative study of experimental documentaries on post-socialist temporalities in Eastern Europe and China—including the work of Chantal Akerman, Cong Feng, and Huang Weikai—the essay unravels documentary’s representation of time that illustrates the “post” as a locus of desires and anxieties, backward and forward glances that create heterogeneous relationships—with their own economy of stasis, velocity, and speed—in relation to the homogeneous and teleological time of Capital.]
Huang, Xuelei. “Murmuring Voices of the Everyday: Jia Zhitan and his Village Documentaries.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 1 (Spring 2016).
[Abstract: This essay examines the documentary films made by Jia Zhitan, a 64-year-old Chinese farmer who has been participating in the ‘Villager Documentary Project’ initiated by Wu Wenguang, the renowned independent documentary filmmaker in China. By looking at seven documentary films made by Jia Zhitan between 2006 and 2013, this essay draws upon the concept of everydayness and presents a localised picture of rural life in contemporary China as reflected in Jia’s films. It also aims to investigate the meaning of peasant documentary filmmaking in the contexts of independent documentary culture in China, as well as the century-long sociological and ethnographic probing into Chinese village life. My analysis focuses on three aspects of village life featured predominantly in Jia’s films: the rhythm of everyday life, village politics and the history of the socialist past. Taken together, these aspects point to the aesthetics, politics and historicity of the concept of everydayness.]
Independent Documentaries on the Mao Era (1992-2015)
[Abstract: Over the past 25 years, many Chinese independent filmmakers have made documentaries about the history of the Mao era. Using personal memories as primary materials, they are shedding light on times and topics that are vaguely, inaccurately or insufficiently narrated in the official history. The following table is an attempt to list these independent documentaries and identify the historical periods they mainly address. Hyperlinks to excerpts, trailers or full versions of these films are provided when available. Although this list does not claim exhaustivity, it is the first attempt to systematically document what has emerged as a specific sub-genre of independent film in China. The selected works all address past experiences of the protagonists, shedding light on the daily life during the Mao era. However, some of the historical content of these films extends well beyond this period, for instance by relating events preceding the founding of the PRC with the period in scrutiny ; other times, the past is revisited in order to explain the historical causes of contemporary issues.–Judith Pernin]
Ingham, Mike. “A Personal Vision of the Hong Kong Cityscape in Anson Mak’s Essayistic Documentary Films One Way Street on a Turntable and On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing.” In Camille Deprez and Judith Pernin, eds., Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
—–. “Too Much Reality? Reflections on the Educational-Observational Film World of Tammy Cheung and Augustine Lam.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 147-60.
Ingham, Mike and Kenny K. K. Ng, eds. “Hong Kong Independent Documentaries and Their Visibility,” special issue of Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022).
—–. “Introduction: Hong Kong Independent Documentaries and Their Visibility.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 117-30.
[Abstract: The authors trace the origins of and motivation behind much of the independent documentary filmmaking produced in the city during a period of great sociopolitical turbulence, leading up to the tight censorship protocols put in place after the mainland government’s promulgation of the repressive National Security Law in 2020. With reference to the individual essays that comprise this volume, they chart the sudden and unprecedented rise of documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong following many decades of public indifference to the genre. Limited public and underground screenings that took place before absolute censorship measures were implemented in 2021 showed huge box-office demand for these topical films, reflecting images of ordinary Hong Kong people and their struggle for political representation. This opening essay introduces a range of essays and one interview, mostly in relation to specific films, dealing with the now-contentious coupling of documentary films or television broadcasts and democracy. As the essays indicate, some directors and producers of these observational and participatory documentaries are still active overseas and many of the films discussed can now only be screened outside Hong Kong. Nevertheless, they bear witness to a spirit of resilience and resistance as well as a deep-seated desire for a genuine democracy based on universal suffrage constantly reneged on by the city’s various rulers, from the colonial era until now.]
Iovene, Paola. “A Madwoman in the Art Gallery? Gender, Mediation, and the Relation between Life and Art in Post-1989 Chinese Independent Film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8, 3 (2014): 173-187.
Jacka, Tamara and Josko Petkovic. “Ethnography and Video: Researching Women in China’s Floating Population.” Intersections (Sept. 1998).
Jaffee, Valerie. “Every Man a Star: The Ambivalent Cult of Amateur Art in New Chinese Documentaries.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 77-108.
Jilu guandian 记录观点 (Viewpoint). [a site on the Taiwan Public Television Station website devoted to Taiwan documentary film]
Johnson, Matthew David. “A Scene Beyond Our Line of Sight: Wu Wenguang and New Documentary Cinema’s Politics of Independence.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 47-76.
—–. “Bringing the Transnational Back into Documentary Cinema: Wu Wenguang’s China Village Documentary Project, Participatory Video and NGO Aesthetic.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 255-82.
—–. “Institutionalizing Independence: Security, Culture, and Unofficial Documentary Filmmaking under the Xi Jinping Government.” Problems of Post-Communism 64, 2 (2017).
[Abstract: This article assesses recent Chinese Communist Party responses to the issue of post-Soviet ideological fragmentation by examining independent documentary media in the context of broader policy discussions surrounding culture and the lessons of the “Arab Spring.” It argues that Xi-ist policies of cultural securitization began under Hu Jintao and should be understood as the outgrowth of elite consensus-based efforts to deal with the implications of new media technologies and marketization for authoritarian rule. New political and factional formations have, in turn, reconfigured the landscape of institutions, patronage networks, and quasi-legal lines of permissiveness affecting documentary producers. This “political institutionalization” of independent media practices is significant as a window onto broader dynamics of managed pluralism.]
Johnson, Matthew D., Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds. China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Kissel, Laura. “The Memory Project and Other Ways of Knowing: Filmmaking, Affect, and Embodied Knowledge.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-first Century China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 99–115.
Kunze, Rui. “Tasting a Good Life: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Happiness in the Documentary A Bite of Happiness 2 (2014).” China Perspectives 1-2 (2018): 45-53.
Kuo, Li-hsin. “Sentimentalism and the Phenomenon of Collective ‘Looking Inward’: A Critical Analysis of Mainstream Taiwanese Documentary.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds., Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 183-203.
Laughlin, Charles. “Images of Aging and the Aesthetic of Actuality in Chinese Film: Reportage, Documentary, and the Art of the Real.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 2 (Fall 2019): 207-248.
Laughlin, Charles and Li Guo. “Reportage and Its Contemporary Variations: An Introduction.” Special issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 2 (Fall 2019): v-xvi.
Leary, Charles. “Performing the Documentary, or Making It to the Other Bank.” Senses of Cinema 27 (July/Aug. 2003).
Lee, Daw-Mng. “A Preliminary Study of the Market for Documentaries in Taiwan.” Asian Cinema 20, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 68-82.
—–. “Re/Making Histories: On Historical Documentary Film and Taiwan: A People’s History.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds., Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 11-37.
Lee, Maggie. “Behind the Scenes: Documentaries in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.” Documentary Box 26 (2005).
Lee, Yu-lin. “The Digital Emergence of a New History: The Archiving of Colonial Japanese Documentaries on Taiwan.” In Peng Hsiao-yen and Ella Raidel, eds., The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture: Altering Archives. Routledge, 2018, 113-27.
Li, Jie. “Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie’s Documentary Films on the Cultural Revolution.” Public Culture 21, 3 (2009): 538-49.
—–. “Phantasmagoric Manchukuo: Documentaries Produced by the South Manchurian Railway Company, 1932-1940.” positions: asia critique 22, 2 (spring 2014): 329-70.
Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. “Between Past and Future: Documentary Films on the 2/28 Incident in Taiwan.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, 1 (Spring 2009): 46-71.
Lin, Sylvia Li-chun and Tze-Lan Deborah Sang, eds. Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. NY: Routledge, 2012.
[Abstract: To date, there is but a handful of articles on documentary films from Taiwan. This volume seeks to remedy the paucity in this area of research and conduct a systematic analysis of the genre. Each contributor to the volume investigates the various aspects of documentary by focusing on one or two specific films that document social, political and cultural changes in recent Taiwanese history. Since the lifting of martial law, documentary has witnessed a revival in Taiwan, with increasing numbers of young, independent filmmakers covering a wide range of subject matter, in contrast to fiction films, which have been in steady decline in their appeal to local, Taiwanese viewers. These documentaries capture images of Taiwan in its transformation from an agricultural island to a capitalist economy in the global market, as well as from an authoritarian system to democracy. What make these documentaries a unique subject of academic inquiry lies not only in their exploration of local Taiwanese issues but, more importantly, in the contribution they make to the field of non-fiction film studies. As the former third-world countries and Soviet bloc begin to re-examine their past and document social changes on film, the case of Taiwan will undoubtedly become a valuable source of comparison and inspiration. These Taiwanese documentaries introduce a new, Asian perspective to the wealth of Anglo-American scholarship with the potential to serve as exemplar for countries undergoing similar political and social transformations.]
—–. “Recreating the White Terror on the Screen.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds., Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 38-59.
Lin, Xudong. “Documentary in Mainland China.” Tr. Cindy Carter. Documentary Box 26 (2005).
Liu, Jin. “A Cinematic Presentation of Trash: An Interview with Wang Jiuliang.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (May 2020).
Lü Xinyu 吕新雨. Jilu Zhongguo: Dangdai Zhongguo xin jilu yundong 记录中国：当代中国新纪录运动 (Recording China: Contemporary Chinese new documentary movement). Beijing: Sanlian, 2003. [reviewed by Feng Yan at Documentary Box]
—–. “Ruins of the Future: Class and History in Wang Bing’s Tiexi District.” New Left Review 31 (Jan-Feb, 2005)
Lupke, Christopher. ” Documenting Environmental Protest: Taiwan’s Gongliao Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and the Cultural Politics of Dialogic Artifice.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds., Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 155-82.
Ma, Ran. “Regarding the Grassroots Chinese Independent Film Festival: Modes of Multiplicity and Abnormal Film Networking.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds. China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 235-54.
—–. “Mapping Asian Documentary Film Festivals since 1989: Small Histories and Splendid Connections.” Senses of Cinema 76 (Sept. 2015).
Meng, Jing. “Personal Camera as Public Intervention: Remembering the Cultural Revolution in Chinese Independent Documentary Films.” Studies In Documentary Film 9, no. 2 (2015): 143-160.
[Abstract: Chinese independent documentary films about the Cultural Revolution provide alternative memories to official and popular accounts. In addition to the contestations of memories between the official and non-official and between the mainstream/dominant and the independent/marginal, there lies a third pair of contestation: between the public and the private, which also encompasses the previous two antitheses. To frame it in another way, what is allowed in public and what has to be restricted can be conceived as a key to understanding negotiations and discourses about the Cultural Revolution, as well as the status of independent documentary films in China. This paper explores how Chinese independent documentary films recall the past and bring private memories into public through different aesthetic approaches, reconfiguring discourses around the Cultural Revolution and the documentary films’ independent status.]
—–. “Documenting the Past: Performativity and Inter-subjectivity in the Memory Project.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, 3 (2016): 265-82.
[Abstract: A growing number of Chinese independent documentaries about history and memory have emerged since 2000. This paper explores several documentaries of the Folk Memory Project: Wu Wenguang’s Treatment(Zhiliao, 2010) and Zhang Mengqi’s Self-Portrait series: Self-Portrait with Three Women (Zihuaxiang he san ge nüren, 2010), Self-Portrait: at 47 km (Zihuaxiang: 47 gongli, 2011), Self-portrait: Dancing at 47 km (Zihuaxiang: 47 gongli tiaowu, 2012) and Self-Portrait: Dreaming at 47 km (Zihuaxiang: 47 gongli zuomeng, 2013). Drawing on concepts of performativity and inter-subjectivity, I argue that Wu’s and Zhang’s documentaries highlight the subjective and dialogical dimensions of documentation and memory, making visible their techniques for dealing with past events in ways which invite further engagement and reflection. Wu’s and Zhang’s documentaries have enabled the utterance and affective sharing of muted memories. Moreover, these Chinese independent documentaries also represent a shift in style from austere, long-take realism toward more experimental, performative and self-reflexive works.]
Nunes, Jenn Marie. “I’ve Got a Little Problem (review).” MCLC Resource Center (September 2018).
Palmer, Augusta L. Crossroads: Nostalgia and the Documentary Impulse in Chinese Cinemas at the Turn of the 21st Century. Ph. D. diss. NY: New York University, 2004.
Pernin, Judith. “Filming Space/Mapping Reality in Chinese Independent Documentary Films.” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 22-34.
—–. “Performance, Documentary, and the Transmission of Memories of the Great Leap Famine in the Folk Memory Project.” China Perspectives 4 (2014): 17-26.
[Abstract: Independent documentary film projects dealing with history have recently multiplied in China. While all seek to shed new light on personal experiences of the Mao era, they vary greatly in form, method, and scale. Launched in 2010 by Wu Wenguang at the Caochangdi Workstation, a space devoted to contemporary dance and documentary film, the Folk Memory Project aims at producing various textual and visual records of the historical experience of rural populations, especially during the Great Leap famine. Of special interest are the 20 documentaries of the Folk Memory Project’s film section – a body of works constantly growing following yearly re- turns by filmmakers to their “home” villages. These films are characterised by a performative aspect that is rare in other Chinese do- cumentaries on similar topics. This contribution examines this body of documentaries and the role of performance and performativity in the recording of collective memory of the famine.]
—–. Pratiques indépendantes du documentaire en Chine: Histoire, esthétique et discours visuels (1990-2010). Renne: Presses Universitaires de Renne, 2015.
[Abstract: Cet ouvrage analyse les pratiques du cinéma documentaire indépendant en Chine, de son apparition dans les années 1990 à nos jours. Si les réalisateurs se servent de méthodes opposées à celles, didactiques et autoritaires, des documentaires de propagande antérieurs aux années 1980, ils assimilent dans le même temps les derniers développements de l’histoire mondiale de cette forme. D’autre part, de la cinéphilie de piratage aux festivals non officiels, les indépendants créent des formes de partage du cinéma qui réunissent des acteurs de l’art contemporain et de l’activisme.]
—–. “Independent Documentaries and Online Uses in China: From Cinephilia to Activism.” In Camille Deprez and Judith Pernin, eds., Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Pernin, Judith. “Filming the Individual and the Collective: The 2019 Pro-democracy Movement in Hong Kong Independent Documentaries.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (October 2021).
Pickowicz, Paul G. “Zou Xueping’s Postsocialist Homecoming.” In Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds. Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-first Century China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 68-83.
Pickowicz, Paul and Yingjin Zhang, eds. Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-first Century China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
[TOC: 1. Introduction: Documenting China Independently, by Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang; 2. Who’s Afraid of the Documentary Camera? Refiguring Reality, Memory, and Power in Chinese Independent Documentary, by Yingjin Zhang; 3. For Whom Does the Director Speak? The Ethics of Representation in Documentary Film Criticism, by Yomi Braester; 4. From Root-Searching to Grassroots: Returning to the Countryside in Contemporary Chinese Fiction and Independent Documentary Film, by Angie Chau; 5. Zou Xueping’s Postsocialist Homecoming, by Paul G. Pickowicz; 6. Looking Back while Marching Forward: Reconfiguration of Selfhood in the Folk Memory Project, by Tong Wang; 7. The Memory Project and Other Ways of Knowing: Filmmaking, Affect, and Embodied Knowledge, by Laura Kissel; 8. Gendering Intersubjectivity in New Chinese Documentary: Feminist Multiplicity and Vulnerable Masculinity in Postsocialist China, by Alvin Wong; 9. From Bumming to Roaming: Xu Tong’s The Drifters Trilogy, by Yiman Wang; 10. Documenting through Reenacting: Revisiting the Performative Mode in Chinese Independent Documentaries, by Hongjian Wang]
Qian, Ying. “Just Images: Ethics and Documentary Film in China.” China Heritage Quarterly 29 (2012).
—–. “Power in the Frame: China’s Independent Documentary Movement.” New Left Review 74 (2012): 105–123.
—–. “Crossing the Same River Twice: Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 590-609.
—–. “Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets and the Reconstruction of an Activist Documentary.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 181-96.
—–. “When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism: Documentary Cinema in China’s Great Leap Forward.” Critical Inquiry 46, 3 (Spring 2020): 578-604.
[Abstract: This essay traces documentary cinema’s entanglement in material productions in industry, agriculture, and infrastructure during China’s Great Leap Forward (1957–1961) and uses documentary as a prism to investigate the intertwined histories of media practice and social transformation. I argue that as the fastest growing mode of filmmaking, documentary inculcated a complex temporal aesthetic in this period and propelled the Great Leap Forward as a productive force. Taylorist images provided sensorial training for a rapidly expanding labor force, instilling in new workers the rhythm and speed of optimal industrial movement. Meanwhile, a new mode of artistic documentary blurred the distinction between documentary and fiction, with a practice of documenting tomorrow that shunned uncertainty and brought the future into palpable proximity. Rapidly made to approximate the simultaneous time of television, but delivered manually by mobile projectionists to sites of mass labor all over the country, documentary films accompanied sleepless mass labor on a 24/7 schedule and played pivotal roles in disseminating age-old vernacular technologies, such as the backyard furnaces, to grave consequences. What was the Chinese revolution? How do we grasp its energies and entropies, and account for its failures? Understanding documentary as a critical media that articulated and supported the radical temporality and epistemology of the Great Leap Forward, this essay argues for the important role of media and mediation in delimiting the epistemological, political, and aesthetic possibilities that shaped the paths of the revolution’s actualization.]
—–. Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
[Abstract: From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings¸ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements. With meticulous historical excavation and attention to intermedial practices and transnational linkages, Qian discusses how early media practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century intermingled with rival politicians and warlords as well as civic and business organizations. She reveals the foundational role documentary media played in the Chinese Communist Revolution as a bridge between Marxist theories and Chinese historical conditions. In considering the years after the Communist Party came to power, Qian traces the dialectical relationships between media practice, political relationality, and revolutionary epistemology from production campaigns during the Great Leap Forward to the “class struggles” during the Cultural Revolution and the reorganization of society in the post-Mao decade. Exploring a wide range of previously uninvestigated works and intervening in key debates in documentary studies and film and media history, Revolutionary Becomings provides a groundbreaking assessment of the significance of media to the historical unfolding and actualization of revolutionary movements.]
Reel China: Documentary Biennal (PRC documentary films available for public showing)
Reynaud, Berenice. “New Visions / New China: Video–Art, Documentation, and the Chinese Modernity Question.” In Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. Minneapolis: Univesity of Minnesota Press, 1996, 229-57.
—-. “Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary.” Senses of Cinema 28 (Sept-Oct. 2003).
Robinson, Luke. “Contingency and Event in China’s New Documentary Film Movement.” Working Paper. Nottingham EPrints. (Unpublished).
—–. “Alternative Archives and Individual Subjectivities: Ou Ning’s Meishi Street.” Senses of Cinema (July 2012).
—–. Independent Chinese Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
[Abstract: In the past 20 years, China has witnessed the flowering of an independent documentary cinema characterized by a particular vérité aesthetic. Independent Chinese Documentary traces the roots of this style back to the 1980s, and the gradual abandonment of studio-based filmmaking, dominant during the Maoist era, for shooting live and on location. Known in Chinese as xianchang – or being ‘on the scene’ – this documentary practice is distinguished by its embrace of the contingent. Through a series of synoptic case studies, this book considers the different ways in which contingency manifests in independent Chinese documentary; the practical and aesthetic challenges its mediation presents for individual filmdirectors; and the reasons for the quality’s significance, and enduring appeal, in the context of China’s ongoing transition from socialism to capitalism.]
—–. “Voice, Liveness, Digital Video: The Talking Head in Contemporary Independent Chinese Documentary.” positions: asia critique 22, 2 (spring 2014): 489-516.
—–. “‘To Whom Do Our Bodies Belong?’ Being Queer in Chinese DV Documentary.” In Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2015, 289-315.
—–. “The Good Cats of Chinese Documentary.” Senses of Cinema 76 (Sept. 2015).
—–. “Chinese Documentary as Public Culture.” International Communication of Chinese Culture 2, 1 (2015): 69-75.
Robinson, Luke and Jenny Chio. “Making Space for Chinese Independent Documentary: The Case of Yunfest 2011.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 1 (2013): 21-40.
Sang, Tze-lan D. “Reclaiming Taiwan’s Colonial Modernity: The Case of Viva Tonal: The Dance Age.” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds.,Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 60-88.
Scruggs, Bert. “Cultivating Taiwanese: Yen Lan-chuan and Juang Yi-tseng’s Let It Be (Wu mi le).” In Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang, eds., Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012, 89-111.
Shaffer, Benny. “Shapeshifting Fields: Mao Chenyu’s Rural Media Ecology.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, 2 (2019): 112-29.
[Abstract: This paper examines the recent moving image work of artist, researcher, and rice farmer Mao Chenyu, who has spent over a decade making ethnographically inflected documentary work in his village outside of Yueyang in Hunan Province. With his innovative approaches, which combine the visual idioms of the essay film, found footage collage, autodidactic philosophical reflections, and observational cinema, his work provokes a conceptual reevaluation of rural life and agrarian labor among China’s peasantry. Mao is the founder of Paddy Film Farm, a grassroots operation that serves as both an independent film studio, as well as a cottage industry for the production of organic rice and strong liquor. Through his on-the-ground ethnographic research, he self-identifies as a “native anthropologist,” and explores new modes of knowledge production and experimental storytelling that are displayed in contexts ranging from China’s small circuit of underground film screenings to alternative art spaces and state-sponsored museums. In this paper, I draw on close readings of two of Mao’s films, I Have What? Chinese Peasants War: The Rhetoric to Justice (2014) and Cloud Explosion: Dongting Lake and the Death of Its Symbols (2015); multimedia installations at the 2016 Shanghai Biennial and a recent solo exhibition at A + Contemporary in Shanghai’s M50 Art District; and finally, on an analysis of my own ethnographic research (participant-observation field notes, informal interviews, textual analysis, and curated screenings and discussions) conducted with the artist between Shanghai and Yueyang from 2015 to 2017.]
Shan Wanli 单万里. Jilu dianying wenxian 纪录电影文献 (Documents on documentary film). Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi, 2001.
—–. Zhongguo jilu dianying de lishi 中国记录电影的历史 (History of Chinese documentary film). Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 2005.
Shaw, Gareth and Xiaoling Zhang. “Cyberspace and Gay Rights in a Digital China: Queer Documentary Filmmaking under State Censorship.” China Information 32, 2 (2018): 270-92.
[Abstract: Owing to China’s austere censorship regulations on film media, directors of films and documentaries engaging with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themes have struggled to bring their work to domestic attention. Working outside of the state-funded Chinese film industry has become necessary for these directors to commit their narratives to film, but without approval of China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, these artists have had little chance of achieving widespread domestic distribution of their work. However, advancements in new media technology and Web 2.0, ranging from digital video formats to Internet-based distribution via social media networks and video-hosting platforms, provide opportunities for Chinese audiences to access films and documentaries dealing with LGBT themes. This empirical study assesses how production, promotion and consumption of queer documentary films are influenced by the development of social media within Chinese cyberspace. Through close readings of microblogs from SinaWeibo, this study combines analysis of contemporary research with digital social rights activism to illustrate contemporary discourse regarding film-based LGBT representation in China. Finally, the study comments on the role that documentary filmmaking plays in China’s gay rights movement, and discusses the rewards (and challenges) associated with increased levels of visibility within society.]
Shen, Rui. “To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks About His Documentaries.” Senses of Cinema 35 (2005).
Shen, Shuang. “From Deconstruction to Activism: The Chinese Independent Documentary and the Crowd.” Modern China (Nov. 2014). Online First Publication.
[Abstract: This article explores how the increasing visibility of new collectives in contemporary China has shaped independent documentaries. Countering a prevalent approach to documentary studies that emphasizes the individual and the subjective, this article suggests that how to represent collectivity has preoccupied Chinese documentary filmmakers from the inception of this art form. Yet early independent documentary filmmakers of the 1990s did not have a clear agenda on the representation of collectivity. The crowd in their films appears as an indistinguishable entity, akin to a passive or inactive social agent. More recent documentaries present significantly more complicated interactions between the camera and the crowd and deliberately tap into the problem of representation of contemporary crowds not just from a formal perspective, but from a political perspective as well.]
—–. “The Spectacular Crowd: Representing the Masses in DV Documentary.” In Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2015, 97-118.
—–. ‘From Deconstruction to Activism: The Chinese Independent Documentary and the Crowd.” Modern China 41, 6 (2015): 656-679.
[Abstract: This article explores how the increasing visibility of new collectives in contemporary China has shaped independent documentaries. Countering a prevalent approach to documentary studies that emphasizes the individual and the subjective, this article suggests that how to represent collectivity has preoccupied Chinese documentary filmmakers from the inception of this art form. Yet early independent documentary filmmakers of the 1990s did not have a clear agenda on the representation of collectivity. The crowd in their films appears as an indistinguishable entity, akin to a passive or inactive social agent. More recent documentaries present significantly more complicated interactions between the camera and the crowd and deliberately tap into the problem of representation of contemporary crowds not just from a formal perspective, but from a political perspective as well.]
Sniadecki, J. P. “The Cruelty of the Social: Xianchang, Intersubjectivity, and Interobjectivity.” In Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2015, 57-75.
Sun, Hongyun. “Two Chinas? Joris Ivens’ Yukong and Antonioni’s China.” Studies in Documentary Film 3, 1 (2009): 45-59.
Sun, Jianqiu. “Sound and Color in Sun Mingjin’s Silent b/w Films: The Paradox of a Documentary/Educational Filmmaker.” Asian Cinema 17, 1 (Spring/Summer, 2006): 221-29.
Sun, Wanning. “Subalternity with Chinese Characteristics: Rural Migrants, Cultural Activism, and Digital Video Filmmaking.” Javnost: the Public 19, 2 (2012): 83–100.
—–. “The Cultural Politics of Recognition: Rural Migrants and Documentary Films in China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, 1 (2013): 3-20.
Taiwan International Documentary Festival [official site of this important and popular documentary film fest]
Takenaka, Akiko. “Politics of Representation or Representation of Politics? Yasukuni the Film.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 21 (Dec. 2009): 117-36.
Tam, Enoch Yee-Lok. “Hong Kong Independent Political Documentary under the Regulating Dispotif: Inside the Red Brick Wall and Beyond.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 177-89.
Tan, Jia. “Provincializing the Chinese Mediascape: Cantonese Digital Activism in Southern China.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 197-213.
—–. “Toward a Spatiotemporal Consciousness in Media Studies: Locational Aesthetics and Digital Filmmaking in China’s Special Zones.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 3 (2015): 187-203.
—–. “Aesthetics of Queer Becoming: Comrade Yue and Chinese Community-based Documentaries Online.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 33, 1 (2016): 38-52.
Tsai, Futuru C. L. Amis Hip Hop
[website devoted to the documentary Amis Hip Hop; the entire documentary can be viewed online; “Amis Hip Hop documents how a group of young Amis men in Dulan village have blended influences from contemporary social and cultural life in Taiwan with their traditional practice of ritual dance performance in the village. When people think of Amis in Taiwan, images of colorfully dressed female dancers welcoming visitors, or else repetitive chanting in a circle dance at a harvest festival, come to mind. However, the Amis young men of Dulan village on the east coast of Taiwan have been creating a new style of performance that is still based on their traditions. Rooted in the Amis ethos of respect for male age-grade organization, matrilineal affiliation, intimacy with the ocean, and appreciation of joking relationships, these young men also blend in elements of foreign fashion in music and dance all while keeping with traditional village aesthetics. Through their performances, they represent a new image to both locals and outsiders, and actively construct their local identity as Dulan Amis”]
Tsai, Robin Chen-hsing. “Toxic Objects, Slow Violence, and the Ethics of Transcorporeality in Chi Wen-chang’s Zhebi di tiankong (The Poisoned Sky).” In Chia-ju Chang and Scott Slovic, eds., Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016, 67-78.
van der Meulen, Sjoukje. “Documenting China’s Garment Industry: Wang Bing’s Portrayal of Migrant Workers’ Suspended Lives within the Contract Labour System.” Pacific Affairs 94, 2 (June 2021): 371-96.
Viviani, Margherita. “The Digital Revolution: Documentary-Making and Citizenship in Contemporary China.” PhD diss. University of Western Australia, 2012.
Viviani, Margherita. “Chinese Independent Documentary Films: Alternative Media, Public Spheres and the Emergence of the Citizen Activist.” Asian Studies Review 38, 1 (2014): 107-23.
Veg, Sebastian. “From Meiji Modernity to the Nanjing Massacre: Yasukuni‘s Critical Perspective on History and Memory.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (May 2010).
Voci, Paola. “From the Center to the Periphery: Chinese Documentary’s Visual Conjectures.”Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16, 1 (Spring 2004): 65-113.
—–. “Un intento sincero e dei metodi onesti: Riflessioni sul documentario Cina di Antonioni e il nuovo documentario cinese” (A sincere purpose and honest means: Rethinking Antonioni’s documentay ‘China’ and the new Chinese documentary). In Maurizio Scarpari and Tiziana Lippiello, eds., Cher Maître…Scritti in onore di Lionello Lanciotti per l’ottantesimo compleanno. Venezia: Ca’ Foscarina, 2005: 1234-1248.
—–. “Dal grande al piccolo schermo: nuovi sviluppi del documentario cinese” (From silver screen to small screen: new developments of Chinese documentary). In Ombre Elettriche: Cento anni di cinema cinese 1905-2005 (Electric shadows: 100 years of Chinese cinema 1905-2005). Venezia: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2005: 158-167.
—–. “Quasi-Documentary, Cellflix and Web Spoofs: Chinese Movies’ Other Visual Pleasures.” Senses of Cinema 41 (Oct.-Dec. 2006).
—–. China on Video: Small Screen Realities. NY: Routledge, 2010.
[Abstract: China On Video is the first in-depth study that examines smaller-screen realities and the important role they play not only in the fast-changing Chinese mediascape, but also more broadly in the practice of experimental and non-mainstream cinema. At the crossroads of several disciplines—film, media, new media, media anthropology, visual arts, contemporary China area studies, and cultural studies–this book reveals the existence of a creative, humorous, but also socially and politically critical “China on video”, which locates itself outside of the intellectual discourse surrounding both auteur cinema and digital art. By describing smaller-screen movies, moviemaking and viewing as light realities, Voci points to their “insignificant” weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world. The author proposes that lightness is a concept that can usefully be deployed to describe the moving image, beyond the specificity of recent new media developments and which can, in fact, help us rethink previous cinematic practices in broad terms both spatially and temporally.]
—–. “Quasi-Documentary, Cellflix and Web Spoofs: Chinese Movies’ Other Visual Pleasures.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 45-56.
—–. “DV and the Animateur Cinema in China.” In Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, eds., DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2015, 260-88/
Wagner, Keith B. “Xue Jianqiang as Reckless Documentarian: Underdevelopment and Juvenile Crime in post-WTO China.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 147-65.
Wang, Ban. “Documentary as Haunting of the Real: The Logic of Capital in Blind Shaft.” Asian Cinema 16, 1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 4-15.
—–. “In Search of Real-Life Images in China: Realism in the Age of Spectacle.” Journal of Contemporary China 56 (August 2008): 497-512.
[Abstract: This essay re-examines new realism in documentary film and photography in China. Distinct from official realism, genuine realism requires that experience be seen within its real environment and characters and actions of a realist work be shaped by that environment. This principle challenges the visual regime of spectacle controlled by the expanding global cultural industry. Documentary realism represents a penetrating social comment but also recovers a materialist understanding of workers’ life and conditions in China. Photo-realism on the other hand uncovers the forgotten ways of life among ordinary people in the fast modernization of the cities.]
Wang, Qi. “Navigating on the Ruins: Space, Power, and History in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentaries.” Asian Cinema 17, 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 246-55.
—–. “Performing Documentation: Wu Wenguang and the Performative Turn of New Chinese Documentary.” In Yingjin Zhang, ed., A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 299-317.
—–. “Embodied Visions: Chinese Queer Experimental Documentaries by Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en.” positions: asia critique 21, 3 (Summer 2013): 659-81.
—–. Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2014.
Wang Weici 王慰慈 (also Wang Wei-tsy). Jilu yu tansuo: yu dalu jilupian gongzuozhe de shiji duihua 记录与探索: 与大陆纪录片工作者的世纪对话 (Recording and exploring: conversations with documentarians from Mainland China). Taibei: Yuanliu, 2000.
—–, ed. 2006. Taiwan dangdai yingxiang: cong jishi dao shiyan, 1930–2003 台灣當代影像從紀實到實驗 (Contemporary images of Taiwan: from documentation to experimentation 1930–2003). Taipei: Tongxi wenhua, 2006.
Wang Xiaolu 王小鲁. 2010. “Zhongguo duli jilupian ershi nian guancha” 中国独立纪录片20年观察 (Observations on Chinese independent documentary in the past twenty years). Dianying yishu, no. 6: 72-78.
Wang, Yiman. “The Amateur’s Lightning Rod: DV Documentary in Postsocialist China.” Film Quarterly 58, 4 (2005): 16-26.
[Abstract: This article examines the cultural politics of DV documentaries emerging from postsocialist China, discussing the documentary-makers as amateur-authors. It goes on to argue that the documentarians’ self-consciously deployed aesthetics of cruelty constitutes a socio-political claim for an alternative “real,” derived from a subaltern “structure of feeling.”]
—–. “Of Animals and Men: Towards a Theory of Docu-ani-mentary.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds. China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 167-80.
Woei Lien Chong and Anne Sytske Keijser. “Modernizing Mainland China: PRC Films and Documentaries at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, 1999.” China Information 14, 1 (1999): 171-207.
Wong, Lucas L. H. “Lost in the Fumes: Affective Resistance in Relation to the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 225-40.
Wong, Tong. “Looking Back While Marching Forward: Reconfiguration of Selfhood in the Folk Memory Project.” In Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First-Century China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 87–98.
Wu, Helena. “The Making of the Citizen-Spectator in Postmillennial Hong Kong: Authorial and Spectatorial Engagement with Independent Documentary Films.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 191-207.
Wu, Wenguang. “Just on the Road: A Description of the Individual Way of Recording Images in the 1990s.” In Wu Hung, ed., The First Guangzhou Triennial: Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000). Guangzhou: Zhuangzhou Museum of Art/ Chicago: Art Media Resources, 2002, 132-38.
—–. “DV: Individual Filmmaking.” In Chris Berry, Lü Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel, eds., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 49-54.
—–. “Keywords: Independence à Freedom à Activism.” Chinese Independent Cinema Observer 1, no. 2 (2022): 216-224.
Xu, Lingjia. “Rediscovering a Lost Utopia Craftsmanship in A Bite of China.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 38-51.
[Abstract: The transition from socialist to post-socialist China goes hand-in-hand with a devaluation of human labor. In China today, human labor has been alienated, reified, and stripped of embodied practices, affective value, ecological awareness, and cultural memory. But countervailing trends arise and challenge alienated labor. In this essay, I explore how quotidian handiwork, commonly considered low-value and inefficient, is represented as new forms of sentimental qualities, artisanal intelligence, and ecological wisdom by examining the first season of the recent popular 2012 documentary series A Bite of China (Shejianshang de Zhongguo). I investigate how this documentary depicts craftsmanship in food-making as new structures of human-human, human-object, and human-nature relations in the domain of work. In an attempt to critique and redeem labor, dehumanized by technology and industrialization, the documentary’s valorization of craftsmanship problematizes our separation between the socialist and post-socialist vision of labor. A reflection upon industrial production and the handicraft tradition invokes the socialist aesthetics of non-alienated labor and indicates an effort to envision a more idealistic Chinese labor condition.]
Yang, Lawrence Zi-Qiao. “Soil and Scroll: The Agrarian Origin of a Cold War Documentary Avant Garde.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, 2 (Fall 2019): 41-80.
Yang, Xin. “Aestheticizing Labor: The Construction of the ‘Good China Story’ in Li Ziqi’s Videos.” Chinese Literature and Thought Today 53, 3-4 (2022): 30-37.
[Abstract: In the last several years, an increasing number of rural vloggers from China have opened their YouTube channels, Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts. They broadcast their farming, working, cooking, and crafting. The visual narratives make interesting storytelling about contemporary China, given the fact that these social media platforms themselves are officially inaccessible there. Using Li Ziqi, one of the most viewed Chinese YouTubers, as my case study, I will discuss the politics behind the construction of the “good China story” at the grassroots level. I argue that the aestheticized labor plays a central role in making the good story and its nation-building rhetoric, which is enabled and disrupted by the negotiation and contestation of the aspiring rural individual, the profit-driven cooperation, and the overseeing state.]
Ye, Lou. “Popular Documentary Films.” Beijing Review 41, 26 (June 29, 1998): 28-29.
Yeung, Jessica. “The ‘We’ in Two Pairs of Documentaries about Protests by The 70s Biweekly Syndicate and the 2019 Hong Kong Documentary Workers.” Asian Cinema 33, 2 (2022): 161-75.
Yu, Kiki Tianqi. “Toward a Communicative Practice: Female First-Person Documentary in Twenty-first Century China.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 23-44.
—–. ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
[Abstract: ‘My’ Self on Camera is the first book to explore first person narrative documentary in China’s post-Mao era. Since the emergence of the individual as an ever more important social figure in China, this mode of independent filmmaking and cultural practice has become increasingly significant. Combining the approach of cultural ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis of selected films, this study examines the motivations, key aesthetic features and ethical tensions of presenting the self on camera, as well as the socio-political, cultural and technical conditions surrounding its practice. This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.]
Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival [Documentary film festival in Kunming, Yunnan]
Zhang, Ling. “Digitizing City Symphony, Stabilizing the Shadow of Time: Montage and Temporal-Spatial Construction in San Yuan Li.” In Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani, eds, China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 105-22.
—–. “Sounding Travel Documentary in Wartime China: The Dual Journey of Long Live the Nation.” In James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati, eds., Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice. NY: Routledge, 2020, 158-80.
Zhang, Yingjin. “Styles, Subjects, and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary.” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film [England] 2, 2 (2004): 119-35.
—–. “Thirdspace between Flows and Places: Chinese Independent Documentary and Social Theories of Space and Locality.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 320-42.
—–. “Perseverance through Aftershocks: Epistephilia in Chinese Reportage and Independent Documentary.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, no.2 (Fall 2019): 129-161.
Zhang, Yu. “The Cult of Craftsmanship in China: The Industrial Hand and the Artisanal Hand in the Age of High Technology.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 36, 1 (2024): 151-80.
[Abstract: The figure of the craftsman has become a popular national symbol in the past decade with tremendous discursive power. This essay explores the cult of craftsmanship and its meanings in contemporary China by examining two widely-known TV documentary series, The Artisans of the Superpower (Daguo gongjiang, 2015) and Masters in the Forbidden City (Wo zai Gugong xiu wenwu, 2016), as well as its film version under the same title (2016). The Artisans of the Superpower demonstrates the “industrial hand,” which showcases how handiwork is used to symbolize the strength of a rising China and present a self-reliant, creative, and technologically advanced nation. Masters in the Forbidden City presents the “artisanal hand,” which presents another form of labor, restoration, bringing antique national treasures closer to viewers in a quotidian working environment. Despite their differences, I argue that these two representations of craftsmanship — the industrial hand and the artisanal hand — jointly constitute a form of nation-crafting that presents China’s hard and soft power. Moreover, the notion of “one profession, one life,” promoted as a virtue in both documentaries, establishes a form of solid, stable values in response to China’s intense hyper-capitalist working culture characterized by precarity and flexibility.]
Zhang, Zhen. “Dream-waking in Digital Wasteland: Observations on the Use of Black and White in Chinese Independent Documentary.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, 3 (2012): 299-319.
—–. “From Academia to Xianchang: Feminism, Documentary Aesthetics and Social Movement.” Studies in Documentary Film (June 2017): 1-14. [Abstract: a conversation with Ai Xiaoming]
Zhang, Zhen and Angela Zito, eds. DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and the Social Transformations after Independent Film. Honololu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015.
[Abstract: In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. Happening upon the crucial platform of an older independent film movement, this digital turn has given us a “DV China” that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups, including ethnic and religious minorities and LGBTQ communities. DV-Made China takes stock of these phenomena by surveying the social and cultural landscape of grassroots and alternative cinema practices after the digital turn around the beginning of the new century.]
Zhu Jingjiang 朱靖江 and Mei Bing 梅冰. Zhongguo duli jilupian dang’an 中国独立纪录片档案 (A record of independent Chinese documentary). Shanxi: Shifandaxue, 2004.
Zhu, Ying and Tongdao Zhang. “Sun Mingjin and Early Chinese Documentary Filmmaking.” In Marco Muller and Elena Pollachi, eds., Ombre Elettriche.Cento anni di cinema cinese 1905-2005. Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2005, 64-74.
—–. “Sun Mingjin and John Grierson, a Comparative Study of Early Chinese and British Documentary Film Movements.” Asian Cinema 17, 1 (Spring/Summer 2006): 230-45.
Zhuang, Jiayun. “Remembering and Reenacting Hunger: Caochangdi Workstation’s Minjian Memory Project.” TDR: The Drama Review 58, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 118-40.
Television
Bai, Ruoyun. “TV Drama in China – Global Implications.” In Manfred Kops and Stefan Ollig, eds., A Reader on the Internationalization of the Chinese TV Sector. Münster, Germany: LTV Verlag, 2007: 75-97.
—–. Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015.
[Abstract: In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. Featuring a villainous high-ranking government official, it was the first in a series of wildly popular corruption dramas that riveted the nation. In Staging Corruption, Ruoyun Bai looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of these dramas and the ways in which they express the collective dreams and nightmares of China in the market-reform era. She charts the serials’ genesis as a key component of the Communist Party’s anticorruption struggles to their re-emergence, following a government crackdown in 2004, as highly cynical representations of power and money. She considers the political implications of media commercialization in China, showing that the commercialized television culture is actually a better vehicle for cynical representations of corruption. Her book shows how these dramas – as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political censorship – unveil complicated relationships between power, media, and society. Staging Corruption will be essential reading for those following China’s ongoing struggles with the highly volatile issue of political and social nepotism.]
Bai, Ruoyun and Geng Song, eds. Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century: Entertaining the Nation. NY: Routledge, 2014.
[Abstract: 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 conditions of Chinese post-socialism. This book argues for a serious engagement with television entertainment. rethinking, It 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 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. 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.]
Ballew, Tad. “Xiaxiang for the ’90s: The Shanghai TV Rural Channel and Post-Mao Urbanity amid Global Swirl.” In Nancy Chen, et al, eds., China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2001, 242-73.
Barme, Geremie. “TV Requiem for the Myths of the Middle Kingdom.” Far Eastern Economic Review (Sept. 1, 1988).
—–. “‘Road’ Versus ‘River.'” Far Eastern Economic Review (Oct. 25, 1990).
Berry, Chris. “Shanghai Television’s Documentary Channel: Chinese Television as Public Space.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 71-89.
Cai, Shenshen. “Rhetoric and Politics of the Female Body and Sex in Two Contemporary Chinese TV Drama Serials: The Place Where Dreams Start and Blow the North Wind.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 15, 1 (2014): 151-166.
—–. Television Drama in Contemporary China: Political, Social and Cultural Phenomena. Routledge: 2017.
[Abstract: Due to high audience numbers and the significant influence upon the opinions and values of viewers, the political leadership in China attributes great importance to the impact of television dramas. Many successful TV serials have served as useful conduits to disseminate official rhetoric and mainstream ideology, and they also offer a rich area of research by providing insight into the changing Chinese political, social and cultural context. This book examines a group of recently released TV drama serials in China which focus upon, and to various degrees represent, topical political, social and cultural phenomena. Some of the selected TV serials reflect the present ideological proclivities of the Chinese government, whilst others mirror social and cultural occurrences or provide coded and thought-provoking messages on China’s socio-economic and political reality. Through in-depth textual analysis of the plots, scenes and characters of these selected TV serials, the book provides timely interpretations of contemporary Chinese society, its political inclinations, social fashions and cultural tendencies. The book also demonstrates how popular media narratives of TV drama serials engage with sensitive civic issues and cultural phenomena of modern-day China, which in turn encourages a broader social imagination and potential for change.]
Cao, Qing. “Two Faces of Confucianism: Narrative Construction of Cross-Cultural Images in Television Documentaries.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30, 2 (July 2004).
Chan, Alex. “From Propaganda to Hegemony: Jiaodian Fangtan and China’s Media Policy.” Journal of Contemporary China 16 (30) (Feb. 2002): 35-51.
[Abstract: This paper reports the findings of an empirical study of the current affairs program Jiaodian Fangtan , which attracts a daily audience of 300 million. A content analysis of the transcripts of all reports of this program in 1999 shows that although the program is indeed unconventional in its criticism of local cadres, it remains conservative in its subtle and cautious control of the frequency, timing, level, and content of the criticism. Further analysis of the government’s media policy shows that in the 1990s, it redefined the primary role of media as agenda-setting, which allows the expression of the people’s voice, though priority is still given to the party’s voice. To this extent, China’s media policy gradually shifted away from propaganda and towards hegemony before the turn of the century.
Chan, Joseph Man. “Television in Greater China.” In John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka, and Stuart Cunnignham, eds., New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, 126-60.
—–. “Toward Television Regionalism in Greater China and Beyond.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009,15-39.
Chan, Tsan-Kuo. China’s Window on the World: TV News, Social Knowledge, and International Spectacle. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2001.
Chang, Chin-Hwa Flora. “Multiculturalism and Television in Taiwan.” In Michael Richards and David French, eds., Television in Contempoary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 405-20.
Chang, Jiang and Hailong Ren. “Television News as Political Ritual: Xinwen Lianbo and China’s Journalism Reform within the Party-state’s Orbit.” Journal of Contemporary China 25, 2 (January 2016): 14-24.
Chen, Guangzhong. “Beating the Drum of the Mind to March Forward with Spirit: The Artistic Characteristics of the Political Television Documentary The Course of the Century.” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 25, 1 (Fall 1992): 83-91.
Chen, Siyu. “Disciplining Desiring Subjects through the Remodeling of Masculinity: A Case Study of a Chinese Reality Dating Show.” Modern China 43, 1 (Jan. 2017): 95-120.
[Abstract: If You Are the One, the most watched dating show in China, caused a heated public debate following its debut in 2010, resulting in two government notices being issued regarding the regulation of dating shows. Using textual and intertextual analysis of the show and the public debate surrounding it, this article scrutinizes the transformation, following government regulation, of the construction of masculinity on the show. Drawing on Lisa Rofel’s narrative of “desiring China” and Robert P. Weller’s concept of “responsive authoritarianism,” this article shows how the tension between the market logic of the Chinese media and their political ownership is played out through the negotiation and mobilization of the meaning of gender. This article therefore also sheds light on larger political, economic, and sociocultural configurations in contemporary China.]
Chen, Thomas. “Look Back in Anger: The Long Season (2023).” MCLC Resource Center Publication (July 2024).
Chen, Xiaomei. “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: ‘He Shang’ in Post-Mao China.” Critical Inquiry 18, 4 (1992): 686-712.
Chen, Yanru and Xinmin Hao. “Conflict Resolution in Love Triangles: Perspectives Offered by Chinese TV Dramas.” Intercultural Communication Studies 7 (1997-98): 133-148.
Chen, Zuyan. “‘River Elegy’ as Reportage Literature: Generic Experimentation and Boundaries.” China Information 7, 4 (1993): 20-32.
Chin, Yik Chan. Television Regulation and Media Policy in China. NY: Routledge, 2010.
Chinoy, Mike. China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Chong, W. L. “Su Xiaokang and His Film ‘River Elegy.'” China Information 4, 3 (Winter 1989/90).
Chu, J. “Broadcasting in the People’s Republic of China.” In John Lent, ed., Broadcasting in Asia and the Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978, 21-24.
Classic Chinese Television Commercials. Danwei.org. Posted by Joel Martinsen (Sept 16, 2008).
Curtin, Michael. Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
[Abstract: In this provocative analysis of screen industries in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, Michael Curtin delineates the globalizing pressures and opportunities that since the 1980s have dramatically transformed the terrain of Chinese film and television, including the end of the cold war, the rise of the World Trade Organization, the escalation of democracy movements, and the emergence of an East Asian youth culture. Reaching beyond national frameworks, Curtin examines the prospect of a global Chinese audience that will include more viewers than in the United States and Europe combined. He draws on in-depth interviews with a diverse array of media executives plus a wealth of historical material to argue that this vast and increasingly wealthy market is likely to shake the very foundations of Hollywood’s century-long hegemony.]
De Jong, Alice. “The Demise of the Dragon: Bacgrounds to the Chinese Film ‘River Elegy.'” China Information 4, 3 (Winter 1988-89): 28-43.
Del Lago, Francesca. “The Fiction of Everyday Life: Video Art in the PRC.” Art Asia Pacific 27 (2000): 53-57.
Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. “Made in Taiwan: An Analysis of Meteor Garden as an East Asian Idol Drama.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 90-110.
Ding, Ersu. “Imperfect Paradise: The Image of the US on Chinese TV.” In Yahya R. Kamalipour ed., Images of the US Around the World: A Multicultural Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999, 221-28.
Dong, Wei. The Cultural Politics of Affect and Emotion: A Case Study of Chinese Reality TV. Lancaster, UK: Gazelle, 2022.
[Abstract: Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of “X-Change” (2006-2019), Wei Dong investigates the entanglements between emotion and subjectivity, ideology, identity and hegemonic power in the multimodal text of the program. The focus lies on the ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity, and the ways in which affect – in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the material and the body – have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic process of fracture and integration.]
Erwin, Kathleen. “White Women, Male Desires: A Televisual Fantasy of the Transnational Family.” In Mayfair Mei Hui Yang, ed. Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 232-57. [about the mainland tv drama Sunset at Long Chao Li, by an anthropoligist who performed in the drama].
Ferry, Megan. “A New Narrative of Development in Chinese TV Media Representations of Africa.” In Ban Wang and Jie Lu, eds., China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012, 205-24.
Field, Stephen. “He shang and the Plateau of Ultrastability.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, 3 (1991): 4-13.
French, David and Michael Richards, eds. Television in Contemporary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000.
Fumian, Marco. “Chinese Fables of Wealth and Power: The TV Drama Well-intended Love.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (July 2023).
Gai, Qi. “Image Reconstruction and the Reflection of Values in the Formation of National Traumatic Memories: A Review of Recent Anti-Japanese War Films and Teleplays in China.” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 9, 2 (2015): 306-17.
[Abstract: The cosmopolitan cultural behaviors employed by war films and teleplays in the reconstruction of national traumatic memories are worthy of understanding and respect. However, in present-day China, the quantity of Anti-Japanese War films and teleplays is abnormally high, and their values deeply enmeshed in a radical nationalism. The result is a general trend towards a “carnival of vengeful images.” Given the potential harms implicit in this situation, the question of just what kind of war narratives are appropriate for the contemporary circumstances of globalization should receive serious attention and reconsideration from society at large.]
Gao, Mobo 高墨波. “Cong dui dianshiju Shi Lang da jiangjun de zhenglun kan Zhongguo wenhua minzuzhuyi fixing de kunjing” 从对电视剧《施琅大将军》的争论看中国文化民族主义复兴的困境(The dilemma of Chinese cultural nationalism: the case of the TV program ‘General Shi Lang). Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4, 1 (Jan. 2007). 4, 1.
[Abstract: With the rise of China’s status on international stage as a result of its economic development there is an increasingly audible voice of Chinese cultural nationalism. More and more educators and intellectuals are calling for the revival of Chinese traditional culture values. However, the very issues of who are the Chinese and what are traditional Chinese cultural values present a huge dilemma. The debates on a recent a TV program “General Shi Lang” consist a good case to illustrate this dilemma. Shi Lang was a general of the last days of the Ming Dynasty, but had surrendered to the Manchu Qing dynasty invaders and fought for the Machus take over Taiwan from a Chinese ruler. The debates show that the dilemma has its cause in at least three issues. First, it is not at all obvious who should be categorized as Chinese. Secondly, it is not at all obvious what Chinese cultural values are. And finally it is the issue of evaluation of traditional values against the universal claim of the values of liberal democracy.]
Gong, Qian. “Red Women and TV Drama.” In Christopher Crouch, ed., Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010.
—–. Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China: TV Drama as Popular Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.
[Abstract: In the 1990s, China’s economic reform campaign reached a new high. Amid the eager adoption of capitalism, however, the spectre of revolution re-emerged. Red Classics, a historic-revolutionary themed genre created in the high socialist era were widely taken up again in television drama adaptations. They have since remained a permanent feature of TV repertoire well into the 2010s. Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China looks at the how the revolutionary experience is represented and consumed in the reform era. It examines the adaptation of Red Classics as a result of the dynamic interplay between television stations, media censorship and social sentiment of the populace. How the story of revolution was reinvented to appeal and entertain a new generation provides important clues to the understanding of transformation of class, gender, locality and faith in contemporary China.]
Gorfinkel, Lauren. Chinese Television and National identity Construction. Routledge, 2016.
Guo, Shaohua. “The Politics of Love in Contemporary China: Cosmopolitanism and Competing Masculinities in Best Time.” China Information 32, 1 (2018): 88-107.
[Abstract: Since the new millennium, the television industry in China has witnessed a flourishing of television series addressing the aspirations, struggles and gender expectations of the urban middle class. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the televisual construction of masculine ideals in the contemporary era. Taking as a case study Best Time (最美的时光), one of the most popular idol dramas of 2013, this article fills a lacuna in current scholarship and addresses the televisual construction of cosmopolitan masculinities by focusing on the tension between two prominent social groups: overseas returnees and indigenous talents. Through analysis of the construction of competing masculinities in Best Time , this article argues that this drama is as much about an undertone of national rejuvenation, and the desire for China’s rise and global dominance, as it is about unrequited love. In pursuing this argument, a critical reading of a youth idol drama opens new avenues for understanding cosmopolitanism through the lenses of gender dynamics and nationalism.]
—–. “Cinderella Stories Retold: The Geopolitics of Taiwanese Idol Dramas.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, 1 (Spring 2020): 73-107.
Guo Zhenzhi 郭镇之, ed. Zhongguo dianshi shi 中国电视史 (History of Chinese television). Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue, 1991.
Ho, Chang Won. Mass Media in China: The History and the Future. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1989.
Ho, Wing Shan. Screening Post-1989 China: Critical Analysis of Chinese Film and Television. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Hong, Junhao. The Internationalization of Television in China: The Evolution of Ideology, Society, and Media since the Reform. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
—–. “China’s TV Program Import 1958-1988: Towards the Internationalization of Television?” Gazette 52 (1993): 1-23.
—–. “Penetration and Interaction of Mass Media between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Mainland China: Trends and Implications.” In Bin Yü and Tsungting Chung, eds., Dynamics and Dilemma: Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a Changing World. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1996.
—– “Reconciliation between Openness and Resistance: Media Globalization and New Policies of China’s Television in the 1990s.” In Georgette Wang, Jan Sevaes, adn Anura Goonasekera, eds., The New Communications Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization. London: Routledge, 2000, 288-306.
Hong, Junhao, Yanmei Lu, William Zou. “CCTV in the Reform Years: A New Model for China’s Television.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 40-55.
Howkins, John. Mass Communications in China. NY: Longman, 1982. [contains a chapter on television]
“Hua shuo Kewang” (Speaking of Aspirations). Special issue on the TV drama Aspirations. Shanghai wenlun 2 (1991).
Huang, Yu. “Why Party Media Backfired? Television as the Agent of Social Changes in Post-Mao China.” Journal of Radio and Television Studies 2-4 (1996): 169-96.
—–. “Peaceful Evolution: The Case of Television Reform In Post-Mao China.” Media, Culture & Society 16 (1994): 217-41.
Huang, Yu and Andrew Green. “From Mao to the Millenium: 40 Years of Television of China (1958-1998).” In Michael Richards and David French, eds.,Televsion in Contempoary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 267-92.
Hung, Ruth Y. Y. “The State and the Market: Chinese TV Serials and the Case of Woju (Dwelling Narrowness).” boundary 2 38, 2 (2011): 155-87.
[Abstract: The production, consumption, and state control of Chinese TV serial drama can be seen as an instrument of power and profit maximization as well as a medium for mass education and homogenization in the form of popular culture. The serial drama Woju (Dwelling narrowness) (2009) exemplifies the ways in which a prime-time TV serial in twenty-first-century China is a politically, socially, and commercially significant enterprise. Since the 1980s, prime-time serials have emerged as a distinctly successful medium with and through which the Chinese party-state exercises ideological control by entertainment rather than oppression. Indeed, not only did Woju enjoy huge audience popularity, it also benefited from considerable tolerance of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), which, according to the website Danwai, allowed the drama to “slip” through its guidelines.]
Jacka, Tamara and Josko Petkovic. “Ethnography and Video: Researching Women in China’s Floating Population.” Intersections (Sept. 1998).
Jiang, Linshan. “Queer Vocals and Stardom on Chinese TV: Case Studies of Wu Tsing-Fong and Zhou Shen.” In Jamie J. Zhao, ed., Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness. Hong Kong University Press, 2023, 145–160.
Keane, Michael. “Television and Moral Development in China.”Asian Studies Review 22, 4, (Dec. 1998): 475-504.
—–. “Television and Civilisation: The Unity of Opposites?” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 2, (1999): 246-259.
—–. “Send in the Clones: Television Formats and Content Creation in the People’s Republic of China.” In Donald, S, Keane, M. and Yin Hong eds, Media in China: Consumption, Content, and Crisis. Curzon Press, 2001, 176-202.
—–. ‘Television Regulation, Creative Compliance, and the Myth of Civil Society in China.” Media, Culture and Society 23 (2001): 791-806.
—–. “By the Way, FUCK YOU! Feng Xiaogang’s Disturbing Television Dramas.” Continuum 15, 1 (2001): 57-66.
—–. “Cultural Technology Transfer: Redefining Content in the Chinese Television Industry.” Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures 11, 2 (2001): 221-234.
—–. “As a Hundred Television Formats Bloom, A Thousand Television Stations Contend.” Journal of Contemporary China 11, 30 (2002): 5-16.
[Abstract: This paper looks at the growing trend towards television format adaptation as an industry development strategy in China. As China’s television industry professionals imagine a commercial future, this vision is tempered by the reality of a deficit of quality content. Program schedules exhibit limited variety and are dominated by cheap variety show formats, royal court television dramas, game shows, and news. In search of new ways to stimulate audiences, producers have looked outside China to formats successful in Taiwan, SAR Hong Kong, Japan, Europe and the US. The localization of foreign programs represents a more useful experiment for China’s domestic industry than the importation of finished programs. Unlike finished programs the format can be ‘filled’ with culturally specific content, and where licensed co-productions ensue there is the potential for added value in terms of technology transfer. I argue, however, that the strategy of format adaptation is a short-term solution to program development that is unlikely to stimulate a creative media-based economy.]
—–. ‘Television Drama in China: Engineering Souls for the Market.” In Richard King and Timothy Craig, eds., Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 2001, 176-202.
—-. “It’s All in a Game: Television Formats in the People’s Republic of China.” In Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke, and Mandy Thomas eds., Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2004, 53-72.
—–. “Television Drama in China: Remaking the Market.” Media International Australia (Culture and Policy) 115 (2005): 82-93/
Keane, Michael and Tao Dongfeng. “Conversation with Feng Xiaogang , Director of TV series ‘Beijingers in New York.'” positions: east asia cultures critiques, 7, 1 (Spring 1999): 193-200.
King, Richard. “Introducing the Chinese TV Series The Invisible Companion.” MCLC Resource Center (Dec. 2022) [includes access to digitized version of the original series from the 1990s]
Kong, Shuyu. “Rebuilding the Empire: Historical TV Drama and the New Expressive Form of Cultural Nationalism.” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 4, 1 (Jan. 2007). [In Chinese]
[Abstract: This paper explores the discourse of cultural nationalism and its recent articulation in historical TV dramas (Lishi ju): TV serials set in the Chinese imperial past and depicting court politics and the private lives of imperial families. First, I briefly survey the recent resurgence of historical drama on the TV screen, especially comparing two different ways of representing history: “history light” (xishuo) and “history orthodox” (zhengju). While history light, a new genre strongly influenced by the costume dramas imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan, emphasizes the entertainment values of popular culture and adopts a postmodern attitude towards history, history orthodox renews the pedagogical tradition and the moralistic narrative of historical drama in modern China since the May Fourth enlightenment movement. I then focus on TV dramas in the history orthodox mode and their ideological messages, examining two representative works by Hu Mei: Yongzheng Dynasty (Yongzheng wangchao, 1999) and The Great Emperor Wu of Han (Hanwu dadi, 2005). While drawing attention to the various narrative strategies, intertextualities and audio-visual styles employed in these dramas to represent the glorious national history and portray a strong leader (the emperor) as national hero, I also provide a contextual analysis of the production and circulation of these two dramas as well as the critical and media response to them, to reveal the social agencies and social formation of these dramas behind the screen. I suggest that the revisionist reframing of the past in historical TV drama reflects a new nationalist historical consciousness and cultural identity borne out of China’s rapid rise and aspirations to become an economic and political superpower.]
—–. “The ‘Affective Alliance’: Undercover, Internet Media Fandom, and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption in Postsocialist China.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 1-47.
—–. Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. [MCLC Resource Center review by Hui Faye Xiao]
[Abstract: Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms. Contents: Introduction 1. Aftershock: The Sentimental Construction of Family in Post-Socialist China 2. Crying your Heart Out: Laid-off Women Workers, Kuqingxi,and Melodramatic Sensibility in Chinese TV Drama 3. Magic Cube of Happiness: Managing Conflicts and Feelings on Chinese Primetime Television 4. Are You the One? The Competing Public Voices of China’s Post-1980s Generation 5. Undercover: Internet Media Fandom and the Sociality of Cultural Consumption 6. Let the Bullet Fly: Film Discussions and the Cultural Public Sphere]
Lee, Amy. “Hong Kong Television and the Making of New Diasporic Imaginaries.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 183-200.
Lee, Gregory. “Chineseness and MTV: Construction of the ‘Ethnic’ Imaginary and the Recuperation of National Symbolic Space by the Official Ideology.” In Mario Vieira de Carvalho, ed., Music and Lifeworld: Otherness and Transgression in the Culture of the Twentieth Century (in memoriam Fernando Lopes Graça). Lisbon: Fundaçao D. Luis I.
Lee, Haiyan. “Nannies for Foreigners: The Enchantment of Chinese Womanhood in the Age of Millennial Capitalism.” Public Culture 18, 3 (Fall 2006): 507-29.
Lee, Paul S. N. “Hong Kong Television: An Anchor for Local Identity.” In Michael Richards and David French, eds., Television in Contempoary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 363-84.
Lewis, Tania, Fran Martin and Wanning Sun. Telemodernities Television and Transforming Lives in Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
[Abstract: Yoga gurus on lifestyle cable channels targeting time-pressured Indian urbanites; Chinese dating shows promoting competitive individualism; Taiwanese domestic makeover formats combining feng shui with life planning advice: Asian TV screens are increasingly home to a wild proliferation of popular factual programs providing lifestyle guidance to viewers. In Telemodernities Tania Lewis, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun demonstrate how lifestyle-oriented popular factual television illuminates key aspects of late modernities in South and East Asia, offering insights not only into early twenty-first-century media cultures but also into wider developments in the nature of public and private life, identity, citizenship, and social engagement. Drawing on extensive interviews with television industry professionals and audiences across China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore, Telemodernities uses popular lifestyle television as a tool to help us understand emergent forms of identity, sociality, and capitalist modernity in Asia]
Li, Li. “The Television Play, Melodramatic Imagination and Envisioning the ‘Harmonious’ Society in Post-1989 China.” Journal of Contemporary China 20 (69) (2011): 327-41.
[Abstract: The television play has been recognized by scholars as the most influential genre in the flourishing television industry in China’s new media landscape; yet little critical attention has been given to inquiry of why and how it functions as a dynamic cultural agent in the Chinese people’s reconfiguration of their past and imagining of their everyday life. This paper investigates the intriguing socio-historical environment from which the genre emerged and its unique modes of operation by focusing on the television play of sentiment. It demonstrates that the television play embodies the many complex aspects of social forces and relationships contested in China’s reform, suggesting, all at once, commercialization in Chinese society, the popular imaginary of morality and the state’s conceptualization of a ‘harmonious society’, a strategic policy aiming at maintaining social balance while bypassing some of the thorny political questions in the post-revolution era.]
Li, Xiaoping. “‘Focus’ (Jiaodian Fangtan) and the Changes in the Chinese Television Industry.” Journal of Contemporary China 11 (30) (Feb. 2002): 17-34.
[Abstract: As China changes, so the Chinese television industry changes. Once exclusively supported and supervised by the Communist government, Chinese television channels have been granted increased autonomy in the past two decades as China has pursued a policy of economic liberalization. This paper will outline the significant structural changes in the Chinese television industry over the past several years, particularly at China Central Television (CCTV). It will focus on the phenomenon of a highly popular program, ‘Focus’, (jiao dian fang tan) as a case study to analyse the impact of changing television programs on Chinese politics and society.]
Liang, Samuel. “Property-driven Urban Change in Post-Socialist Shanghai: Reading the Television Series Woju.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 39, 4 (2010): 3-28.
[Abstract: In late 2009, the television series Woju received extremely high audience ratings in major Chinese cities. Its visual narratives engage the public and comment on social developments by presenting detailed pictures of urban change in Shanghai and the everyday lives of a range of urban characters who are involved in and affected by the urban-restructuring process and represent three distinct social groups: “white-collar” immigrants, low-income local residents, and powerful officials. By analysing the visual narratives of these characters, this article highlights the loss of the city’s historical identity and shows how the reorganization of urban space translates into a reallocation of resources, power and prestige among the social groups. The article also shows that Woju repre-sents a new development in literary and television production in the age of the Internet and globalization; its imaginative construct of the city was based on transnational and virtual rather than local and neighbourhood experience. This also testifies to the loss of the city’s established identity in cultural production.]
Lin, Min and Maria Galikowski. “From ‘River Elegy’ to China Can Say No: China’s Neo-Nationalism and the Search for Collective National Identity.” In Min Lin and Maria Galikowski, The Search for Modernity: Chinese Intellectuals and Cultural Discourse in the Post-Mao Era. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, 89-102.
Lin, Szu-Ping. “The Woman with Broken Palm Lines: Subject, Agency, Fortune-Telling, and Women in Taiwanese Television Drama.” In Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, ed., Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003, 222-37.
Liu, Jin. “Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s ‘Spring Festival Gala.'” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 10, 1 (Summer 2010).
Liu, Lydia H. “What’s Happened to Ideology? Transnationalism, Postsocialism, and the Study of Global Media Culture.” Working Papers in Asian/Pacific Studies. Durham: Duke University, 1998. [focuses on “Beijingers in New York”]. Rpt in positions 7, 3 (Winter 1999): 763-97.
Liu, Toming Jun. “Uses and Abuses of Sentimental Nationalism: Mnemonic Disquiet in Heshang and Shuobu.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 169-209.
Liu, Y. “The Growth of Cable TV in China: Tensions between Local and Central Goverment.” Telecommunications Policy (April 1994): 216-28.
Lu, Hongwei. “TV Romance and Popular Cultural Mood: The Chi Li Phenomenon.” The China Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 125-152.
Lu, Sheldon H. “Soap Opera in China: The Transnational Politics of Visuality, Sexuality, and Masculinity.” Cinema Journal 40, 1 (2000): 25-47. Rpt in Lu,China, Trannational Visuality, Global Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, 213-38.
Lu, Xinyi. “Ritual, Television, and State Ideology: Rereading CCTV’s 2006 Spring Festival Gala.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 111-25.
Lu, Xinyu. “Government Subsidies, Market Socialism, and the ‘Public’ Character of Chinese Television The Transformation of Chongqing Satellite TV.”Modern China 37 (2011): 661-671.
[Abstract: In March 2011 Chongqing Satellite TV was made a public-interest channel and discontinued advertising, losing 0.3 billion yuan in revenue. The shortfall is to be partially made up by annual government subsidies of 0.15 billion yuan. The transformation of Chongqing Satellite TV is very much related to the widely debated reform of governance in Chongqing (the so-called Chongqing model), and thus is inevitably controversial. It has attracted critical commentary from academia, the advertising industry, and netizens, while the TV station and the Chongqing municipal government have not mounted an effective defense. Often, the two sides in the debate have been at cross-purposes and have spoken past each other. This article attempts to move beyond rigid binary oppositions, such as official/civilian and academic/ political, and to look at the arguments of both sides in the debate with an eye toward promoting a clearer understanding of public media in China.]
Lull, James. China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance. London: Routledge, 1991.
Luo Ming 罗明, et al. eds. Zhongguo dianshi guanzhong xianzhuang baogao 中国电视观众现状报告 (Report on the current state of television spectatorship in China). Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian, 1998. [very useful, filled with statistics about national tv viewing in the PRC in the mid to late 90s]
Ma, Eric Kit-Wai. Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong. NY: Routledge, 1999.
Marlene, Judith. “The World of Chinese Television.” In Donald Altschiller, ed., China at the Crossroads. NY: H. W. Wilson, 1994.
Martin, Fran. “‘From Sparrow to Phoenix’: Imagining Gender Transformation through Taiwanese Women’s Variety TV.” postions: asia critique 24, 2 (May 2016): 369-402.
[Abstract: Through analysis of the fashion-and-beauty variety program 《女人我最大》 (English title Queen), launched in 2003 by Taiwan cable channel TVBS-G and now spreading in syndicated adaptations in China, this paper examines the pop-cultural consolidation of a new category of feminine identity: the 輕熟女 (qingshounü, lit. “young-mature woman”). Drawing on interviews with viewers conducted in Taipei in 2011, the article analyzes audience responses to the program to argue that Queen both reflects and (re)constructs a popular understanding of qingshounü as a new, transitional stage in the life cycle of femininity in urban, late-modern commodity culture. Positioned between “girl (student)” (女生) and “respectable (married) woman” (婦女) or “mama” (媽媽), the qingshounü is defined by her spending power, her relative independence from the burdens of reproductive and domestic labor, and her focus on personal pleasure and individual satisfaction…]
Mi, Jiayin. “The Visual Imagined Communities: Media State, Virtual Citizenship and TELE vision in River Elegy.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 327-340.
Müller, Gotelind. Representing History in Chinese Media: The TV Drama Zou Xiang Gongheguo (Towards the Republic). Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007.
Neder, Christina. Fluss-elegie China Identitatskrise: Die Debatte um die chinesicsche Fernsehserie Heshang, 1988-1994. Dortmund: Projekt Verlag, 1996.
Pan, Zhongdong and Joseph Man Chan. “Building a Market-based Party Organ: Television and National Integration in China.” In Michael Richards and David French, eds., Televsion in Contempoary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 233-66.
Pugsley, Peter C. and Jia Gao. “Emerging Powers of Influence: The Rise of the Anchor in Chinese Television.” The International Communication Gazette 69, no. 5 (2007): 451–466.
Qian, Kun. “Tracing Desire: Cell Phone and the Self-Reflexivity of Contemporary Chinese Media.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (May 2011).
Qu Chunjing 曲春景 and Zhu Ying 朱影, eds. Zhongmei dianshiju bijiao yanjiu 中美电视剧比较研究 (Television drama: Chinese and US perspectives). Shanghai: Sanlian, 2005.
Ren Wen 任文. Zai Niuyue de Beijing ren: changpian baogao wenxue 在纽约的北京人: 长篇报告文学 (Beijingers in New York: full-length reportage). Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi, 1993.
Roberts, Rosemary. “Reconfiguring Red: Class Discourses in the New Millennium TV adaptations of The Red Detachment of Women.” China Perspectives 2 (2015): 25-31.
Rofel, Lisa. “Yearnings: Televisual Love and Melodramatic Politics in China.” American Ethnologist 21, 4 (1994): 700-22.
Rosen, Stanley and Gary Zou, eds. “The Chinese Television Documentary ‘River Elegy’ (part 1).” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 24, 2 (Winter 1991/92): 3-90.
Schnieder, Florian. Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series. Leiden: Brill, 2012
[Abstract: Schneider analyses political discourses in Chinese TV dramas, the most popular entertainment format in China today. He shows that despite their often nationalistic stories of glorious emperors and courageous officials, such programmes should not be mistaken for official propaganda. Instead, the highly didactical messages of such series are the outcome of complex cultural governance practices, which are influenced by diffuse political interests, commercial considerations, viewing habits, and ideological assumptions. Schneider argues that these interlinking factors lead to a highly restrictive creative environment and to conservative entertainment content that ultimately risks creating precisely the kind of passive masses that Chinese media workers and government officials are trying so hard to emancipate.]
Selden, Mark. “Introduction.” Symposium on He shang.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, 3 (1991): 3.
Shen, Jinguo. Reshaping Television Culture and Modernity: A Critical Inquiry of Chinese Television and Communication Praxis. Ph.D. diss. Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.
Song, Geng. “Chinese Masculinities Revisited: Male Images in Contemporary Television Drama Serials.” Modern China 36 (2010): 404-434.
[Abstract: This article investigates the discourse of masculinity in contemporary Chinese popular culture by critical readings of TV drama serials (dianshi lianxuju), a crucial and underresearched site for the study of ideology, shown on prime-time national channels in recent years (2003—2007). In particular, it examines the male images in three sweepingly popular TV programs—The Big Dye House ( Da ranfang), Halfway Couples (Banlu fuqi), and Unsheathing the Sword (Liangjian)—as “cultural types.” It looks at the social, economic, and cultural factors that have affected men and representations of men in today’s China against the backdrop of the dynamic interplay between nationalism, globalization, and consumerism. Building on the burgeoning research on Chinese masculinity in the past decade, it argues that forms of masculinity are becoming increasingly hybrid in a globalizing China and that the male images in these dramas are a product of social changes tied in with new formations of power.]
—–. “The Overbearing CEO: Cinderella Fantasy and Chinese-style Neoliberal Femininity.” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 35, 1 (Summer 2023): 201-26.
Su, Herng and Sheue-Yun Chen. “The Choice Between Local and Foreign: Taiwan Youths’ Television Viewing Behavior.” In Georgette Wang, Jan Sevaes, and Anura Goonasekera, eds., The New Communications Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization. London: Routledge, 2000, 225-44.
Su, Xiaokang, et. al. Deathsong of the River: a Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang. Ithaca: East Asian Program, Cornell University, 1991.
Sun, Wanning. “A Chinese in the New World: Television Dramas, Global Cities and Travels to Modernity.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, 1 (April 2001): 81-94.
—–. “Dancing with Chains: Significant Moments on China Central Television.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10, 2 (2007): 187-204.
—–. “Sex, City, and the Maid: Between Socialist Fantasies and Neoliberal Parables.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 39, 4 (2010): 53-69.
[Abstract: Of the many rural migrant workers who go to Chinese cities as cheap labourers, the one who interacts most intimately with urban residents is the domestic servant. In fact, precisely because of this “intimate stranger” status, the figure of the “maid” has captured the imagination of the urban population. This fascination is evidenced by the plethora of television narratives centring on the fraught relationships between the rural migrant woman and her male employer. This paper analyses a range of television narratives from the genres of dramas and documentaries. It shows that in these narratives, sex functions as the metaphor of social inequality between two social groups. It shows that if we explore how love, romance and marriage are constructed, we may gain some insight into processes of social and ideological contestation in the domain of cultural production.]
—–. “Remembering the Age of Iron: Television Dramas about Chinese Workers in the Socialist Era.” China Perspectives 2 (2015): 33-41.
—–. “Consumption Plus Love: Inequality, Domestic Utopia, and China’s New Politics of the Future.” Modern China 46, 1 (2019): 49-78.
[Abstract: With hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers now dominating the labor market in China’s fastest growing regions, this group embodies that nation’s most intractable problems of inequality. Young, single, socially disenfranchised rural migrants, particularly men, reportedly experience widespread difficulty in finding a marriage partner, largely because they cannot afford to buy a home. The resulting potential social instability is of pressing concern to the Chinese Communist Party. How do discourses of governmentality reconcile/manage class inequality? How do they construct the future and encourage hope? What moral, cultural, and rhetorical resources does this ideology of the future draw on, and to what extent does it represent a rupture with China’s revolutionary—and traditional—past? Do China’s most disenfranchised socioeconomic groups buy into the “China Dream” rhetoric? This article addresses these questions through a series of “love stories” screened by China Central Television. It pinpoints a particular moment in China’s state capitalism when romantic love became a means of managing, if not solving, social inequality. It uncovers a new discursive blueprint for future state narratives of inequality and brings to light some new ways of restructuring the fantasy of the “good life.”]
Tan, Jia. “Neoliberalized Romantic Encounter: If You Are the One and the Gender Politics of Chinese Reality TV.” Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies 20 (Spring 2015): 79-102. (in Chinese)
Thomas, Amos Owen. “Transborder Television for Greater China.” In Michael Richards and David French, eds., Television in Contemporary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 91-110.
Tsai, Yean. “Cultural Identity in an Era of Globalization: The Structure and Content of Taiwanese Soap Operas.” In Georgette Wang, Jan Sevaes, and Anura Goonasekera, eds., The New Communications Landscape: Demystifying Media Globalization. London: Routledge, 2000, 175-87.
Wang, Jing. “He shang and the Paradoxes of Chinese Enlightenment.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, 3 (1991): 27-32. Rpt. in High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 118-36.
Weber, Ian. “Reconfiguring Chinese Propaganda and Control Modalities: A Case Study of Shanghai’s Television System.” Journal of Contemporary China 11 (30) (Feb. 2002): 53-75.
[Abstract: China’s television industry has experienced a number of internal changes that have shaped this system’s structure into the new millennium. The Chinese Government has reconfigured the propaganda and control modalities of this industry to allow television to become the prime mover for economic reform. A case study of Shanghai’s dynamic television system from 1995 to 1999 is used to understand the changes that have taken place. This analysis provides an understanding of how the Chinese Government policy changes impact on the interrelatedness of the system’s components. The consequences of these changes have had dramatic and lasting effects on the way the television industry operates in China. These effects have serious implications for foreign organisations, that are attempting to find a foothold in this booming industry, and for the Chinese television viewer.]
Wei, Ran. “China’s Television in the Era of Marketisation.” In Michael Richards and David French, eds., Televsion in Contemporary Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000, 325-46.
Weigelin-Schweidrzik, Susanne and Carsten Schafer. “The Individual and the War: Re-remembering the Sino-Japanese War in the TV series A Spring River Flows East.” In Weigelin-Schweidrzik, ed., Broken Narratives: Post-Cold War History and Identity in Europe and East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2014, 57-84.
Wilkins, Karin Gwinn. “Hong Kong Television: Same As It Ever Was?” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 56-67.
Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. “Globalizing Television: Chinese Satellite Television outside Greater China.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 201-20.
Worrall, Simon. “A Year in Front of the Dianshi.” Sight and Sound 55, 3 (Summer 1986):178-81.
Wu Di and Lisa Pola, eds. Class and Gender Debates over the Television Soap Opera “Aspirations.” Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.
Xiao, Hui Faye. “What Quality (Suzhi) Do Chinese Wives Lack? Performing Middle-Classness in Chinese-Style Divorce.” In Xiao, Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014, 116-39.
—–. “Androgynous Beauty, Virtual Community: Stardom, Fandom and Chinese Reality Shows under Globalization.” In Karen Brison and Susan Dewey, eds., Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Youth Cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012, 104-24.
Xu, Janice Hua. “Building a Chinese ‘Middle Class’: Consumer Education and Identity Construction in Television Land.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 150-67.
Yang, Mayfair Mei Hui. “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis.” In Aiwha Ong and Don Nonini, eds. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politicsof Modern Chinese Transnationalism. NY: Routledge, 1997, 287-319.
Young, Bob and Rachel DeWoskin. “Foreign Babe in Beijing.” Transpacific 67 (1996). [written by the two foreign actors who played in the tv series Yangniu zai Beijing]
Yu, Haiqing. “Mediation Journalism in Chinese Television: Double-Time Narrations of SARS.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 129-49.
Yu, Huang and Xu Yu. “Broadcasting and Politics: Chinese Television in the Mao Era, 1958-1976.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (Oct.1997).
Zhang Qing 张庆 and Hu Xingliang 胡星亮, eds. Zhongguo dianshi shi 中国电视史 (The history of Chinese television). Beijing: Zhongyang guangbo dianshi daxue, 1996.
Zhang, Tongdao. “Chinese Television Audience Research.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 168-79.
Zhang, Wei. “The River Dies Young.” Beijing Review 32, 4 (Jan. 1987):19-24.
Zhao, Jamie J., ed., Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023.
[Abstract: The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices, and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal society. Through examining nine cases contesting the ideals of gender, sexuality, Chineseness, and TV production and consumption, the book also reveals the generative, negotiative ways in which queerness works productively within and against mainstream, seemingly heterosexual-oriented, televisual industries and fan spaces.]
—–. “From ‘Kill This Love’ to ‘Cue Ji’s Love’: The Convergence of Queer, Feminist and Global TV Cultures in China.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 44, 4 (2023).
[Abstract: This research looks at women-centred Chinese competition-style programmes that are adapted from foreign TV formats and synthesise transnational televisual elements, idol cultures and gendered aesthetics. With particular attention to imaginaries of women with nonnormative gender and sexual identities, I expound how and why representations of female gender and sexuality on Chinese TV are fashioned by the intersected discourses on China’s TV and cultural globalisations and digitisation, the party-state’s manipulations and regulations of feminism, androgyny and homoeroticism, and the entertainment industry’s capitalisation of queer women’s stardom and fandom. My analysis reveals that the emergence, survival and endurance of queer women on Chinese TV has coincided with China’s appropriations of both global formats and twenty-first-century idol girl group cultures. Through examining some key moments in popular idol group-cultivating shows produced in 2020 and 2021, I capture a multilevel, ambivalent queer convergence that transforms these televisual stages into queer-charging venues through which queer imaginaries of womanhood have actively incorporated local situations and transcultural televisual, gender and sexual knowledge to bypass, compromise with – and even partly connive with – the government’s ideological and moral controls.]
Zhongguo guangbo dianshi nianjian 中国广播电视年鉴 (Yearbook of Chinese broadcasting and television). Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi, 1986- .
Zhong, Xueping. “Multiple Readings and Personal Reconfigurations Against the ‘Nationalist Grain.'” In Sharon K. Hom, ed., Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora. Garland Publishing, 1999, 103-25. [on Beijing ren zai Niuyue]
—–. Mainstream Culture Refocused: Television Drama, Society, and the Production of Meaning in Reform Era China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. [MCLC Resource Center review by Wei Yang]
[Abstract: Serialized television drama (dianshiju), perhaps the most popular and influential cultural form in China over the past three decades, offers a wide and penetrating look at the tensions and contradictions of the post-revolutionary and pro-market period. Zhong Xueping’s timely new work draws attention to the multiple cultural and historical legacies that coexist and challenge each other within this dominant form of story telling. Although scholars tend to focus their attention on elite cultural trends and avant garde movements in literature and film, Zhong argues for recognizing the complexity of dianshiju’s melodramatic mode and its various subgenres, in effect “refocusing” mainstream Chinese culture.]
Zhu, Ying. “Yongzheng Dynasty and Chinese Primetime Television Drama.” Cinema Journal 44, 4 (2005): 3-17.
—–. Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Dramas, Confucian Leadership, and the Global Television Market. NY: Routledge, 2008.
—–. “Transnational Circulation of Chinese-Language Television Dramas.” In Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, 221-41.
—–. “From Anticorruption to Officialdom: The Transformation of Chinese Dynasty TV Drama.” In Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 343-58.
—–. Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television. NY: The New Press, 2014.
[Abstract: Zhu’s brilliant dissection of China Central Television (CCTV) is the first book to look at the dynamic modern media conglomerate and official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, with an audience of over 1.2 billion viewers globally, including millions in the United States. With “cogent analysis and penetrating insight” (Publishers Weekly), Two Billion Eyes tells the groundbreaking story of this hugely influential media player. “A fascinating window into the emergence of a Chinese public sphere” (Fredric Jameson) and “an indispensable guide to the Chinese media landscape” (The New Inquiry), Two Billion Eyes explores how commercial priorities and journalistic ethics have competed with the demands of state censorship and how Chinese audiences themselves have grown more critical. A “unique window” (South China Morning Post) into one of the world’s most important corporations, this is a crucial new book for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China.]
Zhu, Ying and Chris Berry, eds. TV China. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. [press blurb]
Zhu, Ying and Michael Keene, eds. TV Drama in China. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2009.
[Abstract: This collection of essays brings together the first comprehensive study of TV drama in China. Examining in depth the production, distribution and consumption of TV drama, the international team of experts demonstrate why it remains the pre-eminent media form in China. The examples are diverse, highlighting the complexity of producing narrative content in a rapidly changing political and social environment. Genres examined include the revisionist Qing drama, historical and contemporary domestic dramas, anti-corruption dramas, ‘pink’ dramas, Red Classics, stories from the Diaspora, and sit-coms. In addition to genres, the collection explores industry dynamics: how TV dramas are marketed and consumed on DVD, and China’s aspirations to export its television drama rights. The book provides an international and cross-cultural perspective with chapters on Taiwanese TV drama in China, the impact of South Korean drama, and trans-border production between the Mainland and Hong Kong]
TV/Radio Stations
The Complete Reference to China / Chinese Related Television and Radio Websites (Chinasite.com)
PRC:
National:
CCTV
CCTV3 (General Arts channel)
CCTV4 (International channel) [has live webcast]
CCTV9 (English channel) [live webcast]
Zhongyang Dianshitai Dianying Weixing Pindu (China’s national all-movies satellite channel)
Beijing:
Beijing TV
Beijing TV Video Online (provides Beijing TV programs on the Web in Real Video format)
Beijing Music Radio FM 97.4 (has online broadcast in real-time, RealAudio format)
Beijing People’s Broadcasting Station
Shanghai:
Shanghai Oriental TV
Shanghai TV
Shanghai East Radio
Guangdong:
Radio Fuoshan
Guangdong Television
Nanhai Renmin Guangbo Diantai (Cantonese)
Shenzhen TV
Other:
Baoding Dianshitai (Hebei)
Chengdu TV Station
Chengdu Economy TV Station
Hainan TV
Hainan P and T CATV Ltd, Co.
Huizhou PBS
Hunan Weishi (Satellite channel from Hunan province)
Hunan Economic TV
Jinan Dianshitai (Serving Shandong)
Liaoning Cable TV
Luoyang Cable TV (Henan)
Nei Menggu Dianshitai (Inner Mongolian TV station)
Tangshan Dianshitai (Hebei)
Urumqi Guangbo Dianshibao (Official website of the T.V. station in Urumqi, Xinjiang. No internet broadcasts yet)
Wuhan TV
Yangzhou Cable TV (Jiangsu)
Yanbian Guangbo Diantai
Xinxiang Guangbo Dianshibao (Print news from this TV station in Henan province)
Zhejiang Youxian Dianshitai
HONG KONG
StreamingAsia (new internet service from Hong Kong, in Chinese or English)
Fairchild Television
Fenghuang Weishi (Phoenix Satellite)
Star TV
TVB
Hudong Dianshi (iTV Hong Kong)
Youxian Dianshi (Cable TV)
RTHK (Hong Kong radio station)
TAIWAN: