As the famous sociologist Fei Xiaotong argued, “the real life of most Chinese can only be seen in the villages.” Peasants not only comprise a significant part of the Chinese population but represent a distinctive culture and one that is expressed in its own particular way. This makes for an important area of study for scholars in communication studies. This volume investigates how Chinese peasants express their culture and adapt to social change. The author’s research consists of participant observation and interviews of shadow puppetry artists in Guanzhong, China, illustrating how peasant artists have adapted to the historical and social changes since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. He discovers that Chinese peasants integrate urban popular culture with their own aesthetic criteria, even if the mainstream discourse of the Chinese community overlooks the subjectivity of peasants. He goes on to put forwards a creative analytical framework for the studies of the dynamics of “subject-time-space.” Scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, and communication studies, especially rural communication studies, will find this an ideal case study.

This book explores how Chinese films constructed an image of China in the 1980s through analyzing the characters, composition of space, and conflict patterns of the films. It also examines the relationship between the representations in Chinese cinema and the realities of Chinese society. The study analyzes the imagery, metaphors, and cultural values of Chinese films in the 1980s to discover the common creative focus of Chinese film directors at the time. It also examines the specific creative elements and cultural significance of Chinese cinema in the 1980s. This book is neither a “period history” of Chinese cinema in the 80s, nor a thematic study of the “fifth generation”. Rather, it is an analysis of films as narrative texts that reflected on history. It uses the perspectives revealed by characters, narrative patterns, and conflicts in films of the 1980s to examine how the era was perceived at that time as well as how China’s national future and individuals’ personal futures were being conceptualized. This title will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Chinese Studies, Contemporary China Studies, Film Studies, and those who are interested in Chinese culture and society in general.

Emphasizing the role of documentary in shaping a nation-state’s image, demonstrating social development and promoting cultural exchanges, this book examines the changes in China’s national image in documentaries at home and abroad since 1949. Based on theoretical frameworks of media sociology, political economy of communication and cultural studies, the book traces the development of Chinese documentary and discusses social transformation and cultural representation embodied in documentaries related to China. It is revealed how these works witness, reflect and interact with social transitions in all aspects of a modernizing China, as well as how documentary production struggles among and mediates between technology, market, ideology, social forces and professionalism. In terms of future prospects of documentary in an era when media convergence is burgeoning, the author explores feasible paths to further promotion of cross-cultural communication and China’s national image, by analyzing documentary aesthetics and representative cases of documentary practice. The title will appeal to scholars and students interested in culture and communication, documentary, film, media and Chinese society.

The role of media is becoming increasingly important as globalization has developed. Given fast social transformation and technological development in China, the consequent environmental and health risks demand citizens integrate the communication and prevention of such risks as a significant part of their daily life. This book systematically discusses the communication process of typical environmental risk issues, and the complex interaction among multiple actors, including the public, media, experts, non-governmental organizations, and government in contemporary China. From a media-centered perspective, it applies major theories in the field of environmental and risk communication, and uses a variety of empirical research methods to unravel the complicated and unique experience of communication and governance. Combining theoretical reflections with real-life examples of Chinese scenarios, the authors not only encourage a dialogue between Western and Chinese academia but also inspire students and practitioners to apply risk communication theories to solving real-life problems. The book will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners of risk and environmental communication studies.

Drawing on cultural trauma theory, this book investigates how collective memory of the Nanjing Massacre is fashioned in China and how the mass media, political power and public praxis jointly shape the politics and culture of memory in contemporary China. Allowing for the dimensions of history and different mediating spaces, the authors first conduct textual analysis of news reports from traditional media since the event took place, revealing that the significance of the Massacre was initially portrayed as a local incident before its construction as a national trauma and finally a collective memory. In a study of physical and online memorial spaces, including the Memorial Hall, commemorative activities on the Internet and new media platforms, the book unveils the production and reproduction of trauma narratives as well as how these narratives have been challenged. The final part further studies the interactions between media and other institutional settings while exploring issues of global memory and reconciliation in East Asia. The title will be an essential read for anyone interested in memory studies, media and communication, and particularly the collective memory of the Nanjing Massacre.

This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, and wealth; and the difficulties in visualizing the invisible pathogen on screen. The authors argue that epidemics have long been presented in cinema as forming a point of cohesion for the communities portrayed, as individuals and groups “from below” represented as characters in these films find solidarity in battling a common enemy of elite institutions and authority figures. Throughout the book, a central question is also posed: “cohesion for whom?”, which sheds light on the fortunes of those characters that are excluded from these expressions of collective solidarity. This book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of film studies and visual studies as well as academic and general readers interested in topics of films and history, and disease and society. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book explores the relationship between social mentality, public opinion, media, and other factors through mixed methods in China, especially since the 21st century. The book deploys qualitative and quantitative research and adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective and diverse research methods. The studies are built on and contribute to the burgeoning literature seeking to anatomise the relationship between social mentality, media, and public opinion from the point of view of sociology and communication. It also aims to explore how media can be used to appease public opinion. As the first systematic study of the interconnection between social mentality and public opinion, this book provides empirical support and a theoretical framework for both areas. It will thus be a great read for students and scholars of communication, sociology, and social psychology, especially for those with a focus on China and new media.

This book attempts to document and analyse the complicated role new media play in the adaptation and integration of China’s new generation of migrant workers. By analysing the interviews and observations of more than 500 migrant workers under the age of 25 between 2010 and 2015, the author tries to understand how new media shape the experiences of this significant group of people at different stages of their lives. This study profiles the daily life of this new generation of migrant workers and examines the intricate connections between media and the reconstruction of migrant workers’ identity, as well as their urban life adaptation and social inclusion. Not only is their interaction with new media a key factor in decisions to migrate to the city in the first place, but it continues to play a crucial role in how their outlook on life, sense of identity, lifestyle, personal relationships, and aspirations change as they navigate their new environment. These findings reveal the impact of new media on China’s accelerating urbanization and modernization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary China studies, and those who are interested in the urbanization of China in general.

Chinese Reportage details for the first time in English the creation and evolution of a distinctive literary genre in twentieth-century China. Reportage literature, while sharing traditional journalism’s commitment to the accurate, nonfictional portrayal of experience, was largely produced by authors outside the official news media. In identifying the literary merit of this genre and establishing its significance in China’s leftist cultural legacy, Charles A. Laughlin reveals important biases that impede Western understanding of China and, at the same time, supplies an essential chapter in Chinese cultural history. Laughlin traces the roots of reportage (or baogao wenxue) to the travel literature of the Qing Dynasty but shows that its flourishing was part of the growth of Chinese communism in the twentieth century. In a modern Asian context critical of capitalism and imperialism, reportage offered the promise of radicalizing writers through a new method of literary practice and the hope that this kind of writing could in turn contribute to social revolution and China’s national self-realization. Chinese Reportage explores the wide range of social engagement depicted in this literature: witnessing historic events unfolding on city streets; experiencing brutal working conditions in 1930s Shanghai factories; struggling in the battlefields and trenches of the war of resistance against Japan, the civil war, and the Korean war; and participating in revolutionary rural, social, and economic transformation. Laughlin’s close readings emphasize the literary construction of social space over that of character and narrative structure, a method that brings out the critique of individualism and humanism underlying the genre’s aesthetics. Chinese Reportage recaptures a critical aspect of leftist culture in China with far-reaching implications for historians and sociologists as well as literary scholars.

Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nüshu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new poetics in contemporary society? This book explores nüshu in conjunction with the local women's singing tradition (nüge), tied into the life narratives of four women born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s respectively, each representative in her own way: a nüge singer (majority of Jiangyong women), a child bride (enjoying not much nüshu/nüge), the last living traditionally-trained nüshu writer, and a new-generation nüshu transmitter. Altogether, their stories unfold peasant women's lifeworlds and forefronts various aspects of China's changing social milieu over the past century. They show how nüshu/nüge-registering women's sense and sensibilities and providing agency to subjects who have been silenced by history-constitute a reflexive social field whereby women share life stories to expand the horizon of their personal worldviews and probe beneath the surface of their existence for new inspiration in their process of becoming. With the concept of "expressive depths," this book opens a new vista on how women express themselves through multiple forms that simultaneously echo and critique the mainstream social system and urges a rethinking of how forms of expression define and confine the voice carried. Examining the multiple efforts undertaken by scholars, local officials, and cultural entrepreneurs to revive nüshu which have ironically threatened to disfigure its true face, this book poses a question of whither nüshu? Should it be transformed, or has it reached a perfect end point from which to fade into history?