Contemporary Chinese Print Media

Description

This book examines the transformations in form, genre, and content of contemporary Chinese print media. It describes and analyses the role of post-reform social stratification in the media, focusing particularly on how the changing practices and institutions of the industry correspond to and accelerate the emergence of a relatively affluent urban leisure-reading market. It argues that this reinvention of Chinese print media vis-à-vis the creation of a post-socialist taste (class) culture is an essential part of the cultural and affective transformations in contemporary Chinese society, and demonstrates how the reinvention of such taste culture effectively creates, through new kinds of reading materials and carefully demarcated target audiences, a middle-class civility that serves as the locus of the new niche media market.

Contents

Introduction: Cultivating Class and Reforming Post-Socialist Civility. Chapter 1. Manuals of Elite Civility and Taste Cultivation. Chapter 2. Narrating City, Placing Class. Chapter 3. Refining Petite-Bourgeois Sentiments and Romancing White-Collars. Chapter 4. Becoming a One Hundred Percent Classy Woman.

Author Bio

Yi Zheng is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Chinese Studies, School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Edmund Burke, Guo Moruo and the Sublime in Historical Crisis (forthcoming) and the co-editor of Travelling Facts: the Construction, Distribution, and Accumulation of Knowledge (2004).

Related Subjects

1. Media & Communications
2. Cultural Studies
3. Chinese Culture & Society