China, Media Industries and the Market

Jean-Marie Vianney Kavumbagu

Communication is ‘an ensemble of phenomena related to the possibility, for a subject, to convey information to another by means of an articulate language or other codes’.1 At a time when communication technologies are being increasingly perfected, information is more and more the central concern of States, organised communities, and public and private institutions in their attempts to set out educational or political strategies, to advocate issues, to lobby and apply pressure. The need to send and receive information quickly is, therefore, a vital challenge to vulnerable people such as refugees, those displaced by war, asylum seekers, etc., who do not know their basic rights, which are frequently violated without anyone taking any notice.

Kristine Greenaway

It may well have been, as The Guardian's critic Peter Bradshaw said, ‘the worst Cannes film festival in living memory.’ The danger signals were there from the first when the farcical costume comedy, Fanfan la Tulipe, was screened at the opening night gala. It is a movie that can most charitably be called ‘lightweight but pretty’ and is certainly not the calibre of film one would expect to be chosen to open a top-class world film festival. As te following article recounts, things did not get better!

by Pamela Calvert

A contextual theology of crucifixion and resurrection for US rural communities is suggested by two recent documentaries, Delafield and Zenith. In the contemporary culture of ‘electronic orality’, the following article argues that story-based ‘media ministry’ may be a powerful vehicle for such communities to construct narrative theologies.

by Yuezhi Zhao

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has significantly accelerated the country’s integration with global capitalism through its rapidly expanding communication industries. On the one hand, transnational communication firms, as a key component of their globalisation strategies, are extending the scope and depth of their penetration into the Chinese market, both through and beyond the formal provisions of China’s WTO accession agreements. On the other hand, domestic Chinese players, from Party officials to private entrepreneurs, are using WTO accession as both material and symbolic opportunities to pursue their respective agendas of re-structuring Chinese communication industries. The resulting tensions between national and class interests, between the imperatives of capital accumulation and the communicative needs of an increasingly fractured society, and, between horizontal and vertical communications among different social groups in a globalising context, are profound and potentially explosive.

Colin Sparks

The general assumption amongst observers is that global media companies are queuing up to enter the Chinese market. The well-publicised Murdoch operations are taken as the tip of a very much larger iceberg. This article examines what is at stake in the Chinese market and what the plans of the major companies are.

by Dan Schiller

Control over communications and information is a crucial concomitant of contemporary political-economic power, international as well as domestic. We might therefore anticipate that, as China becomes an increasingly important pole of growth within the global market system, it would also claim and win a substantially greater presence in international communications and information. Indeed, in this sphere a series of Chinese initiatives is unfolding in information and communications technology manufacturing and service provision, including both mass media and telecommunications and information services. These initiatives are too many and too widely rooted to be, simply, unconnected. But do they evince a unified coherence? Do they testify to a systematic national ambition?

By Yik-chan Chin

Since the late 1990s, China’s television industry underwent a major re-organisation. This was particularly evident after China’s accession to the WTO in December 2001. The central issues facing China’s broadcasting are the construction of large media organizations able to compete on level terms with international media forces, and the establishment of sound guiding principles for state regulation. The following article analyses China’s policies regulating flows of transnational television dramas. It demonstrates that, even though transnational media pose a challenge to a national media system and culture, the local state still plays a crucial role in regulating domestic cultural policies and guiding the development of broadcasting.

by David Banisar

In March, 2001, ordinary Chinese citizens used news websites and chat rooms to expose government attempts to hide the deaths of 38 children and four adults in an explosion in the south-eastern province of Jiangxi. Corrupt teachers, Communist officials, and businessmen had forced the children, some as young as eight, to hand-manufacture firecrackers to pay school fees. At first Premier Zhu Rongji blamed a suicidal villager for the tragedy. Nine days later, as outrage and facts spread across the internet, the premier was forced to make an extraordinary public apology.