Chinese television presents itself as both a metaphor and metonym of Chinese modernity. Despite the much-touted impact of the Internet on social life in China, it is still television that provides the majority of Chinese audiences with information and entertainment on a daily basis. As a result, Chinese television is now a well-established subject for academic research, with a large – and still rapidly growing – body of literature on the topic. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to speculate that, as we speak, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of research papers and dissertations being written on various aspects of Chinese television across the globe, in Chinese, English and other languages. One of the latest additions to this flourishing literature is TV China, edited by Ying Zhu and Chris Berry.

One important reason why many scholars have been kept busy writing about Chinese television is the simple fact that it is in a constant state of change. However, the status of Chinese television as a field of study seems paradoxical. On the one hand, as the editors of this volume rightly point out, there are fewer English-language books devoted to this area of study than to other areas such as Chinese cinema. On the other hand, there is an enormous body of scholarly work in other forms that deals with Chinese television – most notably as articles and essays in a range of scholarly journals, and as chapters in volumes that are not necessarily devoted to the study of television per se, but which consider Chinese television as an integral part of Chinese media and communication in general (Yuezhi Zhao's 2008 book, Communication in China, comes to mind).

Against this backdrop, TV China is a very welcome addition to the limited number of major works dedicated to this topic. To varying degrees and adopting diverse approaches, individual contributors have updated and expanded our current knowledge of Chinese television. Chapters in the volume are grouped into four sections, adopting the conventional tripartite approach in media studies (media production, media representation, and media consumption), with the addition of a fourth section that brings an international dimension to Zhu and Berry's study. Part one (“Institution”) comprises three chapters that examine the institutional contexts of television production, updating our knowledge of Chinese television including CCTV (chapter two) and television in Greater China (chapters one and three). Chapters in this section have a strong empirical focus and, compared with sections two and three, are much more “straight-forward” and less encumbered by theoretical signposting.

Part two (“Programming”) deals with television content, and includes an examination of Shanghai Television's Documentary Channel (chapter four), an analysis of Meteor Garden, a popular television idol drama series (chapter five), and a consideration of one of CCTV's annual Spring Festival Gala events (chapter six). Taken together, the chapters in this section explore how a range of genres (documentary, drama, gala) in a variety of locations (Shanghai, Taiwan and Beijing) speak to television audiences within the national space of the PRC and Greater China.

Each of the three chapters in part three (“Reception”) makes a unique contribution to the study of Chinese television, but their grouping under the rubric of “Reception” is somewhat misleading. Chapter eight explores consumer education through life-style interactive television formats, and may be certifiably described as audience research, but chapter seven, on mediation journalism, might have sat more comfortably in either part one or part two. Chapter nine offers a useful account of the status of the field of television audience research in China, but taken as a whole, the figure of the Chinese television viewer remains somewhat elusive in this section of the book. There is a lack of dedicated, ethnographic work detailing how Chinese television viewers actually watch and use television, and this is true not only of this volume but also of the field in general. Researchers should be asking how women and men across the nation are watching and making sense of their lives via television consumption – especially rural and rural-migrant viewers, as they are much harder to access and study. Lisa Rofel's analysis of audiences of Yearnings (2007) sets an excellent benchmark for this type of ethnographic research, and Guo Jianbin's pioneering book (in Chinese) about how Dulong people in Yunnan watch television is a more recent example. My own limited investigation (Maid in China, 2009) of how rural migrant women domestic workers watch television in Beijing also falls into this category.

Part four (“Going Global”) comprises three chapters which examine the global reach of Chinese television beyond the PRC and Greater China. Like the chapters in part one, these final chapters are also relatively free of theoretical and conceptual signposting. Equipped with up-to-date facts, statistics, content and textual analysis, and personal experience, they collectively offer a picture of complexity, dynamism and ambition in the transnational mediasphere of the Chinese diaspora.

The volume as a whole could have benefited from more holistic and vigorous proof-reading, to avoid repetition. For instance, seven lines in one chapter (p. 186) are reprinted in another chapter (p. 225). Also, Chinese International TV Corporation's outreach is discussed on both p. 202 and p. 229, in identical fashion. Despite these minor foibles, the volume has succeeded in filling a number of gaps, most notably in bringing together within one volume various approaches to the study of Chinese television as a cultural phenomenon that is at once national, transnational and diasporic. It is a welcome addition to the field, and students and researchers of Chinese media, culture and society, as well as television studies academics in general, should find the book a very useful reference.