Back in the last millennium, we Chinese language students at the University of Leeds used to pile in to the language lab and gather around a small TV to watch a much-taped-over VHS copy of that week's news from China. Twenty years on, you can watch CCTV and Chinese language channels anywhere with a basic cable subscription (not to mention online). The Chinese government isn't doing this for the benefit of Chinese language students, although it does a lot for them via its Confucius Institutes, and the two things are of course related.
China's rise to global economic and diplomatic prominence is one of the major transformative changes of this millennium. Yet, despite the intensity of China's global engagement, its cultural footprint and influence over global discourse remain incommensurate with either its status or ambitions. The fact is, for all Beijing's growing confidence in its own model and trajectory, and faith in the monotonic decline of American hegemony, global media narratives are dominated by the US. But, judging by the efforts described in this volume, even that may change.
China's Media Go Global is a beast of a book. It features 19 full-length chapters divided thematically into four parts; an excellent section on how to conceptualize the globalization of Chinese media, and three sections on Chinese media abroad, discourses around what is termed “Sino-globalization,” and the obligatory “media with Chinese characteristics.” It is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject on the market, and is notable for its foregrounding of Chinese scholars, who account for three quarters of the chapters. This perspective is valuable, although some of the more sanguine chapters do accentuate the positive. Anbang Shi's fascinating argument about integrating cosmopolitanism and tianxia, for instance, finds no irony in promoting the concept of hexie (harmony) while ignoring the vernacular bei hexie (to suffer censorship). Overall, however, the editors have managed to compile a collection that eschews the question “is this good or bad?” for “it's a thing, how do we understand it?”
And there is so much here. In the first section, Daya Kishan Thussu situates the globalization of Chinese media in the global context, invoking the concept of Sino-globalization, a term that Google Scholar tells me has scarcely been used by China scholars, but with the Belt and Road Initiative and other challenges to the US-led globalization of the past 60 years deserves greater play. Hugo de Burgh analyses the domestic context of Chinese media's outward expansion, and shows how it is a more natural and less contrived development than often portrayed. Zhengrong Hu and colleagues assess CCTV's capacity to play a foundational role, while Suzanne Xiao Yang covers the old but important ground of “soft power” and strategic motivations.
In the second section, Vivien Marsh considers CCTV's African news operations, Falk Hartig (who has previously done excellent work on the global spread of Confucius Institutes) assesses the impact of China Daily, and Kuo Huang provides a detailed overview of the international operations of the often-overlooked China Radio International. Also less well-known is the globalization of Chinese documentary film, covered in Guoqiang Yun and Jing Wu's chapter, and magazines, provided by Miao Mi. The chapters in the third section don't cohere quite as well, but the section contains one of the outstanding chapters in the collection: Wanning Sun's analysis of Chinese foreign correspondents. The final section is, for me, the most interesting. First up is Shanshan Lou and Hong Cheng's analysis of the domestic and global implications of the advertising market in China, which is huge, lucrative and growing. Advertising underpins the business models of the entire media and internet sectors and has played a crucial role in processes like commercialization and consumption that are coming to define Chinese society under “market socialism.” Next up is David Feng's fascinating look at how Chinese state media use their English language accounts on Twitter (a platform blocked by the Great Firewall inside China) to “participate” in global social media “conversations” (my quotation marks). Hong Li and Rong Zeng present a fascinating look at the adoption and localization of transnational TV formats in China, and Jiao Yang and Mei Wu wrap up with a fascinating case study on Yunnan media's “gateway to Southeast Asia” narrative.
This is a solid volume, and I recommend it to anyone looking to understand more about the international dimension of the Chinese media. There are some lacunae: notably we need a proper reckoning with Chinese censorship and a more critical appraisal of how the media fit into China's broader repertoire of influence activities, including attempts to influence global audiences through purchasing space in national newspapers. Also, consideration of the next frontier, which is China's influence on the global internet. That said, this volume is definitely worthy of your time.
