Schedule and Info: 1st UK-China Media and Cultural Studies Association Conference
Free Entry. All welcome
First Annual Conference of UK-CHINA Media and Cultural Studies Association
Chinese Media and Cultural Studies: Consumption, Content and Crisis.
Conference Program
Time: 6th February
Location: Bute Building,
King Edward VII Ave, Castle, Cardiff CF10 3NB
Organization
UK-CHINA Media and Cultural Studies Association
Journalism Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC), Cardiff University
Conference Timetable
Bute Building 9: 30 – 10:00 registration
Room 2.32 10:00 – 10:15 introduction
Room 2.32 10:20 – 11:35
Abel Ugba
Contested interpretations of China-Africa relationship: Evidence from media reports in China, Nigeria and Britain
Guy Starkey
Online news journalism: challenges in cross-cultural analysis of multimedia practice in China and the United Kingdom.
Yan Wu and Yakun Yu
China's dream and the Chinese dream: soft power as a political discourse and a public discourse.
Room 2.32 11:35 – 11:50 break
Room 2.32 11:50 – 13:05
Tang Miao
Has China had enough? The death of British Entertainment TV formats in China
Tianyang Zhou
Shulin Gong
Room 1.61 11:50 – 13:05
Hiu M. Chan
The Take Away Discourse: An Obstruction of Intellectual Equality
Song Lin
Covering environment: China vs. the West?
David Feng
What's Zhongnanhai Saying to Us? Analysis of Messages Conveyed by the Chinese President over New Year's Messages
Bute café 13:05 – 14:00 Lunch time
Room 1.61 14:00 – 15:00 keynote speaker Prof. Richard Sambrook
Room 2.32 15:00 – 15:15 break
Room 2.32 15: 15 – 16:30
Kristina Karvelyte
Probing into urban cultural policy narratives: A role of large-scale cultural events in Shanghai
Wang Ken
Creative industries policies with Chinese characteristics? Study of Chinese city policy makers' interpretations of creative industries policies.
Weida Wang
From curation to censorship: three restrains in the progress of classical music programming in China
Room 2.28 15: 15 – 16:30
Jing Cheng
The mythscape online: a discursive construction of the past
Tianbo Xu
Thematic analysis of interviews: how has the internet impacted on traditional journalism in the context of China?
Lianrui Jia
What Public and Whose Opinion? A Critical Analysis of Chinese Online Public Opinion Management Specialists
Room 1.61 15: 15 – 16:30
Ariel Chen
Changing visual representation and visual design in Chinese women's lifestyle magazines: the path to consumerism and new female identity
George Guo
Learn to produce classic TV: BBC's influences on China's early television drama production
Lisa Liang
Cultures in Motion: Subtitling between British and Chinese Cinema
Room 2.32 16: 45 – 17:45 keynote speaker 2 Dr. Paul Bowman
Room 2.32 17:45 – 18:00 conclusion
Bute Café 18:00 – 19:00 drink reception
19:30 Conference Dinner (Red Hot World Buffet Cardiff: 03-06 Hills Street, St David's, Dewi Sant, Cardiff, CF10 2LE)
Keynote Speaker Introduction
Prof. Richard Sambrook
Read Prof. Sambrook's posts (http://www.jomec.co.uk/blog/author/jomec_sambrook/) on the 'JOMEC @ Cardiff University' Blog or visit his personal website (http://sambrook.typepad.com/).
Professor Sambrook's interests include digital journalism and social media, hyperlocal journalism and international news.
Dr. Paul Bowman
Abstracts of all presenters:
10:20 – 11:35
Room 2.32
Abel Ugba: Contested interpretations of China-Africa relationship: Evidence from media reports in China, Nigeria and Britain
Reliable indicators confirm that China and Africa are into each other as they have never been. As far back as 2007, the New York Times, quoting the Chinese Xinhua News Agency, reported that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods in Africa. Trades between the two regions had reached $55 billion in 2006 (New York Times 2007). The dynamic and multi-faceted relationship between the two regions has continued to attract the attention of academics, politicians and the media. The West, it seems, is worried that China's presence in Africa could result in a re-alignment of political and economic forces that could ultimately tilt the balance in favour of China.
The role of the media is important because journalists do not simply report but they interpret and, in some cases, set the agenda for politicians and the public. This presentation is based on a preliminary content analysis of government-owned media in China and Nigeria and one independent mainstream media in Britain and Nigeria. It will identify the voices and issues that have dominated media coverage and seek for evidence of conflicts and convergence. It will also assess the extent to which the coverage have reflected, and been influenced by, media ownership and ideology and the broader social and political contexts.
Guy Starkey: Online news journalism: challenges in cross-cultural analysis of multimedia practice in China and the United Kingdom.
This paper will consider a number of conceptual and methodological issues around approaches to researching the evolution of journalism as a result of media convergence and technological advance in countries as distant and disparate as China and the United Kingdom. The paper, and the research which informs it, are part of an ongoing investigation into interactive multimedia reporting in the two countries. The first phase of the research was to analyse the news websites of different media organisations exhibiting sufficient commonalities of objective and perspective to allow relevant comparisons to be made between practices in multimedia news journalism. This was done simultaneously on three randomly chosen days in 2014 by saving and then carrying out detailed textual analyses of three domestic news websites in each country: Xinhua She, a Chinese state news agency whose main public presence is online; Nandu Wang and Renming Wang, newspapers with identifiably left-leaning and right-leaning tendencies respectively in their political outlook; the BBC, a public service broadcaster operating nonetheless at some distance from government; and The Guardian and The Telegraph which are both newspapers that are situated on the left and right of UK politics respectively. The paper will examine some of the issues around undertaking such international collaborative research, in which both distance and time difference can prove as problematic as socio-economic, cultural and political divides, as well as drawing some limited conclusions from the data set about the nature of journalism practice in the mainstream media of the two countries.
Yan Wu and Yakun Yu: China's dream and the Chinese dream: soft power as a political discourse and a public discourse.
Current debates surrounding 'China's Dream' mostly focus on the interpretation of Chinese official documents and little attention has been paid to the implication and relevance of 'China's Dream' to the public in the country. Starting with the research question: 'how has Chinese public responded to China's Dream as a dominant political discourse', we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the main research method, and compared the representation of 'China's Dream' in mainstream media and the reception of 'China's Dream' by Chinese general public via an examination of related discussion on Chinese social media.
Although the interpretations of 'China's Dream' may vary among Chinese netizens, this study reveals a general gap between the messages delivered by the official media and that which is received by the public. Firstly, the official definition of 'China's Dream' as 'national rejuvenation' is not fully accepted by the Chinese public. Although the Chinese public welcomes the anti-corruption campaign recently launched by the central government, they tend not to view China's dream as closely connected with their livelihood. That is, 'China's dream' is a top-down political discourse instead of an organically developed aspiration by and for the Chinese people. A frequent comparison of the 'China's dream' to the 'American Dream' reveals the Chinese netizens discontent with the state-serving propaganda.
A further investigation into the employment of Confucius culture in legitimating 'China's Dream' reveal that Confucianism has been used as a soft power internally and externally to 'build China into a socialist cultural superpower'
11:50 – 13:05
Room 2.32
Tang Miao: Has China had enough? The death of British Entertainment TV formats in China
Through an in-depth look at British entertainment Television formats in contemporary China, this essay rethinks the role of culture in the adaption of global formats. After ten years of being the most successful format shows, the popularity of British TV formats experienced a sharp fall since last year. In contrast, South Korean formats are now in vogue. This essay presents the decline of British formats from three aspects: rating, audiences' feedback and broadcasters' preference. It followed by examining case studies from a cultural globalization and localization perspective of five imported formats, three from the UK and two from South Korea. This study argues that the continuing falling trend of British formats is a result of decades of conflict between the Western culture, represented in the Western formats, and oriental culture. The culture difference that used to attract Chinese audiences now deters them. The improvement of China's economy has increased the cultural confidence of Chinese audiences who now expects format shows to reflect their own culture. However, the Chinese TV producers are unable to do that yet. That is why they have to borrowing formats from South Korea who has been empowered to take Western formats production skills and use them in an oriental way. What lies behind the changing audience taste is the shifting of global cultural power.
Tianyang Zhou
Shulin Gong
11:50 – 13:05
Room 1.61
Hiu M. Chan: The Take Away Discourse: An Obstruction of Intellectual Equality
One of the most important public relation strategies in China recently is, translated from its official statement literally, "culture going out" (文化走出去). After its official announcement, universities and institution began to establish research on cultural exportation on after another. A great amount of surveys have been conducted under any possible circumstances, in order to "figure out" what the most effective tunnels for China to "export" its culture are. Though, hasn't China always been exporting its culture in various ways? Takeaway, for example, is the most well known one; it exists in almost every corner in the UK.
This paper first takes a Foucaultian method to trace back the historical development and discursive patterns on how "takeaway" gradually became a cultural stereotype, that it is now widely being associated with "Chinese" and "Chineseness". The norms of Chinese takeaway throughout its cultural legitimatization outside of China have mostly been associated with lower class, cheap, easy to access, and most importantly, to be taken away.
Rey Chow has once coined the term "primitive passion", the sentiment for longing to see the primitivism, are being produced and reproduced in films. To follow Chow's logic, I shall propose a new phrase, the "take away discourse". I argue that such discourse is also a symptom that is effecting cultural perceptions, productions and reproductions. By uxtaposing the "take away discourse" with Beneditct Anderson's 'imagined community' and Edward Said's 'imagined geographies', it argues further that the development of such discourse has integrated deeply into Western popular culture as everyday life knowledge. It has been imagined as a specific social categorization that is widely associated with "Chinese" and "Chineseness". Such powerful discourse, on one hand, stands opposite from the common perception of intellectuals; at the same time, it has also become an obstruction for campaigning an intellectual equality.
Hens, the matter and question on "cultural exportation" have become a complicated and complex issue, rather than a one-way injection.
Song Lin: Covering environment: China vs. the West?
China's environment has experienced an unprecedented degradation in the past two decades, with significant long-term consequences for Asia and the rest of the world. There have been many arguments and disagreements between China and the West, especially with regard to China's commitments on improving its physical environment and cut emissions. These debates have dominated international climate change conferences, such as Cancun Climate Negotiations in 2010 and the UN Climate Talks in Lima in 2014. Meanwhile, environmental reporting has become an important topic in both the Chinese and global media. However, due to historical, cultural and ideological differences, there have been misunderstandings between China and the Western world with regard to environmental issues.
The Western discourse on China's environmental crisis is dominated by the view that media in China operate within a strict censorship regime, while the Chinese government has thus far failed to communicate to a global audience its version of debates. This paper aims to examine how should the Chinese environmental journalists and authorities respond to the above problem? Drawing on empirical research based on in-depth, face-to-face interviews with Chinese journalists working for prestigious media groups, the paper provides useful insights into the communication deficit, both within China and with the wider world, as far as the environmental reporting is concerned.
David Feng: What's Zhongnanhai Saying to Us? Analysis of Messages Conveyed by the Chinese President over New Year's Messages
Greeting a country's citizenry is what is often done by the head of state every year, either around New Year or another key moment throughout the year. For long, the New Year's Greetings from the Chinese President have been watched by many, but has only been of significant focus since those have been given by current President Xi Jinping.
Particular attention has been paid in both the form of the presentation (the speech now being given in the president's office), the contents of the speech (shifting from "bare" political ideologies to topics of greater relevance to the population), and how personable the president has become — in Xi's case, very.
This paper attempts to take a closer look at the messages being sent by the Chinese head of state by comparing speeches given during the presidencies of Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. Particular attention will be given to Jiang's 2001 and 2003 speeches (occurring at the start of the 21st century and after power started shifting to Hu Jintao, respectively), Hu's 2004 and 2005 speeches, as well as his 2008 speech following his late 2007 re-election as the leader of China's Communist Party, and his final 2013 speech. Finally, this paper will take a look at the speeches given by the present-day president, Xi Jinping. A key focus will be the messages conveyed (including keywords frequently used) and the form of the speeches, as well as how personable each president was.
15: 15 – 16:30
Room 2.32
Kristina Karvelyte: Probing into urban cultural policy narratives: A role of large-scale cultural events in Shanghai
In the last few decades, in an attempt to reduce the tensions induced by the global inter-city competition and deindustrialisation, a significant number of cities around the globe have indicated an increased interest in the facilitation of their cultural and creative sectors. As a result, among other things, we have been witnessing a growing trend for cities to launch their own 'world-class' film, arts and fringe festivals, design weeks, and arts biennales. Drawing upon policy documents analysis and interviews with local government officials, policy advisors and cultural practitioners in Shanghai, this paper examines what role the policy makers attach to the large-scale cultural events in this city. In addition, it also outlines some of the major issues and challenges that may hinder the city from establishing Shanghai as International Cultural Metropolis. It seems that in Shanghai, large-scale cultural events are primarily employed as tools of 'display' (Williams 1984, McGuigan 2004) to highlight the city's economic and political power, and to reinforce a 'world-city' status of Shanghai. On the other hand, however, the socio-cultural role of the events has been only scarcely addressed by the government, and still remains largely marginal within Shanghai's cultural policy narratives.
Wang Ken: Creative industries policies with Chinese characteristics? Study of Chinese city policy makers' interpretations of creative industries policies.
The term "creative industries" was created as policy discourse in Britain in 1997 and various scholars have analyzed how British policy makers interpreted creative industries policies (Flew, 2012; Newsinger, 2012; Oakley, 2004; McGuigan, 2004). The discourse has been exported to China since 2001. However, the political system, policy making context, state control and the relationship between local and central government in China are all different from those in UK. This research aims to test how Chinese city policy makers understand the imported term and how they interpret creative industries policies.
British interpretations of the creative industries policies include many aspects like the use of public funding; the meaning of culture, classification of creative industries and the promotion of cultural small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and these interpretations are also closely related to the discussions about whether creative industries policies are characterized as neoliberal. This presentation will mainly focus on the use of funding in Chinese creative industries policies, and specifically, it will demonstrate the discourse analyses of relevant policies and semi-structured interviews of policy makers in three representative Chinese cities: Harbin, Guangzhou, Beijing to test which kind of culture is funded by policy makers, what is the developing trend of public funding, and whether the previous public funding has increasingly been replaced by corporate sponsorship. Then these findings will be related to the analyses about the interpretations of the city creative industries policies.
Weida Wang: From curation to censorship: three restrains in the progress of classical music programming in China
In classical music industries, the curator plans concerts and programs for various concerts, music seasons and music festivals. The personality of the curator or music planner in China could come through in their creative choices but sometimes they are additionally and substantially restricted by three types of restrains： marketing, cultural policy and political. The classical music concert programmer and planner would produce a schedule filled by different genres and formats of classical music for an orchestra or a music event. As Michael Hannan defined, the role of the music curator is to plan and produce art activities. Collecting and managing these events involves working with artists, loan arrangement as well as conceiving and composing themes and contents for the project (2003, p.163). The curator needs to consider all elements of the planning and programming process before they put their creativity and thought into practice. A music programmer needs to have intensive training in organizing skills and creative management and be essentially equipped with a broad knowledge in music appreciation, music history and cultural marketing (Hannan, 2003,p.163; Becker, 1984, p. 274). There are sometimes obstacles and also opportunities for them in the way such as policy changes, new marketing preferences, or change in consumer tastes. I will probe into three restrictions that I define as an alternative meaning of 'censorship' in China's classical music industry through the following three aspects: marketing censorship, cultural policy censorship and political censorship. In this paper, I question how these restrains display during the process of concerts curating in China.
15: 15 – 16:30
Room 2.28
Jing Cheng: The mythscape online: a discursive construction of the past
Nationalism has been an important issue for China in both domestic politics and international relations. In the Post-Tiananmen Era, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turned to nationalism as an ideological instrument to bolster the faith of the Chinese people and legitimize the Party's rule. Meanwhile, the early 1990s also witnessed rapid developments in information and communications technology (ICTS) in China, which catalyzed the emergence of cyber nationalism in the public sphere. While it is widely expected that the Internet will contribute to the democratization of China, massive waves of anti-foreign nationalist sentiments and movements (primarily targeted at the US and Japan) have been largely mobilized via the Internet, demonstrating the chemical effect of "the marriage of ideology and technology". Against this background, much of the scholarly debate largely focuses upon either the impact of Chinese nationalism on foreign policy or the official-popular nationalism dichotomy. However, the content and the interactions between the official and popular nationalism still remains understudied. This study attempts to move beyond the dichotomy and look into changing power relations in the digitized China. Adopting the notion of Duncan Bell's mythscape, I argue that rather than a static and collective concept, Chinese nationalism is constructed and reconstructed in changing state-society relationship, and collective memories of the past are a contested area. In the digital age, Chinese cyber nationalists are using ICTS to discursively construct their "self" not only against "others" but also against the dominant power of the CCP.
Tianbo Xu: Thematic analysis of interviews: how has the internet impacted on traditional journalism in the context of China?
Two dimensions are cross-applied to discuss the effect of the internet on contemporary journalism. On the one hand, new technologies, including the internet, have influenced journalism as a whole and challenged, to some extent, its pre-existing forms. On the other hand, it is only to be expected that the effect of a new technology is shaped by the economic and political context in which this new technology works. Within these theoretical parameters, this study aims to explore the perceptions of Chinese journalists about their own experience of practice in order to assess the extent to which internet technology has impacted on traditional journalism in the context of China.
Qualitative semi-structured interviews are used as the research method in this study to collect data from 25 news media professionals, including those who work for traditional news media and those who work for the online news media. Thematic analysis is used as the approach to analyse the qualitative data generated from the interviews. In preparation, a pilot study was used to test the validity of interview questions and the possible thematic codes before the formal study.
Core themes, each with respective subthemes, reveal that the functions, the agenda setting and the administration of Chinese journalism may have been influenced by the introduction of the internet. Moreover, the data shows online news media actually enjoy more editorial latitude in China than their offline counterparts.
The quality of the views provided by Chinese journalists can reveal much about the contemporary practice, role perceptions and values of Chinese journalism which cannot currently be found in literature and official reports. By conducting thematic analysis, the gap between existing journalism theories and Chinese specific context can be complemented by the discussion of the ermergent core themes.
Lianrui Jia: What Public and Whose Opinion? A Critical Analysis of Chinese Online Public Opinion Management Specialists
The increasing number of Online Public Opinion Management Specialists on the Chinese Internet has attracted many Western media's attention in 2014 (e.g. the Guardian, Washington Post and CNN). However, most media reports from the West tend to fall prey to the stereotypical framing of portraying such profession as handmaidens of Chinese government's Internet censorship, where they gauge and funnel online public opinions back to the government for the purpose of control (Denyer, 2013). However, unlike other group that acts as censorship proxy, such as the "50 cents party", Online Public Opinion Management Specialists are legitimate and institutionalized profession certified by the China Employment Training Technical Instruction Center (CETTIC).
As Online Public Opinion Management thrive as a career option and as a lucrative business, it is necessary to better understand the current development of this profession and its implications for online participation, Internet and media control. Given that the popularization of this profession is a fairly recent development, little academic studies have examined the growth and implication of Online Public Opinion Management Specialists in China. This paper will address this gap in literature and aims to provide a preliminary, investigative study on Online Public Opinion Management Specialists. The analysis will be focused on three questions: firstly, what are the reasons to analyze online public opinions? Secondly, who are the "public" that these specialists are targeting? Thirdly, what public opinions are they monitoring?
Public opinion and its implication for democracy has been a much-debated topic in Communication Studies. Although the socio-political context in China is vastly different from Western liberal democracy, examining the emergence of Online Public Opinion Management Specialists will help to shed new lights on the concept of public opinion in the digital communication environment. Since the government is the biggest consumer of the online public opinion services, questioning the very concept of the public and public opinion, this study hopes to examine critically what the increasingly standardized profession means for media control and governance and its implication on democratic communication.
15: 15 – 16:30
Room 1.61
Ariel Chen: Changing visual representation and visual design in Chinese women's lifestyle magazines: the path to consumerism and new female identity
Since the Deng's reforms, and particularly China's entry into the WTO, media in China has gone through major changes. The state run propaganda system is becoming more engaged with the global media. Responding to calls for detailed empirical studies of globalisation and localisation process in media, this paper uses a Social Semiotic approach to examine how a Chinese women's magazine Rayli has changed visually from 1999 to 2012.
Given the rapidly changing media environment in China, where commentators have pointed to adoption of western media models and formats and to the interaction between more traditional values and the advertising lead culture of consumer capitalism, I am interested in looking for the ways such changes can be identified. To help with this analysis I also compare Rayli to the Chinese version of US controlled Cosmopolitan magazine. It is through the comparison that can best assess if, where and how visual style and content have changed. I draw on a number of visual analytical tools from linguistics and multimodal analysis to identify details of the ways that the visual content of Rayli has been shifting over the last 17 years to meet more global, consumer-oriented styles and genres.
The analysis addresses the gradual adoption of western consumer branding design styles, changing role of images, changing use of semiotic resources, changing type of images used and the changing representations of women. It concludes that some Chinese ideas and values are recontextualised through Japanese influences which are realised and infused across the magazine through the use of design. Like western magazines this title brand signifies pleasure, but of a very different order to that found in those western counterparts.
George Guo: Learn to produce classic TV: BBC's influences on China's early television drama production
At a time when forms and genres on Chinese television are flourishing and global television format trade has been taking place on both national and local levels of Chinese television, rediscovering China's television history in a global context would be a worthwhile effort. This paper grows out of the presenter's on-going project which intends to investigate the delegation from China Central Television which visited the BBC around 1978: the end of the Cultural Revolution period. Members of this delegation have since become highly influential in the development of TV drama in China, and especially historical dramas and literary adaptations. For example, Fulin Wang, who later became a pioneering figure in China's Post-Cultural Revolution television drama industry, had played a vital role in fostering a new understanding about television as a popular medium and initiating new forms of television drama. The term 'serial television', which derives from this visit, still has currency in China. The project has been involving work at the BBC Written Archives as well as interviews with personnel from CCTV and the BBC. Based on this research project, this particular paper attempts to critically examine how the discourse of classic television which was originally generated within the Anglosphere had been appropriated and re-articulated by China's Post-Cultural Revolution television drama productions.
Lisa Liang: Cultures in Motion: Subtitling between British and Chinese Cinema
My research aim is to explore the untapped history of subtitling which binds China and the United Kingdom. I probe different types of subtitling in relation to a different film genre: children's films, politics, "chick flicks", history films and canonical texts adapted to film. Its overarching aim is to demonstrate the rich and varied subtitling practices which link both nations as well as to underline the political, social historical forces which condition the linguistic act of subtitling.
The paper is based on the third chapter of my PhD thesis, "The Politics of Subtitling: Iron Lady".
Firstly, this study views a history of subtitling between China and Britain, particularly on the background of subtitling into and out of China in relation to Britain. This paper focuses on the investigation of the political translation in the subtitles and has adopted the translation methods of Generalisation, Neutralisation, Domestication and Foreignisation in the forms of shifts, alterations and similarities from four distinct challenges in this political film: feminism, political terms, miners' speech and the speech of parallel structure. The following translation theories will be reviewed and applied into the case analysis: Lefevere's politically loaded act in translation. Considering the study scope and purpose, the author has implemented the study in a political and cultural light, political disparity and cultural conventions between Britain and China are displayed. In each section, political subtitling examples from Iron Lady are observed, and detailed systematic analyses are made.
Finally, a conclusion can be drawn that: under British politics and Chinese politics as a subtext, the actual translation of politics is a process in which the translator continuously make choices in words and translating strategies on the basis of adapting to contextual and structural elements of the source text.
Contact
Shulin Gong, PhD candidate in JOMEC Cardiff University, Chair of UKCHINA association.
Tel: +(44)7459202919
Email: GongS1@cardiff.ac.uk
Lijie(Annie) Yang, PhD candidate in JOMEC Cardiff University, Communication Officer of UKCHINA association.
Tel: +(44)7856482902
Email: YangL20@cardiff.ac.uk
More Information
Registration Desk is in front of Bute Café in Bute Building, started from 9:30 am on 6th February.
How to reach Bute Building from Cardiff Central Station
1. Taxi
2. Walk (MAP)
It will take 20 minutes from Cardiff Central Station to Bute Building by walking.
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