Description

As the market reform deepened in the post-1992 years, official corruption in China has undergone an exponential growth and become a top source of dissatisfaction for the general public. In the same period, sea changes occurred in the structure of Chinese media, which now perform the multiple, oftentimes conflicting tasks of making political propaganda, catering to advertisers, and speaking to viewers’ concerns. Amid all these changes, television drama became a key venue for representing official corruption and a key site of contestations among various social and discursive powers. A multiplicity of meanings of corruption appears on Chinese television despite the fact that the official anticorruption discourse has remained largely stable. In this paper I will first provide an overview of the different ways corruption is imagined on Chinese television in the context of media commercialization and then focus on a
2009 drama hit “Snail House” to illustrate the tendency of Chinese commercial television to normalize corruption in pursuit of (imagined) middle-class viewers in the context of globalizing neoliberal rationality.
Political implications of such a tendency will be discussed.

Prof. Ruoyun Bai is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Humanities. As well as Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the intersection of media, power and popular culture. She published on media commercialization in China, cultural politics of television dramas, culture jamming through digital media, etc.