Description

China’s media and intellectual fields have most often been studied in their respective relationships with the Chinese party-state. This talk, however, draws attention to the increasingly important communication politics between the media and intellectual fields in China’s brave new and post-reform symbolic environment. The first part provides an overview of key factors that have shaped the evolving politics of intellectual publicity in the Chinese communication system, including media commercialization, the contradictory developments of professionalization and corruption both in the media and intellectual fields, the increasingly central role of the Internet in Chinese public communication, the ideological polarization of the Chinese intellectual sphere, as well as the intensification of globalized intellectual flows. The second part offers two contrasting case studies and discusses signs of both hope and despair in the current modes of Chinese media and intellectual interaction from the perspective of public communication for social justice. The first case illustrates that the right academic who not only dares to speak out at the right time but also has the skills to create a media event has the potential to make critical interventions in major public policy debates in China’s brave new media world. In the second case, however, one witnesses how the destructive logics of media sensationalism, academic corruption, and ideological polarization have intersected to spectacularize intellectual in-fights and distract both the media and the academy from engaging the public around the urgent political economic and social issues of the day. This has brought misfortune not only to the individual scholars involved, but also to China’s already highly constrained public sphere.

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Dr. Yuezhi Zhao is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Global Communication at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. Her work concerns both domestic Chinese communication politics and the role of media and information technologies in the global transformations linking to China’s real and imagined rise as a major world political economic power. Dr. Zhao’s recent books include the single-authored Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict and the co-edited Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy, both published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2008.