More than a Mouthpiece: Media Culture in Cold War China

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The panel examines the role of media—print, film, radio, and television—in the cultural Cold War waged across ethnic, cultural, and linguistic borders of the Chinese-language world. Much scholarship has focused on the use of media as a means of distributing political propaganda, conducting psychological warfare, and developing antagonism between the Communist and the Capitalist blocs. This panel aims at investigating media as rising forms of communication and expression, which helped define or redefine notions of cultural identity, home and diaspora, tradition and modernity, in various Chinese-speaking communities across the geopolitical division.

Poshek Fu discusses the changing role of the magazine, Chinese Student Monthly, in Hong Kong and Asia’s cultural Cold War, and how it shaped the debate about modernity and cultural tradition among young intellectuals in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Nicole Huang considers the pre-history of individual television ownership in China in the context of the role that television played in organized leisure activities. She also explores how the medium of television forged individual experiences in a communal setting in 1970s China. Examining the reception and adaptation of the American science fiction TV series Man from Atlantis, Yinyin Xue argues that the TV drama and its transmedia relocation pinpoints a productive space between persisting revolutionary discourses and global circulation of popular cultures. Xiaojue Wang analyzes the ways in which mainland émigré filmmakers in Hong Kong used the medium of radio as a narrative device, in order to investigate the role of radio in shaping the everyday life across ethnic and social divisions in Cold War Hong Kong.

The panel seeks to cast a new light on how media culture constitutes an integral part of the everyday life in Cold War China.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Xiaojue Wang, Rutgers University

Chair

• Jerome Silbergeld, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• From Cold War Consent to Cold War Dissent: The Chinese Student Weekly - Poshek Fu, University of Illinois

• Listening to Television: Daily Life and Communal Viewing in 1970s China - Nicole Xincun Huang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Man from Atlantis in China: An American TV Drama’s Migration in the Early 1980s - Yinyin Xue, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Radio Culture in Cold War Hong Kong Films - Xiaojue Wang, Rutgers University

Discussant

• Ying Zhu, College of Staten Island, CUNY