Chinese Modernity, Media, and Democracy: From the Perspective of Urban-Rural Relationship

• In Event: Revisiting Media, Market, and Democracy in Microblogging China

Abstract

Any discussion of democracy in China without a consideration of the urban-rural relationship will be inadequate. In fact, the urban and the rural are the two sides of the same coin, constituting the inseparable and mutually constraining integral being of Chinese society. Rural society is the secret key for understanding the historical and social transformations in modern China. It is a “secret” because modernization is a process by which rural society is concealed. Today, after 30 years of marketization and export-led growth, the fissure between Chinese rural and urban societies has become a pressing problem, threatening state legitimacy. Along with the penetration and intensified contestation of state, market and dominant social power groups in the media, the relationship between the mass media and workers and peasants as historical subjects has become ambivalent, passive, and even negative. Internalizing their denigrated status, rural residents consider migrating to the city as their only upwardly mobile path. Thus, although we have invested in the rural areas, under the current ideological structure, such investments have reinforced rural disintegration and undermined the basis for the construction of a rural subjectivity. Media phenomena are not independent of the whole social process.

Author

• Xinyu Lu, Fudan U