Organizer: Judy Polumbaum, University of Iowa
Chair and Discussant: Nancy Jervis, China Institute in America
Wenwei Du, Vassar College
This paper focuses on a theatrical sub genre, the xiaopin or "mini drama," which has evolved from a pedagogical tool into a successful brand of mass entertainment in contemporary China. The paper examines how the xiaopin has developed and thrived in China's market oriented economy, largely on the basis of lampooning the commercial ethos itself.
The term xiaopin originally refers to short pieces of theatrical performance or improvisation used for theater education or audition. Most xiaopin are light comedies in spoken drama style, although some make use of regional operatic tunes and techniques for humorous effect.
Since the late 1980s, xiaopin has proved especially adaptable to demands of the entertainment marketplace. As a short and flexible form, with one piece lasting anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes, a xiaopin text is much easier to compose than a full length play; its performance involves only a few actors who can rehearse and prepare fairly quickly; and it can be presented on virtually any stage with a minimum of props. For its playwrights and performers, it yields a quick and often lucrative financial return: Pop stars who dabble in xiaopin can earn 10,000 yuan or more from a single show.
But xiaopin's commercial success is only one side of the story; the other is xiaopin's reaction to commercialism. As a mass entertainment format, xiaopin relies on appeal to diverse audiences through humor, ranging from farce and buffoonery to sophisticated lampooning. It is significant that, even as market forces propel xiaopin to newfound prominence on both live stage and TV, increasing numbers of xiaopin pieces achieve their comic effect through satire on commercialism itself. Thus, these products of the commercialization of the performing arts also reveal and comment on many aspects of the invasion of commercialism into Chinese culture, society, and daily life.
Huazhi Wang, Cornell University
Author Wang Shuo, China's best known literary entrepreneur, has produced a crop of best selling short stories, novels and novellas, and remains much in demand as a scriptwriter of TV soap operas. This paper explores how Wang Shuo's sophisticated understanding of the literary marketplace is reflected in the commodity appeal of his works themselves, as well as his entrepreneurial approach to literary production and promotion.
Wang Shuo's works, with all their idiosyncratic attributes, nonetheless arise from a particular socio economic context in which literary success depends increasingly on market savvy. Much of his popularity hinges on his celebration of people operating on social and economic frontiers; his protagonists-be they riffraff or business people-belong to social groups which were marginalized in the past and are trying to gain social admission under the new historical conditions of commodity culture. His ingenuity, meanwhile, lies in his perceptions of trends in the development of commodity culture; his work captures and promotes attitudes, values and modes of behavior which seem unconventional and even shocking, but actually they are in the process of becoming conventional and even respectable.
This study, incorporating textual analysis as well as data from interviews with Wang Shuo himself, other authors, publishers and literary critics, examines one of Wang Shuo's latest texts, his TV soap script "The Ad People" (Guanggao ren). The circumstances of this work's production and the nature of its reception are discussed, as well as the work itself. The example illustrates the ambiguous, blurred, interactive and constantly evolving relationship of margins to mainstream. On the one hand, Wang Shuo continues to challenge society with the new values of commodity culture; on the other, commodity culture itself is becoming social reality, bestowing legitimacy on literary entrepreneurs like Wang Shuo.
Sun Xupei, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
This paper describes how Chinese news organizations are adjusting to demands of the marketplace, and what these adaptations portend for press-state relations as well as for the relationship between media and their audiences.
For the past decade and more, China's print and broadcast outlets have been trying to wean themselves off dependence on state subsidies by developing new financial bases. In the current period new publications and programs are starting up which have never relied on state subsidies at all. The paper discusses the new financing systems which are emerging, and how both established media organizations and new operations are developing advertising and other ancillary and subsidiary commercial activities. This commercialization of news media is discussed in terms of benefits as well as some problematic byproducts.
The growing competitiveness in media-competition for advertising as well as for readers, listeners and viewers-is reflected in news content in different ways. On the one hand, there has been an explosion of entertainment oriented content, with even the Communist Party and government's official news outlets devoting more space and time to "soft news." On the other hand, there has been a great increase in specialty publications, especially in business and technological fields.
These changes have important implications for press-state relations and for media-audience relations. Although the state maintains regulatory powers over the media, it no longer controls purse strings. The lessening of state control is an inevitable trend. However, the actual results of this lessening of control are not pre-determined.
Several scenarios for the future are possible. China's media could continue to develop as a vehicle for amusement and distraction on the one hand and a channel for specialized information on the other. This might accentuate a "knowledge gap" separation between those who go along passively with the reforms and those who participate actively. Or the new developments could give rise to a stronger, more independent press with a strong sense of social responsibility and the ability to mediate effectively among different social interest groups. Much depends on whether media organizations can maintain both financial health and journalistic integrity, as well as on larger developments in economic and political spheres.
Judy Polumbaum, University of Iowa
This paper examines extremes of press sensationalism on the one hand and press responsibility on the other, contrasting examples of crime, scandal and celebrity journalism found in China's tabloid press with informational, interpretive and investigative efforts underway in the growing specialty of environmental reporting.
The tabloid press and the environmental press, both outgrowths of China's policies of reform and opening up to the outside world, represent two seemingly contradictory trajectories in journalism. The first might be characterized as "junk-food" journalism, the second as "serious" journalism. The former is driven primarily by perceived audience appetites; the latter by conceptions of what audiences may need to know in order to operate intelligently in a context of rapid social and economic change. Necessarily, the desire to succeed in the marketplace underlies both these models, for in today's China media products must get sold in order to survive. But the conception undergirding tabloid journalism is an impoverished notion of consumption, in which news is an ephemeral product designed to deliver "experience" to the reader, listener or viewer; whereas serious journalism incorporates more durable values related to informational empowerment, public expression and public debate.
This study, based on interpretive readings of press content informed by interviews with reporters, editors, sources and other individuals involved with newswork, discusses how these countervailing trends in journalism are evolving simultaneously in the tabloid press and the environmental press. Considering specific examples of news coverage, the paper explores institutional forces as well as situational factors behind both approaches, and examines the quixotic role of the state in encouraging and discouraging both tabloid-style journalism and aggressive environmental reporting.
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