WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/westminsterresearch The politics of enjoyment: the media viewing preferences and practices of young higher-educated Chinese Magnus Wilson School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 2011. This is an exact reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] THE POLITICS OF ENJOYMENT: THE MEDIA VIEWING PREFERENCES AND PRACTICES OF YOUNG HIGHER- EDUCATED CHINESE MAGNUS WILSON A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2011 ii Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv 1. Introduction 1 2. Gaps: Audience and Media Research in China 33 3. Frustrated Aspirations: Negotiating Asian Hybridity 78 4. Viewing Hollywood: Seeking a New „Main Melody‟ 117 5. Viewing US Dramas: a „Chinese American Dream‟? 148 6. Pragmatic Nationalism: Patriotism and Modernisation 182 7. Blurred World: Censorship and Piracy 207 8. Conclusion 236 9. Appendices 244 Bibliography 280 iii Abstract This dissertation examines the widespread phenomenon of online film and DVD viewing that is now prevalent among university students in China. In doing so, it analyses how the social organisation of enjoyment among aspirational urban and educated youth relates to the Chinese political order as the country integrates into the global market economy. Using observation, interviews and written responses, supplemented by journalistic and online material collected „in the field‟ during 2006-2007 and 2010, the research centres on two comparatively neglected areas of Chinese studies: audience reception and foreign entertainment via largely non-regulated downloading and pirate DVDs. The dissertation shows how higher educated Chinese youth use their new semi-illicit media freedom to structure their own social and political attitudes and how in doing this they reassess certain established values of responsibility and morality and make them compatible with the adoption of new middle class aspirations learned and negotiated through their viewing of Chinese, and mainly foreign entertainment media. The research therefore aims to make a broader point about the character of China‟s ongoing modernisation, and the role of the „foreign‟ within this, thereby breaking out of the impasse in which China is seen largely through the perspective of antagonism between the forces of control and those of freedom – a view that has tended to overshadow and oversimplify the field of Chinese studies, particularly since the 1989 political crisis. iv Acknowledgements This thesis contains no material previously published or written by any other author, except where reference is made in the text. I nevertheless gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following in its preparation: 1. Dr. Mark Harrison and Prof. Harriet Evans for their supervision 2. The Universities’ China Committee in London for providing a travel and research grant 3. All who agreed to take part in this research or assisted in finding material and clarifying details. Chapter 1. The Politics of Enjoyment: Introduction Over the period of market reform since the late 1970s, there has been a sea change in Chinese access to international popular culture. In the 1980s, though a growing phenomenon, the availability of Western films, TV series, pop music, and so on, was still haphazard and unpredictable for all but sections of the elite owing to the country‟s long political and economic distance from the world‟s major market economies (J. Hong, 1998, pp. 64-65, 100-101; R. C. Kraus, 2004, pp. 119-120). But in recent years, notwithstanding political and economic constraints including censorship and issues of access and affordability, at least among urban college students, China seems to be as „plugged in‟ to international visual culture as anywhere else in the industrialised world, particularly via the internet (S. Chen, 2009, pp. 42-43; Y. Chen, 2009, p. 33; K. Guo & Wu, 2009, pp. 82-83). According to official statistics, school and college students account for a substantial proportion of China‟s „netizens‟ (28.8%) with over 60% of internet users under thirty years old (CNNIC, 2010, pp. 17, 18). University campuses now generally have broadband internet access in student dormitories as well as libraries.1 So, although by developed country standards the overall internet penetration rate is still relatively low (28.9%), it is growing rapidly and is now above the international average (25.6%) (CNNIC, 2010, p. 11), with rates in larger cities such as Shanghai and Beijing already reaching 60% (CNNIC, 2010, p. 15). As a rising power, such developments have been followed closely in both academic and journalistic reports, though it is notable how, particularly outside China, such reports these have tended to cluster around certain themes – in particular, political censorship and economic liberalisation and the contradictions and compromises between the two.2 Indeed, explicitly or implicitly, the question of democracy and the potential erosion of the Communist party‟s monopoly of political power tends to underlie research 1 The ChinaGrid project, a network covering more than 100 universities in China, was launched in 2002 (Gordon, Li, Lin, & Yang, 2004, pp. 124-125). 2 I will discuss this further in chapter two but as Lee Chin-chuan (2000a, p. 10) suggests, the Chinese media has most frequently been analysed in a „state versus market‟ framework, perhaps best summed up as „between the party line and the bottom line‟ – the subtitle to Zhao Yuezhi‟s analysis of the field (1998). Even inside China where there is a strand of more assertive comment on China‟s rise (see Damm, 2007, pp. 279-280), this is tempered by caution over its conflicted, sometimes unharmonious nature (Y. Zhao, 2008, pp. 181-182). 2 on the topic (see chapter two). Much of this focuses on regulatory and policy changes as well as structural reforms affecting China‟s state media industries from a political economy perspective (e.g. Chin-Chuan Lee, 2003; Lynch, 1999; Y. Zhao, 2008), with a sub-genre looking at the impact of the spread and use of the internet (e.g. Tai, 2006; Taubmann, 1998; H. Yu, 2007). Complementing this, from the critical and cultural studies perspective, there are also content and social analyses of prominent groundbreaking Chinese programmes (mainly dramas and soap operas) expanding from the textual analysis paradigm set by film studies and their readings of the films of the so- called fifth and sixth generation directors.3 These two academic approaches undoubtedly highlight the context of media production and illuminate aspects of Chinese discourse, but the notion that there is a straightforward relationship between media message injected, so to speak, into the positioned audience is something that is now largely discredited by communications theory (Hall, 2006 [1973], p. 164). Indeed, as Higson has argued from the perspective of film studies, in a globalised world, instead of focusing on film production within discrete national cinemas, it may be more appropriate to explore the ways in which foreign films circulate and are referenced within a culture, including how they are understood by different audiences (1989, pp. 44-46). Surprisingly, therefore, relatively few studies have taken audience responses into account: Lull‟s empirical study (1991) of Chinese television audiences was a pioneering exception, but makes a bold case for the medium‟s politically liberating effects (p. 127) which was clearly over-influenced by the 1989 Tiananmen protests and is, therefore, now somewhat out of date. Other studies have tended to focus on responses to individual Chinese programmes or series (e.g. Rofel, 1994; W. Sun, 2002; M. M.-h. Yang, 1997) whereas the few studies of foreign film and television reception are predominantly in the methodologically problematic survey tradition (e.g. Dong, Tan, & Cao, 1998; Harwood & Zhang, 2002) (see chapter two). As for the impact of newer media platforms, Hu‟s articles (2005, 2008) on fans of Japanese dramas are, in fact, a rare instance of research that touches on aspects of the downloading phenomenon among Chinese viewers.4 3 Sheldon Lu (2000) as well as Lydia Liu (1998), Geremie Barmé (1995), and Zha Jianying (1992) among others have written on Chinese soap operas in relation to the dramas‟ political and social context. 4 Wen and Wang (2008) have also conducted a study on DVD and downloading. 3 Apart from the missing audience, academic neglect of foreign popular media‟s impact is also quite striking, especially as contact with the foreign „other‟ is one of the means by which national identity is constructed (Higson, 1989, p. 38). This dissertation therefore attempts to both address these gaps in current research and explore the under- examined assumptions inherent in the „repression v. liberalisation‟ structure of the academic debate on China‟s media which tends to take these two poles as necessarily or straightforwardly antagonistic.5 This is perhaps a legacy of residual Cold War thinking in China media scholarship that tends to overlook constraints on the Western press‟s freedom, and neglects the degree to which the Chinese media is less controlled in practice than it might be in theory (S.