How Wee Ng 2026. Introduction: Rethinking Censorship as Discourse, Articulatory Practices, Performance, and Dialogic. in: How Wee Ng (ed.) The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China Routledge.
| Chapter title | Introduction: Rethinking Censorship as Discourse, Articulatory Practices, Performance, and Dialogic |
|---|---|
| Authors | How Wee Ng |
| Editors | How Wee Ng |
| Abstract | This chapter accounts for the methodology, scope, and organisation of the book. It goes beyond approaching censorship as repression, that is, as discourse, articulatory practice, performance, and dialogic process shaped by entangled moral, commercial, and political logics. Centring on the discourse of worrying—the articulations of concern by censors, teachers, television professionals, students, and academics over the moral susceptibility of imagined audiences, it situates censorship within the suzhi discourse and expands it to examine how television viewers are constructed through assumptions about morality and civic responsibility. Audiences are treated not as empirically real entities but as discursive constructs mobilised to justify censorship. Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogism, this chapter proposes analysing officially endorsed and censored dramas in relation to one another, and within broader disciplinary regimes. By analysing the discourse surrounding censored dramas alongside popular and overlooked ones, this chapter positions the monograph as a contribution to the growing fields of Chinese television studies, media studies, censorship studies, cultural studies, audience studies, memory studies, and social history, offering insight into how moral anxieties shape cultural governance in postsocialist China. |
| Book title | The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 22 Jan 2026 |
| ISBN | 9781003471684 |
| 9781032749549 | |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003471684-1 |
| Web address (URL) | https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003471684-1 |