How Wee Ng 2026. Historical Context: Worrying about the Television Audience in Postsocialist China. in: How Wee Ng (ed.) The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China Routledge.
| Chapter title | Historical Context: Worrying about the Television Audience in Postsocialist China |
|---|---|
| Authors | How Wee Ng |
| Editors | How Wee Ng |
| Abstract | Tracing the history of television in mainland China, this chapter focuses on persistent anxieties over the audience as central to its function as both an ideological tool and a commercial medium. From the Mao era to the postsocialist reform period, television audiences have been positioned as political, consumer, and leisure subjects within intersecting regimes of governance. As television stations became marketised in the 1980s, audience ratings and advertising revenue began to shape censorship alongside state directives, with television dramas reframed as both commodities and instruments of ideological instruction. Worrying about audiences, especially youth, has remained a core feature of media regulation, now linked to concerns about suzhi, media effects, industrial profitability, and social stability. Since the 2000s, these concerns have been increasingly shaped by the dual imperatives of media commercialisation and cultural diplomacy: Chinese television drama is tasked with advancing soft power by fostering positive perceptions of China abroad, while domestically unifying citizens under a patriotic, high-suzhi socialist spiritual order. By examining how worrying about the audience shapes production, regulation, and industry discourse, this chapter highlights how postsocialist Chinese television continues to negotiate a fraught mandate: to cultivate socialist values while capturing and commodifying the attention of a diversifying public. |
| 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/10.4324/9781003471684-2 |
| Web address (URL) | https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003471684-2 |