Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series

Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series has been granted the EastAsiaNet 2014 Award!

In Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series, Florian Schneider analyses political discourses in Chinese TV dramas, the most popular entertainment format in China today. Schneider shows that despite their often nationalistic stories of glorious emperors and courageous officials, such programmes should not be mistaken for official propaganda. Instead, the highly didactical messages of such series are the outcome of complex cultural governance practices, which are influenced by diffuse political interests, commercial considerations, viewing habits, and ideological assumptions. Schneider argues that these interlinking factors lead to a highly restrictive creative environment and to conservative entertainment content that ultimately risks creating precisely the kind of passive masses that Chinese media workers and government officials are trying so hard to emancipate.

Florian Schneider, Ph.D. (2009), University of Sheffield, is Lecturer for the Politics of Modern China at the Leiden University Institute of Area Studies. His research focuses on political communication and mass media in contemporary China.