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China's Media Transformation and Audience Research

Hongmei Li

In his book The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria, New York Times bestselling author and editor of Time magazine, argues that, while the US remains a superpower militarily, “in every other dimension – industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural – the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance” to “the rise of the rest” (Zakaria, 2008, pp. 4–5). Such a power shift is characterized in particular by the rapid ascent of China and India as the next two superpowers, which now share a long list of the world's biggest, largest, tallest, and richest. Zakaria presents an interesting analysis of the political implications of “the rise of the rest” and writes about how the US can no longer ignore other ascending countries such as China and India. Despite increasing economic, social, cultural, and political ties between these two Asian countries and the US, as Parameswaran (2009) has rightly pointed out, there is still “relative silence in the US communications academy on what these geopolitical developments mean for our field.” Acknowledging the urgency of studying major shifts in the global geopolitical and economic orders, this chapter focuses on the exploding media industries in China in response to Parameswaran's call to promote more outward-looking and comparative modes of international communication research in the US communications academy.

Chinese media have experienced exponential growth in the last three decades, after China started its economic reforms and “open-door” policies in 1978. Traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio developed rapidly from the 1980s to the late 1990s, and the last decade in particular has witnessed tremendous development in new communication technologies such as the Internet and the mobile phone. While China had only 32 television stations and 93 radio stations in 1978 (Chan, 1994), the number of TV sets increased to 317 million in 1997, with a penetration rate of 86.2%, and the number of radio listeners reached 725 million in 2002 (Chen, 2008). The penetration rates of TV and radio have now reached 96.6% and 95.4% respectively (SARFT, 2008a). China's cable TV households increased to 153 million in 2007, and the penetration rate was 40% (SARFT, 2008b). In 2007 there were 578 book publishers, 1,938 newspapers, and 9,468 magazines in China (GAPP, 2008). The number of Internet users in China reached 513 million by 2011, and the penetration rate stood at 38.3% (CNNIC, 2012). Since 2008, China has surpassed the United States and has become the world's largest Internet population. China now has more than 800 million mobile phone users (“China's Mobile Phone Users,” 2010).

China's media have expanded against the backdrop of rapid economic development. After three decades of double-digit growth, China recently surpassed Japan to become the world's second largest economy (Barboza, 2010). China's economy was estimated at 1.33 trillion US dollars and its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita reached 3,600 US dollars in 2010, from 400 US dollars in 1978 – a nonuple increase in three decades (Deng, 2009). China has already become the US government's largest creditor, and is estimated to overtake the United States and become the largest world economy in 2030 (Barboza, 2010). The Chinese economy is characterized by huge gaps between the rural and the urban, between the east coast and western inland areas, and between the rich and the poor. While average disposable income for urban residents in 2010 was 9,757 Yuan (about 1,460 US dollars), the cash income for rural people was 3,078 Yuan (approximately 460 US dollars), less than one third of the average amount for city residents (“China's reports income increase,” 2010). The GDP per capita for Suzhou, China's canal city and Shanghai's neighbor, for example, reached 25,500 US dollars in 2009, seven times the country's GDP per capita (Cox, 2009). An article in Fortune magazine reported that the richest 20% of China's population were estimated to control more than 80% of the country's wealth. The World Bank estimates that more than 400 million live on less than $2 a day (Chandler, Wang, & Zhang, 2004, p. 152). Liping Sun (2003), a prominent sociologist, views China as a “fractured society,” and another well-known scholar states that China has developed into “four worlds” (Hu, 2004). China's Gini Coefficient, an indicator that measures inequality in wealth distribution, has reached 0.47, which has surpassed the well-recognized warning line of 0.4 in the international community (Chen, 2010).

The purpose of this chapter is to situate audience research in the broader context of China's social, cultural, and media transformations of the last three decades. The chapter first analyzes some of the lasting structural changes that have taken place in Chinese media industries – media importation, media commercialization, global influences, and commoditization of audiences – and in Chinese society, which have shaped the way audiences are conceptualized and studied in China. The descriptions of these structural changes set the stage for my subsequent summary of existing audience research. I then selectively review some influential publications on media audiences in China, in order to analyze key themes and patterns in this body of work and to identify the scope of what has been studied and what is still missing in this research. Having explained and outlined the gaps in our knowledge of audiences at this historic moment in China's altering media environment, the chapter ends with an agenda for future research.

Research on China necessarily requires a few words on how the author approaches this nation's disputed political boundaries. While China in a broad sense can include mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or even the Chinese diaspora from a cultural perspective, this chapter focuses on mainland China. In reviewing studies on audiences, I limit myself here to research published in Chinese and English that has addressed media in mainland China. Researchers reviewed include scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong, ethnic Chinese scholars residing in the West (predominantly in the US), and foreign scholars in English-speaking countries who have taken an interest in China. My choice here to foreground mainland China means that Chinese media audience research published in other major languages is not included in my review. Nevertheless, my selective discussion still aims to provide insights into the emergent field of audience studies in China and strives to chart the boundaries of the still unfolding trajectory of research in this area.

Importation of Foreign Media Products in the 1980s and Early 1990s

In order to look at media audiences in China, we have to first examine the development of Chinese media, which has been intertwined with China's efforts to globalize its economy from the very beginning, when China started to implement its open-door policies in 1978. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping visited the United States and signed a package plan for cultural exchange between the two countries. Since then, Chinese media workers cautiously but actively sought to introduce Western media programming in China. Man from Atlantis, a short-lived US science fiction TV serial of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), was the first US TV program imported to China. The show was very popular among Chinese audiences, and the sunglasses worn by the hero Mark Harris (starring Patrick Duffy) became the absolutely necessary gadget for fashionable Chinese youth then (He, 2007). Garrison's Gorillas, produced by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), was the second US TV serial that aired in China. In the 1980s China also aired other US TV serials: Hunter, Falcon Crest, Remington Steel, Matt Houston, and Dynasty (Lu, 2000). China imported the first foreign cartoon, Japan's Astro Boy series, in 1981; since then, a large number of foreign cartoons have entered the nation. In 1991 Shanghai TV Station broadcast Growing Pains, an ABC family sitcom, and this show enabled Chinese parents to see, for the first time, that they could be friends with their children rather than authority figures. Growing Pains was broadcast for four consecutive summers. While there were no official statistics on the global audience reception of the show in China, according to Zhang Xin, who dubbed Growing Pains into Chinese, “[a]ll people I knew, ranging from elder women in our neighborhood, to co-workers, to primary school children, asked me about the next plot after each previous episode was broadcast” (He, 2007). Since then, many more foreign programs have been aired in China. Despite the popularity of foreign media programs and a general pro-Western attitude among the educated elites, however, Chinese media workers were then under a lot of social and political pressure, because they ran the risk of being accused of spreading capitalism and capitalist lifestyles. Capitalism was constantly condemned in official media and by conservative government officials, which created a deep sense of uncertainty.

In the 1980s, an unprecedented “cultural fever” appeared in China, which was accompanied by the publishing of a large number of translated works on the West, imported Western media, and cultural products and by critical reflections on Chinese traditional culture. The educated elites in China yearned for Western democracy and critically reflected on Chinese tradition and history. Some popular media programs symbolized their tensions with the official ideology of the time and their sense of anxiety toward China's future. A telling example was a 1988 TV program entitled River Elegy (He Shang), which sharply criticizes Chinese culture and civilization by reinterpreting long-standing Chinese symbols: the Great Wall, the Yellow River, the Dragon, the Red Flag, and many other Chinese icons. While River Elegy portrays the “azure blue civilization” of the West as symbolizing “youthfulness, adventure, energy, power, technology, and modernity,” the “yellow land culture” of China is described as decadent, incompetent, superstitious, lifeless, and outdated (Chen, 1995, p. 31; Chen & Jin, 1997). This controversial television show only aired twice, in June and August 1988, and was later banned by the Chinese government; but it was extremely influential. Practically every Chinese citizen with TV access watched this program. After the TV show was banned, handwritten manuscripts of the book were circulated among high school and college students. Also, the government encountered a legitimacy crisis, which was largely due to China's reflections on its own Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), on the history of its Communist Party, on its past propaganda, on the problems that occurred during the economic reforms, and especially on the Chinese government's crackdown on the Tiananmen student democracy movement in 1989.

Rapid Media Commercialization in China since 1992

The controversy that ensued after 1989 deepened the crisis over the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. Consequently the government turned toward economic development, intending to consolidate and maintain its authority. In 1992 Deng Xiaoping, architect of China's reforms, toured southern China and called for officials and entrepreneurs to take bigger and bolder steps toward developing the whole country. Deng's aphorism – “it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice it is a good cat” – was commonly cited to show his cool head and utilitarian way of viewing ideological differences. Since then, Chinese media have commercialized their operations with great speed and have openly embraced transnational and Chinese private capital.

While in the pre-reform era Chinese media were pure propaganda tools for the government, now they have to serve two masters simultaneously: on the one hand they are mouthpieces of the state party; on the other hand they have to earn money for their own survival (Zhao, 1998, 2008). Lee, He, and Huang (2006) further point out that Chinese media have been transformed into a “Party Publicity Inc.” and have become a “quasi-business that seeks to make huge profits on the one hand and to legitimate Party mandate by promoting its image on the other” (p. 1). Since 1998 the Chinese government has stopped subsidizing the Chinese TV industry. The termination of subsidies and the increasing competition have forced the media to seek partners and to find other financial means of funding their content production and distribution. Seeking advertising money has become a natural choice. Except for a few party organs, Chinese media now rely exclusively on advertising funds, sponsorship, and subscription fees for survival. Some media obtain more than 90% of their yearly revenues from advertising (Zhao, 2008).

The increasing importance of advertising is also reflected in China's double-digit and sometimes triple-digit advertising growth in the last three decades. In 1981 the country had slightly over 1,000 advertising operation units – advertising agencies and media organizations such as newspapers, magazines, radio, television stations, and outdoor media – that were licensed to carry advertising; but that number reached more than 172,000 in 2007. The number of people employed in the industry also increased, from slightly over 16,000 in 1981 to over 1 million in 2007; and the yearly advertising revenue increased from 118 million Yuan in 1981 to over 174 billion Yuan in 2007 (Li, 2006; Lu, 2009). The market value of the Chinese media industry – which consists of advertising, broadcasting, cable TV, publishing, movies, and entertainment markets – reached 50.5 billion US dollars in 2009; this figure put China in the third place, next only to the United States and Japan (Datamonitor, 2009). Broadcasting and cable TV represent the largest and quickest growth. Revenue generated by the broadcasting and cable TV segment made up 48.2% of the Chinese media market value in 2009 (ibid.).

Foreign advertising entered the Chinese market right after China started its economic reforms in 1978. Foreign companies relied on slick image-oriented advertising, and foreign products had been advertised in China even before they were available there. Japanese and US advertising firms were the first to explore opportunities to expand their business in this country. Foreign agencies began to enter the Chinese market on a large scale in the 1990s. By the end of 1994, almost all the top ten transnational advertising agencies had established joint ventures in China (Li, 2006). While then foreign advertising firms were required to establish joint ventures with Chinese partners and were only allowed to maintain up to 49% of the shares, now they can own their operations in entirety.

China's demand for foreign capital and management expertise opened the door for transnational capitalists to enter the Chinese market through limited channels. Large book publishers such as Bertelsmann, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Publishing, and Simon & Schuster have long established collaborations with Chinese publishers. Chinese magazine publishers have also actively sought cooperative ventures with foreign publishers. For example, fashion magazines such as Elle, Cosmo, Rayli (a fashion magazine founded by a Chinese and Japanese publisher), and Vogue already have a big presence in China.

Rapid media commercialization also led to gradual media fragmentation in China. Since the late 1990s, China has launched various movements to consolidate media. Actively supported and sometimes required by Chinese authorities, some media companies have merged to form larger companies within single media industries, and others have pursued mergers across media platforms. The conglomeration of media groups is, on the one hand, a measure designed to increase the competitiveness of Chinese media by anticipating foreign media's flooding into the Chinese market after China joins the World Trade Organization (WTO); on the other hand, it can also be seen as a way for the government to exert further control over the media in the context of the latter's fragmentation (Zhao, 2000, 2008).

Global Influences on Chinese Media in the Post-WTO Environment

China entered WTO in 2001, which led to many structural and institutional changes in the Chinese media industry. For example, China doubled the quota of foreign films from the original 10 in 1994 to 20 in 2001 (“Foreign Films ‘Would Boost Economy,’” 2009). China has recently agreed to obey a WTO ruling and to increase the import of entertainment products by March 2011 (Reuters, 2010). This ruling means that more entertainment products will enter China in the future.

Complex networks for the co-production and co-financing of films have become more and more common in China's film industry. Even though in 2008 China created a record 406 feature films and the box-office revenue increased 30% – to 4.34 billion Yuan (US$ 638 million) – over 2007 and realized a continuous annual growth of 25% since 2002 (“Foreign Films ‘Would Boost Economy,’” 2009), many so-called Chinese films were co-produced and co-financed, especially the big box-office hits. Hero (2003), directed by the famous Zhang Yimou, for example, was a co-production venture that involved mainland China, Hong Kong, and Hollywood (the US-based Miramax was a principal investor), and it featured a pan-Asian cast of highly bankable stars. Hero started the co-production trend; it was followed by Zhang's box-office success House of Flying Daggers. Feng Xiaogang's annual New Year comedy (Hesuipian) has also attracted major foreign investors like Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia, which distributed Big Shot's Funeral to the global market (Kong, 2007). His Cell Phone (2004) was a co-production with Columbia, and his A World Without Thieves (Tianxia Wuzei, 2004) was a co-production with Hong Kong-based Media Asia. Films produced by renowned Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou, Feng Xiaogang, and Cheng Kaige received much of their profits from overseas exhibition (Kong, 2007; Wang, 2009). Exhibition in foreign countries has also become an important consideration for Chinese film directors, and some banned films have only been exhibited at foreign film festivals. Indeed Zhang's Hero (2003) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) were produced with international audiences in mind, and these productions had a mixed reception among Chinese critics and consumers, even though they were commercially successful (Wang, 2009).

The state and the transnational media corporations have formed strategic alliances in China in order to sell hybrid forms of popular culture to Chinese audiences. These hybrid media blend the slick modern aesthetics of global media with nationalistic pro-Chinese cultural content approved by the state authorities (Fung, 2008). Media groups such as Viacom, Disney, Times Warner, and News Corporations have long penetrated the Chinese market. Outdoor media groups such as Clear Channel, JCDecaux, and Tom Group have already gained control over some of the most influential outdoor media firms in China.

In the TV industry, media restructuring measures were taken to separate the production of content from broadcasting (zhibo fenli), in response to the challenges that Chinese media face in the post-WTO era. Discussions about these measures reached their peak in 1999. The essence of this strategy was to break the administrative monopoly and to increase the competitiveness of Chinese TV stations while deepening the impact of market reforms. TV drama is the first arena through which private capital has been channeled into the Chinese TV industry. As the most widely watched TV genre, TV drama has grown at an exponential rate and has become a cash cow for TV stations (Guangergaozhi, 2004; Wang, 2008). While broadcasting was suspended in 2002 for various reasons, in July 2009 the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) issued an official directive that reinvigorated the concept and practice of zhibo fenli (Ming, 2009). Now programs that are not closely related to politics or to sensitive issues, such as TV dramas, children's programs, entertainment programs, fashion shows, and sports, are grouped within the boundary of zhibo fenli, which means that a certain percentage of programming must be purchased on the market. Nevertheless, the government still maintains a tight control over the production of news, political commentary, and other sensitive programs (Ming, 2009).

Zhibo fenli can further promote entrepreneurship and private investment in the Chinese media industry, which has already been penetrated by private capital through advertising money, product placement, content transaction, sponsorship, and money from the stock market. The ongoing separation of media's political and economic functions has also been discussed in the Chinese media, as a form of preparation for the latter to be listed in the future on overseas stock markets – as has been the case for the Beijing Youth Media Group, which was listed in the Hong Kong stock market in 2004, which was the first time for any Chinese media to be listed overseas.

Private capitalists and entrepreneurs can also collaborate with China's official media to host joint programs and co-produce TV programs for official media in China. For example, Yang Lan, China's Oprah Winfrey, a former China Central Television (CCTV) host and founder of a Hong Kong-based media organization Sunmedia, founded Yang Lan One On One (Yang Lan Fangtan Lu) with Shanghai Oriental Satellite TV, and she has hosted it ever since. It is a program that specializes in interviewing well-known celebrities, sports stars, politicians, writers, and cultural figures. Since 2004 Yang Lan also invested in Women of the World (Tianxia Nuren) and has hosted it with Hunan Satellite TV. Targeting young urban women, this talk show covers topics of life, family, and culture and competes with CCTV's Half the Sky(Ban Bian Tian). The financial capital of Sunmedia has been drawn mainly from private investment and from the stock market.

Developments in the Internet industry in China probably represent the ultimate possible convergence between foreign and domestic content. While Chinese authorities have been partially successful in censoring Internet content and in controlling access to foreign websites, Chinese Internet users have access, though a limited one, to foreign media content. And those with expertise in Internet use can bypass the Great Firewall to access censored websites and content. Even Twitter, which is now censored in China, has managed to attract a large number of ordinary Chinese users and activists.

Against the backdrop of media commercialization and global influences in China, the following section charts the landscape of audience studies and identifies a set of key concerns for future research in the field. I begin here with a brief review of the historical shift in the state's conceptions of the prototypical Chinese audience, from being viewed as obedient and frugal citizens of an authoritarian state to being wooed as spectators of global media and as insatiable consumers of a range of commodities.

Shifts in the Portrayal of a Chinese Audience: From Workers and Citizens to Consumers and Spectators

In the 1980s, the Chinese audience was largely understood as an undifferentiated conglomeration of citizens, situated in a historical relationship with the authoritarian state party, and depicted as loyal political subjects. In this relationship the media were viewed as tools that could help nurture strong and close ties between Chinese citizens and the Communist Party (Chen, 2008; Liu, 2008). The main lens for conceiving audiences was their political relationship with the state, and this representation was considered necessary for the state party to enact public policies efficiently and to disseminate its propaganda by having a better understanding of citizens' needs. While the state party had historically relied on personal interviews and fieldwork to gather knowledge concerning “the mass” – that is, the population of China – the government and its agencies soon began to conduct large-scale scientific public polls in the 1980s. Research on media audiences, which was closely related to public opinion research, emerged in this context. During that period individual media organizations, which were part of the state's propaganda apparatus, carried out systematic audience research in order to profile their viewers and readers, in a continuation of China's propaganda model.

In April 1982 the News Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, together with the People's Daily, the Worker's Daily, the Chinese Youth Daily, and the Beijing Broadcasting Institute (currently named the Communication University of China), conducted the first ever poll on audiences in Beijing, and it used the computerized random sampling method. Directed by Congshan Chen, this poll was designed to survey, among a host of other factors, audiences' media exposure, content preferences, and perceptions of the media's credibility (Chen, 2008). The survey also aimed to correct an over-politicization of demographic orientation during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) that treated class and class inequality as the only criteria by which the Chinese population was judged. In 1986 China held the first conference on media audiences, and in the same year Renmin University founded the Public Opinion Research Center, which later became one of the most influential public opinion centers in China (ibid.). In 1987 CCTV conducted the first ever national media poll, in 27 provinces, aiming to map demographic and psychographic characteristics of audiences, their behaviors, and their media consumption patterns.

China's clampdown on the Tiananmen student democracy movement of 1989 had a negative impact on media reforms and audience research (ibid.). Facing Beijingers' cold reactions toward the regime, China conducted a large-scale poll to measure Beijingers' opinions of the Asian Games in 1990. In April 1991 the Audience Research Commission of the Chinese Radio and TV Association was established, and it was the first academic organization to specialize in studying radio and TV audiences, training pollsters, hosting research seminars, and publishing original and translated works on audiences (ibid.).

Media commercialization since the early 1990s quickly changed the way in which the Chinese audience was historically conceptualized. After the liberalization of the Chinese economy, media audiences experienced their newfound status as commodities in the eyeball economy of increasingly capitalist media systems. The entry of large number of transnational corporations and of their advertising agencies spurred the acquisition of data about Chinese consumers, their lifestyle choices, behaviors, media preferences, and other information. Marketing firms began to conduct research about Chinese consumers. Horizon (Lingdian), China Mainland Marketing Research Firm (Meilande), and Sinomonitor (Xinshengdai) are among the most important Chinese polling firms established in the 1990s. Gallup China was established in 1991 as the first foreign survey research organization licensed to do business throughout China. Although China allows marketing firms to conduct survey research on consumer attitudes and behaviors, surveys on social and political issues are still highly controlled, and foreign polling firms are forbidden to conduct survey research on sensitive social issues.

The media rating system started to emerge in the 1990s. Advertising professionals such as Liu Guoji and the corporation Procter & Gamble (P&G) helped develop China's first set of television audience measurement protocols and standards. Two former P&G managers founded the first TV commercial monitoring company: Kangsai, whose English name was X&L, and which was later purchased by the Central Viewer Survey & Consulting Center–Taylor Nelson Sofres (CVSC–TNS Research, which is often shortened as CTR) company – a joint venture between CCTV and one of the largest global marketing firms, TNS. In 1997 CCTV and CTR jointly founded CVSC-Sofres Media (CSM), China's largest TV media monitoring company. Liu Guoji, who was working as the media public relations (PR) director at Zenith Media in November 1997, led a Chinese delegation – consisting of about 30 directors of TV advertising departments and TV station deputy directors in charge of advertising – to the United States to make visits to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and the headquarters of P&G. The delegation was to learn about the advertising management models of these companies and to get trained in them (Liu Guoji, personal communication, 12 July 2005).

Media professionals gradually learned to measure Chinese TV and radio ratings by modeling their techniques after other countries' tools of audience assessment. CSM used people's meter, people's diary, and other means to monitor TV and radio ratings in mainland China and Hong Kong. A. C. Nielsen also established its operation in China; but it was much less influential, and its market share was between 10 and 20% in China. In 2009 Nielsen left the Chinese market, and CSM now monopolizes the Chinese TV and radio monitoring market. TV ratings have gradually become the most important criteria for a TV station to decide whether a program should be launched or continued, especially at a time when advertising has become the most important source of income. Companies that monitor print media and the Internet have also emerged. For example Hui Cong (www.huicong.com), established in 1992, now monitors more than 1,400 print media and more than 7,000 Internet sites.

Ethnic Chinese people from the diaspora who were trained in Western universities also began to be involved in training mainland Chinese researchers in survey design, sampling, and other issues related to survey research. Audience research in this sense emphasizes pragmatic application and media management and has little interest in theorizing, even though it has generated some of the richest data in Chinese media research (Liu, 2008; Hu, 2010). This kind of audience research stresses scientific positivism, and media scholars in this area introduced and applied Western theories of media effects in China.

Understanding the Implicit and Explicit Audience: Textual Analysis and Ethnography

While media scholars in mainland China often emphasize positivist scientism in the study of media audiences (Hu, 2010), cultural studies scholars have engaged with audiences in quite a different manner. One group of scholars has approached the construction of audiences in cultural representations through textual and critical cultural analyses. One of the most prominent scholars in this camp is Jinhua Dai, a professor of comparative literature and cultural studies, who has founded the Center for Film and Cultural Studies at Peking University; and this is the first cultural studies center established in China. In Breaking the Surface of History (1989), Meng and Dai produced the first academic study that critiques Chinese women's literature; this study investigates the literature produced by nine prominent writers and uses textual analysis, historical analysis, and Marxist feminism. Dai's work Gendering China (2002a) examines the gendered culture of the 1970s and 1980s by analyzing how more recent Chinese women writers' narratives represent gender roles and imagine their communities of readers.

Dai's works encompasses feminist research, film criticism, and cultural studies. Some of her recent work focuses on critiquing China's cinematic culture by reading film “not simply as a textual signifier in itself, or merely as a commercial or technological industry, but also as a cultural field scored by both elites and popular discourse” (Wang & Barlow, 2002: 4). Her work (1995, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002a, 2002b) investigates how social forces – such as audience tastes and expectations – shape the content of popular texts such as films, advertisements, TV dramas, and other cultural forms. Dai has become the most important scholar in the field of cultural studies in China. She cannot be classified as an audience research scholar in media studies' more empirical traditions; however, her methodological approach, which combines textual analysis, historical analysis, and Marxist criticism, does fit into the broader realm of cultural studies and into its concern with reading/viewing publics. In a televised interview she has acknowledged her elitist stance in studying popular culture; there she stated that her lack of training in survey research, interviews, and fieldwork methods prevented her from studying audience reception (Dai, 2008). She has explored instead how and why audiences consume popular cultural texts; and she has done so by interpreting the broader significance of these texts and by situating them in their broader social and historical contexts. Like Dai, other scholars (Larson, 1991, 1998, 2009; Meng, 1993; Barlow, 2004) critique literature, media texts, and popular cultural texts, aiming to understand larger issues such as modernity, feminism, sexuality, gender, and the nation. Taking an interpretative and interdisciplinary approach to media texts, these scholars, whose work crosses over into media studies, are identified with such fields as Chinese studies, East Asian studies, or comparative literature.

Wang (2009) is among the few communication scholars who have critically studied cinematic texts. In her case study, Wang looks at the complex interaction between Chinese cinema and Hollywood and at the reception of two films directed by Zhang Yimou – the most successful Chinese film director with an international reputation – namely Hero (2003) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) that used Hollywood production and narrative style and marketing practices. Wang argues that the reception of these two commercially successful films among Chinese critics and consumers – as indicated in reviews and other texts that responded to the films – was, at best, mixed, because Chinese audiences assessed them as films that emphasize cinematic style over cultural substance. Given the choice of catering to the tastes of a global audience or satisfying local cultural preferences, Zhang Yimou leaned toward the former (or so argues Wang) – which left Chinese audiences dissatisfied with the narrative content of these films.

Aiming to go beyond textual analysis and critical cultural studies, scholars with training in ethnographic research techniques have focused on audience reception of particular programs – especially on various tactics of resistance and negotiation – and on the changing relationships among viewers, texts, and media industries (Lu, 2000). Ethnography and the active audience achieved important status in cultural studies during the nineties, in the wake of Janice Radway's influential book Reading the Romance; this book contained ethnographic research that contested the normative perception of female readers of romance, in the US, as passive dupes of patriarchal popular culture texts (Ang, 1996; Lu, 2000; Lull, 1990).¹ As part of this larger tendency to pay attention to the responses of ordinary audiences to media culture, studies of Chinese audiences' engagement with a vastly altered mediascape have also relied on ethnography, focus groups, and interviews.

Attempting both to transcend textual analysis, which treats texts as having closed meanings, and to overcome the idea that audiences have total autonomy in making meanings, anthropologist Rofel (2007), for example, studied the influential TV drama Yearnings (Ke Wang; 1990), and her ethnographic analysis moved back and forth between narratives of the TV drama and ordinary viewers' responses. By intertwining her critique of the drama's narratives with viewers' interpretations and critiques, Rofel treats media texts as open-ended and fluid narratives. Rofel proposes that viewers' disagreements and conflicts with the drama's narratives demonstrate that popular culture can incite larger discussions of citizens' changing expectations and subject positions in postsocialist China. Similarly, another anthropologist (Friedman, 2006) studies audience responses to Twin Bracelets, a popular film that targeted Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Friedman watched Twin Bracelets with her subjects and then compared their commentaries on the film with her ethnographic notes about their everyday work and family lives. Situating viewers within national and transnational contexts of media production and consumption, Friedman analyzes how these women's responses to the film revealed both their authorial agency as active spectators and their containment within existing structures of power, which were echoed in the film's narrative. Murphy (2007) draws on ethnographic fieldwork and on the textual analysis of state-sponsored official media products – a party-produced prefectural newspaper, JA Daily, and an anti-corruption film titled The Life and Death Decision – to examine how these pedagogic training tools are enlisted to help large audiences of official cadres understand and implement state policies. Murphy argues that these media products participate in the larger project of suppressing knowledge of the state party system's flaws and of discouraging political reform, which in the end results in poor governance.

Communication scholars in Hong Kong have produced some of the most interesting studies of Chinese audiences in the past decade, partially due to their geographic proximity with mainland China. These researchers, who were often trained in the West, have conducted ethnography and in-depth interviews with Chinese consumers/citizens in the broader context of global media flows, cultural politics, and media transformations in China. Hong Kong scholars such as John Erni, Eric Ma, Anthony Fung, and Laikwan Pang have authored extensive studies of audiences, media, and popular culture. I will comment here, however, only on a few of them, which focus on media culture in mainland China. Generally speaking, these studies can be categorized into research on youth culture (Erni, 2005, 2007, 2008; Fung, 2009), research on modernity (Pang, 2002, 2007), research on global media flows (Pang, 2002, 2007; Erni, 2005, 2008; Fung, 2008), research on regional media production and consumption (e.g., Fung, 2008, 2009), and research on issues of identity (Pang, 2002; Erni, 2007; Fung, 2009). For example, Erni (2007) studies the production and consumption of Cantopop and the “gender negotiations found in the production, the musical forms, and the consumption of Cantopop” (p. 87). Conducting interviews and focus groups with youth in Shanghai and Hong Kong, Erni has also investigated the reception of the Harry Potter phenomenon (Erni, 2005, 2008).

Fung (2008) analyzes the localization strategies of transnational media corporations in China and argues that Chinese audiences have embraced popular cultural forms that sell “blatant individualism, seditious independence, and above all, crude commercial values,” which cannot help nurture a public culture of social responsibility and civic society. Yet, in a more optimistic recent article on stardom in China, Fung (2009) also examines how Chinese fans responded to Faye Wong, one of the most influential pop singers in the country and outlines how Faye Wong's unconventional femininity challenges gender norms and provides the newly emergent middle-class female base with a sense of empowerment. Fung combines textual analysis of Faye Wong's lyrics, persona, and images with ethnographic methods and in-depth interviews with fans in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Audience Research and New Communication Technologies

Communication scholars who focus on how the Chinese use new communication technologies, such as the mobile phone and the Internet, tend to stress the notion of the active consumer and the blurring of the boundary between producers and consumers. Because a typical user of new communication technologies is generally young, urban, and educated, researchers working in this area often focus on the production and consumption of youth culture. For example, Wang (2008) devotes one chapter of her recent book Brand New China to youth culture and music marketing by analyzing Motorola's marketing campaigns. With a primary focus on music and mobile phones, Wang examines whether music is a major mechanism driving youth culture in China, and she concludes that Chinese youth are engaged in a safe yet cool phenomenon: on the one hand, they want to be different from others; on the other hand, they experience their coolness within boundaries that are socially acceptable.

Scholars who have studied Internet users address the issues of cyber-nationalism, activism, control vs. countercontrol, civil society, identity formation, and community building. Wu (2007), for example, examines the evolution of online nationalism from being an “ivory tower” issue to becoming a popular phenomenon in China, and he traces specific cases about cyber-nationalism by drawing on secondary data and interviewing key players. Li (2009) analyses controversial Toyota and Nippon advertisements in China and explores how netizens expressed overwhelming feelings of nationalism toward these ads. Yang (2009) analyzes the development of online activism in China by studying how the Internet has enabled the creation, formation, and shaping of contentious forms of public opinion. Analyzing how Internet forums are used as sites for the expression of conflict and control, identity-building, and community formation, Yang argues that the Internet has offered a limited platform for underdogs to organize themselves and to express dissent and a desire for social justice. The emergent civil society in China provides the cultural foundation for online activism, and some business organizations have also participated in producing and sustaining contentious forms and practices of public opinion.

With an interest in censorship and control, Esarey and Xiao (2008) examine how popular Chinese bloggers use subtle forms of political expression, such as satire, to criticize the state without facing political repression. Yu (2006; 2007a; 2007b) further states that online participation enables Chinese users to exercise forms of active citizenship. Yu (2007a) studies some cases of political and social parody in the Chinese cybersphere, to argue that the Internet gives citizens a public platform for alternative expressions of dissent. Li (2011) interrogates how Internet users in some well-known egao (“spoof”) cases have deployed parody to protest against state control and censorship of the Internet in China. Qiu (2009) studies, among many other things, how Chinese citizens from different socioeconomic strata gain access to information and use communication technology for different purposes. He thus inserts an important discussion of class into debates over the uses of information and communication technologies in China. Wallis (2008) examines how migrant young women in the low-level service sector of Beijing use mobile phones to negotiate the struggles they face in their daily lives and to create and sustain meaningful social connections.

Most of the studies mentioned above are interested in notions of modernity, globalization, youth culture, identity formation, community-building, and civil society. The emergent middle classes – or in some cases the cultural elites – are often what scholars appear to be primarily interested in; which means that rural residents and elderly audiences are often excluded from their research projects. Wallis (2008) and Qiu (2009) study migrant workers and working-class people, but these less privileged populations are still located in urban spaces in their projects. Rural residents residing in the countryside have rarely been studied in media audience research, and the neglect of these marginalized citizens in academic work on audiences echoes their invisibility in China's market economy and commercial media spheres.

While communication scholars have played an active role in engaging with Chinese audiences' interactions with the new media, they still lag behind in producing knowledge about Chinese audiences' consumption of traditional media. While cultural anthropologists have led the way in using ethnography to study media culture as part of larger social and economic transformations, their focus is often on popular culture, namely cinematic texts and fictional TV programs. Recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of past audience studies in China, the following section will provide a tentative agenda for future research.

Agenda for Future Audience Research

In the mid- to late 1990s, there was a strong push in some quarters in the West to abandon media ethnography, and these critics lamented that audience studies often produce and repeat the boring mantra of active audiences (Parameswaran, 2003). Critics thus called for a return to media texts and political economy. What is missing from such critiques is the fact that audiences in large parts of the non-Western world have not been studied. As Parameswaran has pointed out, in the context of global capitalism, what we need now is a “renewed commitment to discovering global media's role in constraining and enabling progressive social–democratic practices” (pp. 311–312). Parameswaran (2001; 2003) is among the few scholars who have conducted audience ethnography in developing countries; in her case the location is India. Her research among young middle-class women in urban India who read Western romance fiction indicates that Indian women assert the superiority of Indian culture and simultaneously enjoy the privileges of Western media culture. Among Indian women, the reading of romance is closely related to discourses of patriarchy, nationalism, and modernity, which are of paramount importance to third-world countries and to the international community at large. Concurring with Parameswaran, I would argue that media scholars should be committed to in-depth ethnographic audience studies of China – an emerging superpower that is exerting an increasing amount of influence and is shaping the political and economic agendas of numerous communities in the world.

When studying Chinese audiences, scholars can start by paying attention to citizens'/consumers' interpretations, negotiations, and even contestations of TV dramas, which are the most watched entertainment genre. The subgenres of TV drama popular in China consist of “lianxuju (television serial), tongsuju (popular drama), qingjieju or yanqing ju (melodrama), shineiju (indoor drama), feizaoju (soap opera), xiju (comedy), qingjing xiju (sitcom), lishi ju (historical drama), wuxiaju (martial arts drama), and jingfeiju (detective and crime drama)” (Lu, 2000: 26). The most recent popular TV serial called Woju (Live in a Snail Shell, 2009) takes on three hot and controversial topics in a changing Chinese society: corruption, second wives (ernai), and the high price of housing. While the series was originally planned in 35 episodes, the last two episodes were never broadcast and, according to a rumor, authorities banned them because the subject matter was too sensitive. Studying how different audiences interpret the drama's representation of controversial topics could reveal the hopes, tensions, and anxieties of citizens in China's rapidly changing society.

The second potential area of research relates to Chinese audiences' negotiation and construction of their identities along the vectors of gender, sexuality, and class. Numerous TV dramas and newspaper and magazine reports can provide rich background materials for this kind of research. While Rofel (2007) analyzes how men and women of different social classes negotiate their national identity in the process of watching a TV drama, more research needs to address the impact of China's transitions on family relations, gender roles, and norms; on changing ideas of respectability and upward mobility; and on practices of romance and sexuality. Audience research on gender and sexuality in China should be situated within the contexts of an increasing social stratification and of a neoliberal consumer culture that commodifies women and casts them in enduring patriarchal–traditional structures of power, where they are marginalized.

The third promising area of inquiry and research studies how rural residents and older people consume the media. These two groups of people are often ignored despite their large numbers. The majority of Chinese people still live in the country-side. More than 162 million people (11.2% of the entire population) – with the addition of 10 million every year – are now over 60 (Du, 2009). Reportedly China has already entered the ranks of aging societies. For many elderly people, watching TV is one of the most important entertainment activities of their daily lives. Studying how elderly audiences consume the media not only gives insight into these populations, but also has strong political and social implications for media producers and policymakers.

The fourth promising area of research is the consumption of news programs. News programs and political commentary programs are traditionally viewed as the voices of the party state, but they are also undergoing reform. While poker-faced anchors of CCTV's Network News often deliver news in a sober, serious, and solemn way, represented by Luo Jing – a 25-year-old CCTV anchorman who died in 2008 – CCTV has recently hired a fashionable sexy anchorwoman in its program Zhaowen Tianxia. Recently Chinese news media programs have also acquired a new importance as part of China's efforts to use media as tools of global soft power. China is reported to have set aside 45 billion Yuan (6 billion US$) to expand the capacity for outreach of its three major news media outlets: Xinhua, China Central Television (CCTV), and the newspaper People's Daily. Thus it is important to study how Chinese news and media programs are consumed by domestic and global audiences. CCTV's annual gala, which is the most watched program since its inception in 1983, is also a very good avenue for future audience research.

With an avalanche of foreign media texts that have descended upon China, especially children's media products, researchers can study how young citizens and their parents are responding to these media and how their exposure shapes, or contributes to shaping relations across different generations. Each year, China imports large quantities of children's literature and cartoons. For example, in 2007 more than 10,000 children's books were published, and many of them were translations (GAPP, 2008). In 2001 Nickelodeon entered China; 62.9 million Chinese households view its daily half-hour Chinese-language program over 100 cable and terrestrial stations nationwide, and in March 2004 Nickelodeon's “CatDog” and “The Wild Thornberrys” aired on CCTV's new children's channel, for one hour and a half daily, to almost 386 million households across China (www.nick.com). Research on ethnic groups other than the dominant Han community in China would shed light on the challenges of facilitating and sustaining multicultural citizenship in the global economy, a problem that other countries also face. A few scholars (e.g., Oakes, 1998; Gillette, 2000; Schein, 2000) conducted anthropological studies on the culture of Chinese minorities such as the Miao and the Hui, but their research does not center on the media. Media programs produced in Tibetan and Arabic cater for the minority Tibetan and Hui populations. It would be interesting to study the role that specialized linguistic media play in helping minorities preserve their culture yet also forge affiliations with the larger construct of nation.

Last but not least, researchers should consider a paradigm shift when studying audiences. While the above-mentioned research projects and suggestions for research only consider the reception of media texts at the individual level, I argue that researchers should also pay increasing attention to how audiences form various kinds of social networks with each other and how the existing networks affect their interpretation of media products. Given that the new media environment blurs the line between media producers and consumers, it would be a mistake to view Chinese audiences as contained at the reception end. Rather, researchers should come up with a new model, which looks at how audiences interact with each other, whom they tend to share information with, and how such information flows change the meanings of the media products and provide opportunities for audiences to collaboratively consume, modify, and resist media products. In this sense, online fan culture offers a very promising field of research, not only because huge fan bases have grown that are centered on media celebrities, sports stars, and other public figures, but also because interdependent networks of entrepreneurs, public relations (PR) firms, advertising agencies, and corporations have been developed to market Chinese celebrities as valuable commodities and further to capitalize on fan culture (Li, 2010). While Oates and Polumbaum (2004) study how Yao Ming (the professional basketball player) has been marketed, there is little research on how celebrities like these are “consumed,” even though they are constantly ranked and rated for their popularity. Research on these celebrities should go beyond just media ratings and rankings, if one is to develop a more sophisticated cultural understanding of audiences. Rather, researchers should study the formation of networks among audiences that either identify with the celebrities or partially resist, if not completely reject, celebrity culture. Studying audiences from a network perspective allows us not only to see how social networks structure media production, distribution, and consumption, but also to explore how consumption enables the formation of new social networks.

Conclusion

Commercialization, China's entry into the WTO, and global influence have shaped the development of the Chinese media industry to a great extent and have guided the trajectories of audience research in China. Generally speaking, audience research conducted by mainland Chinese media scholars has been characterized by an overemphasis on the positivist tradition; thus audience studies often gets equated with survey research and with the media effects tradition. Researchers in this area tend to stress the utilitarian and applied research that has been funded by media organizations, and this fact has resulted in an inadequate development, at this historical moment in China's transformation, of theories that are concerned with the complexities of audience engagement with media (Liu, 2008; Hu, 2010).

Some prominent scholars in the field of critical studies have approached imagined audiences or implicit readers through textual analysis, historical analysis, and Marxist criticism, in an attempt to study cultural representations within the larger context of expansion in the media industries, issues of local and global cultural interactions, and China's embracing of consumer modernity. However, their critical approaches often take an elitist position, without giving due consideration to ordinary audiences' interpretations of media. Scholars who are trained in the West used ethnographic approaches to conduct fieldwork and to give voice to audiences; but they have largely focused on cinematic texts and TV dramas, without paying much attention to news programs and other media genres.

In attempting to analyze media narratives as open-ended semiotic texts, some scholars have conducted interesting and informative research, which combines ethnography and in-depth interviews with the analysis of the political economy of media production. Media scholars in Hong Kong have played a leading role in such research. Trained in the West, these scholars have examined topics such as modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, and globalization in the context of a media boom in China. A few Western scholars, largely in the fields of anthropology and Chinese studies, have also published important work on popular culture's influences on the social fabric of different communities.

Some communication scholars have focused their attention on new media such as the Internet and the mobile phone in order to address the topic of Chinese audiences as active users of media technologies. Aiming to understand Chinese users as well as to promote activism, civil society, and community formation, these studies have come side by side with the rapid growth of new communication technologies in China and with the rising importance of this country as a superpower.

Despite the fact that the Internet has recently increased its rate of penetration there, generally speaking the majority of Chinese Internet users are still young, educated, and urban (CNNIC, 2010), which means that rural residents and elderly people are largely excluded. Indeed most audience research in China has generally privileged middle-class and urban populations. Young urban residents with considerable purchasing power represent a valuable consumer audience for transnational and Chinese capitalists and media entrepreneurs. Elderly people and residents in rural areas, who are more likely to consume traditional media such as TV and radio and who cannot contribute much to the current eyeball economy, are often excluded from audience research. Future research projects should pay heed to largely ignored social segments of the population – such as poor women, children, elderly people, and rural residents – in order to correct the urban middle-class bias of most of the existing work on Chinese audiences.

I also suggest that researchers should go beyond the models of traditional audience studies, which focus on the reception of media products at the individual level, and start to embrace social network analysis, which enables researchers to look at how structures affect the reception of media products and how consumption produces new social networks. Given that the new media environment has greatly facilitated communication across various boundaries, studies of audiences from a network perspective have the potential to offer insight into the intertwining relationship between structure and agency.

Media scholarship in China is very new, and the field of Chinese communication has been established only recently. Media research in China has been largely influenced by communication theories developed in the West, particularly in the US. As the numbers of US scholars who are interested in China increase, the academy should find ways to support and fund these scholars' interests in empirical audience research in distant locations. The communications academy should do a better job of encouraging students to engage more with comparative modes of thinking about the world; and promoting audience research in developing countries that are witnessing a sweeping economic transition is just a first step toward achieving such an objective. Finally, going beyond essentialist or imperialist models of research on culture and communication, the field of audience studies should nurture not only ethnic Chinese, East Asian, or more privileged Western scholars' interests in China; it should also encourage minorities in Western nations and scholars in non-Western nations to become curious about China and to conduct ethnographic work there.

NOTE

1 A note of caution here: Ethnographical research needs careful preparation and contemplation. Douglas Kellner (1995) states that hasty ethnographic research may result in various fetishisms: the “fetishism of struggle,” the “fetishism of audience pleasure,” and the danger of “celebrat[ing] resistance per se without distinguishing between types and forms of resistance” (pp. 38–39).

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