Capitalizing China's Media Industry: The Installation of Capitalist Production in the Chinese TV and Film Sectors
Zhou, Yuanzhi
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/86588
Description
Title
Capitalizing China's Media Industry: The Installation of Capitalist Production in the Chinese TV and Film Sectors
Author(s)
Zhou, Yuanzhi
Issue Date
2007
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Daniel Schiller
Department of Study
Communications
Discipline
Communications
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Mass Communications
Language
eng
Abstract
This project seeks to document, examine, and critique the ongoing push toward capitalist production in China's media industry. It strives to conceptualize and detail the process of building capitalist production, to look at how it connects with the prevailing political and economic institutions, and to analyze its costs and consequences. Specifically, I will present a critical analysis of China's changing film and television industries, using the theories and conceptual tools of the political economy of communication to frame my argument. This approach demands taking China's particular economic and political contexts into account for media reform in China only makes sense within the contexts of China's social, economic and political transformations. Today, media institutions in China still face ideological control enforced by the CPC (the Communist Party of China), but they have also been redesigned as more capitalistic enterprises. In other words, the CPC continues to play crucial roles in sustaining--or restricting--media development in China, but there is now much more collaboration between the CPC and the market as political and financial interests become more intertwined. In general, this project will focus on two dimensions of the construction of capitalist production in China's media industry. The first aspect of the capitalist reform of the media is commercialization, which ranges from profit-driven business models to conglomeration and the relatively free flow of capital into the television and movie industries. The second aspect of the capitalist reform of the media is change of labor relations and how altered conditions of labor connect to social and economic transformations in China. While capitalist oriented reform may appear inevitable, the CPC is not carrying out the reform at the cost of its authority. The CPC plays a foundational role in building film and television industries. It protects both its values and those of the domestic and transnational businesses building the media sectors. Yet the alliance between the CPC and private businesses does not serve everyone; instead, it helps those on top of the social hierarchy much more than those at the bottom.
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