CMC Seminars

China Media Centre 2012 Autumn Seminar

CASTING AN ‘OUTSIDER’ IN THE RITUAL CENTRE

Two Decades of Performances of ‘Rural Migrants’ in CCTV Spring Festival Gala Show

 

Speaker: Dr Yan Yuan

Chair: Dr Xin Xin

Date: Wednesday 28^th November 2012

Time: 2pm-4pm

Venue: MHW A7.1 General Teaching, Harrow Campus

OPEN TO ALL

 

Abstract

For those who want to experience the power of the media ritual in contemporary China, the best example is China Central TV’s (CCTV) Spring Festival Gala Show, a televised ceremony aired on every Chinese New Year’s Eve since 1983. Previous studies have been focused on how this invented tradition wields its ritual effects to impose a hegemonic national identity and prednisolone rezeptfrei kaufen social order as part of the propaganda of the authorities. Very little, however, has been discussed about what made this official TV programme look like a ritual that was integral in the broader festivity of the year turning, and how its ritual authority has been historically constructed. One remarkable phenomenon in the broadcasting history of the Gala Show offered us an interesting angle to addresses this gap. From 1990 to 2011, a social character representing the increasing presence of rural migrants in Chinese cities arose as a central role on the stage of the Gala Show. Content analyses of two decades of performances related to this character demonstrate a four-stage scripting process in the portrayal of this ritual subject, including ‘demon intrusion’, ‘status reversal’, ‘status elevation’, and ‘grassroots celebrity’. Each stage enacted a different ritual mechanism in response to the agenda emerging in the according historical period of the Gala Show. Such a dynamic process exemplifies an important form of ritualised action in the media world: the persistent and strategic casting of the ‘social outsider’ in the ritual centre. By shedding light on this previously less developed domain, the case study reveals another layer of complexity of how the sacred power of the media ritual is constructed, negotiated, and sustained under the entanglement of multiple social forces.

 

Dr. Yan Yuan is a graduate of School of Media, Art, and Design at the University of Westminster. She finished her PhD in 2011 with a research titled: ‘A Different Place in the Making – Everyday Practices of Rural Migrants in Chinese Urban Villages’, which presents an ethnographic investigation into the place-making process through everyday life practices of Chinese rural migrants in their urban settlements and its influences on the formation of the migratory identity. Before her PhD, Dr. Yan Yuan was a vice-professor of School of Journalism and Communication at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. She also has many years of TV journalistic experience in China, including working as an investigative journalist for CCTV.

 

 

More about China Media Centre and seminars see https://chinamediacentre.org. If you have any queries about CMC events, please contact Hong Li at hong.li@my.westminster.ac.uk

 

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CHINA: SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

Speaker: Dr. Bingchun Meng

Date: Thursday 8th March, 2012

Time: 2-3.30pm

Venue: A6.5, Maria Hewlett Building (A Block), Harrow Campus

Chair: Prof Hugo de Burgh

OPEN TO ALL

In this presentation, Dr Bingchun Meng will first lay out some of the theoretical debates as well as methodological challenges regarding the research of mediated citizenship. She will then draw upon my two recently completely projects, one on online spoofs and another on a peer production community on the Chinese Internet, to offer some empirical materials for reflecting on the issue of mediated citizenship. Dr Meng will conclude with a few thoughts on future research agenda.

Biography:

Bingchun Meng is a Lecturer in the department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interests lie in communication governance and media production, both of which are examined in the context of globalization and technological shifts. There are three strands in this research: 1) What are the institutional responses to the challenges brought by new communication practices such as disturbance to political control and subversion of the conventional business model; what are some wider ramifications of such responses? 2) How have the institutional arrangements of media production changed in response to the local and global conditions and how the change affects the content being produced. 3) Media production at the grass-root level. How citizens exploit the opportunities afforded by digital technologies to expand their cultural and political participation, which, in different social contexts, may be constrained. These lines of research are connected by a general inquiry into the power dynamics operating at the macro- and micro-levels in communication networks.

Before joining LSE, Dr Bingchun Meng was a post-doc fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked at the Centre for Global Communication Studies and also taught courses on Chinese media. She obtained her PhD in Mass Communication from the Pennsylvania State University.

If you have any queries about CMC events, please contact Miao Mi at m.mi@my.westminster.ac.uk

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