Cultural governance in contemporary China: popular culture, digital technology, and the state

This dissertation is a study of the historical formation and transformation of the Chinese online audiovisual industry under forces of strategic political calculations, expanding market relations, and growing social participation, and the cultural ramifications of this process, especially the kind of transformations digital technologies have wrought on the state-TV-station-centered mode of cultural production/distribution and regulatory apparatuses. Through this case, the project aims to theorize the changing mode of cultural governance of post-socialist regimes in the context of digital capitalism. Using mixed methods of documentary research, interviews with industry practitioners, participant observations of trade fairs/festivals, and critical discourse analyses of popular cultural texts, the study finds that the traditional broadcasting and the online video sectors are structured along two different political economic mechanisms. While the former is dominated by domestic capital and heavily regulated by state agencies, the latter is supported by transnational capital and less regulated. Digital technologies coupled with transnational capital thus generate new cultural flows, processes, and practices, which produces a heterogeneous and contested cultural sphere in the digital environment that substantially differs from the one created by traditional television. The development of such a sphere in a cultural environment that was historically policed suggests that the Chinese state strategically configures the cultural realm into multiple zones delineated by technological forms. Cultural zoning allows the state to accommodate needs in relation to transnational forces while simultaneously retaining socialist legacies through state media. Zoning technology demonstrates flexibility in cultural governance and thus illuminates the extraordinary resilience of post-socialist regimes amid neoliberal globalization

If You Are the One: Dating show and feminist politics in contemporary China.

Dating shows are experiencing resurgence in contemporary China. This study conducts a critical discourse analysis of If You Are the One, one of the most popular dating shows, to examine what are the ways in which women are represented and how the show is both shaped by and constitutive of the ongoing sociocultural practices in contemporary China. The study concludes with the observation of women’s subordination to the collusion between commercialism and patriarchy and of double manipulations of women in media discourses by forces of both market and state. Facing a state–market complex, feminism has a long way to go in China

Rethinking the Chinese Internet: social history, cultural forms, and industrial formation

Current accounts of the development of the Chinese Internet have provided important analyses of the political economy of telecommunications and the Internet. This study builds on these research to examine how vernacular online practices played a role in enabling political economic dimensions of the Chinese Internet to act as significant shaping forces. With this objective in mind, this article considers vernacular online practices that preceded the rise of commercial online video portals. My specific examples are ‘video spoofing’ and ‘fansubbing’, practices popular in the early to mid-2000s. Led by amateur enthusiasts, these practices were intimately associated with the legacy of cultural piracy in China in the pre-Internet era. My primary concern here is with identifiying and explicating the social energies that encouraged the formation of these online practices, their development trajectory, and finally, how these practices eventually became assimilated within a nascent video industry. In that respect, my argument is that the vernacular cultural forms and practices associated with these phenomena were central, and indeed essential, to the formation of an online video industry in China

The shifting institutional bases of digital Asia studies: Communication, culture, and governance in Asia - Introduction

In recent years, several collections, books, events, journals, and dedicated publishing ventures on the digital in Asia have emerged, such that we can now speak of a body of digital Asia studies work. This introduction situates the Special Section on “Communication, Culture, and Governance in Asia,” coedited by Emma Baulch, Terry Flew, and Luzhou Li, within this broader body of work. It identifies three themes in digital Asia studies—infrastructure, political and civic engagement, and digitally equipped consumerism—and considers the Special Section’s contributions to each of these areas. The articles in the Special Section, most of which are authored by Asia-based scholars, point to a shift in anglophone digital media studies toward Asia-based institutions and networks

A new type of parameter estimation algorithm for missing data problems

The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is often used in maximum likelihood (ML) estimation problems with missing data. However, EM can be rather slow to converge. In this communication we introduce a new algorithm for parameter estimation problems with missing data, which we call equalization-maximization (EqM) (for reasons to be explained later). We derive the EqM algorithm in a general context and illustrate its use in the specific case of Gaussian autoregressive time series with a varying amount of missing observations. In the presented examples, EqM outperforms EM in terms of computational speed, at a comparable estimation performance.Parameter estimation with missing data Maximum likelihood Expectation-maximization Cyclic maximization