The government’s new Digital Economy Act will do little to prevent file sharing – the music industry must continue to innovate online if it is to survive

Nearly as old as the internet, the peer-to-peer file sharing of music online has been a constant bugbear for the music industry, with claims of billions in lost revenues over the past decade. Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng have found that despite these assertions, incomes from innovative online products such as LastFM and Spotify are complementing a resurgence of interest in live music and are driving up industry revenues

When anxious mothers meet social media: WeChat, motherhood and the imaginary of the good life

In this article I have tried to unpack the anxiety of Chinese middle-class mothers through examining the dialectics of structural changes and discursive shifts. The theoretical premises are that, on the one hand, China’s highly compressed modernisation process has had a major impact on parenting arrangements and parenting ethos; on the other hand, the practice of mothering and the imaginary of motherhood have significant implications for social reproduction. Combining empirical materials collected through a social media platform, in-depth interviews and focus groups, I have teased out the classed imaginaries of good mothering and how these are subsequently linked to imaginaries of the good life

Political scandal at the end of ideology? The mediatized politics of the Bo Xilai case

In this article, I use the high-profile Bo Xilai case to illustrate the dialectics of media and politics in contemporary China. I start by explaining some of the similarities and key differences between mediatized politics in the West and in China. This leads to an emphasis on the ideological dimension of media logic that is largely missing from discussions derived from a liberal democratic context. I then analyze the dialectics of the mediatized ideological struggle and politicized media logic running through the Bo Xilai scandal. In the last section, I summarize the theoretical contributions that the Chinese case makes to the study of mediatized politics

Confronting the China Problem

In this post, LSE’s Professor Bingchun Meng further delves into the issues tackled in her video ‘The rise of China and Western media,’ in which she explains how, faced by China’s increasing economic and geopolitical presence, Western media tend to fall back on familiar stereotypes and dystopian imaginaries

The maternal in the city: outdoor advertising representations in Shanghai and London

The article examines representations of mothers in Shanghai and London outdoor advertising. We treat their display of motherhood as a regulatory space where ideas about the maternal and fantasies of the “good life” under neoliberal rationality are formulated and normalized. Situating Shanghai and London outdoor adverts within their respective media cultures, we identify two common themes: (a) mothers as self-responsible individuals managing the family; (b) public display of maternity and intimate family life. We discuss similarities and differences in depictions of motherhood and the purportedly normative ideas about the “good life” they suggest. We argue that outdoor advertising acts as a visual disciplinary space regulating fantasies of the “good life” which millions of city-dwellers consume, but rarely realize

Patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics: gendered discourse of ‘Double Eleven’ shopping festival

In this article we consider the Double Eleven shopping festival as a major discursive site where the hegemony of what we call patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics is articulated. The state, the market, the corporations, and the media, both mainstream and social media, all played an important role in building up a national spending spree that is deeply embedded in the current class and gender structure of China. The phenomenon of Double Eleven emerged at a time when state capitalism has been overwriting socialist institutions, while patriarchal ideology being further intensified through consumerism. As a consequence, the intersectionality of class and gender become increasingly manifest in the Chinese society. We start with a brief overview of the trajectory of gender politics in China since 1949, with specific focus on how the socialist project of seeking gender equality was gradually replaced by the quest for ‘womanhood’ and ‘femininity’. We then discuss, using both secondary sources and our own analysis of news coverage of Double Eleven, why maintaining a high level of consumer demand is of crucial importance for the Chinese state and what the state’s role has been in configuring the hegemonic gender order. A brief section on ideology and discourse lays out the conceptual framework of our analysis. It is at the intersection of a dissipating socialist ethos, emerging economic stagnation and ascending consumerism that the sexist discourse in relation to Double Eleven proliferates, and this is the analytical focus of our empirical section. We elaborate on the theoretical implications of the empirical analysis before concluding

A change of lens: a call to compare media in China and Russia

This article makes what Western scholars call a “leap in the dark” by suggesting that, instead of comparing the “West” with the “Rest”, we should compare the “East” with the “East”- in this case the media in China with the media in Russia. We have identified three blind spots in previous comparative media research that have resulted in turning attention away from comparative study of China and Russia. These are: (1) ahistoricism; (2) misunderstanding the relationship between the state and the market; and (3) understanding national media and communication as closed and homogenous systems. We propose three remedies: (1) historicizing comparative media studies ; (2) re-conceptualizing the relationship between the state and media markets; and (3) rethinking the dynamics between the global, the national and the media

Media Policy Project Policy Brief 1: Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection

Two days before the opening of a Judicial Review on the Digital Economy Act (DEA), a new report from the London School of Economics and Political Science casts doubt on the proportionality and likely effectiveness of measures to protect intellectual property, due to be implemented by the DEA. This report, called ‘Creative Destruction and Copyright Protection’ by Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng (London School of Economics), has been commissioned by the LSE Media Policy Project

The worlding of St. Petersburg and Shanghai: comparing cultures of communication in two cities before and after revolutions

In this article we propose an alternative model for comparative communication research. We first make the case for comparing cities, especially worlding cities outside what is traditionally called the “West.” We then explicate what we mean by comparing cultures of communication and why this offers an opportunity to reevaluate methodological nationalism and the cultural dynamics of worlding. We go on to use Shanghai and St. Petersburg as two historical examples to demonstrate how worlding cities (1) compel us to see cultural hybridization as a historical process; (2) offer good opportunities to observe contested elements of cultures; (3) make it possible to analyze cities as texts that are always connected with, but not necessarily contained by the nation

Political scandal at the end of ideology? The mediatized politics of the Bo Xilai case

In this article, I use the high-profile Bo Xilai case to illustrate the dialectics of media and politics in contemporary China. I start by explaining some of the similarities and key differences between mediatized politics in the West and in China. This leads to an emphasis on the ideological dimension of media logic that is largely missing from discussions derived from a liberal democratic context. I then analyze the dialectics of the mediatized ideological struggle and politicized media logic running through the Bo Xilai scandal. In the last section, I summarize the theoretical contributions that the Chinese case makes to the study of mediatized politics