Brand China in the Media

Transformation of Identities

Author: Qing Cao, Doreen Wu and Keyan G. Tomaselli

This book examines China’s identity transformations with a focus on self-perceptions and their representations and communication in the mass media. It explores the emerging multifaceted ‘China brand’. The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Arts.

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This book examines China’s identity transformations with a focus on self-perceptions and their representations and communication in the mass media. By considering the internal dynamics of change, it explores the emerging multifaceted ‘China brand’.

With its growing economic clout, China has taken a proactive stance in shaping global economic and strategic order through ambitious programmes such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. However, as a developing country, China is at pains to manage its own transformations while trying to carve out an international identity. Arguably, China’s unique sense of history and identities may lead to a ‘contested modernity’ or ‘multiple modernities’; radically different from the prevalent classical theories of modernisation and convergence of industrial societies. To understand China’s trajectory of future development has been a major issue in international affairs. This book is concerned with how China’s hybridised identities are articulated, and intertwined with situational, institutional, and societal dynamics – and how they are interwoven with China’s international outlook which converges with or diverges from China’s historical assumptions and beliefs.

This book will be of interest to those studying China’s identity in the media; situated at the juncture of past, present, and future, and between China and the wider world. The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Arts.

About the Author

Qing Cao is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University, UK. He has published extensively in Chinese media and social change, focusing on the issue of modernity. He is the author of China under Western Gaze: Representing China in the British Television Documentaries 1980-2000 (2014), and lead editor of Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China (2014).

Doreen Wu is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She has published extensively on glocalization and Chinese media discourses. In addition to editing two special issues for Critical Arts, she has edited and co-edited a number of books and journal issues, including Discourses of Cultural China in the Globalizing Age (2008).

Keyan G. Tomaselli is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is editor of Critical Arts and has been working with various Chinese universities on cultural and media topics.