Abstract
This book provides a rich analysis of the role of print media in cultivating a culture of middle-class proclivities in post-reform China. While much of the academic attention is drawn to digital and social media, Yi Zheng demonstrates vigorously that print media is an often overlooked yet important avenue for examining social and cultural changes. Print media may have dwindled in market size but, as Zheng argues, its ability to bring about transformations in sociocultural spheres has not waned. This is partially facilitated by the unremitting historical links ‘between literacy, education, social mobility and the elite formation in both pre-modern and modern China’ (p. 9); but more importantly, by the ways in which print media has reinvented and transformed itself to adapt to the drastically changing sociopolitical and market conditions in post-socialist China.
Yi Zheng starts with the argument that the Chinese middle class is not a taken-for-granted descriptive category. The idea of a ‘social middle’ was reintroduced and propagated by a political necessity to harness the success of the economic reform as well as to tactically deal with the growing disparities in today’s China. Zheng indicates that what appears to be an individual’s aspiration to taste, culture and upward social mobility is never simply a personal quest but directly related to political change and state intervention. The book, as such, contributes to one of the understudied yet much sought-after themes in Chinese studies: how the emerging and expanding group of affluent Chinese are guided to take on ‘a middle-class civility’ (p. 4) so as to help realize the state-sanctioned discourse of building a harmonious and relatively affluent (小康) society.
This book is a remarkable exercise in showing how post-reform social stratification shapes the media, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how the practices and institutions of print media correspond to and even help expand the growing affluent urban middlebrow reading market. To demonstrate this intertwining relationship between politics, print media and the making of the Chinese middle class, the author presents a robust analysis on the production and targeted consumption of three important types of leisure reading genres.
The first chapter looks into ‘cultural readers’ (文化读物), which covers a wide range of subjects from personal memoirs and popular philosophy to popular history. A common feature of this genre is its use of the past: how history is turned into a cultural source. By examining the works of a few celebrity academics such as Xin Zhengfeng, Yu Qiuyu and Yu Dan, the author shows how these academics not only utilize, capitalize and turn their cultural capital into social and economic capital but, more significantly, how the works they produce have become social manuals and cultural guides that help create a normative cultural taste. Zheng demonstrates how these intellectuals are complicit with the state-orchestrated idea of developmentalism.
The second genre Zheng examines is city and travel narratives. Based on narratives related to Shanghai and Chengdu, the author examines the changing modes of representing and capturing place in this genre, shifting from the documentary style to lyrical association, and the incorporation of image and the discursive idea of place in these narrations. Zheng argues insightfully how place-associated middle-class moralities, aesthetic discernment and the pursuit of affluent-driven pleasure feed into a middle-class civility that this genre seeks to cultivate but which it also depends on.
The final chapter is devoted to the hugely popular white-collar romances. Because of their emphasis on fashion, cultural taste, success strategies, and the office setting, these romances are often read as ‘a cultural indicator of the emergence of a new middle class’ (p. 12). Drawing on illustrative analysis on romances in book form as well as features in lifestyle magazines, Zheng shows that the emphasis on class and the cultivation of taste is a precarious and never-ending practice which helps strengthen the production of a state-sanctioned normative middle-class civility.
This book, in my view, offers a valuable analysis of the working of governmentality. One sees how the state manages to guide actions and conduct by other means (as illustrated here in the case of print media) than by laws and regulations. Although the author mentions the concept of governmentality (e.g. pp. 9 and 70), one gets the impression that it is not sufficiently explained. I believe it will be theoretically inspiring if the author can elaborate her analysis in connection with the concept and perhaps even help explore further the role of media in Chinese governmentality studies.
There are two different but related points. The book takes class and taste as its central theoretical and analytical angle. In the Introduction, Zheng discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of taste, distinction and class as well as the challenges of applying it to the Chinese context, yet she rarely returns to this theoretical discussion in the book. It would have helped readers if the author had elaborated her analysis and given a sustained discussion throughout the book. Also, the author uses the word ‘affective’ repeatedly, for instance, ‘affective cultivation’ (pp. 12 and 79), ‘affective transformation’ (p. 59), and ‘affective uncertainty’ (p. 92). Its recurring appearance makes one wonder whether the notion of ‘affect’ plays a role in this study and about the kinds of ‘affective’ responses and changes which print media has generated. I would have liked an elaboration of such responses and changes; perhaps with the help of interview data, the author could have illustrated how individuals participate in the self-making process to become middle-class subjects.
All in all, Contemporary Chinese Print Media is a welcome study on the development of media culture in China in general and print media in particular. The book has accomplished the challenging task of linking literary studies to the larger social, cultural, and political development in post-socialist China. It is a must-read for anyone interested in China’s contemporary media development, Chinese politics, state–society relations, cultural studies and literary studies.