SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION
CMNS 428-4 (D1)

Yuezhi Zhao	Summer 2001
Telephone: 291-4916; Office: RCB 6149	Burnaby Day
yzhao@sfu.ca

MEDIA ANALYSIS PROJECT GROUP
MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA

Prerequisite:

Advisor/instructor’s permission, based on: at least 75 credit hours including two upper division CMNS courses or courses related.
This course explores the media and popular culture scene in reform era China. A wide range of media and popular culture forms and practices, including films, best-sellers, soap operas, late night talk shows, street tabloids, T-shirt signs, popular rhymes, letters from young female sweatshop workers, nationalistic Internet postings, and Falun Gong practices, are analyzed in their concrete institutional settings and dynamic relationships with official ideologies, market imperatives, and the every day struggles and cultural sensibilities of various social groups during a period of epochal transformation in China.

Required texts:

James & Ann Tyson, Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories from Unofficial China
(Boulder, CO:, Westview Press, 1995).
Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and Bottom
Line (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Michael Dutton, Streetlife China (Cambridge, Mass:, Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Useful Texts for Supplementary Reading and Research (no purchase is necessary):
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern
China, Second Edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).
Chen Fong-ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese
Popular Cultural Movement and Political Transformation, 1979-1989. HK: Chinese
University of HK Press, 1997.
Geremie Barme, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (Columbia University Press
1999).
Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen, China Beyond the Headlines (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000).
Huot, Marie Claire, China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (Durham, N.C. &
London: Duke University Press, 2000).
Jianying Zha, China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture (New York: The New Press, 1995).
Extra Readings are available on reserve in the Library.