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Associate Professor
SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
Department of Humanities and Asia-Canada Program
   
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Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China, London & New York: Routledge, 2014

Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people.

Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dramas, entertainment television shows, and their corresponding online audience responses, and describes the affective articulations generated by cultural and media texts, audiences and social contexts. Crucially, this book focuses on the agency of audiences in consuming these media products, and the affective communications taking place in this process in order to address how and why popular culture and entertainment programs exert so much power over mass audiences in China. Indeed, Shuyu Kong shows how Chinese people have sought to make sense of the dramatic historical changes of the past three decades through their engagement with popular media, and how this process has created a cultural public sphere where social communication and public discourse can be launched and debated in aesthetic and emotional terms.

Based on case studies that range from television drama to blockbuster films, and reality television programmes to social media sites, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media and communication studies, film studies and television studies.

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Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Products in Contemporary China, Stanford University Press, 2005.

The book is reviewed by academic journals College and Research Libraries, Nov. 2005; China Review International, Vol. 12 (2) (Fall 2005); Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 65: 3 (Aug. 2006); The China Journal, No. 55 (Jan. 2006); and Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Vol. 28 (2006).

It also received a prominent reviewin German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z) "Das rote Buch hat ausgedient Löcher im Käse: Chinas Bestsellermarkt wird immer bunter", by URSULA RAUTENBERG, July 30, 2007,Nr. 174/Seite 28.

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Beijing Women: Stories By Wang Yuan, co-trans with Colin S Hawes, MerwinAsia, 2013

Beijing Women presents four short stories: “Lipstick,” “Deception” “Ginger,” and “Beijing Women”—stories about how contemporary Chinese women must learn to survive in China’s new market economy, and their inner struggles in a society full of moral ambiguity. These women come to Beijing to “advance themselves,” or leave Beijing for the coastal economic zone of Hainan to explore new opportunities. They make their living in various ways: working as PR girls, as popular singers, waitresses, or private business owners—all professions unfamiliar to women in Maoist times, but ubiquitous in today’s capitalist consumer society. 
            At a deeper level, these stories are about much more than just women’s lives and careers. Beijing here is a synecdoche for China, whose march toward capitalism at breakneck speed has profoundly changed peoples’ relationships and their inner emotional lives. Stress, suspicion, anxiety and exploitation make interpersonal communication and compassion difficult, and the constant competition for material gain tears apart the fabric of a society which, despite its faults, was at least rooted in traditional ethics and socialist idealism. This social and moral crisis is poignantly reflected in these stories, where young women find themselves constantly falling into traps set not only by men but also by other women, and in some cases, even by themselves.

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© 2011 Shuyu Kong