Communication, Public Opinion, and Globalization in Urban China

Francis L.F. Lee, Chin-Chuan Lee, Mike Z. Yao, Tsan-Kuo Chang, Fen Jennifer Lin, Chris Fei Shen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134676361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As China is increasingly integrated into the processes of economic, political, social, and cultural globalization, important questions arise about how Chinese people perceive and evaluate such processes. At the same time, international communication scholars have long been interested in how local, national, and transnational media communications shape people's attitudes and values. Combining these two concerns, this book examines a range of questions pertinent to public opinion toward globalization in urban China: To what degree are the urban residents in China exposed to the influences from the outside world? How many transnational social connections does a typical urban Chinese citizen have? How often do they consume foreign media? To what extent are they aware of the notion of globalization, and what do they think about it? Do they believe that globalization is beneficial to China, to the city where they live, and to them personally? How do people's social connections and communication activities shape their views toward globalization and the outside world? This book tackles these and other questions systematically by analyzing a four-city comparative survey of urban Chinese residents, demonstrating the complexities of public opinion in China. Media consumption does relate, though by no means straightforwardly, to people's attitudes and beliefs, and this book provides much needed information and insights about Chinese public opinion on globalization. It also develops fresh conceptual and empirical insights on issues such as public opinion toward US-China relations, Chinese people's nationalistic sentiments, and approaches to analyze attitudes toward globalization.

1
Introduction

It is often claimed that we are living in the era of globalization. Anthony Giddens (1991) defined the term more than 20 years ago as “the intensification of worldwide social relations [that have linked] distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (p. 64). Theorists have debated about the point of origin of globalization, with some seeing it as a relatively recent phenomenon, as a “consequence of modernity,” and others seeing it as having started six centuries ago, coterminous with the emergence of the capitalist world system (Wallerstein, 1999; Waters, 2001). But no matter when the process began, most scholars would agree that increasing global interdependence is a continuing process that speeded up in the last decades of the twentieth century. Today national borders are becoming increasingly porous for the flow of money, commodities, media, technologies, ideas, people, images, and viruses. Our lives are indeed increasingly affected by events happening afar, matters over which we usually have little control and about which we may have little knowledge.

Besides the “objective reality” of increasing global interdependence, globalization also involves a subjective component. Roland Robertson (1992), for example, defined globalization as referring “both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.” Marshall McLuhan (1964) used to describe the rise of television as a harbinger of an emerging “global village.” A more apt metaphor would indeed be what Saskia Sassen (1991) calls global cities, with international metropolises serving as the key nodes in the global capitalist system. For the residents of global cities, the reality of globalization can be easily felt in everyday lives, through encounters with tourists and migrants, exposure to foreign media, purchases of foreign commodities, working for or dealing with multinational corporations, and so on. The signs of global capitalism—ranging from Nike, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s to Prada, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Giorgio Armani—are ubiquitous, and international nongovernmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, the Red Cross, and others often play important roles in linking domestic policies to global concerns.

Of course globalization is also an uneven process. Influences in some directions are much stronger than in others, and different countries are drawn into the processes of globalization in different ways and to different extents. Although the amount of time needed to travel from one place to another continues to shrink, some places remain much more difficult to get to as compared with others. As the common saying goes, when America sneezes, the whole world gets a cold. The European debt crisis is also having a significant impact on economies and stock markets throughout the world. One can only imagine, however, whether and how things happening in the world at large are affecting people living in societies such as North Korea and Burma.

Obviously China is somewhere in between the extreme self-enclosure of North Korea and complete openness to the outside world. On the one hand, capital flows are still under heavy control, as continual debates between China and the United States on the valuation of Renmenbi, China’s currency, remind us. The household registration (hukuo) system continues to place severe limits on Chinese people’s mobility even within the country, not to say in terms of traveling abroad. The media system in China remains tightly controlled by the state. In a seminal article in the early 1990s, communication scholar Joseph Chan (1993) described China’s media scene with the phrase “commercialization without independence,” and the phrase is as applicable today as it was 20 years ago (see Zhao, 2008). In addition, the Chinese government had a history of seeing foreign media as a threat, as agents bringing “spiritual pollution” to the Chinese people and society (Lee et al., 2011). Despite China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the Chinese government still imposes significant barriers, such as import quotas for movies, to the entrance of foreign media.¹ Even in cyberspace, Internet users in China may find it hard to access many foreign websites, ranging from the websites of some Hong Kong newspapers that are regularly critical toward the Chinese government to some of the most prominent websites in the era of Web 2.0, including Facebook and YouTube.

On the other hand, there is no question that Chinese citizens are increasingly connected to the outside world. In order to engage with global capitalism, the Chinese government has created numerous zones of “exceptions” (Ong, 2006)—the coastal metropolises, the Special Economic Zones, and the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions—in which foreign capital, foreign people, and foreign media can circulate and move relatively freely. Meanwhile, China’s international travelers may constitute only a small proportion of the whole Chinese population, but their sheer number is significant. And with their new-found spending power, their presence is now keenly felt by shopkeepers in places near and afar.

Many Chinese people are also active in defying state control in order to come into contact with the outside world. Despite restrictions on the import of foreign media, American and European films, television dramas, and popular music are widely available online. Many Chinese students studying in the United States, for example, are actively engaged in the practice of copying and “subtitling” the entertainment contents on American television and then sharing them with others back in China (Chu, 2012).² They do so through file sharing software and several highly popular Chinese websites (such as tudou.com). Their work is so speedy that today pirated copies of Hollywood movies are often available to Chinese people online even before the movies are shown in cinemas in China. The young and technically sophisticated Internet users within China can also “get across the firewall” and reach the banned websites. Even politically sensitive contents from abroad are often circulated through online channels and arenas such as weibo (microblogs). People who circulate such contents in China use various methods to evade official censorship, most notably by “recoding” whatever sensitive keywords may be involved.

For Chinese people, foreign media and commodities can be of considerable significance to their lives and cultural identities. In some cases, Chinese people make use of foreign media and cultural products to develop, construct, and/or fulfill their dreams of being modern and cosmopolitan “world citizens.” Here, “foreign media” can include media products coming from Hong Kong, the former British colony. As Eric Ma (2011) has shown, Hong Kong has served as a “satellite” in the processes of cultural globalization, relaying and refracting western modernity into China. But with the continual economic growth of China, Chinese people are nowadays looking directly to the West. Take cultural studies scholar John Erni’s (2008) analysis of China’s reception of Harry Potter, for example. By mid-2007, the Chinese editions of the Harry Potter novels reached a combined sale of about 10 million. Although the translated versions of the novels often illustrate the logics of hybridization and localization, Erni argues that the urban Chinese reception of Harry Potter should also be understood in relation to the background of the “myth” of the rising Chinese elite middle class:

If the “Chinese middle-class” today is in part a self-generating myth as well as a global dream, then Harry Potter provides a clear case of cultural interface of the production of that global-local fantasy. Chinese youth who engage with Harry Potter give off a visible impression of a growing middle-class society capable of enjoying and performing a translation of cultures; in other words, they are (self-) positioned as the cultural intermediaries of globalization. (p. 144)

But China is also a country with a rich cultural tradition of its own. Chinese people take pride in being descendants of Emperor Huang, a member of an ancient civilization with a history of five thousand years. The intrusion of “western” and/or “global” culture can also result in backlashes. An illustrative controversy surrounded the case of the Starbucks coffee shop in the Imperial City. In January 2007, famous Chinese Central Television (CCTV) anchor Rui Chenggang criticized the presence of Starbucks within the old Imperial Palace in Beijing, arguing that Starbucks represents American “lowbrow food culture.” Rui’s argument received support from many people in China, and public pressure finally led to the closing of the shop in July 2007.

The controversy demonstrated not only the possibility of a backlash but also the fundamental unpredictability of when, where, and how it would happen. After all, that particular Starbucks opened in 2000. For years, the coffee shop did not seem to be generating any discontent. Rui Chenggang, meanwhile, was far from being a narrow-minded old man clinging to the ancient culture of his own country at all costs. In fact, he was an anchor for the English channel of CCTV-9, a Yale World Fellow in 2005, and is a journalist who had interviewed many of the world’s important political and economic leaders. He is not only a member of the rising middle-class elite in China but, if there is an emerging global elite (Castells, 2000; Davidson, Poor and Williams, 2009; Sklair, 2002), he is definitely also a member of it. The controversy, therefore, is more a matter of taste in the global cultural field than an outbreak of xenophobic nationalism—Rui was criticizing Starbucks not so much as representing lowbrow culture from America than as lowbrow culture in America. His statement was also a criticism of crass commercialism encroaching on what is supposedly a sacred symbol of imperial pride.

On the whole, under the conditions of continual political control, economic and social reform, media commercialization, and the general processes of globalization, many Chinese people today are engaging in what Norris and Inglehart (2009) labeled “cosmopolitan communications” in their own unique and complex ways. At the same time, Chinese people’s reactions to foreign media and culture are also complex and at times contradictory. However, there have not been many studies examining Chinese people’s attitude toward the processes of globalization and their perceptions of foreign countries, and there are even fewer studies addressing the questions of how media consumption, transnational experiences, and social connections may relate to such attitudes and beliefs.

Against this background, this book provides a systematic examination of Chinese public opinion toward globalization and the world at large, with a specific focus on the impact of media and social communications. This endeavor is important given the rising influence of China. Although the country is not a democracy, public attitudes remain a constraining force on the parameters of what the government can and cannot do. An understanding of public opinion in China is far from irrelevant to an understanding of the roles China is likely to play in world affairs.

This book aims at achieving three goals. First, it aims to provide a descriptive overview of urban Chinese people’s connections with and perceptions of foreign countries and globalization at a specific historical juncture. The survey data analyzed in this book came from a survey conducted in late 2006 and early 2007. Although the data may not fully reflect the most current situation in the country, they should still be valuable because of their relative rarity. A look into the scenario of early 21^st century China should provide information and insights that can help to clarify the more current scene, and the data can also serve as an important basis for future comparisons. In any case, we have just argued above that Chinese people are increasingly drawn into the orbit and processes of globalization. But to what degree are they really exposed to the influences from the outside world? How many transnational social connections does a typical urban Chinese citizen have? How often do the Chinese consume foreign media? To what extent are they aware of the notion of globalization? Have they developed a “consciousness of the world as a whole”? If yes, what do they think about the processes of globalization? Do they believe that globalization is beneficial to China, to the city where they live, and to them personally? Various researchers may have addressed some of these questions separately, but this book analyzes all of them and therefore presents a relatively more comprehensive overview of Chinese people’s “global outlook” at a specific historical moment.

Second, our analysis also examines how social positions and psychological orientations influence Chinese people’s attitude toward the world and globalization. People located differently in the social structure are connected to the processes of globalization to different extents and in different ways (Bauman, 1998). They are likely to have different amounts of transnational experiences and social connections, to consume national and foreign media to different extents, and to perceive foreign countries and the processes of globalization differently. In addition, people’s value orientations should also play an important role in determining individual attitudes. Our analysis in different chapters will examine the social and psychological determinants of Chinese people’s connections with, attitudes toward, and perceptions of the world at large. Through such analyses, the significance of many findings in this book goes beyond the time and place of the survey; many findings should contribute to research on the formation of public opinion regarding globalization in general.

Third and most important to the authors, this book examines the significance of media and social communications in shaping people’s attitudes and perceptions of the world. Walter Lippmann (1922) pointed out almost a hundred years ago that people rely on the media to transform “the reality out there” into “pictures in our heads,” and in the process journalists have to resort to the imperfect construction of “steoreotypes” as interpretive categories. In articulating his theory of public opinion against the background of the nationalization of politics in the United States, Lippmann in effect argued that the media would become more important when public matters could no longer be fully understood within a local context and on the basis of personal observations. It follows that the significance of the media in shaping people’s understanding of the world at large would only be even higher. Early modernization literature (Katz and Wedell, 1977; Lerner, 1958; Schramm, 1964) all pointed to the media as a key catalyst of national integration and cultural expression. Lerner (1958), in particular, theorized the media as the “magic multiplier of empathy,” or a capacity to break off from the yoke of fatalism and to imagine beyond immediate roles and contexts; such a modernizing personality was deemed essential to the “passing of traditional society” into the threshold of modernity. Now our activities, identities, and imaginations may go far beyond national borders. Borrowing the famous argument of Benedict Anderson (1991), any idea of a global society can only be a product of imagination, and the media should be the most important sources of materials on the basis of which people can construct their own global imaginations. At the same time, as people start to develop more transnational social networks, these networks may provide interpersonal sources of information that are perceived to be more credible and trustworthy. And as people have more chances to go abroad to travel, work, and study, they can experience and see “the world” by themselves. Their personal experiences and observations may confirm or deny the images from the media. The various chapters of this book will empirically examine whether and how media consumption and social communications matter to people’s attitudes toward their own country and the outside world. Again, such an analysis not only gives us an understanding of the formation of public opinion in China but also has broader theoretical implications for our understanding of the impact of communications on how people see the world.

In sum, by addressing the issues stated above, this book should make important contributions to the study of contemporary Chinese societies and public opinion as well as to our understanding of the effects of media and communications on people’s attitudes and beliefs related to globalization. Whereas the previous pages have sketched a rough background of the relationship between globalization and the Chinese public, a brief discussion of the problematic of communication effects should also be useful.

On the Significance of “Cosmopolitan Communications”

There have been many studies on the influence of the media on people’s values and attitudes within the field of international communications research. Most of these past studies focus on a rather narrowly defined aspect of a person’s psychological profile. For example, some research has looked into the impact of foreign media on cultural values in an attempt to test (often quite inadequately) the media or cultural imperialism thesis—that is, the question of whether the consumption of foreign media would lead to acceptance of the cultural values and behavioral norms presumably encoded into the foreign media texts (e.g., Salwen, 1991; Will-nat et al., 2002). Nisbet and colleagues (2004) examined the influence of television news on anti-American perceptions and sentiments among people in nine predominantly Muslim countries. Meanwhile, De Vreese and Boomgaarden’s (2006) analysis of media effects on public opinion regarding the European Union touches upon issues of national and supranational identities (for additional studies, see Antecol and Endersby, 1999; Disdier, Head, and Mayer, 2010; Kern and Hainmueller, 2009). Most recently, in two earlier articles based on the current survey project, we examined the influence of national and foreign media consumption on Chinese people’s attitudes toward globalization and political and cultural values respectively (Lee et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2011).

Not many scholars have attempted to examine the effects of transnational communications on a range of social, political, and cultural values and behavior comprehensively. One exception is Norris and Inglehart (2009). Their book-length treatment of the impact of what they labeled “cosmopolitan communications” is an ambitious effort. Although this book is by no means restricted to an analysis following or testing their theory, a focused discussion of their book can help clarify some of the conceptual issues involved in the analysis of communication effects. It will also help us explicate the approach undertaken by our study.

We may begin by recapitulating their major arguments and findings. In the most general sense, Norris and Inglehart defined cosmopolitan communications as “the way that we learn about, and interact with, people and places beyond the borders of our nation-state” (p. 9). Yet what they actually emphasized through the concept is the growth of transnational communications of all kinds, driven by media deregulation in many countries, the increasing power and reach of multinational media conglomerates, the advance of deterritorialized new media technologies, the increasing level of people’s geographical mobility, and other processes of globalization at large. Putting aside the question of whether people are attitudinally and behaviorally “cosmopolitan,” more and more people in the contemporary world do find themselves embedded in dense transnational networks of communications.

Given this background, the empirical research question they posed is: What would be the impact of cosmopolitan communications on people’s attitudes and values? This research question is not fundamentally different from the one that has long been posed by scholars interested in test...