Political Communications in Greater China

The Construction and Reflection of Identity

Gary D. Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415411349
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135786748
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the role played by political communications, including media of all kinds - journalism, television, and film - in defining and shaping identity in Greater China; China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. In the context of increasing cross-border interactions of people, investment and commercial products between the component parts of greater China, the book explores the idea that identity, rather than nation-states or political entities, may be the key factor in achieving further integration in Greater China. The book focuses on the ways in which identity is communicated, and shows how communication of identity within and between the component parts of greater China plays a central role in bringing about integration.

1 Introduction

Gary D.Rawnsley and Ming- Yeh
T.Rawnsley

This volume represents the latest attempt by the editors to understand how the forces of globalisation coincide and conflict with localisation through economic, political, media and cultural processes. In our teaching and research, we have long wrestled with questions of cultural imperialism versus protectionism in Asia (typified by the survival of the Asian values movement), Americanisation versus indigenisation, globalisation versus localisation. These concerns have led to an abiding curiosity about the way identities are formed and re-formed by the constant interaction and collision of assorted external influences. We are particularly intrigued by postmodern approaches, which understand identity as a fluid and subjective concept that is not temporally or spatially settled. In short, we dismiss the idea of identity as inert, consistent and unalterable. Rather, we prefer to regard identities as flexible, permeable, coexisting and multiple, so we can now experience our local, national, regional and even international identities, depending on the situation in which we find ourselves.

This fits perfectly with the manifold understandings of Greater China that are reviewed in this book. In commissioning the chapters, we asked the contributors to define both Greater China and political communications in the way that they thought most encapsulated the growing ‘glocalisation’ that we see taking place in the region. Hence, this collection of essays illustrates that ‘Greater China’ remains a contested term for a multi-faceted phenomenon that has greater relevance in the twenty-first century than at any time previously. We have deliberately avoided assembling any conclusions about the geographic centre of Greater China, since the meaning of that term varies according to whether one is assessing the economic, political or cultural interaction of the component parts.

This is the essence of John F.Copper’s chapter on the meaning and significance of Greater China. Surveying the history of the idea, Copper argues that the value of Greater China lies in its ambiguity, thus allowing for variation according to the political, cultural and economic interests of its members. Although Greater China has no definite centre or existence as a homogeneous unit, Copper agrees that it does have a reality as a cultural and economic community. It is difficult to foresee a time when this will develop into political reality, but Copper does wonder whether the further evolution of Greater China might offer a solution to the region’s more intractable problems, especially the difficult China-Taiwan relationship. In introducing the multiple representations of Greater China, Copper provides the contextual and theoretical foundations for his fellow contributors.

The three chapters in Part I converge on the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the first two sharing an interest in the creation of Chinese identity and China’s understanding of itself. The authors are concerned with the political ramifications of communication, and they demonstrate the importance of mediated identities in reinforcing political legitimacy. Thus Chin-Chuan Lee and Yu Huang aim to elucidate the social context in which the Chinese media displayed strong pro-American tendencies in the 1980s and strong anti-American tendencies in the 1990s. In the middle to late 1980s, the authors argue, Chinese intellectuals allied themselves with the reform bureaucracy, harnessing the media to advocate ‘liberal’ agendas (such as supervision by public opinion) and frequently invoking the United States as a point of reference. This accounted for the Chinese media’s enthusiasm for the United States as a model of comparison, if not emulation.

Lee and Huang explain how the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 became the motif of American media coverage of China, while revived economic reforms since 1992 have fostered a renewed sense of national pride, but with an emerging consumer culture beginning to overshadow interest in political reform. What we are observing, say the authors, is the realisation of the century-old Chinese dream of pursuing national wealth and power, but with a distinctly communist twist.

These themes are developed by Neil Renwick and Qing Cao. They discuss how political discourse is crucial to the legitimation of China’s ruling elite and critically informs their formulation and execution of political action. The chapter explores the theme of ‘victimhood’ in China’s contemporary political discourse, the constructed nature of which draws upon a range of supporting sources. Of central importance is the role of history, and one of its key features is the depiction of China as victim. This offers a distinct pole of identifying attachment for the construction of a modernist reading of national Chinese political identity. Renwick and Cao conduct discourse analyses of several primary texts, concluding that objectified discursive power remains an influential factor in Chinese politics.

Hugo de Burgh analyses how Chinese journalists—the mediators of these discourses—view themselves and their chosen profession. He seeks to understand changes that have taken place in journalists’ perceptions of their political and social roles to discover the reasons for these changes: are they reflections of cosmopolitan influences, economic and technological changes in the media industries, institutional factors in the Chinese media, or changes in attitude to politics and society? The author reviews the history of journalism and journalism education in China by drawing on his extensive interviews with journalists themselves. Their words provide a unique and instructive insight into the character and functions of Chinese reporters. Many of them have been influenced by Western myths of journalism, what de Burgh describes as the ‘discourse of the Tintin journalist’, for example (although few would confess to emulating a foreign model). This role is represented by the remarkable growth of investigative journalism in China. Others see their value in terms of their responsibility to the state. All agree that they are providing a valuable service to the Chinese people by ‘mediating’ information for their audiences, but there is no escaping the honesty of de Burgh’s concluding remarks: that ‘most journalists live in the world as it is constructed for them by their political masters, and probably jog along as best they can’.

Gary Rawnsley’s chapter moves the discussion to another area of what we loosely term Greater China, namely the recently democratised Taiwan. Rawnsley analyses trends in election campaigning in Taiwan, with particular reference to the landmark 2000 presidential election, when the Kuomintang’s (KMT) fifty-year monopoly on power finally ended. Rawnsley examines the growing professionalism in election campaigning, which stands alongside, and is shaped by, the systemic and institutional features of Taiwan’s electoral landscape, such as the path dependency of the parties and the electoral system used. The chapter challenges us to reconsider the notion of how identity is shaped and communicated; globalisation has given birth to a spurious catch-all notion of ‘Americanisation’ that is invoked by many modern election observers. It is said to describe a trend towards a global convergence of electoral practices based on the adoption of election campaign techniques developed in the United States. The discourse on Americanisation resonates with the pejorative vocabulary more associated with cultural imperialism, suggesting the displacement of the indigenous by the foreign. Rawnsley warns that we need to be careful of using this discourse too liberally. The flows of influence and information are in fact multidirectional, with the United States absorbing cultural effects as well as supplying them. Newly democratising systems have not undergone a blanket Americanisation, because, as the Taiwan example clearly demonstrates, traditional methods of voter mobilisation remain important; the foreign coexists with the indigenous.

Bey-Ling Sha builds on Rawnsley’s discussion to examine ‘gendered dimensions of political activism’ by focusing on the role of women and gender in Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP is a fascinating case study to use, since it offers a multi-layered analysis: in a relatively short period, the DPP has transformed from an illegal opposition movement to a party that has not only captured the presidency (in 2000) but also won the largest number (although not a majority) of seats in the 2001 legislative election. In short, the DPP has broken the KMT’s fifty-year monopoly on power in Taiwan.

The DPP has been involved in challenging official opinion on Taiwan’s identity and has, in the past, been the focus for the mobilisation of Taiwanese, as opposed to the Chinese who arrived from the mainland with the KMT in 1945. But the DPP’s identity itself is undergoing thorough reconstruction as it comes to terms with its new political status, agenda and understanding of Taiwan’s position in the world.

The DPP has also been a powerful voice for a political agenda that in the West we might label ‘liberal’. For example, the DPP has been vocal in advocating equal opportunity for women and, as Bey-Ling Sha demonstrates, in supporting issues that can be classified as ‘women’s issues’. However, the party’s concern for women may reflect a political strategy (mobilising women voters) more than a genuine agenda for social change. Furthermore, Sha demonstrates that gendered communication within the DPP tends to reflect a traditional and patriarchal perspective on women and women’s issues; women are still identified by their ‘traditional’ roles of wife and mother, while articulating women’s issues and concerns largely falls to women within the party. Women in Taiwan have certainly been presented with a positive role model in the Vice President, (Annette) Lu Shiu-lian, and many hoped that her high profile would invite the government to address issues of gender and the problems facing women in Taiwan today. But the DPP’s political agenda has still not devoted time or space to a full and frank discussion of this subject.

The final chapter to focus on Taiwan is Ming-Yeh Rawnsley’s exploration of how Taiwan’s national identity has been constructed and reflected by the media. These issues frame the methods and content of political and social discourse in Taiwan, and they structure the form and substance of mediated communications there. Taiwan’s media, argues Rawnsley, have helped to construct and perpetuate the problems and contradictions of identity that have challenged society since the 28 February 1947 incident. While the introduction of media liberalisation in 1987 permitted a more open and less violent debate about identity, political parties are still defined largely by their Taiwanese or ‘mainland’ orientation, and their election campaigns tend to be structured around this polarity.

Rawnsley uses Formosa Television (FTV) to analyse these debates. Established in June 1987, FTV was the first national television station to communicate the Taiwanese identity, long suppressed under martial law. The question is whether FTV will be an exclusively Taiwanese station and thus perpetuate the primary division of identity within Taiwan, or whether it will provide equal resources and access for other minority language programming and therefore provide a credible alternative to the Mandarin-dominated Nationalist television networks.

CNN correspondent and veteran China watcher Willy Wo-Lap Lam opens the discussion about the media and communications in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. He analyses the communication strategies employed by Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa’s first administration following Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese rule in 1997 (Tung was ‘elected’ for a second term in March 2002). Lam affirms that since 1997 Hong Kong’s political culture has become more ‘Chinese’, by which he means that values and norms associated with political institutions and processes in the PRC can now be discovered there. In a perceptive analysis of the administration’s relationship with the media, Lam examines how the political system has invoked the media to participate in the continued sinicisation of Hong Kong. Most disquietingly, Lam identifies what he calls an ‘erosion of press freedom and an alarming increase in self-censorship’ by the territory’s media. This is demonstrated by Tung’s claim that the media of Hong Kong and Macau have distinct social responsibilities and his insistence that they should play a more ‘positive role’ in the interests of the state and Chinese nation. As a former journalist for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Lam knows from personal experience the effects of 1997 on the territory’s press, an understanding shared by his colleague, Jasper Becker, dismissed in May 2002 as Beijing bureau chief for ‘insubordination’ (Far Eastern Economic Review, 9 May 2002).

Lam’s conclusions are interesting in the light of Hugo de Burgh’s assessment of Chinese journalism: where de Burgh sees reason for optimism, especially in the growth of ‘investigative reporting’ on the mainland, Lam is concerned that journalism in Hong Kong is failing to attract bright new entrants; and this is important, because Hong Kong’s survival as an Asian democracy and economic powerhouse depends on the integrity and strength of its media institutions.

Anthony Fung addresses the situation facing Hong Kong’s press after 1997 from a political economy approach. He has identified several characteristics that contributed to the transition of Hong Kong’s press: first, he considers spatialisation, by which he means the agreement arrived at by the press in terms of allotting market niches. This gives rise to a discussion of how the relatively small market was disturbed by a new entrant, the Apple Daily, in 1995. Next, Fung examines how many family-owned Hong Kong media organisations weathered political uncertainties by turning a political and cultural entity into an economic good. The media then experienced a pronounced process of extension whereby they acquired non-media businesses by acquisition or through partnership. This was intended to diversify companies’ investments and to cushion the possible effects of recession and political pressure on the media after 1997. Media barons were then able to consolidate and extend their control within a particular sector of media production and to maximise the economies of scale and share their resources. Finally, Fung discusses the impact of globalisation on Hong Kong’s media.

In this way, Fung observes a discrete process of commodification in the way news is reported in the territory, leading him to hypothesise that this is the only strategy available to the press to maintain commercial viability and independence from political interference. Fung concludes that those newspapers that choose populism over principle are most likely to survive the transition to Chinese rule. However, the important question is whether this commodification will help to structure the media agenda and contribute to their economic and political sensitivity. Or will the increasing concentration of media ownership turn ‘mass communication’ into ‘mass consumption’ and thereby counter press freedom in Hong Kong? These possibilities deserve close scrutiny as the story of Hong Kong under Chinese leadership continues to unfold.

Andrew Brown is concerned with political communication through popular culture and provides a political reading of Hong Kong films made in the run-up to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule. Brown compares the ideological position and political interpretation of two specific film texts: John Woo’s The Killer (1989) and Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994). His discussion reveals that both directors express a sense of Britain’s betrayal in failing to secure satisfactory democratic safeguards for Hong Kong in their films. Hence their anxiety with discovering what it means to be a citizen of Hong Kong both prior to, and especially following, the 1997 handover. Brown’s chapter provides the foundation for a deeper exploration of cinema’s contribution to globalisation, claiming that in the work of both directors it is possible to discern Western and Chinese influences. Like other Asian directors, especially Ang Lee, Woo and Wong have started to experience success in Hollywood, in Woo’s case by adapting to the formats and genres favoured by Hollywood but retaining his personal style of film making (seen especially in his 1997 blockbuster Face/Off). The contrast with Ang Lee is striking: Lee has enjoyed remarkable success in what might be termed ‘mainstream Hollywood’ movie making, being responsible for such films as Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride With the Devil (1999), which do not employ Chinese themes or actors. Arguably, it is only because Lee was considered a ‘bankable’ Hollywood director that his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) received global success as a mainstream movie, even though it was essentially a ‘Chinese’ film.

In contrast to Woo and Lee, Wong is more critical of the union of Western and Chinese art forms, resisting the complete appropriation of American influences. Their different approaches reveal, therefore, the divergent assessments of globalisation and its impact on identity that are apparent in film, suggesting that movie making can be as much a political act as it is a commitment to entertain.

The following three chapters focus on the overseas Chinese and their experiences of coping with coexisting and competing identities. As the chapters demonstrate, the overseas Chinese have developed discourses through which they can create and articulate their identities—to themselves, to each other, and to the wider societies in which they live. David Parker considers the community of second—and third-generation British Chinese in terms of recent conceptualisations of cultural identity. Parker argues that existing understandings of concepts such as identity and diaspora are both fledgling and decidedly Eurocentric. Parker develops a deeper understanding of notions of space, time and the social, drawing on political communications within the Chinese community in Britain. He does so by analysing how ‘pan-European Chinese news media’, but especially the Internet, have facilitated the creation of a new Chinese public sphere for the diaspora. The new media, he argues, satisfies the postmodern acceptance of multiple identities that incorporate orientation to a distant homeland (familiar only through media representation and inter-generational narration) and attachment to Britain. The identity of the British Chinese was tested in March and April 2001, when Chinese restaurants were identified in parts of the media as the source of the foot and mouth epidemic. The Chinese communities were mobilised by their websites, while demonstrations through London attracted Chinese participation from throughout Britain. Too often, Chinese people are considered passive, untroubled, even invisible. The events of 2001 demonstrated that the Chinese could be provoked into action when required, but more importantly they forced British Chinese to confront their identity, nurturing a new consciousness and a recognition of the importance of developing new forums for expression, debate and mobilisation. Parker’s conclusions are cautionary: at the moment, there are limits to the effectiveness of this public sphere, due mainly to generational and linguistic divisions among the Chinese communities in Britain. Parker also calls for ‘greater participation in civil society’, otherwise the public sphere will only ‘amount to a few thousand people talking to themselves’. Nevertheless, the forums that Parker describes are a step in the right direction; they create new discourses that reflect the multiple, and sometimes competing, identities of the Chinese in Britain—what Parker describes as the ‘beginnings of a cultural identity’.

Yingchi Chu, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Andrea Witcomb analyse how Chinese children in Australia consume media and information, and thus how they contribute to the shaping of identity. Migrants from the People’s Republic of China have a very recent experience of migration, due to policy changes and crises in their places of origin. The migration flow has been concentrated in the last fifteen years, and many of the new migrants are Chinese with young families. These adults share strong memories of childhoods in China and are possibly living with an alternative model of childhood and media to that used in the construction of media texts for children in Australia. Given the centralised modes of production in the 1960s to early 1980s in China, remembered media products are reasonably simple to trace for analysis. The chapter looks at such texts (film and television products) and analyses them according to the related premises that dominant concepts of childhood are (1) significant markers of the character of multiculturalism in the pubic sphere and (2) political hierarchies in the media. At the heart of the discussion is a tension between parental memories of China and children’s emotional distance from their parents’ experience. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for how this tension might be alleviated. These include recognition that ‘children from migrant families operate between two worlds…. Media practices need to acknowledge and emulate young people’s flexibility and multiple competencies’. This might facilitate the future development of a genuine public sphere for Chinese communities in Australia.

Julian Stringer’s chapter builds upon the discussion offered by Andrew Brown on Hong Kong cinema to explore the cultural politics of Asian American cinema. Recent productions by both Asian American film makers and critics have emphasised the importance of agency in the formation of Asian American social identities. While much of this work has documented the evolution of an Asian American independent film practice over the past thirty years, Stringer concentrates instead on the poli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Meaning and Significance of Greater China
• Part I: The People’s Republic of China
• Part II: Taiwan
• Part III: Hong Kong
• Part IV: The Overseas Chinese
• Conclusion