China Under Western Gaze: Representing China In The British Television Documentaries 1980-2000

Representing China in the British Television Documentaries 1980–2000

Qing Cao

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9789814578318
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science générale

This book presents a critical analysis of the images of China portrayed in British television documentaries between 1980 and 2000. The examination is contextualized within the profound transformations of the post-reform China and global political structures in the last two decades of the 20th century. Using an innovative analytical framework based on Vladimir Propp, the book focuses on how different images of China are constructed through an effective use of TV narrative strategies. In particular it details how various strands of (Western) modernity underpin major discourses about China. The book will be valuable to the understanding of how China was perceived in the West during one of the most dramatic moments in modern history.

Contents:

• China as an Image: History, Structure and Perspectives
• Television Narrative as Discourse: Poetics of Representation
• Legitimate Controversy: China as a Civilisation
• A Struggle Without Heroes: Representing Republic of China, 1911–1949
• Consensus and Deviance: China as the Communist ‘Other ’, 1949–1989
• Road to Xanadu: A Case Study
• Behind Representation: Discursive Strategies and Relations of Power
• Conclusions

Readership: Researchers and students who are interested to understand how China was perceived in the West during the 1980–2000 period.

Chapter

China as an Image: History,
Structure and Perspectives*

1.1 China and the West: Relations vs. Images

China experienced dramatic falls and rises in the twentieth century, rising from being crushed by the Eight-Power Allied Forces in 1900 to being the world’s second largest economy in 2010. China’s fate, however, is inextricably intertwined with that of the West although this is a connection that, originally, China did not desire. The Opium War (1840-1842) ushered China into an era and world that it found baffling and is still struggling with today. For China, its experiences with the modern West are unsettling, an unease symbolised by the pervasive use of the phrase ‘a century of humiliation’ (1840-1945). This hurt pride has led to an entrenched sense of victimhood that characterises China’s modern historiography. This victimhood narrative highlights a sense of moral outrage engraved in Confucian (pre-modern), republican (1911-1949), Marxist (1949-1976) and nationalist (post-reform) discourse and it still lingers today. On the other hand, the West represents the ultimate source of tools for wealth and power that nationalists wish to acquire to transform China into a ‘modern’ nation. Thus, China views the West with a mixed feeling of suspicion and admiration, as a place it has to be on guard against and to learn from. Therefore, since China became aware of the Western challenge, it has criticised and romanticised the West equally, though the degree of suspicion and admiration has varied at different historical times.

However, China’s engagement with the ‘modern world’ is viewed rather differently from a Western perspective. The emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) was perceived as arrogant and ignorant in dealing with the West; China’s 19^th century refusal to buy European manufactured goods was deemed inexplicably ‘unenlightened’ and ‘backward’ and testimony that China was hopelessly ‘inward-looking’ ‘irrational’ and oblivious to rising European power. After being crushed by Western naval power in early 1840s, China came to be viewed with increasing disdain. The traditional image, popularised by Marco Polos tales of ‘Cathay’, of a ‘middle kingdom’ crouched in an aura of Confucian sages presiding over a splendid land, lost much of its lustre in the 19^th century. The euphoria about Chinese civilisation in the previous century evaporated. Condemned by Hegel as having no ‘history’, China was viewed as ‘embalmed’ in an eternal state of changelessness, forgotten by time. Karl Marx, optimistic about the European proletarian class, inherited and reinforced the Hegelian view of China as being bleakly trapped in a political ‘ Oriental despotism’ and economic ‘Asiatic mode of production’ that needed European colonial penetration. ‘Progress’, it was firmly believed, could only be brought about by Europeans, by force if necessary. Nevertheless, despite Western colonial encroachment, China remained the last and largest country that successfully resisted Western appropriation and was, therefore, not politically, economically or intellectually possessed by the West. When China finally regained its independence in 1949, it found itself stuck in a global ideological contest between communism and capitalism. For most Chinese, 1949 represents the end of war, famine, chaos and a ‘century of humiliation’. To the West however, China was ‘lost’ to communism and once again ‘withdrew’ into total isolation. A civilisation veiled in cultural mystique acquired a new veneer of an alien ideological enemy. Communist China invoked a fresh fear of the spread of the ‘red peril’, alongside a vision of a romanticised socialist utopia.

The last three and half decades have witnessed China’s transformation from one of the poorest countries (end of 1970s) to the world’s second largest economy. The change has coincided with an equally dramatic geopolitical shift — the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, ‘war on terror’ and, since 2008, a global financial crisis. China’s image has oscillated with each swing of the global relationship change. The China/West honeymoon of the 1980s was quickly replaced by thorny Sino-Western relations in the 1990s. China’s pariah status in the world media, however, was short-lived, and China’s 2001 WTO membership affirmed its new standing as a global economic powerhouse that the West has to do business with. The human rights-focused negative image has switched to a wider range of topics that reflect new areas of Western interest such as China’s global reach for energy and trade. However, viewing it as a surviving communist one-party state, the West has as deep a suspicion of China as China has of the West. Despite the rise in China’s economic power, the Western image of China has entered an ‘age of uncertainty’ in the 21^st century, and this image is not distinctively negative or positive but rather mixed, varied and broadly non-ideological. There is an absence of a clear overarching perspective for viewing China, as was seen in the 1980s image of ‘China going capitalist’ or the 1990s ‘China as a last communist state’. This ‘grey image’ reflects the complexities of evolving the Sino-Western relationship in the post-9/11 world.

China’s external image is described as being ‘burdened with mistrust and misunderstanding’ in a Newsweek article ‘An Image Emergency’. The author argues that ‘for one of the few times in its history, this famously inward-looking nation is vulnerable to how it is seen abroad’ (Ramo, 2006). It is true that China has become more conscious of its international image and is sensitive to how it is portrayed abroad. Substantial efforts have been made on the foreign policy front to combat negative perceptions, using proactive diplomatic and discursive campaigns such as the controversial ‘China’s peaceful rise’ and ‘harmonious world’. High profile events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 Shanghai World Expo have enabled China to project a preferred cultural image. However, in the post-financial crisis world, Western perceptions of China have not seen substantial improvement despite its increased visibility and diversity in the media. As the Cold War demonstrated, suspicions and fears are generated by both a clash of strategic interests and perceptions. Little (1995: 63) concludes that the post-World War II world was conventionally characterised as being dominated by an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism and such concepts largely shaped Cold War political discourse. However, ‘although the ideological divide was readily acknowledged, it was almost universally accepted that the Cold War could best be understood as a power struggle and discussed in terms of the balance of military power between the two competing blocs’ (Little, 1995: 63).

China has become difficult to define ideologically as it is in a process of constant change and search for national and international identities as well as a development model. Nonetheless, many in the West are uneasy about what is happening in China and some in the U.S. see it as a potential strategic competitor. China’s embrace of economic globalisation and the deepening interdependence between the Chinese and global economies have complicated China-Western relations. While it is difficult to assess to what extent China’s images are vulnerable to such evolving structural patterns of relations, it is impossible to conceive that they do not play a part.

It is generally recognised that perceptions and images are an important dimension of international relations and a contributing factor in conflict or peace. At a popular level, the mass media is crucial in shaping public knowledge of and attitudes to China. Understanding the production, circulation and reception of China’s image is critical to China-Western relations. This is a vast and extraordinarily complex terrain. Image and reality is a curious and notorious couple locked in perpetual tension. They can never be the same but the latter is invariably seen from, if not taken as, the former in contemporary mass media-saturated society. ‘Image’ has many meanings, but its modern use is dominated by a sense of publicity that relies on pre-existing popular conceptions. It is therefore understood as ‘perceived reputation’ in a way similar to that of a commercial brand (Williams, 1976: 158). The evolution of ‘image’ from a ‘visual representation’ to a ‘public impression’ of reality (O’Sullivan et al., 1994: 144) parallels the meaning of ‘representation’ from ‘accurate reproduction’ in the world of art to how reality is ‘presented’ or ‘re-presented’ in cultural and media studies (Williams, 1976: 269). Seeing ‘representation’ in semiotic terms, Hartley (1992: 265) understands ‘representation’ as producing ‘an abstract ideological concept’. For Hall (1997: 17), ‘representation’ functions as the ‘production of meaning of the concepts in our minds through language’. Both Hartley and Hall follow Williams in seeing ‘representation’ as a political construct in contemporary sociocultural processes. Representation is believed to constitute one of the central practices producing culture.

The two senses Williams distinguishes in representation — accurate reproduction and social construction — are relevant to two main perspectives for studying cultural representation in general and China’s image in particular. Hall (1997) emphasises representation as a mode of social construction through a conceptual map — a culture-specific schematic knowledge. Only through sharing a similar conceptual map can people communicate meaningfully with one another. It is in this sense that culture can be understood as shared meanings or shared ‘conceptual maps’. In an intercultural context however, there are not only different sets of concepts but different ways of organising, classifying and arranging them (du Gay et al., 1997). In representing China as a non-Western society the ‘conceptual map’ applied is inevitably one that is shared within the West. Therefore, to a significant extent, China has to be understood within a Western conceptual system. Image formula- tors employ, consciously or unconsciously, concepts and categories defined primarily in Western terms both as a necessary condition and an important mode in mediating the meaning of their cultural ‘other’. Thus, the conceptual map determines largely the framework within which ‘stories’ about China make sense to a Western audience.

This conceptual map-based image is nonetheless complicated by specific relationships with China at a particular historical moment. Isaacs (1958: 71) was the first to chronicle the trajectory of the evolution of the Western image of China and was followed by Mosher (1990: 20-21). They find an oscillation between positive and negative in perceptions of China paralleling largely with political relations in what they call different ‘ages’(Fig. 1.1).

Isaacs’model:

(1) The Age of Respect (18^th century)
(2) The Age of Contempt (1840-1905)
(3) The Age of Benevolence (1905-1937)
(4) The Age of Admiration (1937-1944)
(5) The Age of disenchantment (1944-1949)
(6) The Age of Hostility (1949-present)

Mosher’s update:

(6) The Age of Hostility (1949-1972)
(7) The Second Age of Admiration (1972-1977)
(8) The Second Age of Disenchantment (1977-1980)
(9) The Second Age of Benevolence (1980-1989)

The author’s update:

(10) The Third Age of Disenchantment (1989-2001)
(11) The Age of Uncertainty (2001-present)

Fig. 1.1 Historical pattern of changing images of China

The dominant image of each ‘age’ reflects Western attitudes towards China. In the 1980s, for instance, China served as a counterbalancing force against the ‘Soviet threat’, although this disappeared in the 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union. This radical geopolitical shift exposed China as the only significant country with rising economic power practising an alien ideology. The challenge to ‘engage’ China ‘productively’ and to balance political and economic interests seemed to have ushered China reporting into a new era. In contrast to a renewed interest in the 1980s that saw a flowering of documentaries on Chinese culture and history, a series of high-profile negative investigative documentaries emerged in the 1990s including Laogai: Inside China’s Gulag (ITV Yorkshire Television, 1993) and The Dying Rooms (Channel 4, 1995). The 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and a sea change in world politics contributed to this swift transformation of China’s image, aggravated by thorny Anglo-Chinese relations in the run-up to the 1997 Hong Kong handover. The media’s critical voice in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen helped inaugurate an era of negative reporting that subsided gradually following China’s 2001 entry into the WTO. Throughout the 1990s, human rights concerns became a central focus in the Western media, highlighting such issues as prison labour, child abuse, the death penalty, Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet.

Jespersen (1996: 188) contends that changes in images and perceptions have often been the product of domestic attitudes and forces. The resilience of the notion that China should change to fit an American model reveals how images of China are motivated, although, at times, practising journalists recognise such problems (Fu, 1990; Becker, 1992). Bennett (1990: 266), a resident American correspondent in China, reflects the challenges of preconceptions in reporting China:

Romantic/cynic split is an old story for anyone involved with China. We all know about the love-hate relationship of China students and scholars and about the extremes of American foreign policy over the ages… Rather, most distortions reflect our application to China of our own very powerful, sometimes unarticulated feelings about some of the very basic American values.

The 1980’s romantic reporting of China and cynical coverage of the Soviet Union, according to Bennett, resulted from the fact that ‘China and its reformers fit neatly into one pre-existing American myth structure, while the Soviet Union fit another’ (Bennett, 1990: 266). It is not difficult however, to see the parallel between China’s image oscillation and the shift of China-Western relations. Mackerras (1999: 187) argues ‘the government influence on popular images is usually more important than the converse’ while Isaacs (1958: 407) argues that it is more productive to see image as a relationship. The underlying force behind image vacillation lies in the ‘change in the underpinning of the total relationship between Western and Asian and African men’. For Isaacs, this change determines ‘almost every Western image of Asian and other non-Western people’. Chang (1993: 247) surveys 35 years (1950-1984) of American press coverage of China and concludes the press is ‘more a surrogate for foreign policy makers than an independent voice of alternative views in the making of China policy’. In reporting China, the American press serves as an unofficial instrument for foreign policy makers to establish the rules of the game. This view is echoed in another study of New York Time’s reporting of China from 1949 to 1988 (Yan, 1998).

1.2 Representing China: Key Perspectives

1.2.1 Essentialism vs. Non-essentialism

Unlike a political and economic relationship that is largely objective, the conceptual map reflects subjective cultural...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter 1 China as an Image: History, Structure and Perspectives
• Chapter 2 Television Narrative as Discourse: Poetics of Representation
• Chapter 3 Legitimate Controversy: China as a Civilisation
• Chapter 4 A Struggle Without Heroes: Representing Republic of China, 1911-1949
• Chapter 5 Consensus and Deviance:China as the Communist ‘Other’, 1949-1989
• Chapter 6 Roads to Xanadu: A Case Study
• Chapter 7 Behind Representation: Discursive Strategies and Relations of Power
• Chapter 8 Conclusions
• Appendix I List of Key UK Documentaries about China, 1980-2000
• Appendix II List of Interviews
• Appendix III An Interview with Hugh Baker
• Index