News about killing, news that killed: Media culture and identities in the 1920s China

My dissertation explores the question about how urban media shaped an urban identity and personal identities in the twentieth century China. My research centers on two sensational cases in Shanghai. One of them is a comprador's murder of a famous prostitute in 1920; the other one is a wealthy young woman's elopement with her male servant in 1928. Newspapermen, novelists, dramatists, filmmakers and "street artists"---such as storytellers and folklore singers---all pursued these two cases. The media's fascination over these two cases was because the human dramas touched upon a set of issues that were specific to Shanghai, such as international business as embodied in comprador, sex-entertainment (the celebrity prostitute), and the fluidity of class and gender (elopement). Urban media represented the murder as a modern case that resembled Hollywood detective films, and displayed every detail of modern life styles in Shanghai. Producers thereby solicited audiences to participate in modern experience via consuming such representations. The elopement subverted family values and class distinctions. The young woman, who had received a new style education, was painted as a modern girl challenging the feudal family, the marital system and traditional morality in China. Media's interpretation of the elopement enabled the couple to justify their love affair and performed their personal identities as pursuers of free love and marriage in the media.; Urban media's coverage of these two cases enables me to explore how individual cultural forms, such as newspapers, novels, drama and film, closely connected with each other by sharing personnel and texts. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, writers, dramatists, newspapermen and filmmakers in Shanghai simultaneously embarked on multiple careers and tended to capitalize on the same "texts" such as these two cases. This dissertation examines how this unique cultural operation created maximal audiences. Namely, while individual cultural forms were intended to cater to specific social groups, media culture as a whole could exert impact on much wider audiences of heterogeneous social and cultural backgrounds. Media culture's capability of linking urban residents enabled the audiences to participate in a new public media realm.