The Communication Of Peking Opera Shaped By State,Market And Social Media

Today’s Peking Opera is in such a special situation: it is the quintessence of Chinese culture,while being a minority culture with only a few people know it;it has a small audience market,while being highly praised by the state.Its main disseminator and audience,that is,the Peking opera actors(actresses)and the fans,are also small group that is not understood and well-known by the public.In this case,the communication of Peking Opera cannot be simply understood as the spread in the mass media.The purpose of this paper is to study the shaping process of Peking opera’s industry and the communication of Peking Opera,which includes issues like how each force is produced,evolved and intertwined,and ultimately how it has an influence on the communication of Peking Opera.In the process of this research,I employ methods include literature retrieval,field observation and in-depth interview to analyze the evolution of state power and market power in Peking Opera’s industry,the intervention of media technology force,as well as the turn of the communication of Peking Opera under the shaping of these joint triple forces.The birth of Peking Opera is in the late Qing dynasty,since the beginning of its birth,it has been inseparable from the power of the state.It has a huge market due to the emergence of commerce,so the market power has been running through the communication of Peking Opera.And in a series of the opera reform,since it is difficult for the structural forces of the state and market to break through,the emergence of media technology has boosted a new shape of structural power.At a national level,the state adopt an expropriation attitude towards Peking Opera,that is,from it was used as a cultural tool to safeguard the feudal society order at first,to the medium used to propagate official ideology,eventually to the cultural resources to consolidate the status of the nation-state today.From the level of market,Peking Opera has changed from the original popular culture to the niche literature and art.Its resources mainly come from the artistic charm of Peking Opera itself and its cultural resources and identity.From the level of media technology,because of the “sense of presence” it reproduces the audio-visual communication of Peking Opera,and at the same time gives birth to a new fans’ community and ways of communication.Under this "parallelogram of force",a variety of Peking opera propagation patterns,which present the culture of the quintessence cultural/niche literature and art/virtual interest,are finally formed.