Screening modernity at Shanghai Television Station: An ethnographic study of globalization, media, and cultural identity-making in local context (China)

Combining interviews, participant observation, documentary research, and textual analysis, and this project examines the work of television producers at Shanghai Television Station in the negotiation of Chinese cultural identity generally and the construction of Chinese modernity specifically. A case study of the local experience of the cultural dimensions of globalization, this study explores how these cultural commentators employ the new medium television in the age-old yet ever-urgent task of making China modern, of constructing what scholars in transnational cultural studies have called an ‘alternative modernity.’ Related issues addressed include the nature of an emergent public sphere in China and the role of media in negotiating cultural identity in global context. Findings suggest that while locally constructed modernities are variously alternative, it is important to consider the limits to such alterity in specific ethnographic contexts. Due to the technical and creative conventions of this imported medium, and to the cultural power of the rhetoric and symbolism of western modernity, STV television producers reproduce, for literally hundreds of millions of people daily, many of the cultural artifacts of precisely that version of modernity at the heart of global capitalism. Thus while China's emergent public sphere may occasion variously oppositional practice in relation to the state, it is also often a site of effectivity of the hegemonic ambitions of global capitalist culture. This thesis demonstrates then the importance of recognizing the relativity of resistance in ethnographic detail in studies of globalization and alternative modernities.