"Getting Electrocuted": Media and the Author in Postsocialist China

Type Thesis

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Summary

This dissertation investigates how writers in the People’s Republic of China during the Late Reform Era (1989–2012) represented through media the existential challenges facing their profession and the institution of Chinese literature. During this period, the state began to divest from institutions such as Writers’ Associations and state-run publishing houses that had provided Chinese writers with a stable (although certainly constricted) existence. This policy shift forced Chinese writers to compete with successive waves of cultural imports from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States; the television industry, which dramatically expanded in the late eighties; and a newly profit-oriented film industry. The apparent rise of audiovisual media tracked neatly with the increasing precarity and marginalization of the Chinese writer and the increasing atomization of their postsocialist readership. Because of the correlation of these trends, television, film, and eventually internet platforms became icons of the challenging postsocialist transition, media through which those challenges could be articulated, and sources of inspiration for new models of creative production.