Seeking News, Making China

John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news transformed China's political and social landscape.He shows how new technologies of communication created a Chinese 'newsscape' that linked distant regions, shaped how people understood politics and community, and redefined the relationship between citizens and the state.By tracing these shifts across the twentieth century, the book reveals how media innovation and political power became deeply entwined in the making of a modern mass society.Laura De Giorgi: One of the core arguments of your book is the idea that, when we reflect on the emergence of mass society in China in the twentieth century, we must pay attention to the interplay between social practices and technologies of communication-a fluid interaction that changes over time in what you call the 'technopolitical process'.To highlight this nexus, you have also coined the concept of 'newsscape'.Why this choice?How does this concept inform our analysis of China's path to a mass society?John Alekna: In the simplest terms, the newsscape is the way in which new, time-sensitive information ('news') moves through society and the physical landscape.The contours of the newsscape are determined by communication technologies (telegraph, broadcasting, newspapers, roads), human behaviour (socio-religious calendars, habits, the tendency to gather), and natural geography (rivers, mountains, distance).Using this framework helps us analyse how the circulation patterns of news create power.Tracing the changes in these information circulation patterns over time, therefore, reveals changes in the political structures of society.We might say, then, that the newsscape is a snapshot of the technopolitical process in time.This changes our understanding of the emergence of a mass society in several ways.First, we can understand mass society-which I define as a society capable of theoretically universal political, economic, and informational consumption-as one that does not emerge from war or party reorganisation alone.Shifting away from these distinctive political developments allows us to see a longer-term technological story-one that sits outside the usual litany of governments and political movements.In fact, I argue that shifts in information technology and the newsscape were chronologically prior to political transitions and stretch across supposed geographical or temporal regime disjunctures

Conversation · Conversation analysis · Narrative · Globalization and Cultural Identity · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Japanese History and Culture