Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China
Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China

Author: Yiu Fai Chow

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2019-10-04

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 9048535530

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With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from "made in China" to "created in China". Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and "soft power," creativity has become part of the new China Dream. This anthology engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake stuffs challenge notions of the original and authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China's fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, contribute to explore, examine and problematize what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of "creativity".

Chinas Digital Presence in the Asia-Pacific
Chinas Digital Presence in the Asia-Pacific

Author: Michael Keane

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1785276239

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China’s Digital Presence in the Asia-Pacific explores China’s digital presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on political economy of the media, industry analysis, platform studies and cultural policy studies, the book shows that China’s commercial digital platforms are increasingly recognized outside China and can disseminate Chinese culture more effectively than government supported media. It illustrates how these platforms are contributing to Chinese cultural influence, their perceived reputation and obstacles in the region while pursuing a combined approach of culture+, industry+, internet+, and platform+. In considering the multi-layered rise of the China argument, the book considers its growing technological status as an innovative nation through four policy approaches: culture+, industry+, Internet+ and platform+. Other + characterizations include intelligent+ and social+. These + characterizations show how China is rejuvenating, drawing technological knowhow from the region and adding to its cultural (and soft) power. The book focuses on six locations: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. The authors analyse Beijing’s changing policies towards the governance of culture, Internet technologies and digital platforms, as well as examining consumer perceptions of China and Chinese products in the Asia-Pacific region. In using the + characterizations, the authors provide a comprehensive analysis of how Chinese cultural and creative industries became digital, as well as investigating the key players and the leading platforms including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, TikTok, Baidu, iQiyi and Meituan.

Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China
Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China

Author: David Craig

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-02-25

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 3030653765

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In Chinese, the term wanghong refers to creators, social media entrepreneurs alternatively known as KOLs (key opinion leaders) and zhubo (showroom hosts), influencers and micro-celebrities. Wanghong also refers to an emerging media ecology in which these creators cultivate online communities for cultural and commercial value by harnessing Chinese social media platforms, like Weibo, WeChat, Douyu, Huya, Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishuo. Framed by the concepts of cultural, creative, and social industries, the book maps the development of wanghong policies and platforms, labor and management, content and culture, as they operate in contrast to its non-Chinese counterpart, social media entertainment, driven by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. As evidenced by the backlash to TikTok, the threat of competition from global wanghong signals advancing platform nationalism.

Digital Immersive Art in China
Digital Immersive Art in China

Author: Xinyang Zhao

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-10-08

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1839993049

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China has been stereotypically perceived as a place of backwardness. However, the 21st century has been a transitional period for China to express its cultural power. This book explores how digital technology, in particular virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), is playing a role in China’s rejuvenation, especially in relation to cultural displays, performances and art exhibitions. It examines how audiences, both in China and globally, respond to Digital China through digital immersive art. Drawing on the author's anthropological research and empirical studies on stakeholders and audience reception, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of transformative power of digital technology and its impact on cultural experience in contemporary China. The ‘reform of the cultural system’ over the past two decades in China has fostered a techno-cultural imaginary mixed with the celebration of Chinese civilisation and advanced by digital technology and entrepreneurs. Such a hybrid imaginary influences how people view and consume digital immersive art. Much digital immersive art within China is thus viewed within the framework of modernisation, as the case studies in this book will show. Outside China, however, the dominant narrative of techno-orientalism prevails, constructing a different image of Digital China, a technocratic state.

Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema
Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema

Author: Dan Luo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1538157306

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Motion pictures were introduced to China in 1896, and today China is a major player in the global film industry. However, the story of how Chinese cinema became what it is today is exceptionally turbulent, encompassing incursions by foreign powers, warfare among contending rulers, the collapse of the Chinese empire, and the massive setback of the Cultural Revolution. This book coversthe cinematic history of mainland China spanning across over one hundred and twenty years since its inception. Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on the major filmmakers, actors, and historical figures, representative cinematic productions, genre evolution, significant events and institutions, and market changes. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Chinese Cinema.

The Conformed Body: Contemporary Art in China
The Conformed Body: Contemporary Art in China

Author: Jiehong Jiang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-07-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9004703608

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Through the perspective of the ‘conformed body’, this groundbreaking book examines the role in art of everyday conformist practices in the People’s Republic of China, such as mass assemblies and bodily trainings and exercises, as well as their impact on people’s perceptions and collective memories. It identifies related artworks, reassesses artistic interpretations with critical reflections, and explores a key origin of artistic productions in post-Mao China. Featuring 200 colour illustrations, the book discusses works by more than 30 internationally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artists, including Ai Weiwei, Geng Jianyi, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Zhang Peili and Zhang Xiaogang.

Apps
Apps

Author: Gerard Goggin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 150953850X

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Since the rise of the smartphone, apps have become entrenched in billions of users' daily lives. Accessible across phones and tablets, watches and wearables, connected cars, sensors, and cities, they are an inescapable feature of our current culture. In this book, Gerard Goggin provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the development of apps as a digital media technology. Covering the technological, social, cultural, and policy dynamics of apps, Goggin ultimately considers what a post-app world might look like. He argues that apps represent a pivowtal moment in the development of digital media, acting as a hinge between the visions and realities of the “mobile,” “cyber,” and “online” societies envisaged since the late 1980s and the imaginaries and materialities of the digital societies that emerged from 2010. Apps offer frames, construct tools, and constitute “small worlds” for users to reorient themselves in digital media settings. This fascinating book will reframe the conversation about the software that underwrites our digital worlds. It is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as for anyone interested in this ubiquitous technology.

Remixing Wong Kar-wai
Remixing Wong Kar-wai

Author: Giorgio Biancorosso

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2024-12-13

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1478060166

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Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films. Drawing on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, Biancorosso contends that Wong’s borrowing is akin to a practice of creative destruction in which Wong becomes a bricoleur who remixes music at hand to create new and complete, self-sustaining statements. By outlining Wong’s modus operandi of indiscriminate borrowing and remixing, Biancorosso prompts readers to reconsider the significance of transforming preexisting music into new compositions for film and beyond.

Freedom of the Press in China Hb
Freedom of the Press in China Hb

Author: GUO

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9789463726115

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Western commentators have often criticized the state of press freedom in China, arguing that individual speech still suffers from arbitrary restrictions and that its mass media remains under an authoritarian mode. Yet the history of press freedom in the Chinese context has received little examination. Unlike conventional historical accounts which narrate the institutional development of censorship and people's resistance to arbitrary repression, this book is the first comprehensive study presenting the intellectual trajectory of press freedom. It sheds light on the transcultural transference and localization of the concept in modern Chinese history, spanning from its initial introduction in 1831 to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. By examining intellectuals' thoughts, common people's attitudes, and official opinions, along with the social-cultural factors that were involved in negotiating Chinese interpretations and practices in history, this book uncovers the dynamic and changing meanings of press freedom in modern China.

Gaming, Simulation and Innovations: Challenges and Opportunities
Gaming, Simulation and Innovations: Challenges and Opportunities

Author: Upinder Dhar

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-07-26

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 3031099591

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This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 52nd International Simulation and Gaming Association Conference, ISAGA 2021, held in Indore, India, during September 6–10, 2021. The 24 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: game design and facilitation; gaming in education; player experience in simulations; and policy formulation and serious games.