Convergent Chinese Television Industries (eBook)

This book provides a rich description of the shifting production cultures in convergent Chinese television industries, through the examination of daily production practices, showing how they embody a new set of opportunities and tensions across strategic, programming and individual levels. Lin argues that the current Chinese television landscape is an ideological, cultural and financial paradox in which China's one-party ideological control clashes with consumer-orientated capitalism and technological advancement. These tensions are finely poised between new opportunities for innovation and creative autonomy, and anxiety over political interference marked by censorship and state surveillance. Through its in depth study of ethnographic data across Chinese broadcast and digital streaming sectors (including CCTV, Hunan Broadcasting System, and Tencent Video), this book illuminates how Chinese producers have placed their aspirations for creative freedoms within technological advancements and rhetorical strategies, both demonstrating compliance with ideological control, and leaving room for resistance and resilience to one-party state ideology. Nuanced and timely, Convergent Chinese Television Industries unveils a complex picture of an industry undergoing dramatic transformations.

Dr Lisa Lin is a documentary producer and media scholar in the UK, Singapore and China. Her documentary credits include I Wouldn't Go in There WW2 Specials (National Geographic, 2015), G-Force (Hummingbird Music, 2016), Last Breath (One World Media, 2017) and Frontline Medics Dairies (Channel 4, 2020). Dr. Lin is a Research Fellow in Documentary Practice at Anglia Ruskin University. She holds a PhD in Media and Communications and MA in International Broadcasting from Royal Holloway, University of London.