Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society

John Alekna

Published by Stanford University Press 2024

Seeking News, Making China

Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society

John Alekna

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503638587

Overview
Contents

About this book

Contemporary developments in communications technologies have overturned key aspects of the global political system and transformed the media landscape. Yet interlocking technological, informational, and political revolutions have occurred many times in the past. In China, radio first arrived in the winter of 1922-23, bursting into a world where communication was slow, disjointed, or non-existent. Less than ten percent of the population ever read newspapers. Just fifty years later, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, news broadcasts reached hundreds of millions of people instantaneously, every day. How did Chinese citizens experience the rapid changes in information practices and political organization that occurred in this period? What was it like to live through a news revolution?

John Alekna traces the history of news in twentieth-century China to demonstrate how large structural changes in technology and politics were heard and felt. Scrutinizing the flow of news can reveal much about society and politics—illustrating who has power and why, and uncovering the connections between different regions, peoples, and social classes. Taking an innovative, holistic view of information practices, Alekna weaves together both rural and urban history to tell the story of the rise of mass society through the lens of communication techniques and technology, showing how the news revolution fundamentally reordered the political geography of China.

Author / Editor information

John Alekna is Assistant Professor of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Peking University.

Reviews

"Through his meticulous research, Alekna has retrieved valuable primary sources purporting to highlight the importance of radio in China from 1919 to 1968.... Alekna portrays an attention-grabbing picture of modern China through his captivating narration and persuasive interpretation of radio and its listeners. Recommended."—P. F. Shan, CHOICE

"Seeking News, Making China is a fresh, ambitious, and engaging meditation on the intersection of mass politics and mass media in twentieth-century China. By charting the emergence of a distinctive Chinese 'newscape,' it effectively challenges venerable assumptions about the relationship between technology, nationhood, and the news."—Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications

"News and propaganda have been central to China's 20th century story. John Alekna's deeply-researched book gives the inside story of how that 'newsscape' was made, providing a powerful new insight into the formation of a society through war and revolution."—Rana Mitter, author of China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

"This is an important book, both for its conceptual sophistication as well as for its rich empirical detail. It makes a convincing case for the centrality of radio-based (and intermedial) communications for understanding how mass politics and mass media became intertwined in modern China, and provides unique contributions not just to new understandings of twentieth century Chinese history, but also to broader discussions in global media history and global histories of technology."—Arunabh Ghosh, author of Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Figures Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
A Note on Names and Transliterations Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
INTRODUCTION The Question of the Sparrows Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 The Newsscape of 1919 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2 Sun Yat-sen, Shanghai, and 43 the Technopolitics of Semicolonial China, 1922–1925 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
3 The Manchurian State Constructs 61 a Newsscape, 1922–1931 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
4 Reading the Radio, 84 Listening in the Streets, 1927–1937 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
5 The Occupation of the Mind, 1937–1945 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
6 Red News and Red Women, 1937–1949 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
7 Socialized Media, 1949–1958 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
8 The Technopolitics of Disorder Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	238
CONCLUSION Desire and the Transformation of the Newsscape Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	258
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 374
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 10
- Other: 10 halftones
Keywords: China; News; Technology; Media History; Twentieth-Century Politics; Broadcasting; Mass politics.

eBook

Published: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781503638587