TELEMODERNITIES

Television and Transforming Lives in Asia

TA N I A LE W I S  FR AN MARTIN  WA N N I N G SU N
Console-ing Passions Television and Cultural Power
A series edited by Lynn Spigel
Telemodernities Television and Transforming
Lives in Asia Tania Lewis, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun

Duke University Press / Durham and London / 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press. All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lewis, Tania, author. | Martin, Fran, [date] author. | Sun, Wanning, [date] author.
Title: Telemodernities : television and transforming lives in Asia / Tania Lewis, Fran
Martin, and Wanning Sun. Other titles: Console-ing passions. Description: Durham :
Duke University Press, 2016. | Series: Console-ing passions : television and cultural power
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016007859 (print)
lccn 2016009285 (ebook)
isbn 9780822361886 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822362043 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373902 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Reality television programs—China. | Reality television programs—India. |
Reality television programs—Taiwan.
Classification: lcc pn1992.8.r43 l49 2016 (print)
lcc pn1992.8.r43 (ebook)
ddc 791.45/655—dc23
lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007859

Cover art:
Cover: Photograph by Kiran Mulenahalli
Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction: Telemodernities / 1

one. Lifestyle Television in Context Media Industries,

Cultural Economies, and Genre Flows / 25

two. Local versus Metropolitan Television in China

Stratification of Needs, Taste, and Spatial Imagination / 52

three. Here, There, and Everywhere Mediascapes, Geographic

Imaginaries, and Indian Television / 82

four. Imagining Global Mobility TLC Taiwan / 106

five. Gurus, Babas, and Daren Popular Experts on Indian and

Chinese Advice TV / 126

six. Magical Modernities Spiritual Advice TV in India and Taiwan / 157

seven. Risky Romance Navigating Late Modern Identities and

Relationships on Indian and Chinese Lifestyle TV / 196

eight. A Self to Believe In Negotiating Femininities in

Sinophone Lifestyle Advice TV / 222

Conclusion: Negotiating Modernities through Lifestyle Television / 254

Notes / 273 Works Cited / 281 Index / 305

Acknowledgments

The large-scale, transnational nature of the multiyear project on which this

book is based is not only the result of the labors of its three authors but also
owes much to a number of other individuals’ valued contributions. First we
would like to thank the many audience members and householders who par-
ticipated in this project and the numerous industry representatives who gave
their time and energy to be interviewed for the study.
We also want to express our deep appreciation for the many onsite and
Australia-based research assistants who supported us during this project, in-
cluding John Alexander, Tripta Chandola, Gin Chee Tong, Yajie Chu, Isabelle
de Solier, Jacinthe Flore, Phyllis Yu-ting Huang, Vikrant Kishore, Amber Lim,
Peihua Lu, Wokar Rigumi, Claire Tsai, Min Wang, Zhonghua Wu, and Juliet W.
Zhou. Tania Lewis would like to particularly thank Delhi-based colleague
Kiran Mullenhalli for his humor and enthusiasm, and his terrific fieldwork
and translation skills, and Wokar Rigumi and Tripta Chandola for their critical
feedback on the Indian material in this book. Thanks also to H. J. Padmaraju
and Hirehalli Devraj for helping recruit interviewees in Tovinkere village in
Southern India and P. Nandagopala for recruiting interviewees in Bengaluru
(Bangalore).
We are also indebted to the generosity and support of a number of academic
colleagues, including Professor John Sinclair, who was a key early collaborator
on this research, Professor Graeme Turner, Professor Koichi Iwabuchi, Profes-
sor Lu Ye, Dr. Kelly Hu, and Dr. Ti Wei.
General thanks also to Dr. Bao Xiaoqun, ceo of Channel Young, smg;
Mr. Han Song, ceo of Bengbu tv; Christine Che, cts Taiwan; Harry Hu,
cts executive vice president, Taiwan; Mimi Wang, former assistant director of
programming at tvbs Taiwan; Yvonne Wu, Da Ai tv Taiwan; Lin Shanshan,
pts Taiwan; and Sophie Yang.
We are especially grateful to Lynn Spigel for considering our book for her
Console-ing Passions series and to the team at Duke University Press, in par-
ticular, Editorial Director Ken Wissoker for his enthusiasm in and support for
our project, and Elizabeth Ault for her supreme professionalism.
Finally, we thank the Australian Research Council for funding the project
dp1094355, “The role of lifestyle television in transforming culture, citizenship
and selfhood: China, Taiwan, Singapore and India” (2010–13), which enabled
the research on which this book is based.

viii / Acknowledgments
Introduction. Telemodernities

On Location
In 2010 the South Indian tv channel Suvarna aired a fish-out-of-water-style
tv program titled Halli Haida Pyateg Bandha (Village boys go to the city),
which follows the adventures of eight lunghi-wearing “tribal youths” extracted
from their villages and introduced to the bright lights of city life while be-
ing partnered with eight urbane and attractive city girls. Offered an instant
consumption-oriented lifestyle makeover, the hapless and somewhat shell-
shocked contestants are taken to their first malls to learn how to shop, taught
handy life skills like how to walk on a cat walk, and coached to perform on stage
in front of an audience. Although in some ways this show is a standard rags-
to-riches reality format—premised on the desirability of learning to exude an
air of cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial individualism—at the same time, the
program also plays on a certain anxiety about a perceived loss of connection
with the authenticity of village life. Indeed, the program followed the success of
an earlier Suvarna show, Pyate Hudgir Halli Life (City girls, village life), where
the story was reversed: eight young female contestants accustomed to living the
urban high life were transported to a hitherto little known South Indian village
to test their capacity to live traditionally for three months.
On the surface, these formats mimic numerous lifestyle swap shows fa-
miliar to Western audiences, from reality shows featuring ordinary urban-
ites struggling with the deprivations of the everyday lives of their forebears
(Colonial House; Frontier House) to morally charged formats where rampant
consumers are transported off to live frugally in developing regions like Africa
(Worlds Apart). But what distinguishes these South Indian shows from their
Euro-American counterparts is their portrayal of a meeting of traditional and
modern cultures and lifestyles within the single nation of India in the present
day. Scenes where contestants learn to be savvy consumers or to dress for
success are played out against the backdrop of competing cultural and religious
identities, urban/rural and socioeconomic divides, and nostalgic yearnings for
traditionalism at a time of rapid sociocultural transformation.
This book is about lifestyle television in Asia and its role in teaching people
how to live. As our discussion of the South Indian examples above suggests, in
Telemodernities we are concerned precisely with this type of programming’s
role in the social and cultural negotiation of modernization and modernities.
For the above examples are far from isolated cases: in recent years, tv screens
across Asia have become host to an explosion of programs aimed at provid-
ing modern lifestyle guidance to viewers, particularly the consumer middle
classes. In this book, through a focus on three key countries—the People’s
Republic of China (PRC or mainland China), India, and Taiwan—we take up
lifestyle-oriented popular factual television as a critical lens through which
to examine shifting and emergent social and cultural formations. The wide
range of life guidance shows we discuss takes in everything from magazine-
style travel programs, to glossy reality shows helping contestants negotiate the
complexities of modern love and dating, to home renovation formats aimed
at aspirational urbanites, and religious lifestyle shows promoting a blend of
spiritualism, entrepreneurialism, and self-help. From enterprising yogic spir-
itualism to cosmopolitan romance scripts negotiated through the family, we
explore these shows’ variegated engagements with cultural modernity across
South and East Asia. Lifestyle television as a recognizable genre is unevenly
distributed across South and East Asia and is not by any means the most pop-
ular or prevalent mode of programming on the small screen. Nevertheless,
the characteristic directness of lifestyle television’s instruction in correct ways
of being—its blatant pedagogies of good taste, appropriate consumption, and
desirable identity—make it a uniquely rich object of study when we seek to
understand dominant and emergent templates for selfhood and constructions
of the good life in a given society.
Another factor in lifestyle television’s significance is the way in which it
articulates to a series of ongoing social and economic changes in Asia today.
Across South and East Asia, the past three decades have seen hyperaccelerated
social, cultural, and economic transformation. Consumer culture increasingly
shapes everyday life as market economies are fostered by (post)socialist states
like China and India, and a dizzying diversity of media and consumer goods
continues to proliferate in those nations where capitalism has been longer

2 / introduction
entrenched, like the four Asian “tiger economies” (Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Singapore, and South Korea). Governments in Asia, as elsewhere in the world,
increasingly address their citizens as individualized, sovereign consumers with
reflexive choices about their lifestyles and identities.
It is against this backdrop that South and East Asia have seen a proliferation
not only of lifestyle television but of a wide range of media aimed at instruct-
ing the middle classes in matters of consumption, taste, and “the good life.”
However, we argue that television plays a particularly central role in Asia,
both as a broadcast and increasingly also as a digital and narrowcast medium.
While Eurocentric media studies narratives now routinely depict television as
a heritage form, in South and East Asia television is far from in decline; on the
contrary, in many Asian countries it represents the most powerful and ubiq-
uitous media form, with large and growing investment from the commercial
and, in some cases, state sector.
These questions of social, political, and economic context and geocultural
location are key to our analysis of lifestyle television. As Ana Cristina Pertierra
and Graeme Turner note in Locating Television, much recent Western scholar-
ship on television in the postbroadcast era has been not only Eurocentric but
also decidedly dislocated in its approach, preoccupied in a fairly abstract way
with the affordances of technical convergence and new media developments
and platforms in a multichannel environment. As a result, they argue, “what
television does—how it is imbricated into the practices of everyday life, what
kinds of social and cultural function it can perform, and how it participates
in the construction of communities—has been much less explored” in the
Western-centric mainstream of global television studies (2013, 10). As these
remarks underline, while on the one hand television content is highly mo-
bile, “ordinary television” (Bonner 2005) is also profoundly connected to the
everyday, the domestic, and the personal, and to intensely localized modes
of address. This is certainly true of lifestyle advice television, which offers a
prime site for critical comparative analyses of specific, situated formations of
lifestyle, modernity, and television cultures. What, for example, is the social
and cultural significance of the appearance of a licensed version of the bbc’s
MasterChef in India, a country battling with ongoing issues of food security
and malnutrition? How should we understand the popularity of a thinly dis-
guised copy of Changing Rooms in China, where the emergence of individu-
alized, consumption-based models of identity are shaped by persistent forms
of collectivist cultural citizenship and a sense of social and familial duty? In
addressing questions like these, the socially and culturally embedded, multi-
perspectival analysis offered in this book responds to Pertierra and Turner’s

introduction / 3
contention that “to be understood in its complexity, television has to be studied
from a range of research approaches and in a diversity of regional and histor-
ical contexts” (2013, 11).1
Moving beyond a geoculturally exceptionalist approach, however, we sug-
gest that Asian popular factual programming as an object of inquiry also offers
insights into the evolving sociocultural role of television more broadly. While
media scholars often ask about the impact of global tv formats on local cul-
tures outside the West, this book poses this question rather differently. With
China and India now becoming major players in global television (and broader
entertainment) industries, how might the experiences of these and other Asian
sites impact on our thinking about global media processes? How does the evo-
lution of lifestyle tv in a variety of national spaces—which need not be limited
to Western European and Anglophone contexts—speak to changing relation-
ships between popular media, audiences, and social, moral, and political en-
gagement? What kinds of mediated civic spaces are emerging in postcolonial,
postsocialist, and established Asian capitalist nation-states grappling with the
potentials and challenges of globalizing commercial media and culture?

Framing Lifestyle: Late Modern

Transformations in Identity and Social Life
A central focus of this book is television’s relationship to projects of
modernity—or projects of modernities, to be more precise. As we elaborate in
detail below, we do not understand television as simply a global distributor of
universal (read Euro-American) models of modernity, as in earlier theories
of cultural imperialism where globalization was often equated with cultural
homogenization. Instead, the “multiple modernities” paradigm that we adopt
as a central framework is underpinned by the idea that modernity is not and
never has been the sole preserve of the West. Studying lifestyle television in
Asia demands that we balance an appreciation of the plurality and specificity
of modern cultures beyond the West, with attentiveness to how the global mo-
bility of lifestyle formats may bespeak certain shared experiences in the (late)
modern world, particularly concerning the transformation of social identity
(Bignell 2005; Kraidy and Sender 2011).
In relation to the latter issue, many scholars writing from Euro-American
perspectives have argued that the rise of lifestyle tv reflects the increasing
dominance of an individualist, consumerist approach to everyday life, in
which selfhood is seen as endlessly malleable—a project to be worked on
and invested in (Wood and Skeggs 2004; Lewis 2007; Redden 2007). Within

4 / introduction
Euro-American contexts, the rise of this pliable conception of the self has been
understood as a shift away from the predictability and structural certainties
of traditional societies, marked by collective identities and communal norms
and values, toward what Anthony Giddens (1991) has called a “post-traditional
society.” The mainstreaming of lifestyle television and lifestyle expertise over
the past decade or so in Western Europe and the developed Anglophone
world has been interpreted as offering new codes for living in an uncertain,
post-traditional social landscape (Lewis 2008). As Giddens argues (1991, 5),
as “reflexively organised life-planning . . . becomes a central feature of the
structuring of self-identity,” people increasingly turn to abstract, rationalized
systems of expertise for guidance, much of which is provided today through
the consumer marketplace (Lury 1996; Rose 1996; Petersen 1997).
Relatedly, Foucauldian-influenced scholarship on governmentality, par-
ticularly Nikolas Rose’s work (1989), has proposed that the emergence of the
lifestyle consumer is linked to new technologies of governing the self in late-
modern Western societies. Rose contends that the rise of neoliberal govern-
ments in many nations in the 1980s (in particular in the United Kingdom and
United States) has seen the figure of the self-governing citizen—an individual
who is constructed as enterprising and self-directed—become a cultural dom-
inant. On television, so the argument goes, such trends are reflected in the
personal, health, and relationship advice offered on moralistic lifestyle-reality
shows like the weight-loss show The Biggest Loser. Here, lifestyle gurus fill the
gap left by the neoliberal state as it passes responsibility for once public con-
cerns like obesity onto self-managing consumer citizens (Lewis 2008; Lewis
2011a; Ouellette and Hay 2008).
The proliferation of lifestyle programming in Western Europe, the United
States, and Australasia can thus be seen as the product of a very particular
historical-ideological moment. But to what extent does the emergence of life-
style media in South and East Asia reflect similar sociopolitical developments?
While we argue that lifestyle media in these contexts undoubtedly do speak
to certain transnational trends associated with the consolidation of consumer
culture and individualizing identities, as outlined above, we are also convinced
that lifestyle media in China, Taiwan, and India need to be understood in
the context of specific sociopolitical and cultural circumstances marked by
distinct and variegated modernities. To develop that line of thought, in the
following section, we offer a brief summary of the multiple modernities par-
adigm, followed by a discussion of the reasons behind our choice to focus on
India, China, and Taiwan. We then offer introductory discussions of the dis-
tinctive modernizing processes that have shaped the public and media cultures

introduction / 5
of these three countries over recent decades. The final section of this chapter
explains how we undertook our research on lifestyle television in these sites.

The Modernities Paradigm

While for Western viewers, competitive dating formats from China, such as
If You Are the One, or Indian wedding makeover shows may, on the surface,
appear to bear many familiar markers of competitive individualism and con-
sumerism, a key argument in this book is that such shows also involve complex
negotiations of social, political, economic, and cultural structures that are em-
bedded in the specific, geolocated histories of modernity in their countries of
production. A major limitation of the “post-traditional” arguments forwarded
by social theorists like Giddens, discussed above, is that they assume a globally
homogeneous experience of modernity. Sociological definitions of modernity
in the Euro-American scholarship conventionally depict it as a fixed constel-
lation of institutional developments, from the industrialization of production
and the rise of capitalist market economies and wage labor to the emergence of
bureaucratically administered states, democratization, the rule of law, and the
emergence of mass media (Wittrock 2000; Gaonkar 2001). Oft-cited modern
cultural transformations include secularization and the rise of scientific think-
ing, the doctrine of progress and self-improvement, the imagination of the
nation as a community, and the detraditionalization of gender roles (Lefebvre
[1971] 2002; Berman 1982; Anderson 1983; Bauman 2000; Eisenstadt 2000;
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Schmidt 2006).
While aspects of these processes are indeed undoubtedly shared—albeit
unevenly, differentially, and unpredictably—across many societies in the world
today, numerous critics agree that classic modernization theory is intrinsi-
cally limited by its tendency to posit Euro-American historical processes as
normative. For example, arguing for “a non-Eurocentric interpretation of the
history of the world-system,” Enrique Dussel (2002, 224) contends that a nar-
row two-hundred-year focus on European modernity effaces the role of early
modern formations elsewhere, such as China and India, in shaping modern
processes. This observation foregrounds the complex, long-standing worlds
of these civilizations not simply as varieties of a singular modernity but as al-
ternative articulations of cultural modernization. Such arguments suggest the
need to conceptualize modernities in the plural, despite the recent hegemony
of Euro-American modernity (J. Abu-Lughod 1989; Ong and Nonini 1997;
L. Lee 1999; Rofel 1999; Eisenstadt 2000; Wittrock 2000; S. Shih 2001; Knauft
2002; Chakrabarty 2007; Kraidy 2008; Shome 2012).

6 / introduction
 This recognition of the plural and variegated nature of modernities pro-
vides a key conceptual framework for our book. Indeed, we are primarily inter-
ested in engaging with the various modalities of Asian lifestyle programming
discussed in this book as entry points into understanding the complexity of
Asian modernities. As we illustrate in the chapters that follow, the local, na-
tional, and regional particularities of lifestyle advice television across the range
of Asian contexts that we examine reinforce our conviction that people and
institutions engage, produce, and mediate modern ways of thinking and being
in geoculturally specific ways. Such engagements are shaped both by nationally
specific state, economic, and political drives and by more recent global-scale
processes (Larkin 1997; Liechty 2003; Kang 2004; Keane 2004a; L. Abu-Lughod
2008; Gerow 2010; Sundaram 2010; Wen 2013). However, in Asian media con-
texts the rise of discourses of self-improvement, individualized identity, and
reflexive selfhood often mark the parallel (and at times distinctly divergent)
evolution of these late modern concepts rather than a simple diffusion from,
or convergence toward, any putative Western center (Beck and Grande 2010;
Martin and Lewis 2016).
Taking seriously the plural and variegated character of cultural moder-
nities becomes particularly urgent when dealing with the complex cultural
and political economies of Asian media. East Asia is widely recognized as a
semiautonomous media region whose transborder flows of tv dramas, variety
shows, manga, anime, pop music, and commercial cinema knit together a
specific “East Asian cultural imagination” of modernity (Iwabuchi 2002, 2004;
Keane, Fung, and Moran 2007; Chua 2012). The wide transnational reach of
Bollywood cinema, music, celebrity culture, and aesthetics provides another
obvious challenge to Eurocentric diffusionist models (Athique 2010). In this
context, it is clearly not tenable to assume that, following the partial erosion
of national broadcast television and the increase in transnational televisual
flows of various kinds, television—conceived as a singular, global force—must
necessarily be advancing the worldwide spread of Western-style cultures and
identities. Instead, adopting a multiple modernities paradigm cues us to pay
detailed attention to how television is actually produced and consumed in
specific contexts, and to remain alert to variations from Euro-American mod-
els in the visions of modern selfhood and citizenship that television projects.
Our use of the term telemodernities for this book’s title puns on the two as-
sociations of the tele- prefix: tele as in television, and tele from the Greek τῆλε,
meaning “at a distance.” On the one hand, this latter sense of telemodernities
relates to our intention to continue the work of provincializing Anglophone
television studies, and to demonstrate the importance of centering formations

introduction / 7
of televisual modernity located at a geocultural distance from Western Eu-
rope, North America, and Australasia (Murphy and Kraidy 2003; Chakrabarty
2007). On the other hand, the telemodernities concept also implies that in-
ternal to modernity itself is a certain sense of subjective distance: modernity
as an ideal to which one aspires rather than a state that is straightforwardly
embodied. Given lifestyle television’s repeated narratives of personal trans-
formation, self-empowerment, and nimble adaptation to changing social
and economic conditions, the aspirational character of modern formations
of identity is clearly central to many examples of the genre being produced
today—to some extent regardless of their countries of origin (Weber 2009).
However, the concrete manifestations of these modern dreams in particular
media contexts—dreams of ideal selfhood, good taste, appropriate consump-
tion, optimally functioning relationships, proper gender—are very location-
specific.
Eric Ma, among others, has observed the distinctive sharpness of cultural
modernity as an aspirational ideal in developing countries in particular (Ma
2012; see also Knauft 2002; Robbins 2002; Karlström 2004; Mazzarella 2012).
Ma’s example is of Hong Kong as an embodiment of the dream of moderniza-
tion for audiences of Hong Kong media in southern China’s cities in the 1970s
and 1980s. The locational specificity of people’s modern dreams is undeniable,
and is indeed often connected to a sense of their homeland’s relative position-
ing in a global hierarchy of economic development. This is what Bruce M.
Knauft refers to as “the force of the modern as an ideology of aspiration and
differential power” (2002, 33); Pertierra and Turner concur, noting the im-
mense force generated by the desire for modernity as channeled through tele-
vision but also emphasizing that such a desire “works differently depending
on where you are” (2013, 112). We take the locational specificity of people’s
modern aspirations as axiomatic: it is these specificities that we explore in the
chapters that follow.

South and East Asian Modernities: China, Taiwan, and India

In the following sections, we offer a brief snapshot of the recent histories of mo-
dernity in China, Taiwan, and India, the three sites chosen for this study. In par-
ticular, we outline the distinctive social, cultural, and economic backgrounds
for the emergence of middle-class formations in these countries as a broad
context for understanding their lifestyle television cultures. Given lifestyle
television’s recurrent preoccupations with consumption, middle-class identity,
people’s emotional and economic survival in times of rapid social change, and

8 / introduction
the individualization of social life and civic responsibility, this outline of the
basic conditions attending Chinese, Taiwanese, and Indian modernities pro-
vides crucial context for the detailed analyses that follow in the book’s chapters.
Our relatively narrow range of focus sites is obviously not intended to pres-
ent a comprehensive—or indeed even a representative—picture of lifestyle
television across Asia as a whole. Instead, we have chosen our sites based on
the principle of including the region’s two largest media markets and the na-
tions that are currently experiencing the fastest growing middle classes and
consumer cultures (China and India). Taiwan is included as a representative
of the earlier tiger economy nations that experienced industrialization, urban-
ization, and economic growth several decades prior, whose economies have
experienced slowing growth in more recent years (Chua 2016). In chapter 8,
we also draw upon audience research conducted in another tiger economy
nation—Singapore—as a way of exploring the wider transnational reach of
Taiwanese media culture in Sinophone Asia.
In addition to its role as a representative of the group of longer-established
(post)industrial economies and national middle classes in the Asian region,
there are also two more reasons behind our decision to include Taiwan in our
study. First, disproportionately to its relatively small size, Taiwan remains a
major player in transnational Chinese-language media circuits in East Asia
and worldwide, especially through its production of Mandarin pop music
and television (Chua 2012). While China remains a net importer of popular
media by a wide margin (Chua 2012), Taiwanese and Hong Kong commercial
media, known colloquially as Gang-Tai (Hong Kong–and–Taiwan) media, are
widely influential throughout the transnational Sinophone world as vectors
of what Eric Ma has called “satellite” modernity; that is, hybrid imaginaries
of modernity that are Western-inflected and aspirational but also regionally
specific (Ma 2012, 11–31; see also Kraidy 2007). Second and relatedly, as we will
see, Taiwan television culture has a strong influence on television culture in
China in particular, through its export of commercial entertainment genres,
the cross-strait outflow of tv talents, and the direct consumption of Taiwan-
produced content by Chinese audiences, today largely via online media piracy.
In this sense, our focus on Taiwan television genres and trends offers enriching
information on developments also affecting television in mainland China.

introduction / 9
Chinese Modernity: The Tensions
and Contradictions of Postsocialist Culture
China is often held up by multiple modernities theorists as the ultimate
exemplar of an alternative, non-European modernity: until the eighteenth
century, Europeans and neighboring Asian powers alike recognized China
as a major economic, political, and cultural power (Dussel 2002). Since the
turn of the twentieth century and the relative economic, military, and cultural
hegemony of European formations of modernity, China’s leaders and elites
have dreamed of building a strong and modern China and restoring its former
glory (Schwarcz 1986). As a direct response to imperial subjugation by the
West, this modernization dream was fueled by nationalism. When the Chinese
Communist Party took power in 1949, it promoted a vision of a modernized
and unified nation, consisting of the Han majority and fifty-five other “ethnic
minorities,” all of which were loyal to the notion of China as a sovereign entity
(C. Shih 2003). The standardization of the national language (Putonghua) and
the simplification of the classic Chinese script during this era were crucial
dimensions of achieving national unity and modernization. In the decades
of socialism, with its collectivist farming, Soviet-style central planning, and
isolation from the world economy, Chinese society was egalitarian but poor
and underdeveloped (Goodman 2013). Subjecting its population to one polit-
ical movement after another, China emerged in the mid-1970s with the lowest
per capita income in the world, and with living standards that had remained
stagnant for several decades (Naughton 2006).
The three decades of economic reforms that started in the late 1970s
brought about an effective end to the socialist vision of modernity. Adopting
developmental strategies and embracing the logic of market liberalization,
from 1979 China opened itself to the world, welcomed foreign investment, set
up special economic zones, and in 2001 joined the World Trade Organization
(wto). Between 1978 and 2004, China’s gdp grew at an average rate of 9.4
percent per annum, with its per capita gdp growing at 8 percent (Shirk 2007).
The result is nothing short of staggering. China is now the world’s second-
largest economy, with a national gdp of over US$9 trillion in 2013, and a per
capita gdp (ppp) of $10,011 (International Monetary Fund 2013). It has had the
highest average annual growth rate in the world over the past two decades, and
is the world’s largest energy consumer. China also boasts of being the world’s
largest exporter, second-largest importer, third-largest trader in services, and
second-largest trading nation (Shambaugh 2013, 156).
Rapid economic growth has considerably reduced overall poverty. A World
Bank statistic indicates that in 1990, China still had 360 million people living

10 / introduction
below the poverty line, but in 2011, only 170 million people lived on less than
$1.25 per day (Vairon 2013). At the same time, however, the gap between the
rich and poor has widened. In fact, three decades of economic reforms have
transformed China from one of the most equal societies in Asia and the world
to one of the most unequal ones (C. Lee and Selden 2007). With a third of the
nation’s wealth held by 1 percent of its citizens, it is widely felt in China that eco-
nomic inequality could be a serious trigger for social instability (Kaiman 2014).2
Both the spectacular economic achievement and the deepening of inequal-
ity are results of China having pursued a neoliberal-style economic develop-
ment trajectory. However, this is quite distinct from American-style economic
and political neoliberalism. On the one hand, anthropologists and observers of
China’s cultural industries have produced ample evidence pointing to myriad
neoliberal aspects of governance and subject formation (Rofel 2007; Yan 2008;
Zhang and Ong 2008, Zhao 2008b, Hoffman 2010; Hong 2010; Ren 2010, 2013;
Sun 2014). But on the other hand, China attributes its status as the main engine
of global economic growth to the “China Model,” which represents a unique
alternative to the Washington Consensus approach to politics and economics
(Callahan 2013, 66). Indeed, China remains a country where the party-state
holds a considerable portion of the country’s fixed assets, and where liberal
institutions, such as the rule of law, transparent markets, and democracy,
are largely missing. As Ching Kwan Lee observes, engaging critically with
Harvey’s (2005) proposal that China offers an example of neoliberalism with
“Chinese characteristics,” China has never had the prehistory of embed-
ded economic liberalism from which neoliberalism purportedly grows out
(2014, 245).
Nevertheless, the state-led project of instituting a market economy has fun-
damentally reshaped social and cultural life in China since the end of the 1970s.
A fundamental difference between socialist and capitalist visions of modernity
lies in their legitimation of social identities. Whereas workers, peasants, and sol-
diers embodied the most legitimate social groups in China’s socialist discourses
under Maoism, in the reforms era, they have been replaced by entrepreneurs,
professionals, and managers (Chen and Goodman 2013a, 1). In China’s cities,
the middle classes are clearly expanding. The East Asian Middle Class Project
(eamc), a transnational collaborative research project led by Hsin-huang Mi-
chael Hsiao, estimated that by 2006—leaving aside the vast, relatively impover-
ished rural hinterland—the new middle class (professionals, managers, and gov-
ernment officials) accounted for 18.8 percent of the population, the old middle
class (employers and owner-operators with small staffs, and the self-employed)
19.6 percent, and the marginal middle class (low white-collar workers or routine

introduction / 11
workers) 25.4 percent (Li 2014). Although the definition and size of the middle
class remain contested, the reappearance of such a class in the last decades of
the twentieth century was seen as politically, socially, and economically useful
to the party-state. Considered as a stabilizing force, the middle class is seen
as more likely than the underclass to support the authoritarian regime, thus
hindering political radicalization; it functions as a buffer between the upper
class and the underclass, thus ensuring social stability; and it constitutes the
most active consumer group, thus stimulating economic growth (Li 2013). It is
precisely for this reason that the development of a middle class is considered as
a “state project of managing risks in Chinese society” (Ren 2013, 9).
Due to its perceived importance, it is not surprising that sociological work
inside mainland China has paid significant attention to the middle class. In
fact, the sociological categorization of the middle class in much of the state-
funded research (for example, from the China Academy of Social Sciences) has
been crucial in turning China’s middle class into a normative category (Green-
halgh 2005). Such processes of legitimation cannot be completed without also
normalizing certain values and lifestyles as proper to the middle class in the
realm of consumption and everyday practices. Correspondingly, the reforms
era has seen the socialist logic of class identity as the privileged measure of per-
sonhood (peasant, worker, or soldier good; bourgeois bad) effectively inverted
by a new discourse of “human quality” (suzhi) that valorizes education, culti-
vation, competition, and broadly middle-class cultural norms (Bakken 2000;
Kipnis 2006). Børge Bakken (2000) observes that the now-pervasive discourse
of suzhi marks the establishment of a new suite of “exemplary norms” to which
individuals are held accountable, as the state attempts to impose social order
through population management at both micro- and macroscales during the
chaotic process of accelerating modernization. Anthropological work has
shown that in contrast to the putatively suzhi-deficit rural populace, middle-
class, urban, educated professionals are considered “sites of high levels of
suzhi” (Hoffman 2010, 105; see also Anagnost 2004; Jacka 2006; Yan 2008; Sun
2009). An understanding of how suzhi discourse makes reforms-era China an
“exemplary society,” by idealizing a type of personhood associated with urban
modernity (Fong 2007, 86), has obvious resonance in our investigation of the
pedagogies of life advice television in the following chapters.

12 / introduction
Taiwanese Modernity: Neoliberal Transition
in a Postindustrial Tiger Economy
The Republic of China that today occupies Taiwan was originally founded
in 1911 on the Chinese mainland. It moved to exile on Taiwan with the Kuo-
mintang (kmt, or Chinese Nationalist Party) in the late 1940s, when the kmt
army and leadership fled to the island following their defeat by Mao Zedong’s
Communist forces in the Chinese civil war. Over the Cold War decades that
followed, Taiwan’s totalitarian regime, headed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-
shek, was supported politically, militarily, and economically by the United
States as part of its strategy of creating a right-wing, capitalist bulwark against
the spread of Communism in the Pacific. In significant part, it was this U.S.
economic support and military protection that enabled Taiwan to number
among the Asian tiger economies—along with Singapore, South Korea, and
Hong Kong—that underwent rapid economic growth through industrializa-
tion in this postwar period. In Taiwan’s case, these developments took place
within a decentralized industrial structure based on small- and medium-sized
family-based enterprises (smes), overseen by the kmt developmental state
(A. Lee 2004). Between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s, culture, media, and
politics in Taiwan were strictly controlled by the state, based on the politi-
cal principle of anti-Communism and the cultural principle of ensuring the
dominance of the Mandarin-speaking northern Chinese culture of the kmt
regime, in opposition to both the Japanese language and culture of the island’s
former colonizers (1895–1945) and the southern Chinese Minnan and Hakka
languages and cultures of the majority of the island’s inhabitants.
Since the mid-1980s, the old statist model has shifted toward what some
characterize as a neoliberal transition (Tsai 2001), with economic liberal-
ization, the privatization of public-sector enterprises, and the introduc-
tion of market-oriented labor reforms. From the mid-1990s, a new wave of
economic restructuring saw Taiwan’s economy shift away from industrial
manufacturing—which migrated across the strait to mainland China—and
toward the service sector, which today constitutes the center of gravity of
Taiwan’s economic structure (dgbas 2010, 16). At the same time, economic
growth slowed, due in large part to the massive capital outflows to China (Tsai,
Fan, Hsiao, and Wang 2014, 33). In 2012, gdp growth sat at just 1.32 percent
(Executive Yuan 2013). Transforming from an agrarian to postindustrial soci-
ety in about four decades, Taiwan, like Korea, has been aptly described as an
example of compressed modernity (Chang and Song 2010).
Politically, socially, and culturally, Taiwan saw immense transformations in
the late twentieth century, following the revocation of martial law by Chiang

introduction / 13
Kai-shek’s more liberal son, Chiang Ching-kuo, in 1987. The new middle
classes that emerged from the economic growth of the preceding decades
tended to favor democratization; this helped fuel the far-reaching political
changes of the post–martial law period (Hsiao 2014). These include the rise
of a multiparty democracy with direct presidential election, which resulted in
the first non-kmt president, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive
Party (dpp), being elected in 2000. In this same period, the political censor-
ship of media was lifted and state regulation of culture virtually abandoned.
A vibrant civil society emerged, along with a wide range of social movements
from trade unionism to environmentalism to advocacy for the rights of the
island’s indigenous peoples, an antinuclear movement, feminism(s), and
queer activism. Minnan and Hakka languages and cultures emerged strongly
in revivalist movements after the long decades of suppression by the old kmt
regime; these movements have had significant, lasting impacts on televisual
and other media, especially in their new linguistic pluralism. The same period
witnessed Taiwan’s intensifying interlinkage into transnational cultural, com-
modity, labor, and media circuits, and the rapid expansion and diversification
of its media cultures following commercialization and deregulation in the
early 1990s (see chapter 1).
Notwithstanding what some see as evidence of global neoliberal trends
in Taiwan’s government’s economic strategies in recent decades, it is import-
ant to note that, as with China, many commentators argue for the specificity
of Taiwan’s engagement with economic neoliberalism. It is seen as markedly
different from neoliberalism as manifested in Euro-American contexts due
to the persistent structural legacies of the developmental state: like several
other comparable examples in the Asian region, it is argued, Taiwan’s econ-
omy might therefore be better described as postdevelopmental or neodevel-
opmental (Kong 2005; Chen and Li 2012; Wang 2012). In the cultural sphere,
however (again, as is the case in China), it is undeniable that ideologies broadly
consonant with neoliberalism—self-responsibilization, a privatized conceptu-
alization of the social, the evaluation of human value in commodity terms, and
so on—have become increasingly influential, as our analyses in the following
chapters explore (Chen and Chien 2009; Pazderic 2013; Thomas and Yang
2013; Yang 2016).
As a result of the economic and social histories sketched out above, today,
Taiwanese society is dominated by its middle classes. In 2013, Taiwan’s gdp
sat at US$494.85 billion, with a per capita gdp (ppp) of $40,392 (International
Monetary Fund 2013). In postindustrial Taiwan, social inequality is markedly
lower than across the strait in developing China: in 2011 its gini coefficient

14 / introduction
sat at 0.34, compared to China’s 0.74 (cia 2013; Kaiman 2014). In 2006 over 70
percent of Taiwan’s working population fell within the middle classes. These
comprised 27 percent in the new middle class (professionals, managers, and
government officials), 20 percent in the old middle class (small employers,
small owner-operators, and the self-employed), and 23.1 percent in the mar-
ginal middle class (low white-collar workers or routine workers) (Li 2013; Tsai,
Fan, Hsiao, and Wang 2014). Taiwan’s expansive and well-established middle
classes of today have consolidated as a result of upward class mobility enabled
by business opportunities flowing from Taiwan’s state-led industrialization
during the 1960s to 1990s, coupled with rising levels of education over this pe-
riod (Hsiao 2010, 254). As the analyses in the chapters that follow demonstrate,
media produced in Taiwan and for Taiwanese audiences is, unsurprisingly,
dominated by broadly middle-class interests.

Indian Modernity: From Postcoloniality

to the Contested Middle Class
The third country of focus in this book is India, a nation whose contemporary
media industries and institutions have emerged against the backdrop of a com-
plex and extended engagement with globalization and vernacular modernities.
Like China, India has played an important role in the longue durée of world
history (Dussel 2002). With its key position in the spice trade, one of the main
trades in the early world economy, it has also long been the site of European
colonization. The expansion of British power in much of India in the early
nineteenth century saw it transition from military-commercial domination
(under the rule of the East India company) to a system of colonial governance
(Guha 1997), with the British carving out the dominion into a manageable
territory with maps, trains, and the introduction of demographic surveys
(Prakash 1999). Colonial governance saw the British educating a class of in-
digenous elites as civil servants to mediate colonial rule (Chatterjee 1993),
though this elite also sought to reclaim ancient Indic knowledge in order to
articulate new modernities of their own (Prakash 1999). These largely cultural
endeavors at salvaging Indian self-identity preceded the rise of a more radical
generation of politicized leaders, unleashing the mass movements that would
lead to India’s independence in 1947 (Chatterjee 1986).
The first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, driven by the pragmatics of
nation-building, saw the state as the engine of change that would haul the
nation into industrial modernity (Corbridge and Harriss 2013). Propelled
by Nehru’s famous maxim, “dams [are] the temples of modern India,” the

introduction / 15
postindependence decade saw the creation of large public-sector companies,
heavy industries, and a range of major public works. The developmental state,
however, was fraught with difficulties, arguably due in part to its failure to
mobilize big business toward developmental goals along the lines of state-led
industrialization in East Asia, such as the rapid industrialization and economic
success of South Korea (Chibber 2003). As a result, the economy languished
from the 1950s to the 1980s at the infamous 3.5 percent “Hindu rate of growth.”
In 1980 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched pro-business reforms
that were subsequently aggressively expanded by her successor Rajiv Gandhi,
who promoted and embraced the growing strength of domestic capitalists
(Kohli 2006). A balance of payments crisis in 1991 drove India to deregulatory,
pro–free market reforms in the changed global context of a disintegrating
Soviet Union and the imminent arrival of the wto (Corbridge and Harriss
2013). With the dismantling of the planned economy, market liberalization
saw growth rates pick up to 6 percent in the 1990s and 8 percent in the 2000s,
though rates have dropped to around 5 percent in recent years.
The benefits of economic liberalization have been bitterly debated, with
a broad consensus now emerging that most of the post-1991 growth is owed
to the 1980s reforms (Rodrik and Subramanian 2004), which achieved
poverty reduction and job creation unequalled in the post-1991 period
(Chandrashekhar and Ghosh 2002). Contrary to the pattern observed in other
late-industrializing countries, the post-1991 period only saw minor expansion
in manufacturing in the large-scale skill-intensive industries (Kotwal, Bharat,
and Wilima 2011). On the other hand, the service sector grew exponentially,
with the information technology (it) boom creating business services within
the domestic economy and outsourcing jobs from developed nations on the
back of India’s cheap, educated labor pool (Kotwal, Bharat, and Wilima 2011).
India’s contemporary rhetoric of integration into global markets has to be seen
within this landscape of lopsided growth that has privileged skilled labor and
largely reinforced existing class disparities.
As in China, this pairing of economic growth with a deepening of social
inequality is often seen as the result of the pursuit of neoliberal policies. Again,
though, there has been much debate as to whether this fully accounts for the
complexity and specificity of what has taken place in the Indian context. For
example, Akhil Gupta and Aradhana Sharma (2006) discuss the limitations
of applying the Foucauldian concept of neoliberal governmentality in a post-
colonial state where the coexistence of poverty and a neoliberalized econ-
omy has seen the rise of both state welfare and postwelfare “empowerment”

16 / introduction
programs aimed at the rural poor. Meanwhile, Patrick Neveling (2014) has
challenged conceptions of the Nehruvian state as the radical other of reform-
ist post-1991 India, showing that it already included significant and powerful
institutional arrangements that might be labeled neoliberal. Similarly, there is
a wide range of opinion on the degree to which neoliberalism as an everyday
cultural logic is shaping people’s lives in India today. Nandini Gooptu intro-
duces her edited collection, Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India, by noting
its pervasiveness in current public discourse: “In India . . . multiple agents
and institutions (state and non-state) [seek] to create heightened aspirations
and expectations, promoting the ideology of self-making, providing self-help
and self-development tools, [and] purveying the evidence of success of self-
propelled individuals as [a] motivational instrument” (2013, 8–9).
At the same time, Steve Derné’s longitudinal research from the 1980s to
the 2000s on young male film viewers in a midsize town in Northern India
suggests that the impact and experience of global ideologies of neoliberalism
and individualism are highly stratified (Derné 2008). He argues that while
“cultural globalization” has seen the Indian elite embrace forms of transitional
cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism, such late modern cultural trans-
formations have not dramatically impacted what he calls the locally oriented
“ordinary middle class”; that is, non-English-speaking professionals, students,
and successfully self-employed people, as well as drivers and clerks, who argu-
ably form the bulk of the Indian solidly middle and lower middle class.
Derné’s observations regarding the need to recognize the very different
experiences and lifestyles of cosmopolitan upper-middle-class urbanites
versus more ordinary middle-class Indians points to the complexity of the
term middle class in the Indian context, with class hierarchies continuing to be
shaped by residual caste and colonial influences (Deshpande 2004). Estimated
to be anywhere between seventy and four hundred million by differing bench-
marks, using the yardstick of a per capita daily income of above US$8–40,
the middle class has grown from 5.7 percent of the population in 2001 to 12.8
percent in 2010 (153 million) (Shukla 2010). In India, extremely uneven eco-
nomic development has seen the poverty rate reduce much more slowly com-
pared with China. The incidence of people subsisting on $1.25 a day declined
from 55 percent in 1990 to around 40 percent in 2005, with this impoverished
section of the population still being a long way from reaching anything near
middle-class status (Chen and Ravallion 2004). Meanwhile, the middle classes
themselves experience significant precarity. As Jan Nijman shows, data on the
distribution of household incomes in Mumbai demonstrate that while the

introduction / 17
upper-middle-class incomes have grown relative to the total, lower-middle-
class incomes have shrunk, while much of the growth in consumption in the
urban middle classes is credit based (Nijman 2006).
Given this context, Leela Fernandes argues that the rise of an entrepre-
neurial, cosmopolitan middle class in India is perhaps best understood in dis-
cursive rather than purely economic terms, as the production of a distinctive
social and political identity that represents and lays claims to the benefits of
neoliberalization (Fernandes 2006). Post 1991, the urban middle classes and
their associated consumer goods and increasingly globally connected life-
styles have become the symbol of a new liberalizing India, replacing state-led
modernization, rural development, and uplifting images of rural workers as
symbols of national pride and progress (Mazzarella 2003; Fernandes 2006;
Brosius 2010). In contemporary India, then—as in China and Taiwan—the
increasing naturalization of representations of consumerist, urban, middle-
class lifestyles on television, while not necessarily widely matched by people’s
material experiences, may contribute significantly to shaping the social hori-
zons and aspirations of many ordinary people. It is this possibility that we
investigate in depth in the chapters that follow.

Researching Lifestyle Television:

Contexts of Production and Consumption
The project that this book came out of involved a three-pronged approach to
studying lifestyle television, designed to enable us to compare, contrast, and
trace possible links and flows between our sites across the areas of television
content, production, and reception. We employ the term lifestyle television to
embrace a range of programs airing on both daytime and evening television.
This includes everything from magazine and variety shows incorporating life
advice segments, to cooking, health, home renovation, and personal makeover
programs. As we will see, adopting this generic term is not without its diffi-
culties, in relation both to different televisual conventions and to the varied
meanings of lifestyle across these sites. However, in this book we adopt the
term as a starting point for comparison and critical reflection.
The first part of our three-pronged approach was a series of industry stud-
ies. Between 2008 and 2011, we conducted a total of forty-four in-depth, semi-
structured interviews with television professionals (14 in China; 18 in India;
9 in Taiwan; 3 in Singapore). We conducted these interviews in Shanghai,
Bengbu (in Anhui province in mideastern China), Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore,
Taipei, and Singapore, targeting a mixture of programming heads with their

18 / introduction
big-picture take on programming strategies, and on-the-ground producers
and other professional staff, across a range of public, commercial, and cable
channels as well as independent production houses. These industry studies
aimed to flesh out the regional industry history of lifestyle programming, to
access information about the production context of lifestyle tv, and to map
the role played by television producers as cultural intermediaries who shape
the values promoted by lifestyle shows. In India and China, it was impossible
to capture a comprehensive picture of all lifestyle content produced and con-
sumed across national, regional, and municipal levels. We therefore chose to
focus our industry studies on one major metropolis and media center in each
country (Shanghai and Mumbai), plus one smaller regional city (Bengbu in
China and the southern city of Bangalore in India). This allowed us to capture
some sense of the diversity of television cultures in these massive media mar-
kets and also, importantly, to offer a partial corrective to the general neglect of
nonmetropolitan sites in extant English-language studies of television in these
countries. Insights gleaned from these industry interviews into the production
contexts of the lifestyle advice shows that we analyze in our chapters are woven
into our discussions throughout the book, especially chapter 1.
Our second research method involved textual studies of a range of free-
to-air, cable, and satellite lifestyle programs, including both daytime and
primetime programming, from each of our main sites. Between 2009 and
2014, we purchased and recorded hundreds of hours of programming across
a wide variety of genres, the critical contextual analysis of which forms a cen-
tral component of the chapters that follow. Given the diffusion of lifestyle
advice-related content across a wide range of genres in the countries on which
we focus, and the relative lack of a clearly defined lifestyle genre in some of
them, we had to cast a wide net in our recording strategy. Our principle was
to sample any nonfictional, non-news programming that incorporated direct
advice to the viewer on the proper execution of everyday life activities. Us-
ing a mix of satellite and online feeds, dvd purchases, and recordings made
with the help of our in-country research assistants, we archived everything
from magazine-format daytime television on cooking and housekeeping; to
prime-time comic variety shows from Taiwan with life advice sections embed-
ded among the games, quizzes, and other hijinks; to the far straighter moral
pedagogies of cctv’s psychological advice and personal makeover formats
in China; and to morning yoga shows in India hosted by religious gurus. We
then drew on this massive archive to refine our sense of the dominant genres
and patterns in each country, and selected examples for analysis based on both
the centrality of particular genres and themes (for example, yangsheng [health]

introduction / 19
shows in China, variety formats in Taiwan, and religious lifestyle television in
India), and the popularity of specific programs, in both urban and rural sites.
Our key question regarding our selected examples is how the programs make
imaginable particular configurations of identity and lifestyle.
The third component of our method consisted of audience studies. Be-
tween 2011 and 2013, we conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with
viewers of lifestyle advice programming in Shanghai (32 viewers), Bengbu
(8 viewers), Mumbai (18 household interviews with 36 viewers), Tovinkere,
southern India (16 household interviews with 34 viewers), Bangalore (2 view-
ers), Taipei (30 viewers), and Singapore (16 viewers).3 Our strategies with the
China and India audience studies mirrored those adopted in the industry
and content studies, focusing again on both metropolitan and regional sites.
In the audience interviews, we sought to understand how different viewers
interpret and subjectively relate to the lifestyle programming that they ha-
bitually consume; how the cultural, linguistic, gendered, and socioeconomic
specificity of viewers’ existing social identities affects their interpretation of the
programs; and whether, and if so how, the consumption of lifestyle programs
relates to viewers’ elaboration of social identities and lifestyle practices in each
location. The audience studies provide some of the richest, most complex data
generated by this project. Viewer interactions with the programs in question
constitute the key moment in which lifestyle television as media form(s) in-
tersect directly with identity, subjectivity, and everyday practices; since that
intersection between media and identity is the ultimate focus of our project,
discussion of the audience studies constitutes a central focus in several of the
chapters that follow.
As is implicit in the discussion above, the multisite research project on
which this book is based is centrally structured by a transnational orientation.
We have approached television not (only) as a series of national industries and
apparatuses but also as an inherently transnational form that is marked by flows
of content, talent, genres, and ideas across the borders of nation-states. The
chapters that follow show how cross-border flows are often of defining signifi-
cance within local manifestations of lifestyle tv (Chinese copies of American
lifestyle makeover formats like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy; the outflow of
Taiwanese tv talents to China and concomitant cross-strait spread of Taiwan-
ese tv genres and styles; Indian versions of global formats such as the Master-
Chef franchise and The Biggest Loser). Beyond the content of our research,
though, our research method has also been marked—and challenged—by the
transnationality of its operations. Funded by the Australian Research Coun-
cil, our project had its institutional location in Australia, with the central

20 / introduction
investigators employed in Australian universities, from where we had to find
ways of researching television overseas. And notwithstanding the intensifica-
tion of its movements beyond national borders via satellite, international cable,
and online delivery (Chadha and Kavoori 2012), we were quickly reminded that
television remains a medium whose flows are strongly channeled and directed
by geospatial technologies and geographically delimited markets.
The project faced major technical challenges in capturing domestic tv
content from a distance. For instance, to capture Chinese content, we ulti-
mately installed a 2.3-meter-wide pole-mounted mesh satellite dish on top of
a building at the University of Melbourne. Tuned to the seven relevant locally
accessible satellites and routed through a baroque techno-legal configuration
involving meters of in-wall cabling, a set-top box, a television, a hard-drive
recorder, a personal computer (pc), and a public liability insurance purchase
lest the dish detach itself from the six-story roof and descend onto students
below, the dish allowed us to record a high-quality feed from some channels in
mainland China, and a couple in Taiwan (though during the life of the project,
more and more of the Chinese programs became available via video archives
on channel websites). At the time of our research, however, local Bengbu tele-
vision was utterly inaccessible in Australia, so we relied on our in-country
research assistants to make dvd recordings, which they then mailed to us.
For India, we accessed lifestyle programming via a domestic satellite dish and
through a commercial subscription service delivered via Internet, and also
sourced key shows via the now extensive range of catch-up television offered
online by commercial channels in India, as well as via recordings provided by
in-country research assistants. For Taiwan, we followed the lead of Melbourne’s
diasporic Taiwanese community and used an informal, gray, Internet-based
distribution system (Lobato 2012, 95–109), purchasing an annual subscription
to a service that delivered a pixelated feed of Taiwanese domestic television
(more than 150 channels) live to pc, via an unlocking program provided on a
usb stick. Such complex exigencies of simply getting access to overseas televi-
sion continually brought home to us the still-located nature of tv. We suspect
that this very practical issue may be one reason why there have been so few
in-depth multisited studies of television to date.

Structure of the Book

While the chapters in this book can be read as stand-alone essays, we have
structured the book to be ideally engaged as a whole, with each chapter con-
necting to, building on, and responding to conceptual frames and questions

introduction / 21
introduced earlier. This introduction and chapter 1 introduce the key concep-
tual, theoretical, and empirical contexts underpinning the book. Following
this introductory chapter, chapter 1 discusses the political economy of lifestyle
programming in China, India, and Taiwan. Combining policy analysis with
institutional and historical snapshots, interviews with industry staffers, and
mapping of television schedules and ratings, we outline the political, eco-
nomic, and cultural forces that have shaped the rise of lifestyle-oriented tv
programming in our three focus sites.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 pivot around the question of imaginative geographies.
Drawing from our interviews with viewers of lifestyle advice tv in China,
India, and Taiwan, this section of the book focuses on how people’s engage-
ments with lifestyle television involve imagining place at a range of scales, from
the link between regional localities and national metropolises to the relation
between identification with a national homeland versus the alluring vision
of limitless global mobility. Chapter 2 examines the complex, multiscalar na-
ture of Chinese television through a discussion of metropolitan and regional
lifestyle television industries, with a focus on two channels: Shanghai tv and
Bengbu tv. Studies of Chinese television often betray an urban, technological,
and class bias, ignoring formations of local media cultures below the scale of
the province (Sun and Chio 2012). This chapter addresses this analytical and
methodological gap in conceptualizing Chinese mediascapes, discussing a
range of geographic imaginaries, and in the process exploring the links be-
tween lifestyle formats, structures of taste and perceived needs, and place.
Chapter 3 examines another vast televisual landscape, that of India. This
chapter maps the shifting and varied constructions of place, space, and socio-
temporalities that have formed Indian tv, noting that questions of scale in India
are strongly shaped by social and cultural distinction, with media markets split
along linguistic and regional lines (Bollywood versus Sandalwood, the Kannada-
language film industry in southwest India, for instance) as well as religious,
class, and caste lines. In discussing place and scale in the Indian context we
draw upon Ash Amin’s nonterritorial way of conceptualizing place, where place
and spatiality are understood as increasingly virtual, such that “the proximate
and the remote [can coexist] at the same geographical level” (Amin 2002, 389).
In chapter 4, we extend our analysis of lifestyle television’s role in shap-
ing imaginative geographies through a study of the American cable Travel
and Living Channel—available in many countries across Asia—in Taiwan.
Our interviews with Taiwanese viewers suggest that one of the most notable
impacts of this channel is the way it works to shore up the global orientation
of young, urban, middle-class internationalist subjects, consolidating their

22 / introduction
consciousness of their own perceived potential for future mobility both out-
ward, toward the global, and upward, toward upper-middle-class consumer
lifestyles. In using tlc to think through new identities based on the capacity
for social and geographic movement, we argue that these viewers are accumu-
lating an immaterial form of movement capital; it is through shoring up the
value of such movement capital that lifestyle programming on tlc Taiwan
contributes to the transformation of identities.
Chapters 5 through 8 offer in-depth analyses of specific examples of life
advice television across our three countries, providing insights into the ways in
which transforming relationships between state- and market-led regulation of
culture are played out in lifestyle tv’s representations of identity, interpersonal
relations, and everyday life practices. Chapter 5 examines the proliferation
of life experts on Chinese and Indian tv, from transnationally recognizable
figures such as makeover experts and celebrity chefs to more culturally dis-
tinctive forms of popular expertise. Discussing the rise of psychologized, in-
dividualized models of everyday expertise aimed at responsibilizing citizens,
and the growing rationalization and informationalization of everyday life, the
chapter examines how culturally inflected forms of expertise and expert prac-
tices speak to the specificity of engagements with emergent forms of sociality
and first and second modernities in China and India.
This theme is developed further in chapter 6 on enchanted rather than
modern-rational forms of expertise. Here, we turn to religious, spiritual, and
supernatural life advice television in India and Taiwan to explore the distinc-
tive counternarratives of modernity that emerge there from the confluence of
religious, supernatural beliefs and late modern media cultures. While religious
programming is banned by the state in China, in India and Taiwan, a variety
of gods, sages, sacred texts, and rituals are presented to and interpreted for
viewers to help them manage the challenges of escalating risk, transcendent
meaning, and collective affiliation in times of rapid social change. This chapter
considers what is historically and locally specific about the interpenetration of
religious and supernatural belief systems and contemporary media cultures,
as well as how spiritual elements shape both the genre(s) of lifestyle advice tv
and the forms of identity it projects in these countries.
Chapter 7 moves into the territory of love and relationships. In recent years,
tv audiences in both China and India have been exposed to a growing number
of reality and lifestyle shows focused on dating, marriage, parenting, and love
relationships. While, like spirituality, the affective and intangible space of love
might seem to inhabit a realm beyond the logics of late modern struggles,
we argue that the study of televisual treatments of love and marriage offers

introduction / 23
a privileged perspective from which one can gain an understanding of the
cultural process of modernity. Drawing on a range of examples, from game
show–based dating formats to reality shows dealing with love and romance to
more advice-oriented formats, we examine how these shows navigate the con-
tradictions between apparent forms of gender empowerment and marketized
aspirations toward social and cultural fluidity, versus the realities of powerful
gendered social and economic inequities, and the continued cultural potency
of familial and communitarian notions of duty.
Continuing the exploration of reflexive individualization and gender from
chapter 7, chapter 8 surveys a range of women’s lifestyle advice shows from
China and Taiwan, drawing on audience research on the reception of these
shows across China, Taiwan, and also Singapore, in order to explore trans-
forming models of feminine identity in the transnational Sinophone world.
The Chinese example analyzed in this chapter foregrounds the normative
definition—promulgated in this case by state media (cctv)—of adult femi-
ninity as an identity focused on familial care work. In contrast, an alternative
subcategory of women’s lifestyle television, originating in Taiwan, centers
on an emergent and idealized feminine identity in Sinophone East Asia, the
“young-mature lady” (qingshounü): urban, unmarried, white-collar women
who are seen as individualistic in attitude, with a high level of education and a
penchant for beauty and fashion consumption. However, based on our audi-
ence research, we show that the idealization of this emergent form of feminine
identity does not reflect the self-perceived situation of Taiwanese viewers but
rather provides imaginative resources for contesting the locally dominant cul-
tural hegemony of patriarchal familialism.
Finally, the conclusion summarizes some of the central themes of the book,
addressing key questions raised by the case studies. How does the impact and
evolution of lifestyle tv in these sites speak to changing relationships between
popular media, audiences, and social, moral, and political engagement? What
kinds of mediated civic spaces are emerging in postcolonial, postsocialist, and
post–economic miracle Asian nation-states grappling with the potentials and
challenges of commercial global media? Returning to our multiple modernities
framework, this chapter asks how developments in these rapidly shifting and
emerging media spaces—marked by very different speeds and experiences of
modernity—might speak back to and transform conventional understandings
of the mediated relations between social identities, politics, and citizenship.

24 / introduction
Notes

Introduction
1. In relation to television in China, such a multiperspectival approach has been
pioneered, in different ways, by a series of earlier works (e.g., Lull 1992; Zha 1995; Zhu
and Berry 2009; Zhu 2012); these works and others are discussed in chapter 1.
2. It is generally believed that societies with a Gini coefficient of more than 0.40 are
at increased risk of social unrest (Goodman 2013).
3. We were aiming initially to base all the audience interviews in domestic settings,
but for a range of logistical and cultural reasons we were able to conduct household-
based interviews only in India.

one. Lifestyle Television in Context

1. For detailed histories of the structural evolution of the current broadcasting
system, see Guo 2007; X. Chen 2010; and Zhou 2012 (especially chapter 3).
2. In 2009 these ranked second, third, fifth, seventh, eighth, and ninth in nationwide
ratings (F. Wu 2010, 119).
3. The China tv Rating Yearbook of 2012 lists sixteen Chinese productions aired on
provincial satellite channels based on such trades in 2011, mainly talent shows (e.g.,
Fremantle Media’s X Factor), variety/light entertainment (e.g., itv’s Surprise Surprise),
game shows (e.g., bbc One’s This Time Tomorrow), and marriage/dating shows (e.g.,
Endemol’s The Marriage Ref) (Wang 2012, 198).
4. Interview with Mr. Bao Xiaoqun, ceo of Channel Young, Shanghai, China,
October 20, 2010. Further quotations from Mr. Bao are from this interview.
5. The ten top channels by market share in descending order for 2012 were ftv (ter-
restrial), San Lih Taiwan (cable), ctv (terrestrial), tvbs News (cable), San Lih News
(cable), ettv News (cable), ttv (terrestrial), ftv News (cable), CtiTV News (cable),
San Lih Urban (cable) (Taipei Media Agencies Association 2013, 12–14).
6. See http://www.niotv.com for detailed schedule and channel information.
7. Thanks to Taiwanese media industries scholar Ti Wei for his discussion with us on
these points.