Modern China Episode 1: Controlling Leisure - Regulating Celebrities and Prostitutes in China
Sinobabble
English - June 15, 2019 04:00 - 25 minutes - 17.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsCourses Education News china chinese chinese history history education asia communism hong kong ccp xi jinping Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
A new series in which I introduce some of the themes of modern China scholarship, research, and journalism, and explain these broader themes using a couple of example articles each episode.
In this episode, we look at Chinese government regulation and control of entertainment and leisure using the examples of celebrity culture and prostitution. The two articles I’ve chosen to look at are from completely different sources, but are both really well researched. The first is a research report that was published in the most recent issue of the China Quarterly, which is pretty much the most outstanding China journal out there. It’s titled Truth, Good and Beauty: The Politics of Celebrity in China by Jonathan Sullivan and Séagh Kehoe. The second article was published in the latest issues of the Made in China Journal, which is an open access online quarterly journal, and is titled The Plight of Sex Workers in China: From Criminalisation and Abuse to Activism by Tiantian Zheng.(https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/04/18/the-plight-of-sex-workers-in-china%EF%BB%BF-from-criminalisation-and-abuse-to-activism/)
Both the celebrity entertainment industry and prostitution - organised or otherwise - are viewed by the government as having a huge influence on the social fabric of society. In both these cases, The Chinese government is working to mitigate the negative effects of the leisure industry on the population through official administrative channels that use a range of means that can sometimes border on coercion. These topics are linked as they both reflect the Chinese government’s moral panic and their way of thinking about and dealing with social influences that originate outside of the government or Communist Party. They both also touch on issues of activism in slightly different ways.
Sign up for Buzzsprout to launch your podcasting journey: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=162442
Subscribe to the Sinobabble Newsletter: https://sinobabble.substack.com/
Support Sinobabble on Buy me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Sinobabblepod