Orchestrating thinking : communications in China

Abstract

Chinese society today is a diverse and fragmented complexity of personal and collective values and desires. Despite this, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to have unchallenged political power, and relative social stability has been maintained among the nation’s 1.4 billion people during a period of intense social and economic change. While the status quo is always shifting in China, the nation’s news media, television and film industries, digital infrastructure and commercial operations, state propaganda campaigns, community groups, and political processes all carry the responsibility of the broader commitment to the nation’s goals of the Chinese dream, which prioritise national rejuvenation and economic prosperity. Creating a new status quo is vast, ranging from encouraging a consumer society, managing narratives of the historical past, moulding gender norms, redefining political agency and legislation, and engendering a national identity and nationalistic instincts, and in doing so, necessarily ensuring these understandings characterise a uniquely Chinese (and thus exclusive to the Chinese people) idea of the Chinese people vis-à-vis that of the foreign. While studious oversight, and in some cases direct control by the Party-state of the communications networks and opportunities that inform, entertain, and facilitate the exchange of ideas among its people, there are also private and personal interests at play that also necessarily contribute to propelling thinking about the status quo in mainstream Chinese society.