Interpreting and shaping geopolitics in Chinese media: the discourse of the ‘New style of great power relations’

Chinese leaders have attempted to alleviate international anxiety about its rise to global prominence describing its development as a ‘peaceful rise’ or ‘peaceful development’. Most recently, Chinese leaders have begun deploying a new term, the ‘New Style of Great Power Relations’ (新型大国关系). The purpose of this study is to examine the treatment of the ‘New Style of Great Power Relations’ as a political slogan within the Chinese media as a means to shape a geopolitical worldview among Chinese citizens and international actors. Researchers identified 541 articles from 25 different Chinese media sources selected to represent varying levels of government influence and editorial perspectives. This study found the concept primarily intended to engage the United States by stressing cooperative aspects of U.S.–China relations, but also challenges specific U.S. actions. Those U.S. policies challenged within the Chinese media are portrayed as inconsistent with the ‘new style’ concept’s principles. This forms a ‘rhetorical trap’, as it were for the United States, in that the framing of the discourse implicates U.S. intentions and policies as disingenuous unless the United States changes its policy stances. The essay examines the implications of the discourse for understanding Chinese political communication.     

Reconciling Hall with discourse,written in the shadows of ‘“Confederate” and Rainbow Flags

ABSTRACT

This essay addresses Stuart Hall and discourse theory, focusing on his essay “Signification, representation, ideology.” Reflecting upon recent events involving representation and identity—US legalization of gay marriage, murders at a gay nightclub, removal of the “Rebel Flag” from the South Carolina state capitol, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—I attempt to destabilize the counterproductive dualism of material/discourse in Hall’s critique of poststructural discourse theory. Finding amenability between Hall and Foucaultian discourse theory, I describe Hall’s utility for discourse scholars, such as his perspectives on ideological practices and generation of new discourses as an interventionist act.     

“The Rising Tide of War”: Cambodian Bombings and the Discourses of American Military Power in Time

During the Vietnam War, American planes dropped more bombs on Cambodia than had fallen in all of Europe during World War II. The event marks a key moment in the secretive expansion of U.S. military power, and this article looks at how mainstream journalism helped create the discursive conditions that abetted this expansion. After an explication of the historical and theoretical rationales for studying the relation between journalism and U.S. military power, this article analyzes Time magazine's coverage of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 and finds that the American press at the time was not discursively configured to critique the U.S. military-diplomatic apparatus. The article analyzes the depiction of Cambodia as a theater of war and argues that most critiques of the bombing were limited to President Richard Nixon's quality of character, providing a locus that prevented more systemic critiques from emerging.     

“What is an author?” Contemporary publishing discourse and the author figure

Martin Amis’ novel The Information was published in paperback in May 1995. For a number of convergent reasons, the publication became, in itself, a major media event. In examining this occasion., the economic and cultural imperatives that shaped the marketing of The Information and the wider context of contemporary book publishing and its relation to other media, this paper problematises the relationship between cultural and economic value. It considers the discourse around what an author is “worth” in a late capitalist society of fiercely competitive consumer choice, and how the representation of an avowedly “literary” author is mobilised in the marketplace in ways that aim not to threaten to compromise the investment in the difference between literary and popular fiction.     

Hide and Seek: Neoliberalizing the State and “Stating” the Neoliberal in the Italian Media System

The author claims that neoliberal discourse plays “hide and seek” with the state, which appears at the same time absent and present, negated, and necessitated. In order to test its limits, the paper historicizes such discourse by engaging with the Italian case. More specifically, this study examines the most representative figure of Italian neoliberalism, former prime minister and media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, and his ambiguous relationship with the state. Drawing on Marx and Gramsci's conceptualization of the state, the paper sheds light on the Italian context as well as the more general characteristics of the neoliberal state.     

The vortex of multiculturalism in South Korea: a critical discourse analysis of the characterization of “multicultural children” in three newspapers

This study investigates how multicultural children have been portrayed by the Korean media, where the term is typically used to mean a child of an underprivileged Korean man and a female marriage migrant from a less industrialized neighboring country. Adopting the theoretical lens of critical discourse analysis, I examine news articles published from 2009 to 2013 in the Hankyoreh, the Hankook Ilbo, and the Chosun Ilbo: three daily newspapers representing a full range of progressive, moderate, and conservative political perspectives within society. Analysis reveals that multicultural children have been characterized as a marginalized group, as a threat to the future Korean society, or as global human resources. Given that these discourses are manifestations of underlying ideology, I also explore how these three discourses are conjoined with three competing ideologies in Korea; namely, democracy, nationalism, and neoliberalism. This study concludes by discussing how multiculturalism serves as a discursive framework through which democratic, nationalist, and neoliberal ideas gain their effectiveness.     

“Contact Us”: Archivists and Remote Users in the Digital Age

SUMMARY

Archive repository web pages have become more sophisticated in the past several years, and information about repository holdings is often readily available online. However, so long as full archival records are not available electronically, archivists will have to contend with the increase in reference requests from remote users. The author surveyed one hundred university archives web pages to examine the current availability of archival records on the Web and to explore the possible effects of this presence on archivists' efforts to provide remote users with access to repository holdings through “ask an archivist” forms, electronic mail, and other modes of communication.     

Understanding the “Heroes” and “It Getters”: Fandom and the Colbert Nation

The Colbert Report, an innovative American satirical news show, and the show's dedicated viewers, known as “the Colbert Nation,” redefined fan engagement through audience participation, mediated culture jamming, and ironic political spectacle. Yet very little is known about this fan group. This survey of The Colbert Report's devoted followers finds that the fans are distrustful of political and media elites, highly cynical, very politically involved, not apathetic, and moderately efficacious. Further analysis reveals that viewers have different motivations, some seeing the show as primarily entertainment, some mainly as a trusted source of political information, and others as a mix of entertainment and information. The fans are also found to be highly sophisticated consumers of satire and news, and watch the show as an alternative to mainstream media and as a form of comic relief from current events. Several implications are discussed.     

“Look for the Union Label”: Exploring the Contradictions and Complications in LGBT Terminology

This article is an exploration of the implications of the gay label applied to LGBT persons and how that label surpasses all others in its implications. The author’s particular focus is on the decades since World War II, where religious, legal, and political definitions all got mixed together into a mélange of cleavages affecting everything from the most definitive national and international proclamations to the personal behavior and beliefs of gay and straight individuals.     

Covering the world‐class downtown: Seattle's local media and the politics of urban redevelopment

Local disputes over land use and urban development generate some of the most heated struggles in American politics. Yet the role of local media organizations in covering debates over urban development has been woefully understudied by media scholars. To address this soft spot in the critical media literature, this article offers an investigation of how the local press covered a particularly bitter debate over one urban redevelopment proposal in Seattle during the mid‐1990s. Drawing on Hallin, who predicts that reporters will abandon professional codes of neutrality and balance when they perceive the political field to be unified around a single position, an examination of sourcing patterns in the Seattle case suggests that local reporters cover debates over urban development from a spurious assumption of “consensus”—an assumption that privileges the voices of downtown business leaders and pro‐development public officials. A concluding section offers suggestions for future investigation into the intersection of local media and urban development politics, drawing particularly on Bourdieu's notion of “symbolic capital” to explore how such presumptions of consensus are cultivated, maintained, and contested within the local public sphere.     

“We bleed for female empowerment”: mediated ethics,commodity feminism,and the contradictions of feminist politics

Discourses of female empowerment are increasingly prominent within ethical capitalism, which seeks to remedy global crises with private-sector solutions and their commodities. This article examines the intersecting manifestations of female empowerment, commodity activism, and ethical capitalism with case studies on Born Free Africa, a fashion collection combatting mother-to-child HIV transmission, and THINX, which sells “period-proof” panties. Each company articulates empowerment through a binary between the Western feminist savior and “in-need” woman of the global south. This article argues that this iteration of empowerment not only reinforces logics of neo-colonial capitalism, but also masks disciplinary regimes for individual feminine subjects.     

Mapping contentious discourse in China: activists’ discursive strategies and their coordination with media

Discursive strategy in social movements in China has received limited scholarly attention. This paper systemically examines the way in which contentious discourse in China is informed by its cultural repertoire and illustrates how activists strategically frame their culturally informed discourse in coordination with the usage of media platforms. We analyzed 143 slogans and banners from 22 environmental and land requisition protests, and found that activists in China draw heavily on Chinese cultural repertoire. They embed family values in a rank system that is mapped onto two axes – space vs. time and us vs. them – with family/self at the center, to frame diagnostic, motivational, and prognostic collective action frames. In order to unpack the dynamic process of strategic framing, we paid special attention to activists’ coordination mechanisms with media in our analyses drawn from extensive participatory observation and interviews in two protest cases. We found strategic framing (such as frame bridging, amplification, extension, transformation and borrowing) was used in coordination with both traditional and new media in an effort to adjust their contentious discourse to achieve consensus mobilization, action mobilization, and social mobilization at various stages of protest. This study brings cultural repertoire back into the study of contentious discourse in China and highlights the dynamic nature of strategic framing that is often practiced in coordination with media.     

Suburban American Punks and the Musical Rhetoric of Green Day's “Jesus of Suburbia”

This essay examines Green Day's “Jesus of Suburbia” as an artifact and reflection of suburban American punk culture. It looks at how music, lyrics, and the ethos of the performer interact to create a message that fostered identification between speaker and audience by using Sellnow and Sellnow's Langer-based illusion of life perspective. In this case it was found that music can be seen as an effective tool for expressing the suburban punk experience due to its ability to convey both linguistic and emotional content.     

‘Play mas’: carnival in the archives and the archives in carnival: records and community identity in the US Virgin Islands

Over the past several decades, scholars concerned with post-colonial and indigenous populations have focused on archives as one method of excavating the cultures and lives of marginalized peoples. The limitations of textual and bureaucratic records, combined with the recognition that an archive can consist of interrelated knowledge constructs composed of many different kinds of documentation, have led these scholars to seek ‘archives’ beyond the walls of official buildings. For archivists likewise engaged in documenting post-colonial and other communities, expanding the definitions of what an archive could be, and suggesting new ways of seeing ‘records’, offers the potential of creatively representing and preserving the cultural expressions of these communities. This paper examines carnival as a cultural archive. Carnival, an annual tradition in many Caribbean islands was initially created by both enslaved and freed Africans as a counter-narrative to the festivals of the colonizers. In the US Virgin Islands, carnival began in the eighteenth century when the islands were Danish colonies. It was briefly revived at the beginning of the twentieth century and again in 1952 as an annual public celebration, which it remains today. While carnival produces traditional records, the week-long event also embodies the continuum of a local culture through a variety of non-traditional records that transmit genealogies, folkways, food customs, and history.     

“Amoral universalism”: mediating and staging global and local in the 1998 Nagano Olympic Winter Games

This paper is a case study that critically analyzes the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games. The Olympics are a gigantic global event, largely as a result of significant global media attention, particularly through television and corporate sponsors. However, these entities simultaneously need a specific locale in which to operate. Analytically, the paper focuses on interactions between the global media actors and the host city and its people. It argues that the commercialized nature of the Olympic Games controls not only the program, but also numerous aspects of the local host city to maximize benefit for the media. This paper reviews how historically and structurally the media were able to obtain such extensive control. Then, it argues how the media actually control the locale through the initial bid, the process of preparation, the Games, and even the aftermath.     

A Review of “Temptations in the Office: Ethical Choices and Legal Obligations”

A citation analysis study was conducted on faculty publications from Business School at Institution. Citations were analyzed by format of materials, library availability, journal concentration by department and the citation age of the journal articles. This study was undertaken in an effort to guide local collection development knowledge, compare how departments in the business school used different resources, and illustrate trends in business faculty citations as compared to similar studies. The study was also conducted in order to enable business librarians to be able to understand, anticipate, and respond to faculty research needs in the business school.     

Be/longing in the archival body: eros and the “Endearing” value of material lives

This paper explores the nature of the archival body and the ways in which it is temporally situated and yet also always in motion. Applying transdisciplinary logics, it argues that the affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and (un)becoming. Using two queer/ed and transgender archives as sites of inquiry, the paper explores the erotic and affective nature of accessing the archival body in its multimodal forms. Although touching, smelling and stroking what remains of distinct material lives might elucidate arousal and certain other affective and haptic responses within the visitor to the archives, the records themselves hold and cradle their creators and their storytelling techniques along with their relationships to longing for and belonging in the archival body of knowledge. This approach suggests that understanding of the record and its affects can be enriched by temporal perspectives that acknowledge distinct and diverse temporalities and promote generative understandings of potentially meaningful progressions of time and everyday rhythms embodied within archival materials.