Cultural Politics and Audiovisual Media within China 1

University of Leeds

Institute of Communications Studies

Shall We Get Started?

A Policy Approach to Ethno-Cultural Diversity, Cultural Politics and Audiovisual Media within China

By

Chen Li (200197981)

MA in Communications Studies

Supervised by: Dr. Katharine Sarikakis

1 September 2006

A dissertation submitted to the University of Leeds in accordance with the requirements of the degree of MA in Communications Studies in the Institute of Communications Studies.

CONTENTS

1 THE INTERNATIONAL AND THE NATIONAL

International legislation of cultural diversity

Emergence of ethno-cultural diversity for China

The Chinese approach to the inclusive and ethno-cultural society

Constructing the nationhood

2 SURVIAL OR NOT? TRADITIONAL ETHNO-CULTURES MATTER

Is there any ‘cultural genocide’ in Tibet?

Overview of ethno-cultural policy in China

Discourse of policy-shifts in the post-Mao era

Dual-role of audiovisual media in the discourse of ethno-cultural diversity

3 ETHNO-CULTURAL REPRESENTATION STRATEGIES

THROUGH MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Seeking representation strategies: Vibrating between the realistic and idealistic

Representing ‘positive stereotypes’ of ethno-cultural diversity

Vehicles of Identities

‘Exotic Images’

4 MAPPING MINORITY LINGUISTIC BROADCASTING SERVICES

‘Xinjiang-Tibet’ project: the product of ‘western regional development’ policy

The ‘diversity’ of ethnic minorities’ linguistic satellite media

The rise and fall of CCTV Western Region Channel:

In search of a specialised multicultural channel

Conclusions

References

Acknowledgement

This dissertation could not have been finished without the generous help and support of many people.

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my dissertation supervisor Dr. Katharine Sarikakis, who is always there to provide me invaluable suggestions to clarify my thoughts. Her book Media, Policy and Globalisation (2006) teaches me how to critically examine the role of media policy in different contexts in a logical way.

I’m also grateful to Emeritus Prof. Colin Mackerras at Griffith University, Australia, who is a leading specialist on Chinese ethnic minorities. Thanks to his generous help, his insightful journal can be found by me within the UK.

I am indebted to my friends both at home and at Leeds. Few words of courage or even an eye contact has made me cheer up when coming across difficulties. Special thanks to Wang Xian, producer from China Central Television 9, who gave me useful advice and helped in my data collections and Dr. Yu Li at Ohio State University for her insightful advice and providing related journals.

A profound debt of gratitude is owed to my parents, Jianguo Li and Huafen Chen, who make my dream of studying at UK become true. Their endless love, supports and encourages make me gown up.

INTRODUCTION

The international legalisation of cultural diversity was realised through UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions on 20 October 2005. Leaving aside the non-stop debates about cultural trade protection or cultural exception, the essence of cultural diversity as the ‘full realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms’ was emphasised (UNESCO, 2005).

Bhikhu Parekh (2006: 336) advocates the perspective of multiculturalism to approach cultural diversity, given that more and more resistance against ‘homogenising or assimilationist thrust’ and demands for ‘political recognition’ are from diverse groups, such as indigenous groups, ethnic minorities, new and old immigrants and so forth. In this process, ‘cultural heritage’ of different groups and societies should be preserved and promoted through various expressions, as a ‘guarantee of the survival of humanity’. Further, the discourse of ‘within societies’ cannot be marginalised, as more attentions have been paid on the international arena, as in the case of ‘social cohesion’ and multicultural society (UNESCO, 2004). That’s why ‘ethno-cultural diversity’, one form of culture diversity, has been chosen has the focus of this dissertation.

As reaffirmed by 2005 UNESCO Convention, cultural expressions can be enabled to ‘flourish within societies’ on the basis of ‘freedom of thought, expression and information, as well as diversity of media’ (UNESCO, 2005). Obviously the role of media, both as one expression and as a technology, can greatly promote the diversity of cultural expressions. Attempts trying to combine media with ethnic groups are striking. On the basis of the multicultural society[1] in UK or Canada mainly characterised by ‘historical and contemporary flows of people and the operations of power’ (Cottle, 2000: 215), western academic studies like Wober and Gunter (1988), Cottle (2000), Georgiou (2002) categorise three issues as fundamental studies of ethnic minority and media: 1) whether ethnic minorities have been negatively stereotyped, over-represented, under-represented or even invisiblised, which are also the central themes of Canadian TV and UK’s Cultural Diversity Network[2]; for them, content analysis is typically employed to explore the representations in News programmes or TV Dramas; 2) Structural Analysis of Minority Language Radio and Television Stations; 3) specifically, studies of diasporas, as one sub-categories of minority groups, with their representations and media in the discourse of globalisation.

Based on this, this dissertation will employ a policy approach to the ethno-cultural issues, cultural politics and related audiovisual media within China, trying to explore and identify what factors have shaped its related policy initiatives. Given the complex Chinese context (like different definitions of ethnic groups, authoritarian regime, media’s role as mouthpiece, etc.), it seems sensible for us to explore more on the relationships between the majority Han and ethnic minorities as a way of examining whether social cohesion exists or not. From the assimilation strategy in Cultural Revolution to economic-development-dominated current agenda, from anti-splitting and religious-sensitive censorship to selective identities and exoticisation of representation, it inevitably gives us a picture of how far China has been away from the ethno-cultural diversity that is based on freedom of expression and human rights. Additionally, can those apparently prosperous ethnic minority linguistic services express their own voices? It will also draw on examples, both regionally and nationally, to map the ethnic minority linguistic service in China, thus exploring how the accommodations have been made between ideological-constructing and commercialisation-fuelled competitions.

In Chapter 1, I will firstly start from the international legislation and conceptualisation of cultural diversity, analyse the two implications (as emphasised by 2001 Declaration), as well as China’s standpoint as a nation-station towards the Convention in the international stage. Further, French-initiated Diversity strategy was initially utilised to address concerns caused by cultural deficits through ‘identifying uncontrolled global trade in culture as a threat to cultural diversity’ (Beale, 2002: 85) and as a continuing way of ‘cultural exception’ to protect cultural industries. But the meaning of diversity is far more than that. I will adopt Parekh’s (2004) division of common forms of cultural diversity in modern life, then focusing on communal diversity (or ethno-cultural diversity in China’s case) to examine its significant role in the multicultural society. The second part for Chapter 1 will be located into the Chinese ethnic minorities within its own society, tracing how the notion of Chinese nation has been conceptualised, negotiated and interpreted by Chinese as an ‘inclusive’ one with ethno-cultural diversities in the historical discourse.

Chapter 2 will start from debates around Dalai Lama’s assertion of Chinese government’s ‘cultural genocide’ in Tibet, as a way of examining the current ethno-cultural policy system of the Chinese government. Then, I will extend my discussion to a more range of ethnic minorities to explore the extent to which the Chinese government have done to preserve and promote (or damage) the diversity of ethno-cultural expressions as well as ethno-cultural identities. In this process, I will combine analysis from the UNESCO’s joint-projects and comments, Chinese government’s white paper documents, western academics’ critiques as well as human rights monitoring organisations’ accusations, tracing more arguments between national unity concerns and their ethno-cultural identities. Lastly, I will examine the role of audiovisual media and how it dual-functions, namely, how it works as one mean of cultural expression and how it serve as one technology to convey more other cultural expressions like folks and customs, artistic creation and so forth.

Besides the cultural diversity in employments of broadcasting system (that’s where the concept originates), it is the representation that associates the ethnic minorities with the audiovisual media most and attracts most western academics attention. However, as the focus of this dissertation is on the policy and related implications, it might seem sensible for me not to conduct a content analysis to analyse the representation from news programmes, films or TV dramas. Instead, I will start my research premised on findings of anthropologists as well as media researchers who are interested in the ethnic minorities’ representations in the mainstream media, and then associate those characteristics with policies to seek representation strategies, shifts and implications. It will be the focus of Chapter 3.

Chapter 4 will start from the emphasis of linguistic diversity as the fundamental to cultural diversity, map and summarise statistically about the ethnic-minority linguistic radios, satellites, both regionally and nationally, and, lastly, analyse the demise of China Central Television Western Regional Channel. In this way, I will try to find out what factors have contributed to this seemingly prosperous media terrain, then analysing the relationship between purpose of anti-splitting, commercialisation-fuelled factor and the expression of ethnic minorities. Ultimately, I will call for a national channel specialising on ethno-cultural diversity.

In sum, this dissertation does not serve as a report on telling how successful the ethno-diversity has been depicted by the Chinese government in various cultural expressions. Rather, it critically reviews, in the realm of policies, strategies, and laws, the ethno-cultural landscape within China, by examining the role of ethnic minorities’ groups in the notion of ‘Chinese nation’, the extent to which the political agenda have influenced the ethno-cultural policy, the representation strategies adopted by the government-tightly-controlled media, and the ethno-linguistic infrastructure nationwide. Hence, it will come back to the claim made by the 2005 Convention on how important the role of human rights and freedom of expression, calling for a framework towards a democratic media system that empowered ethnic minorities freedom of expression. Only through this way can ethnic minorities represent themselves better in their own produced programmes or linguistic channels, thus achieving a true ethno-cultural diversity.

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[1] It is insightful to refer to B. Parekh (2006) that ‘multicultural refers to the fact of cultural diversity’, while ‘muliticulturalism refers to a normative response to that fact’.

[2] Cultural Diversity Network is ‘a network of UK Broadcasters promoting cultural diversity both on and off-screen’. See more CDN website: http://www.cdnetwork.org.uk/