| Focusing on anticorruption television dramas that first appeared in China in the mid-1990s, this dissertation seeks to understand what commercializing television means to the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to reestablish legitimacy in face of rampant political corruption. By interviewing twenty or so Chinese producers, writers, and broadcast officials, scrutinizing trade journals as well as mainstream newspapers, and analyzing more than a dozen of anticorruption dramas, I have tried to grasp this phenomenon using a multiperspectival approach, integrating an examination of the political, economic and social conditions that gave rise to this development with an analysis of the range of cultural meanings of corruption promoted by anticorruption dramas.; I argue that anticorruption drama serials are the result of complex negotiations and compromises between the Party, commercializing media institutions, and a number of influential writers, in a context of social unrest fueled by corruption. At the content level, anticorruption dramas are ideologically complex products, providing a certain degree of openness for negotiation. Although the dominant narrative about corruption is provided by the official discourse, these drama serials are much more complicated narratives that engage a variety of alternative discourses about corruption. Through textual analyses and audience interviews, I identified four major overlapping and conflicting interpretive frameworks in almost each of the drama serials under study. The results are mixed for the official discourse of corruption, which is sometimes reinforced but frequently rendered vulnerable to serious criticism if not subversion. But in the end, none of the alternative discourses poses a challenge to the legitimacy of the market reform policy, which suggests a more fundamental hegemony at work. |
