(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
socialist claims has continued to haunt the Chinese nation in their call for social
justice and equality.
The excesses of market, nevertheless, provided ammunition to state censors with
moral ground to expand its regime of disciplinary power. The playwright and director
are accused of complying with the mainstream melody (for depicting the hardworking
older sister achieving her dream while the younger sister meeting her tragic end) on
the one hand, and bone-bareness depiction of sex on the other hand. This has caused
outcry from morality defenders who called for sanitizing Chinese TV drama market.
The department director of TV dramas at SARFT, Li Jingsheng, criticized the TV
drama for its use of sex, deceit and corruption as the winning ingredients in a public
forum. Li’s comment was met with immediate outrage with a scaling tirade of abuse
from Chinese netizens. One netizens writes: we netizens are already angry about
Dwelling Narrowness being called off air; now you have nobody to blame but
yourself for making such a comment at this moment; your criticism should have
offended your colleagues in SARFT that has approved the TV drama; are you saying
that your colleagues advocate sex, corruption and deceit? You have further offended
85% of the masses who cannot afford a home. Some netizens even started the
infamous “human flesh search” trying to expose Li as a corrupted official. When no
significant evidence was found, an e’gao “human flesh search” started to expose Li’s
legendary mansions and expensive watches. 6 This, of course, did not go any further.
The realistic portrayal of urban life and mortgage slaves in Dwelling Narrowness, the
political turn of pop music represented by MV “Sell,” and the processes of prosuming
these popular cultural products have laid bare the consequences of China’s
authoritarian neoliberalism in its pursuit of double-digit economic growth. In the
following analysis, I will reflect on neoliberalism in China, which is on most
occasions disingenuously applied; hence “disingenuous neoliberalism” in the title of
this article.
China’s Disingenuous Neoliberalism
6 E’gao, or spoof, is a multimedia expression through photoshopping, flash and digital remix of Chinese
and non-Chinese elements to poke fun at an original work, concept, or person. See Meng (2009) on e’gao as
a decentralized form of communication in Chinese cyberspace.
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