Dr. Lu Ye of Shanghai's Fudan University delivered the inaugural Wellen Sham Distinguished Lecture on Dec. 14, outlining the advancements and issues Chinese communication and media have faced in the last 30 years (read the blog post summarized by students Jessie Han Chen and Katharine Keith).
Dr. Ye said that in the last five years, China has seen many media changes based on social reform. Local television in China has seen an increase in bad news, global news and "pretty faces" who deliver the news. She said the increase in reporting on bad news is important because in the past the government focused on reporting only positive stories about China. She said surveys show that people in China who watch more international news are actually more nationalistic. The pretty faces, she said, are the result of the market economy driving media to become more commercialized.
"I think it's really big progress in China," she said. "Yes, it’s still propaganda. It’s still a party organ. But we’re trying to do something about the separation, about the investigative journalism.”
She used an example of a young Chinese couple who were arrested about five years ago to highlight China's advancing views on the line between state power and personal rights. When police entered the couple's house and found they were looking at pornography on their computer, they arrested the man. She said in the past that people in China would be happy he was arrested because he was doing something he shouldn't, but now more would think he should be left alone.
"People now are talking about personal lives, between state power and personal rights," she said. "I think this is a very important change in China. Maybe in the early times, people in China would say, 'You really need to be put in jail,' but now they say, ‘No, it’s my personal life. Good or bad — that’s another judgment — but the police don’t have the right.'”
Dr. Ye's talk was the inaugural Wellen Sham Distinguished Lecture, which is funded by the recently pledged $1 million Wellen Sham Family Endowment.
"This annual event, in partnership with Fudan University in Shanghai, will focus on emerging topics in communication of relevance to the United States and to China, especially as it relates to communication and media," USC Annenberg Dean Ernest J. Wilson III said. "We have the great luxury in this lecture series of not only concentrating on things of the moment, but also more importantly to concentrate on things of lasting value because we know that the lecture series will last until the future."
The lecture kicked off the Dec. 14-15 USC Annenberg Colloquium on China Media Studies.
USC Annenberg Colloquium on China Media Studies blog entry
Dr. Lu Ye's Powerpoint presentation
