Staging Corruption: The Link between Chinese Television and Politics

Staging Corruption goes backstage to explore the politics behind Chinese TV corruption dramas, providing both a critical analysis of their institutional, political and economic context, and sociological reflections on the 31 dramas it covers. The author's central claim is that a "disjunctive media order" has emerged in China as the product the partial commercialization of the media in post-Mao China. Here in the public media—as in many other areas of contemporary China—there is a stand-off between two logics, "neither of which dominates nor collapses into the other": the economic logic of commercial media and the political logic of continuing state control.