Pop Culture China!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This exciting title in ABC-CLIO's Popular Culture series offers the nonspecialist reader the only up-to-date introduction to all facets of popular culture in China. To westerners, Maoist China was a picture of gray homogeneity. As China emerges from drab Maoism, its popular culture presents a bright tapestry of media, entertainment, communications, sports, food, and consumerism. This book displays for the general reader the colorful cloth that is modern Chinese pop culture. China's release from Maoist austerity has produced an explosion in popular culture. The Chinese have embraced such technologies as television and cell phones, and shaped them to their social context. Understanding modern China requires a through knowledge of daily life there. This book presents readers, from high-school and college students to the inquisitive tourist, with that knowledge. The author, a scholar of Chinese culture, draws on his own fieldwork, along with authoritative scholarship and reporting, to give the reader a comprehensive, lively, and accessible introduction to all aspects of Chinese popular culture. The book begins with an introduction to understanding popular culture in China and covers mass media; print media; cinema, film, and video; the Internet; and also discusses the rise of consumption and consumerism. From the modernization of traditional theater to the traditional uses of modern technology, this book presents a guide to the emerging culture of a country that will inevitably become increasingly influential in coming years.

Reviews

"This title is highly recommended for academic, public, and high-school libraries." - Booklist "This work is recommended for libraries with a collection of Asian studies." - ARBA

Author Bio

Kevin Latham is a lecturer in social anthropology of media at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, England. He has written numerous articles on Chinese media, consumption, and popular culture.