America’s National Public Radio has recently featured some voices familiar to the Beijing media crowd.
Sexy’s Beijing’s Su Fei was featured in a Sexy Beijing radio series on NPR, with accompanying videos (to the left and at Sexy Beijing).
Several people who have previously been featured in articles and videos on Danwei are interviewed in an excellent multi-part introduction to the Chinese media by On The Media, an NPR show produced by New York’s WNYC radio station. The episodes are all available online (streaming and download). Below are links to the episodes together with summaries from WNYC:
With the Olympics just weeks away, China is making the final preparations for the PR push of the century, pitching brand China to the world. Meanwhile, young urban Chinese are sorting out new identities and advertisers everywhere are revving their engines, preparing to sell to the fastest growing consumer market in the world.
Still at the forefront of China’s economic boom, Shenzhen is the city that started it all. Created as the country’s first capitalist economic empowerment zone in 1979, Shenzhen attracted countless factories and countless migrants drawn by the promise of work. And for 15 years it’s most popular radio program has been ‘At Night You’re Not Lonely,’ a call-in advice show hosted by Hu Xiao Mei. Once a factory girl herself, Xiao Mei dispenses hard-won wisdom to a city in flux.
Journalism With Chinese Characteristics
There is real investigative reporting in China, it’s just not done under a free press flag. Instead, practitioners mind an unstated set of rules, keeping themselves safe by employing tactics like using excessive jargon and exploiting government rivalries. It’s an evolving dance requiring ingenuity, subtlety, courage and a willingness to be fired every day.
How the world sees China, and how China thinks it is seen by the world may make all the difference as time marches on. The West cannot afford to hold on to kung fu, Confucius, and chopsticks as our big ideas about China. Modern art, fashion, and the young urban elite have a new story to tell; if anyone’s listening.
After Mao’s Little Red Book of Quotations the second best-selling book in Chinese history is, we’re told, Wolf Totem. Admired, bootlegged, criticized as social Darwinism, translated into English, soon to be made into a film, and a Japanese manga series – the novel about resisting and revering Mongolian wolves during the Cultural Revolution has become a Chinese conversation piece. Brooke speaks with author Jiang Rong about coming of age in exile and what those lessons mean for China now.
The internet in China is both censored by the government and used for surveillance, but American companies make the calculation that it is better to be there, albeit in a diminished capacity, than not at all. Nevermind, Chinese internet users are getting organized on the web and the result is real social change.