Chinese Society – China and Media

The Chinese Society – China and Media course offers students insight into the important role of media, social media, emerging new ways of interacting in daily life and the role of censorship in the Chinese society. The course illustrates how media and social media in particular are changing society, reflect social and popular issues, and how the partisan voices are circumventing the censorship machine, and how innovative interplay of language and expressions are utilized in this cat and mouse game with netizens’ desire to express sensitive issues. We will also focus on the world-shaking Corona virus media discussion and how Beijing is carrying out both domestic and global media and information war on the virus. The internet, online wholesaling, games and social media in general have become an inseparable part of Chinese people’s daily life. This revolutionary development has been paralleled with the rise of global media giants; companies such as Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba and number of other Chinese high-tech companies and restricting Western internet companies, such as Google and YouTube, to operate in China. The course also introduces these global leading companies, their role, strategies and intriguing relationship with the Party and its censorship machine in China.