Televising the Cosmopolitan Subject in Contemporary China

Abstract

The rise of China as a global power has witnessed the paradoxical coexistence of both cosmopolitan and nationalistic sensibilities among its population. A fruitful way of investigating this paradox is through a focus on media representation and popular imagination of the Self/Other dichotomy as a response to neoliberal globalization. This paper focus on the construction of the cosmopolitan subjects in recent Chinese TV programs and its reception in the context of nationalism and transnationalism. Through consumption and wealth, a new type of neoliberal cosmopolitan subject is being constructed in China. This discourse of cosmopolitanism is not necessarily in tension with nationalism in the context of contemporary China. As a matter of fact, a cosmopolitanism that emphasizes the formation of new subjects in a more open and stronger China on the world stage is as much nationalism’s supplement as its negation. As recent investigations of younger and more recent Chinese immigrants in the West reveal, nationalism has become part of a cosmopolitan Chinese youth identity in overseas locations. Cosmopolitan subjects have been constructed in relation to the suzhi discourse through a commoditization and dehumanization of the body, constructs a hierarchy of worthiness and utility. Therefore, rather than self-problematization and reflexivity, to which critique is integral, “cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics” is more a confirmation of the self through a claim of cosmopolitan subjectivity that transcends parochial identity. In this sense, it is in line with an important task in postsocialist subject-making in the Chinese media, i.e., the construction of a Chinese identity through a dichotomous imagination of the national selfhood/otherness.