People, Citizen, and User

Guiquan Xu is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication of Sun Yat-sen University, China. He obtained a joint Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Communication University of China in 2013. His research interests focus on the areas of discourse studies, audience research, and media politics.

• 1 Introduction  2 Political Transition, Economic Reform, and the Emergence of ‘Audience’ (1978 – 1989)  3 Socialist Market Economy and the Expansion of ‘Audience·Consumer’ (1990 – 2000)  4 Social Transformation and the Construction of ‘People·Citizen·Consumer’ (2001 – 2011)  5 State Governance, Deep Mediatization, and the Reconfiguration of ‘People·Citizen·User’ (2012 – 2021)  6 General Conclusions

"People, Citizen, and User offers a highly original contribution to Communication Studies, and in particular to Audience Studies, because of its creative deployment of a theoretical approach that is unique to this field, combined with an ambitious and still very rigorous study of the development of Chinese Audience Studies, which spans more than four decades. The book’s discourse-theoretical foundation brings in a fascinating perspective that allows for an analysis of scholarly knowledge production that takes into account the discursive struggles over its development, and the contingencies and contradictions that come out of these struggles. This renders the book deeply analytical: It easily transcends the mere overview, and instead the book offers a deep understanding of the specificity of Chinese Audience Studies, and how it developed (and spectacularly grew) in these four decades."Nico Carpentier, Extraordinary Professor at Charles University, Czech Republic, and President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research"Following the calls of James Curran, Georgette Wang and others to de-Westernize communication research, Guiquan Xu compares terminology, concepts and theories of Western audience research to that of China. After surveying Western research discourse on audiences, he investigates Chinese research discourse, as it arose along with electronic media in China and within the contexts of dramatic economic and political changes. For English readers, this adds a comparative dimension to audience research. To compare such social and linguistic realities, across languages and historical change, is a challenge, but its reward can be to stimulate new questions and thinking about fundamental concepts in communications research. Xu examines four political economic periods in which mass media spread in China, mostly as national priorities, examining words used or invented, as their connotations shifted, while also distinguishing their meanings and usages from comparable English words used in Western communication research.While focused on academic discourses, this research takes a step toward de-Westernizing communication research, and hopefully may encourage further cross-cultural comparisons of other discourses about communication, such as journalism, fiction, or everyday conversation, not only between English and Chinese linguistic communities, but also among others."Richard Butsch, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and Film & Media Studies, Rider University, USA