Chapter 2: Television Narrative as Discourse: Poetics of Representation

There is extensive literature studying Western representations of China, telling us a great deal about what images are presented and why (Isaacs, 1958; Dawson, 1967; Mosher, 1990; Jespersen, 1996; Zhang, 1998; Mackerras, 1999; Pan, 2012). However, the question as to how these images are realized and through what mechanisms, in particular the mass media, has rarely been explored. To deepen our understanding of Western portrayals of China, the issue of how is as important as that of what. This chapter discusses the conceptual and methodological issues of the study of Chinese representation, and establishes an analytical framework to examine television documentary text. In our globalised but technology-driven world, the mass media play a central role in making sense of ourselves and our environment, and crucially the changing relationships between the West and the Rest. Yet the Western media have not made any changes that are commensurate with the transformation sweeping the world. This is most evident in the formation of discourse about the ‘other’ as a system of representation. The West tends to see in the Rest an idealised or distorted image of itself, and projects onto this image their own fears, confidence and desire, through a modernity-centred discourse, in particular in its liberal humanist version. Fundamental in representing the cultural ‘other’ is the deep-rooted assumption of a historically inevitable and necessarily ‘progressive’ character of Western expansion into the Rest. This underlying assumption underlies the latent structure of media reporting of the non-Western world…