The Political Impact of New Media in China

The UCLA Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Anne-Marie Brady on the impact of the continuing evolution of new media on governance in China as well as elite political dynamics.

China, like many other governments, has recognized that new media are both a useful tool of government and a threat to state interests. Instead of fearing the new media, the Chinese party-state has embraced new technologies and forms of communication, utilizing them as new mediums for governance and integrating them into China’s modern economy. At the same time it has worked to limit their negative potential. This talk examines the impact of the continuing evolution of new media on governance in China as well as elite political dynamics. It considers how the use of new media is changing perspectives of upcoming leaders, and how the political expectations of an increasingly wired, tech-savvy, and globally aware Chinese population are also being affected by the potential of the new technology.

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Anne-Marie Brady is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch. She is a specialist in China’s domestic and foreign policy. She is the author of Friend of China: The Myth of Rewi Alley (RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); and the editor of Looking North, Looking South: China, Taiwan, and the South Pacific (World Scientific, forthcoming 2010); Foreign Missionary on the Long March: The Unpublished Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman (Merwin Press, forthcoming 2010); as well as numerous scholarly articles. Her current research topics include China’s modernized propaganda system, the politics of ethnicity in China, and China’s polar interests.