Book Talk : Journalism in the jianghu: Digital news as a “post-public” institution

2025-10-21 - 2025-10-21

Emily H. C. Chua

Hybrid (online & in-person)

 

Date & Time：2025/10/21 16:30-18:30 (GMT+8)

Venue：R106A, HA Building 2, Guangfu Campus, NYCU

Format：Hybrid (online & in-person)  

Speaker: Emily H. C. Chua (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore)

Discussant: Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang (Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, NYCU)

Moderator: Allen Chun ( International Center for Cultural Studies , NYCU)

 

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82026849966?pwd=HWxYR1obj43DMb8yIadutTLpCRLkWB.1

ZOOM ID: 820 2684 9966

Password: 095343

* The event will be conducted in English.

 

【Abstract】

Critical studies of news in China often focus on investigative journalists. But what can we learn about China’s news media from its unheroic ordinary reporters? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at a newspaper in Beijing and Guangzhou, The Currency of Truth (University of Michigan Press, 2023) shows how news articles are often produced and circulated less for their impact on imagined publics, than for the value they may have to other industry players. Journalists make and use their articles to navigate the fluidly shifting relational networks, or jianghu (江湖) that their lives and futures are embedded in. Rather than seeing this as a uniquely Chinese problem, however, the book analyzes it as a broader condition of contemporary news – an outgrowth of digital media business models and “post-public” social imaginaries that are also emerging in other political and cultural contexts. In this book talk, the author thus explores the unique insights that Chinese reporters have on the globally pressing question of what professional journalism is coming to consist in. 

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