Overview

Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World examines reportage as an important aesthetic form of cultural production in the Sinophone world. Originating as a proletarian nonfiction form in interwar Europe, reportage spread around the world, coming into its own in the Sinophone world from the 1930s to today. Going beyond fact-based journalism, reportage is pursued through a variety of artistic forms and media, from nonfiction writing to photography to documentary film. Reportage’s plurimedial representations facilitate and amplify intersectional struggles against multiple forms of social and political oppression. Engaging its audiences in affective ethico-political exchanges with (human or nonhuman) subjects, reportage promotes audiences’ empathetic responses to the democratic appeals of marginalized groups whose status, identity, or situation manifest emergent ethical challenges in the society of their time. This work offers new understandings of reportage’s dialectical relationship with its readership by evoking sympathetic identifications with personal contemplations of place, hearth, and senses of belonging. Covering a breadth of media across mainland China, Taiwan, and the Sinophone diaspora in the United States and Japan, this book examines how intermediality cultivates distinctive expressions in reportage, cross-cultural empathy, and ethico-political relationships between the reporter, photographer, filmmaker, and their surroundings.

Full Product Details

Author:   Charles A. Laughlin ,  Li Guo
Publisher:   The University of Michigan Press
Imprint:   The University of Michigan Press
Edition:   Bilingual edition
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780472077878

ISBN 10:   0472077872
Pages:   306
Publication Date:   05 February 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Language:   Chinese, English

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: “From Reportage to Non-Fiction Art: New Perspectives from the Chinese-Speaking World” Li Guo and Charles A. Laughlin I. Contesting Chinese Reportage 1. “The Poetics and Praxis of Zhang Mengqi’s Documentary Films” Thomas Moran 2. “Forest Chongqing: A Photographic Reportage by Yan Wang Preston” Federica Mirra 3. “Reincarnations of Labor Reportage: Nonfiction by Chinese Migrant Worker Authors” Federico Picerni II. Envisioning Taiwanese Reportage 4. “Gu Mengren and Reportage in 1970s Taiwan” Charles A. Laughlin 5. “Stoic Heroism: Making ""Photojournalist"" a Professional Identity in Ren Jian Magazine’s International Section” Po-hsi Chen 6. “Reportage, Photography, and the Ekphrastic Encounter: On Moon Children by Liao Chia-chan and Yan Hsin-chu” Li Guo III. Race, Indigeneity, and Border-Crossings 7. “Tales of Chinese Coolies in Late Qing Labor Reportage” Ping Zhu 8. “Transforming the ‘Barbarian’ Margins into Multiethnic National Centers: Photographic Reportage and Ethnic Imagination in Republican-era China” Yanshuo Zhang 9. “Chinese-in-Japan Documentary and Media Reportage in the New Millennium: Toward a Disjunctive History of Transnational Affectivity” Ran Ma Epilogue: “The Rebirth of Reportage in the New Age” Charles A. Laughlin and Li Guo List of Contributors Index

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Author Information

Charles A. Laughlin is Ellen Bayard Weedon Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. Li Guo is Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Utah State University.

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