Overview

Xuenan Cao offers an unexpected angle on China's technological rise, spotlighting the role of deficit-driven improvisation. As Cao demonstrates, where printing paper, computers, and microchips have been in shortage, media improvisations and AI gadgetry have filled the gap and become the unlikeliest accelerants of tech imaginaries.  Equal parts media-historical and literary analysis, the book connects several moments in Chinese history: Mao's Great Leap Forward that demanded the country produce mountains of books, notwithstanding the shortage of papers and printers; the compressed development that pushed key industries – such as China Railway – to informatize amidst hazards; the information-theoretical explosion in which scientists impersonated computing devices when there was none for them to access; and the ironic present, when municipals have scrambled to update their smart-cities with low-budget AI gadget theatrics, such as facial recognition toilet paper dispensers. These are scenarios in which media practitioners – from print to information technologies and to AI—have had to improvise in response to political pressure and thrive on a deficiency of funding and materials. Drawing on Chinese communist party archival records, China Railway local archives, newspapers, ersatz college reference books, science journals, and AI-related technical documents, each book section combines archival research and literary readings, narrated through personal history with media-theoretical extrapolation. Ultimately, Cao persuades that the critique and deconstruction of the canonicity of Western media theory requires an understanding of media improvisations in China.

Full Product Details

9781503647237

Table of Contents

Reviews

""One of the most exciting works I have read in media and cultural studies. Original in both form and theoretical intervention, this interdisciplinary book presents a novel pathway for decolonizing knowledge production in Anglophone academia.""--Fan Yang, University of Maryland, Baltimore County ""Chinese Media Improvisations tells a little-known and overlooked media history focused on glitchy radio signals, paper shortages, and AI gadgetry. In our age of media saturation and overabundance, it reveals, in a personal and compelling style, what has been unseen and lost.""--Anna Greenspan, NYU Shanghai

Author Information

Xuenan Cao is Professor and Chair of General Education at San Francisco Bay University and Adjunct Faculty of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available