RECONCILIATION BETWEEN OPENNESS AND RESISTANCE: Media globalization and new policies of China’s television in the 1990s

From the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, television worldwide has been undergoing a new wave of tremendous changes. These changes in television, a medium which acts as the world’s common cultural ground (Dizard, 1994), have resulted from the evolution of the world’s political environment, economic structure, technological advancement, and cultural ecology; meanwhile, unprecedented transformation in the media has also profoundly altered the global scene (Sepstrup, 1989; Hamelink, 1994; Maney, 1995; Downing, 1996; Mosco, 1996; Mowlana, 1997). Although the emphasis and degree of the changes in television in different regions/countries have been various, and have focused either on institutional and structural changes or on ideological changes (Blumler, 1993), several general traits have been reflected in the alterations. Among them, one major trend is deregulation and another one is globalization (Steinbock, 1995). As the pace of these trends becomes more vigorous, so does the need to address the impact which these trends can have on the cultures and societies of individual countries (Mohammadi, 1997).