Search

China's steady economic development, the size of its territory, its population, the growth of economic strength and investment expansion create the need to adequately manage the public media space and adjust the principles of media communication in order to preserve the political and economic stability of society as an important condition for a favorable economic growth. In China, public media space and media communication are different from media culture and media communication in European countries because of the Konfucian principles - one of the most important is the prioritization of community interests over the interests of the individual. It is a part of a Chinese or Asian civilization model. The media space and media communication feauture in China is designed to balance political and social contradiction, to ensure the internal harmony of society in the spirit of Chinese philosophical principles, to avoid high social costs in the development of the Chinese society and the state was consolidating politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current resurgence of the Chinese mega city of Shanghai involves a radical restructuring of the urban fabric, infrastructure, economy and media culture. New Shanghai - a city of excess, commerce, speed and stature - competes to become the information communication hub in the Asia-Pacific. The World Expo of 2010 in the city will furthermore be a spectacular event for fulfilling aspirations of becoming a world city, and even a world centre. Partly through the display of wide-ranging digitalization, at the exposition and in the city, the municipal government has set its mind on once again detaining the future right here. In this paper I sound out space and media theorists as well as phenomenological philosophical thinking about the future, in order to probe the question of how one place becomes continually endowed with futurity. Futurity, I argue, is in fact an essential part of a collective memory in the city. It is Shanghai's genius loci. Moving from the Golden Age of modernity and cosmopolitanism of the 1920s and 30s, through the city under Communism, into the current global/digital city of Shanghai I inquire into they ways in which media and communication - the technological imaginary, mediations of the 'Shanghai illusion' and the factual media and/or mass cultural forms intrinsic to the urban fabric - have been historically, and are at present, a backbone of the Shanghai imaginary. I further discuss how the future is both obsessively desired in Shanghai of today and at once under seizure since New Shanghai is, as much as it is a place of physical monumentality, an elusive and contradictory space of temporal co-existence as well as of hypermobility and hypermediation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]