Date Thesis Awarded
5-2024
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
History
Advisor
Fabrício Prado
Committee Members
Eric Han
Jinghong Zhang
Emily Wilcox
Abstract
How could popular history presented in post-Mao Chinese mass media settle the state’s emerging ideological and sociopolitical tensions and satisfy different historical agents’ multi-level interests? Existing scholarships take a top-down approach by emphasizing how the Communist Party of China (CPC) ’s regulations on mass media industries restricted the historical narratives they produced. Alternative accounts focus more on how Chinese mass media’s diversification and marketization since the 1980s have given agents more opportunities to produce appealing historical accounts that potentially touch on controversial contemporary issues. By employing unexamined Chinese mass media sources and state-level archives, this Honor Thesis studies the mass media historical writings of qigong fever氣功熱 – a mass-organized qigong practicing movement that prevailed in China between the 1980s and the 1990s. It argues that these writings legitimized the fever as a symbol of China’s national revival under the CPC’s leadership to reconcile the tension between tradition, modernization, and the Party in post-Mao China. It also analyzes how these works’ authors – known as mass media historians – actively used the writings to achieve their pursuits of readership, political security, and career benefits. By doing so, the thesis expands the concept of mass media historians in post-Mao China by placing the term in the middle of the “state-public” dichotomy and the writers’ interpersonal networks. It ultimately seeks to reveal how different agents’ considerations and powers in post-Mao China interplayed under a centralized regime’s heavy regulations and how these interplays reproduced knowledge of the past and the present to diverse groups of readers.
Recommended Citation
Hou, Xincheng, "Legitimizing the Myth of the Nation: Mass Media Historical Writings on Qigong Fever in Mainland China between the 1980s and the 2020s" (2024). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 2112.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/2112
