Synopsis
Standing as the world’s two largest economies, marshaling the most imposing armies on earth, holding enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons, consuming a majority share of the planet’s natural resources, and serving as the media generators and health care providers for billions of consumers around the globe, the United States and China are positioned to influence notions of democracy, nationalism, citizenship, human rights, environmental priorities, and public health for the foreseeable future. These broad issues are addressed as questions about communication—about how our two nations envision each other and how our interlinked imaginaries create both opportunities and obstacles for greater understanding and strengthened relations. Accordingly, this book provides in-depth communication-based analyses of how U.S. and Chinese officials, scholars, and activists configure each other, portray the relations between the two nations, and depict their shared and competing interests. As a first step toward building a new understanding between one another, Imagining China tackles the complicated question of how Americans, Chinese, and their respective allies imagine themselves enmeshed in nations, old rivalries, and emerging partnerships, while simultaneously meditating on the powers and limits of nationalism in our age of globalization.
About the Author
Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the director of the UCD College-in-Prison Program, served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association, and is the editor of Captured Words/Free Thoughts, the annual arts and politics magazine. He has published ten books, including A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War (2021) and the coedited Imagining China: Rhetorics of Nationalism in an Age of Globalization (2017). His scholarship on international affairs has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Taiwan Journal of Democracy, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. His journalism on U.S.-China-Taiwan relations has appeared in SupChina, Public Seminar, New Lines Magazine, and Communication Currents. He has served since 2016 as one of co-organizers for five conferences in Beijing, one in Shenzhen, one in Hong Kong, and one online conference in Shanghai (during COVID). He has been awarded the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Association for Chinese Communication Studies’ Xiao Award for Outstanding Rhetorical Research, and the University of Colorado’s Thomas Jefferson Award.
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