Ruoyun Bai

Ruoyun Bai

Associate Professor of Media Studies, and Comparative Literature and Chinese Literature and Culture, University of Toronto.

Professor Bai's esearch agenda has been driven by a sustained fascination with the rise of China’s media and cultural industries in the latter half of the 1990s and beyond. In particular, I seek to understand the multifaceted role of media and popular culture in the reconstitution of political, economic, and cultural power in contemporary China.

A highly dynamic, contradiction-ridden Chinese popular culture is emerging from a rapidly evolving media system, new media technologies, and global as well as regional flows of news and entertainment. Whereas the Chinese state used to employ mass culture to produce subjects, now it turns itself, and finds itself being turned, into a cultural commodity for its subjects’ consumption. A fascinating question that drives my research agenda is: how is the state, including its agents and agencies, re-produced and consumed in Chinese popular culture and what are the cultural and political implications? For example, how do anticorruption television dramas and cop dramas shape and reshape the discourses of state power, corruption, and market reform through the vast array of stories and images with which they fill the prime-time slots? In what ways is state power diluted or corroborated by popular culture? These questions define most of what I do in my research and graduate teaching.

Her recent publications include:

Book: Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics (University of British Columbia Press, 2014), available here: http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=299174228; http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARuoyun%20Bai

Edited books:

• Rethinking Chinese Television, co-edited with Geng Song (Routledge, 2014) (check it out here: http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Television-Twenty-First-Century-Entertaining/dp/0415745128/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418228262&sr=1-1)

• TV Drama in China: Unfolding Narratives of Tradition, Political Transformation, and Cosmopolitan Identity, co-edited with Ying Zhu and Michael Keane (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ZHUTVD.html

Articles and Book Chapters

• • “Fubai, guanchang xiangxiang yu xin ziyou zhuyi lixing– jiedu Song Siming xianxiang” (Corruption in the ‘Realm of Officialdom’: Narrative, and Neoliberalism: Making Sense of Song Siming, the Good Corrupt Official in Snail House, Communication & Society, 23 (2013), pp. 177-199.

• “Cultural Mediation and the Making of the Mainstream in Postsocialist China,” Media, Culture and Society 34:4 (2012), pp.391-406. Reprinted in Michael Keane & Wanning Sun (eds.) China’s Media: A Reader (London: Routledge)

• “Disrobing CCTV – Scandals, E’gao, and Resistance in China's Cyberspace,” in Paradoxa, 22 (2010), pp. 249-268.

• “Media Commercialization, Entertainment, and the Party-State,” in Global Media Journal 4:6 (Spring 2005).

• “Introduction” (co-authored with Geng Song), in Ruoyun Bai and Geng Song (eds.), Rethinking Chinese Television (Routledge, 2014), pp.1-14.

• “‘Clean up the Screen,’ Regulating Television Entertainment in the 2000s,” in Rethinking Chinese Television (Routledge, 2014), pp.69-86.

• “Introduction” (Co-authored with Ying Zhu and Michael Keane), in Ying Zhu, Michael Keane and Ruoyun Bai (eds.), TV Drama in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009), pp. 1-18.

• “‘Clean Officials’, Emotional Moral Community, and Anti-corruption Television Dramas,” in TV Drama in China, pp. 47-60.

• “TV Drama in China – Global Implications,” in Manfred Kops & Stefan Ollig (eds.), A Reader on the Internationalization of the Chinese TV Sector (Münster, Germany: LTV Verlag, 2007), pp. 75-97.

Reviews:

Book review of Mainstream Culture Refocused, by Yueping Zhong (University of Hawaii Press, 2010), Pacific Affairs (September 2011), p. 561.

Book review of TV China, edited by Ying Zhu and Chris Berry (Indiana University Press, 2009), Cinema Journal, (Spring 2010), 49:3, pp. 162-164