Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Tenzin Jinba, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, The Currency of Truth brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals.

The Currency of Truth argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary news, arguing that rather than setting out from the assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its publics, we should explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Hang Tu is a scholar of literature and thought, and his primary research interests center on public intellectual debate in contemporary China. His forthcoming book, Sentimental Republic: Chinese Intellectuals and the Maoist Past (under contract with Harvard University Asia Center), analyzes how the four major intellectual clusters in reform China—liberals, the left, cultural conservatives, and nationalists—debated Mao’s revolutionary legacy in light of its postsocialist transition. His Chinese monograph, An Emotional State: Public Intellectual Debate and the Politics of Affect in Contemporary China (Taipei: Linking Press, 2023), devotes attention to six key writers and scholars from contemporary Chinese and Sinophone world: Li Zehou, Liu Zaifu, Yu Ying-shih, Chen Yingzhen, Wang Anyi, and Liu Xiaofeng. Tu’s recent publications in journals have appeared in Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Intellectual History, MCLC, and Prism. Tu earned his BA in English from Sun Yat-Sen University, and MA in English literature at the University of Washington. He received his PhD in Modern Chinese Literature at Harvard University. At the National University of Singapore, he teaches courses on PRC history, modern Chinese literature, culture and media, and Chinese political thought.

Matt Carlson is Professor and Cowles Fellow at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of three books – News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture (with Sue Robinson and Seth C. Lewis), Journalistic Authority: Legitimating News in the Digital Era, and On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism – and has published over seventy journal articles and book chapters. He is also the editor of three books, including Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices, and Participation with Seth C. Lewis. In combining interests in discourse, epistemology, and power, his research centers on how various actors engage in an ongoing public competition to define what constitutes legitimate journalism in the face of technological, political, and cultural change.

Huay Leng Lee is the Editor-in-Chief for the Chinese Media Group in SPH Media Group. She is responsible for Lianhe Zaobao and its global digital platform zaobao.com, the evening daily Shin Min Daily News, a stable of student publications, a digital channel for young audience called HeyKaki and an English language e-magazine called ThinkChina.sg. Huay Leng joined SPH in 1994 and held numerous roles as a journalist, Hong Kong Correspondent, Beijing Bureau Chief, China Editor, News Editor and Deputy Editor of Lianhe Zaobao. She helmed the evening daily Lianhe Wanbao from 2014-2016. In December 2016, she was appointed Head of the Chinese Media Group and was re-designated to her current role with the formation of SPH Media Trust in 2021. Huay Leng graduated with an honours degree in Chinese Studies from the National University of Singapore and holds a Master of Arts degree in Southeast Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She was an Asian Fellow at Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School (2010-2011), and a Singapore Lien fellow of Lien Ying Chow Legacy Fellowship (2014).

Emily Chua is a social and cultural anthropologist, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. The Currency of Truth is her first book. Her second book project explores the digital transformation of money in Singapore. Through ethnographic engagements with financial app-using retail investors, venture capital-seeking startup founders, and data-deploying fintech developers, it asks how our remaking of money is remaking us. Emily’s articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review and China Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Institute of East Asian Studies at University of California, Berkeley, among others. She earned her PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to ziqi@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.