This book examines why entertainment television is politically and culturally significant in China and how Chinese television relates to the state and society. Further, it explores media regulation and censorship, asks what popular televisual texts tell us about the unsettled and reconfigured relations between commercial television, audiences and the state? An interdisciplinary study of the television industry this book covers a number of important issues in China today, such as censorship, nationalism, consumerism, social justice and the central and local authorities.

Ruoyun Bai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media and Centre of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Geng Song is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.

Introduction Part I: Entertaining TV - A New Territory of Significance 1, Teaching People How to Live: Shenghuo Programs on Chinese Television 2. "The New Family Mediator": TV Mediation Programs in China's "Harmonious Society" 3. The Long Commute: Mobile Television and the Seamless Social Part II: "Curbing Entertainment" 4. "Clean Up the Screen": Regulating Television Entertainment in the 2000's 5. Rethinking Censorship in China-The Case of Snail House Part III: Commercial Television and the Reconfiguration of History, Memory, and Nationalism 6. Imagining the Other: Foreigners on the Chinese TV Screen 7. When Foreigners Perform the Chinese Nation: Televised Global Chinese Language Competitions 8. Make the Present Serve the Past: Restaging On Guard beneath the Neon Lights in Contemporary China 9. Remoulding Heroes: The Erasure of Class Discourse in the Red Classics Television Drama Adaptation 10. Tianxia Revisited: Family and Empire on the Television Screen