Author Description

In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. Featuring a villainous high-ranking government official, it was the first in a series of wildly popular corruption dramas that riveted the nation. In Staging Corruption, Ruoyun Bai looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of these dramas and the ways in which they express the collective dreams and nightmares of China in the market-reform era. She charts the serials’ genesis as a key component of the Communist Party’s anticorruption struggles to their re-emergence, following a government crackdown in 2004, as highly cynical representations of power and money. She considers the political implications of media commercialization in China, showing that the commercialized television culture is actually a better vehicle for cynical representations of corruption. Her book shows how these dramas – as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political censorship – unveil complicated relationships between power, media, and society. Staging Corruption will be essential reading for those following China's ongoing struggles with the highly volatile issue of political and social nepotism.