Abstract

Media as an instrument of world (re)making has been the focus of critical discourses on media in China since the 1940s. As Haun Saussy argues, Euro- American colonial and, later on, global discourses since the mid-nineteenth century have often constructed “China” and the “World” as two imaginary poles that are fundamentally different in concepts of historical temporality, geopolitical spatiality, and culturo-linguistic subjectivity. In this light, how media could mediate the relationship between these two imaginary poles becomes a crucial question in many theoretical discussions. In recent years, a key conceptual framework that shapes the debate in Chinese academic studies of media is “yujing” (linguistic terrain): an imagination of the world today as a global economy of gift exchange, which consists of overlapping and, at times, mutually contesting linguistic environments that require remediation. Interestingly, between 1942 and 1945, media theorist Sun Mingjing proposed a temporal model of studying world media by considering international mediation as a gradual process of constructing a sense of world rhythm called shijie shi (world time). In this chapter, I conduct a comparative reading of these two modes of Chinese media theory: one on spatiality and the other on temporality. I argue that these two models are symptomatic of a semicolonial and, later on, postcolonial, desire to rewrite the imaginary gap between “China” and the “World.”

Keywords: Chinese media theory, Sun Mingjing, Media and world order, Sino-Japanese War and Media, Yujing or linguistic terrain