Dr Bingchun Meng
I am a Lecturer in the department of Media and Communications. I have a BA in Chinese Language and Literature (1997) and an MA in Comparative Literature (2000) from Nanjing University, China. I obtained my PhD in Mass Communication (2006) from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before joining the LSE, I was a post-doc fellow at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where I also taught classes on Chinese media.
Research Interests
My major research interests include, first, political economy of Chinese media and information industries in a globalising era; second, the implications of copyright regulation on communication networks and creative activities; third, contextualised analysis of new media and communication technology in the complex of political, economic and cultural developments. These three sets of research are connected in more than one way. First of all, they are all conducted within the context of globalisation, no matter if it is development of media industries, governance of copyright or social implications of new communication technologies; they all reflect the interactions between the global, the national and the local in different ways. Secondly, these research areas are also unified by a general inquiry into the dynamics between communication, development and democracy in the transitional Chinese society.
Under the first theme, I have conducted research on both the Chinese film industry and Chinese television. In one of my earlier projects, I analysed how the government film policy and local capitalists have been utilising nationalism as a rhetorical strategy to push forward their respective agenda, while real efforts are lacking to establish an alternative model that allows sustainable development of the Chinese film industry. One of my current projects is an investigation of the recent Super Girl phenomenon in China. I intend to examine the show itself together with all the commentary discourses surrounding it as a media event, through which major tensions regarding media politics in China were acted out. Regarding future research, I plan to continue looking at how the Chinese film and television landscape is shaped by the power of transnational capital, nation-state and local capital. I would like to further integrate political economic approach with textual analysis and examine how the actual content that appears on film and TV screens reflect the political transformation and social change as well as help construct new cultural identities.
For my PhD dissertation I examined the development of Chinese copyright policies against the background of China’s integration into global capitalism. Based on my analysis of power negotiations among transnational organisations, the Chinese state, the local copyright industries and the average Chinese citizen, I demonstrate how the legitimacy of copyright is established and problematized in the Chinese context and how post-WTO copyright governance is influencing information access in China. This study is the first part of a larger project to conceptualise the relationship between copyright law, censorship and information flow within the Chinese context.
Contact Details
Room S108
Department of Media and Communications
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7107 5020
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7955 7248
Email: b.meng@lse.ac.uk
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Page last updated on 03 September 2009 ^
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