The Articulation of Audience in Chinese Communication Research

This paper is focused on the articulation of audience in Chinese communication research in the past three decades. Based on the corpus of Chinese academic journal papers, the textual analysis is divided into three phases: 1/ the tradition of 'people' and 'mass line', political transition, economic reform and the emergence of 'audience' (1978-1989); 2/ socialist market economy and the expansion of 'audience-consumer' (1990-2000); 3/ social transformation (harmonious society versus civil society) and the construction of 'audience-market-public' (2001-2011). In each period, Chinese audience research was related closely to the changing societal and academic context as a whole.