This new collection of essays provides a most welcome and refreshing perspective on media, culture, and communications in modern China. Celebrity in China departs from the existing scholarship in two respects. First, Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys have assembled a team of international China-watchers working in assorted but cognate academic fields. This lends the collection a rich multi- and inter-disciplinary dynamic that is poorly represented in similar work. Second, the China focus provides an indispensable corrective to the idea that celebrity is associated only with “western” consumer cultures. These essays demonstrate the multiple ways of defining and analysing the concept of “celebrity”—its manufacture, circulation and reception—within a distinct cultural context. At the same time, it is clear that the development of culture in China has embraced and adapted regional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) and global influences, as well as capitalist practices that are prevalent after the country's “opening up” after 1978....

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