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Abstract
This article makes what Western scholars call a “leap in the dark” by suggesting that, instead of comparing the “West” with the “Rest”, we should compare the “East” with the “East”—in this case the media in China with the media in Russia. We have identified three blind spots in previous comparative media research that have resulted in turning attention away from comparative study of China and Russia. These are: (1) ahistoricism; (2) misunderstanding the relationship between the state and the market; and (3) understanding national media and communication as closed and homogenous systems. We propose three remedies: (1) historicizing comparative media studies; (2) re-conceptualizing the relationship between the state and media markets; and (3) rethinking the dynamics between the global, the national and the local.
Keywords:
The authors wish to thank Tom Hollihan, Raka Shome, Florian Toepfel and Yuezhi Zhao for their useful comments.
The authors wish to thank Tom Hollihan, Raka Shome, Florian Toepfel and Yuezhi Zhao for their useful comments.
Notes
[1] We use ‘comparative media studies’ as a well-established term in communication research, but we also want to emphasize the role of communication.
[2] The East is used here metaphorically, as in “Go West, young man,” potentially opening up new opportunities. We are fully aware of the contended issues when using the “East”–“West” dichotomy. See, for example, Gunaratne, Citation2005, pp. 14–17. We are not arguing either that Russia, for example, has no European part. We are simply using the idea of the “East” to show that we still lack even the concepts we need for this kind of change or re-orientation of our research.