A Chinese book on communication studies.

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As a discipline that emerged in the 20th century, communication studies in China has only existed for a little more than 30 years. Scholars in ancient times had some valuable ideas about interpreting human communication activities, and some scholars in modern times have also endeavored to establish Chinese communication theory. Nevertheless, as an independent discipline, Chinese communication studies is still dominated by Western communication theories.

A review of China’s publications on communication in the past three decades reveals that scholars have constantly sought to interpret Chinese social communication phenomena using Western theories. There are surely successful cases, but problems are also prominent.

For example, it is debatable whether these borrowed theories are fully digested by domestic scholars and whether these interpretations can touch upon the essence of issues. Because these theories and methods were constructed by Western scholars based on the communication phenomena in Western societies, their interpretation power is limited in the Chinese context.

The real result is that some communication research in China has become a process of trying to validate Western theories by Chinese experience. Domestic research is not the discovery and exploration of vivid communication cases or a scientific approach to understanding communication realities. Rather, it is a phenomenon of theoretical paradigms prevailing over awareness of problems, while the latter should be one capacity of researchers.

Currently, China is undergoing social transformation. Various forms of new media confer more discourse rights to the public and individual people, which changes the traditional communication pattern. Public involvement in communication activities creates a boundless resource for communication researchers to draw on. To develop domestic communication theories requires a return to local context, which is to say researchers must understand communication problems within the context of China’s own political, economic and cultural patterns.

 Communication theories use paradigms to represent communication laws. These paradigms can summarize the main points and keys in communication reality, but they are too narrowly defined to have sufficient ability to interpret every individual case. Mechanical application will result in flawed analysis. If Chinese communication research blindly adapts the domestic situation to Western theories, then these theories will take precedence over practical problems.

By shifting their attention from theories to the real context, researchers can propose their own questions based on observation and experience of domestic communication activities. We can adopt Western theoretical resources to analyze China’s communication activities, but at the same time, we should take a critical perspective to reflect upon and then reconstruct these theories. And this is the only way to build a communication theory system of our own.

 

Chu Jinyong is from the School of Journalism and Communication at Zhengzhou University.