Cultural Imperialism: The Censorship Of Chinese Mass Media

3. Appropriateness

Cultural imperialism is represented in the perspectives of ontology (the nature of reality; what is knowable), epistemology (how knowledge is created and expanded), and axiology (the proper role of values in research and theory building). This is related to today 's media that its audience will be hearing, reading, seeing, and knowing on whatever news the media portrays that influence the lives of audience. Its general assumption is at least one change will occur in the behavior or personality of the audience based on their dependency on the media. Since cultural imperialism is mostly involved with the media, especially television (pallavidhakal, 2011), it depicts how cultural hegemony is built and reinforced in the society

GlobalPost reporter Kathleen McLaughlin (2012) researched on the growing influence of Western culture in China that ever since China invested in foreign trade 30 years ago, Western brands and innovations made an economic boom, helping China 's middle class to grow large. However, President Hu Jintao, who represented China 's government, claimed that China 's culture is being “invaded” by Western culture, which he sees them as “hostile forces”. Thus begins the censorship of Chinese mass media with the first step to push inappropriate TV shows out of prime time. Xu Fan, a professor from the Communications University of China, stated that those rules are meant to restrict crime programs and dramas that betrays moral and ethics. These kinds of TV shows seemingly opposed the government 's law that even the Chinese versions of American-based TV shows are quite offensive in terms of moral or ethical issues. “If You Are The One”, based on America 's “The Bachelor”, in one episode, one of the female contestants was asked by the bachelor to ride on his bicycle to which she replied with sarcasm - “I would rather cry in the back of a BMW (a Western car brand).” The producers recklessly brought older contestants, and put a Communist Party school professor to be the third host to keep the show going despite these intentions giving a bad impression of the show. Despite the government 's negative view on Western culture, McLaughlin stated that many of China 's culture consumers oppose

4. Heuristic value Cultural imperialism became an important theory that is used in further researches and theories in order to study how likely viewers of the mass media follow a foreign culture other than their own. Melanie Yoes (2012) relates her research paper to Chioma Ugochukwu 's 2008 research where the latter implemented the ideas of cultural imperialism into the framework of cultivation theory to measure the amount of significant cultural change present among a group of native Nigerians being exposed to American television programs. Later, the research showed that the Nigerian participants may eventually create opinions or adopt definite attributes of Western society (mainly relating American ideas and cultural habits) such as fashion trends or slang terms. However, the participants are unlikely to change their well-established beliefs and values despite being exposed to Western culture for some time (Yoes,