"Culture Struggle Between 'Black' and 'White,' 'Them' and 'Us': A Study for China’s 'Unlicensed Cab'”
Recently, a 19-year-old suspicious Chinese “unlicensed cab” or “black cab” driver cut off a finger to prove his innocence, which disclosed “entrapment enforcement” by Shanghai government who used bounty hunters to manufacture false evidence. Chinese popular ironically named this enforcement as “fishing”. From 1979 till 2009, the number of Chinese unlicensed cabs has been over that of legal cabs. This essay studied the process of the image construction for “unlicensed cab” in 30 years by China’s mainstream media. Unlicensed cabs have been constituted as illegally, destructively, and dangerously “black” as well as “marginal” image, which should be resolutely cracked down and eliminated while the image of “unlicensed cab” drivers are immoral profit-makers, evil offenders and “otherness”. A resistant decoding among the audience was proved. It represents a culture struggle towards “black” versus “white”, “us” versus “them”. This culture resistance liberates the oppressed knowledge so that the audiences produce meanings and pleasures by influencing the mainstream media’s encoding or even by their own encoding text. Ultimately, the production and circulation of meanings and pleasures not only deconstruct the traditional image of “unlicensed cab” but also effect on discursive practice and change the society. In this case, finally, 16-year entrapment had to be terminated by Chinese government.
Approaches of content and discourse analysis were adopted, 70 relative articles on the most authoritative newspaper—People’s Daily in 30 years were studied, contextualizing of macro and micro-environments in China. Meanwhile, the characteristics of “unlicensed cab driver”, “governmental enforcement officials” and “taxi driver” were cognized by 20 audiences and another 10 got interviewed.
The two economies that Fiske (1989, p24) advocated of financial and cultural are highly valuable in contemporary Chinese communication practice. Cultural economy is the phase of the production and consumption of meanings and pleasures. Differential decoding is connected with resistant power. In China, culture struggle always involves politics.
China’s traditional media is monopolized by government and it is mainly for propaganda of the Communist Party. Before web 2.0, although there was differential decoding for the audience, cultural struggles rarely happened or were often oppressed because of no any access to negotiate with traditional media and authorities. With the advent of the internet web 2.0, culture struggles have displayed in everyday life. People are able to express their diverse opinions on the platform of internet, which makes it possible to develop dialogues with authorities including traditional media. In this way, the production and circulation of meanings and pleasures by the masses is of special significance. Moreover, culture struggle provoked by differential decoding will not be completely put down by government like the radical populist. More and more often, to some extent, the government has treated this kind of meanings and pleasures as public opinions worthwhile being paid attention to therefore it can finally make improvements and change the social system. More and more cases as “unlicensed cab” have showed that this kind of culture struggles have won places for disadvantaged minorities.
