Translucent Atmospherics: Media as Utility in China
a talk with Angela Xiao Wu, New York University
Join us on January 30, 2026, from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET for what is sure to be a fascinating exchange!
Use the link here to register for the Zoom webinar: https://tinyurl.com/2fv9xjka
Utilities provide essential services such as water, electricity, railroads, and communication, which societies strive to make affordable and widely accessible. As legacy media lose advertising revenue and “news deserts” proliferate, proposals to treat journalism as a public utility have reemerged. While liberal capitalist societies approach this idea through fragmented evidence and speculative hypotheticals, China has long treated news as a state-supplied, nonproprietary good, akin to earthquake alerts. Since 1978, amid shifting social, economic, and technological landscapes, the state’s stubborn commitment to this utility model has produced surprising configurations of public finance, intellectual property, distribution politics, journalistic forms, and popular culture.
In this talk, Dr Wu will introduce her book-length research tracing the evolution of China’s administration of the socialist press into its regulation of private digital platforms. Reframing media history as utility history, she disaggregates the Chinese state into its lesser-studied roles—as lawmaker, owner, investor, licensor, thinly stretched administrator, and purported guarantor of collective welfare—beyond propaganda and censorship. This perspective sheds new light on post-reform Chinese governance and offers the utility system as a broader framework for thinking about our digital present: What happens to public culture when it is governed through unified computing regimes?
Angela Xiao Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research sits at the intersection of media and communication studies and science and technology studies (STS), with broader interests in the politics and infrastructures of knowledge production. Her work spans critical data studies, platform studies, the political economy of media, political cultures, and post/socialism studies. Her book project has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, among others.