Radio Studies Bibliography—General

For a comprehensive bibliography on radio studies, we recommend Shawn VanCour’s “Radio and Sound Studies” available through Oxford Bibliographies. The same service also offers an entry titled “Radio Studies” by Stephen Lax; however, it was last updated in 2012 and does not appear to have been revised since. Please note that these sources are not open access, which may pose challenges for independent scholars or those whose institutions do not subscribe to this service. To address this, we will soon provide a short list of essential works. While it may not be as extensive as the aforementioned bibliographies, it will serve as a solid starting point.

[List of Essential Works Coming Soon]

Another limitation of these two bibliographies is their lack of content on China and the Sinophone worlds. To fill this gap, we have created the section below.

Radio Studies Bibliography—China

We are starting with a list of publications in reverse chronological order, and we plan to include annotations in the future. If you believe we have overlooked any significant works, please feel free to contact us at seanx.feng@utoronto.ca. Your contributions are greatly appreciated!

In English

Book-Length Studies

Alekna, John. 2024. Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society. Stanford University Press.

Alekna, John. 2020. “Reunified through Radio: Media, Technology, and Politics in Modern China 1923–1958.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

Lei, Wei. 2019. Radio and Social Transformation in China. London: Routledge.

Wang, Yu. 2019. “Listening to the State: Radio and the Technopolitics of Sound in Mao’s China.” PhD diss., University of Toronto. (Also look out for the author’s forthcoming book.)

Krysko, Michael A. 2011. American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919¬–41. Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Benson, Carlton. 1996. “From Teahouse to Radio: Storytelling and the Commercialization of Culture in 1930s Shanghai.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley.

Articles

Feng, Xiangjun. 2023. “The Birth of Noise in Modern China: Radio, Amateur Engineering, and the Sonic Network. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 17(2), 115–134. (Open Access)

Yang, Yingchuan. 2023. “Connecting the Countryside: Radio Network and the Infrastructure of the Masses in Socialist China.” Radical History Review 147: 111–136.

Alekna, John. 2022. “Neither Nation nor Empire: Situating Shanghai Radio in a Global Technological Moment, 1922–25.” Technology and Culture 63 (4): 1078–1105.

Hartono, M. Paulina. 2020. “‘A Good Communist Style’: Sounding Like a Communist in Twentieth-Century China.” Representations 151 (1): 26–50.

Li, Jie. 2020. “Revolutionary Echoes: Radios and Loudspeakers in the Mao Era.” Twentieth-Century China 45 (1): 25–45.

Tang, Xiaobing. 2020. “Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China.” Twentieth Century China 45 (1): 3–24.

Lei, Wei, and Wanning Sun. 2017. “Radio Listening and the Changing Formations of the Public in China.” Communication and the Public 2(4) 320–334.

Lei, Wei. 2016. “Beyond Propaganda: The Role of Radio in Modernizing China in the Socialist Era, 1949–76.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 7 (3): 297–310.

Guo, Zhenzhi. 1986. “A Chronicle of Private Radio in Shanghai.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 30 (4): 379–392.

Books Touching Upon Radio in China

[Coming Soon]

In Chinese

[Coming Soon]