Media institutional contexts of the emergence and development of Xinmanhua in China

This essay examines how ‘Xinmanhua’ (new comics) — a local comic arts style influenced by Japanese manga — has emerged and developed since the late 1980s in China. The analysis will particularly focus on how transformations in the media institutional context of Japanese influenced comics publications and corresponding changes in the cultural localization of Japanese manga have shaped Xinmanhua. Our investigative focus on media contexts reflects an American cultural sociological approach, which emphasizes the causal significance of external, material, and institutional background in determining the symbolic contents of cultural products (Smith, 1998).