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Abstract:This paper analyses the representation and consumption of infant formula advertising on Chinese television, following the baby milk scare in 2008. Drawing on the concepts of 'encoding/decoding' and 'circuit of culture', the paper investigates how the Chinese dairy industry encodes the messages of food safety and quality in their advertisements and how parents decode the messages as part of their risk management strategies. The paper focuses on two moments -representation and consumption -in the 'circuit of culture'. Combining a critical analysis of advertising imagery with focus group and interview regarding its consumption, the paper suggests that the dairy industry juxtaposed images of science and nature to mediate messages about the quality and safety of infant formula. Findings show that Chinese consumers decode these messages based on their previous experience and knowledge, exhibiting considerable ambivalence about the advertising of infant formula and reflecting significant anxiety about the product's quality and safety. Both the representation and consumption of the advertising messages should be understood within the wider social and political context including the prevalent medicalization of childcare which accompanied recent neoliberal reforms and the lax regulation of health product advertising in China. The paper concludes that, in the absence of independent medical advice, affordable medical treatment and adequate government regulation, infant formula companies can make illfounded health claims for their products and employ dubious promotional tactics.

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This paper assesses the present state of political communications in Taiwan through close analysis of the perceived relationship between journalists and politicians. This relationship is examined within the context of media commercialization. Based on the assumption that in cultures of democratic political communication the interaction between media and political actors involves both conflict and cooperation, we consider how journalists and politicians negotiate the balance of power between them. The empirical evidence gathered from semi-structured interviews for this paper suggests that the interaction between media and political elites in Taiwan is defined by high levels of conflict, hostility, mutual suspicion and mistrust -attributes of a relationship that can have profound implications for the legitimacy and efficacy of institutions, actors and political communications in a newly-created democratic system. The paper explains the evidence through the perspective of the 'knowledge deficit model' that operates within the context of media commercialization. This indicates that the perceptions (of the public, journalists and politicians) of the formal aspects of democracy may have been transformed, but the nuances which define the application of democratic norms (the practice of responsible journalism) remain ambiguous. More importantly, huge market pressures and the widely accepted media logic, coupled with the democratic knowledge deficit, are creating a vicious cycle in the practice of political communication in Taiwan. This perhaps provides some tentative explanation for the brisk deterioration of expectations about democracy and the media's role in it, as well as the quality of democratic political communication in Taiwan.