China's Media, Media's China

Chin-Chuan Lee, Chin-Chuan Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429723339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

This book explores the rapidly evolving conditions of political communication in China. It examines how ideology and professional roles affect both scholarly and journalistic understanding of China. The book offers insights into Chinese journalism and Sino-American relations..

Part One
Overview

1
Ambiguities and Contradictions: Issues in China's Changing Political Communication

Chin-Chuan Lee

In a seminal article Tu Weiming articulates the heuristically useful albeit still somewhat ambiguous concept of a Cultural China made up of three distinct but interrelated symbolic universes.¹ The first universe consists of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where ethnic Chinese constitute the majority. The second universe refers to the broad Chinese Diaspora scattered as an ethnic minority throughout North America and Southeast Asia. The third symbolic universe—intellectually united rather than ethnically demarcated by a community of scholars, journalists, writers, entrepreneurs, industrialists, and traders—has come to the forefront to shape discourse about Cultural China.²

This volume and its generously received predecessor, Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Journalism, represent a fusion of American and Chinese perspectives, as well as a dialogue between leading scholars and journalists in what Tu calls the third universe of Cultural China.³ This volume expands on previous discourses about China's media and China as portrayed by the media. Hindsight has provided us with a finer vantage point to reflect on the media changes that have resurged after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Commentators have paid inadequate attention to the media impact of global developments on China, just as their role in helping undo the Soviet empire and autocratic regimes in Eastern Europe as well as in easing democratic transitions elsewhere (including Taiwan) has largely been overlooked. Alongside a new world order evolves a new center-periphery relationship in the larger ecology of Cultural China, a relationship that may partially frustrate the last Communist giant's perpetual resistance to "peaceful evolution." This volume, by focusing once again on the interplay of journalism and political economy in China, attempts to offer a signpost to the process of change, with its analyses grounded in the past and visions geared toward the future.

Different cross-currents impinging on China's media politics have caused ambiguities and contained contradictions. Instead of attempting a comprehensive survey of the chapters herein, this introduction opts to string together several broad themes and sort out different levels of the discourses toward clarifying the ambiguities and contradictions which surround Chinese political communication.⁴ These organizing themes consist of control, professionalism, political struggle, reform, opposition, and development models. Prominent are the following questions: has the PRC's economic reform unleashed a momentum sufficiently robust to loosen political and media controls? How has media control been averted, compromised, or resisted? What are the notable obstacles that Chinese journalists struggle to overcome? With the crumbling of Communist regimes elsewhere, will Taiwan, a peripheral influence, offer itself as a viable analytical model for understanding the PRC and its media? Will the PRC withstand the enduring pressure of advanced communication technologies? What conceptual framework will arise to inform post–Cold War media accounts of China?

Media Control: A Comparative View

No media systems are totally free from control, but the causes and consequences of control vary significantly. An early, cogent statement of press control was expounded in the influential Four Theories of the Press by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. They attacked both authoritarian and Communist systems, while urging the libertarian press to adopt a "social responsibility" concept as espoused by the Hutchins Commission.⁵ Since then, one of the major foci in radical media studies has been to debunk the vaunted independence, autonomy, and objectivity of the liberal press. Many critics have taken aim at the deficiencies—if not the total failure—of the liberal media and, in fact, liberal democracy itself. They have operated from the perspectives of either pragmatism or Marxist humanism under the influence of deconstructionists and anti-positivists.⁶ They have served to sharply expose the ideological structure of American journalism, the imperatives of newswork, and the media's organizational affinity to officialism and corporate interests.⁷

In this process media professionalism—defined as a commitment to claims of objectivity, balance, and ideological neutrality—has also been severely assaulted. Epistemologically questioning media professionalism as the last bastion of raw empiricism, critics maintain that news is socially constructed and bears little correspondence to the external reality. The political import of this critique is that media professionalism represents what Gaye Tuchman calls a "strategic ritual" that shields journalists from public scrutiny and upholds legitimated institutions.⁸ Objective reporting is said to "reproduce a vision of social reality which refuses to examine the basic structures of power and privilege" and "represent collusion with institutions whose legitimacy was in dispute.^"9

These critiques are unfailingly compelling and idealistic to the extent that, as James Carey notes, American journalism is deeply embedded in American culture, with its faults and triumphs characteristic of the culture as a whole.¹⁰ Without a comparative framework, however, these criticisms tend to obfuscate the crucial boundaries between the liberal media and their authoritarian and totalitarian counterparts.¹¹ While attacked at home, American media and their professionalism are paradoxically admired and distrusted by Chinese and Third World journalists constantly under siege of state power.¹²

Institutionalized Censorship

The manufacture of consent is as central to the liberal media's ideological function as coercion is to the authoritarian and totalitarian media's propaganda. There is a qualitative difference, however, between these systems. Totalitarian regimes, according to Carl Friedrich, are characterized by a totalist ideology, a single party committed to this ideology, a fully developed secret police, and the monopoly of mass communications, operational weapons, and all (including economic) organizations.¹³ The Leninist media, acting as loudspeakers of the revolutionary vanguard, allege to embody the mass will by upholding party creeds. But totalitarian regimes tend not to impose overt coercion on the media unless compliance cannot be otherwise secured.

Media censorship is institutionalized only when political leadership sees itself "as not totally penetrating and controlling its population and the journalism profession.^"14 This was characteristic of media control in most bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes—ranging from Brazil and Spain to Taiwan and South Korea—before the onset of recent democratization. Lu Keng's apt comparison of the two rival Chinese regimes (Chapter 9) reveals that the authoritarian Nationalists have exercised more explicit media censorship than the totalitarian Communists. Lu argues that Chiang Kai-shek did not understand the press and would tolerate moderate criticism when his party was in firm control, whereas Mao Zedong used his absolute power to orchestrate a total control environment in which censorship was embedded and invisible.

But a crucial difference in control mechanisms can also be observed within the history of the PRC itself. Su Shaozhi shows in a painstaking analysis (Chapter 5) how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had imposed ideological control—through the interwoven webs of relentless mass campaigns, study groups, criticisms, and self-criticisms—so pervasive, totalistic, and penetrative as to render a specialized censorship agency redundant. It should be remembered that for 30 years (1949-1979) a nation of 1 billion people was governed without explicit civil, criminal, commerce, and press laws. Economic reform, as pragmatic as it seems, has also salvaged the CCP from the brink of losing its legitimacy after the Cultural Revolution, and has also weakened its media control. It is the reform of the 1980s, as Lowell Dittmer (Chapter 6) notes, that forced the regime to make attempts to secularize and rationalize the public sector.

China under Deng Xiaoping has consequently made tumultuous attempts to move from dependence on Mao's charismatic and absolute power (in Max Weber's term) to some sort of a legal-rational system. The primary goal is not to install a system of rule of law which subjects state power to judicial checks and balances, but instead to establish rule by law (fazhi) so that the legitimacy of the Party can be strengthened through the promulgation of more concrete guidelines. It is in this context that Judy Polumbaum (Chapter 7) has documented a series of administrative innovations developed to accommodate the vast sociopolitical change and thus bring the media increasingly under control by more explicit rules and bureaucratic procedures.

Professionalism

The relevance of media professionalism outside Western countries—as previously noted—is rather ambiguous, if not contradictory. In the case of China, its modern press, like the press in other Third World nations, was inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century during the awakening of national consciousness as a result of coming into contact with the previously unknown European powers.¹⁵ The primary function of the press was to advocate enlightenment, reform, and national independence. Some abstract goals of media professionalism have inspired Chinese journalists in their struggle against state censorship, while other elements (such as the professionally imposed code of ethics and responsibility) were weakened when they reached Chinese shores. These vaguely understood imported values have coexisted uneasily with a Confucian ethos that bestowed the moral high ground on intellectual advocacy on Taiwan, and has run counter to a Leninist ideology that assigns a vanguard role to the media in mainland China. How are we to evaluate critiques of media professionalism in the soil of Chinese culture where the very norm seems so underdeveloped?

Li Liangrong (Chapter 12) traces the history of battles fought over "objective reporting" in China that has oscillated with persistent and erratic gusts of the political winds. Marxist humanism and Western media models offer alternative interpretations to Communist ideological orthodoxy. Although Chinese journalists' understanding of Western objective reporting tends to be crude and distorted, and their own theoretical arguments unsophisticated, their yearning for professional autonomy seems nonetheless irrepressible.¹⁶ They took Zhao Ziyang's calls for increased surveillance of government work through public opinion (yulun jiandu) to heart. But nothing of consequence came to fruition. Press freedom is not a gift of any leader's benevolence; a vibrant market, while producing new dilemmas, may best countervail arbitrary political infringement on press autonomy.

At the height of political liberalization in the late 1980s, the reformist Hu Jiwei, former director of the People's Daily, led the drive to formulate a press law that promised to enhance the transparency (toumingdu) of government policy process and legally ensure a certain degree of press autonomy. The effort was aborted by the Tiananmen crackdown. At present there seems to be a consensus that even a good law itself will not ensure its faithful implementation and may, in fact, provoke foes of reform to take advantage of a vigorous press to expose the excesses, corruption, and other negative side-effects of reform. Thus, many feel that the reformists should continue to promote the media's informational role in service of a "socialist market economy" as a way to weaken their traditional propaganda function. Once economic reform is irreversibly entrenched, however, greater demands for press autonomy will resume.¹⁷

The Tiananmen tragedy is a mighty reminder of possible vulnerabilities to press freedom in Hong Kong,¹⁸ a colonial city whose economic power equals 19% of China's gross national product. It is a vibrant market that has bred "professional" media in coexistence with the traditional partisan media aligned along the CCP-KMT division. The survey conducted by Joseph Chan, Chin-Chuan Lee, and Paul Lee (Chapter 13) shows that journalists across the partisan spectrum have endorsed (if not fully practiced) the concept of media professionalism. Furthermore, all (including pro-Communist) journalists are uniformly apprehensive about the loss of press freedom after the colony's reversion to China in 1997.¹⁹ It appears, however, that so long as the market remains vibrant, Hong Kong's liberal media order will survive China's political onslaughts. Equally important, the growth of media flow from Hong Kong is setting a formidable trend for popular culture and leisure in South China in spite of official attempts to clamp down. An indispensable financial beachhead for China, Hong Kong is also a fountain of ideas and information about China that gets fed back to the mainland.

The mainstream media in martial-law Taiwan, despite their close ties to the KMT, acted as essential fora for promoting abstract democratic values. While denigrating political opposition, these media also endorsed liberal intellectuals who derived their privilege to pontificate democratic values from a curious mixture of Confucian ethics (to establish a moral posture) and the ideology of Western professionalism (to voice their opposition to state media stricture). Similarly, oppositional politicians and media took on the KMT and pro-KMT media by appealing to these very values. ...