Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media

Gary D. Rawnsley, Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, Gary D. Rawnsley, Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, Yiben Ma, Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415520775
• eBook ISBN: 9781317635918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of Chinese media is a field that is growing and evolving at an exponential rate. Not only are the Chinese media a fascinating subject for analysis in their own right, but they also offer scholars and students a window to observe multi-directional flows of information, culture and communications within the contexts of globalization and regionalization. Moreover, the study of Chinese media provides an invaluable opportunity to test and refine the variety of communications theories that researchers have used to describe, analyse, compare and contrast systems of communications.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media is a prestigious reference work providing an overview of the study of Chinese media. Gary and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley bring together an interdisciplinary perspective with contributions by an international team of renowned scholars on subjects such as television, journalism and the internet and social media. Locating Chinese media within a regional setting by focusing on 'Greater China', the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese communities; the chapters highlight the convergence of media and platforms in the region; and emphasise the multi-directional and trans-national character of media/information flows in East Asia.

Contributing to the growing de-westernization of media and communications studies; this handbook is an essential and comprehensive reference work for students of all levels and scholars in the fields of Chinese Studies and Media Studies.

Part I
The development of the study and the structure of Chinese media

1
(Re)-Focusing on the target

Reflections on a trajectory of studying the Chinese media¹

Yuezhi Zhao

In the context of China’s rapid transformation in a turbulent global system since the late 1970s, to study the Chinese media is to shoot at a target that appears easy to focus on at first sight, but is in actuality rather elusive. On the surface, the target appears static as there has not been any radical transformation in the basic structure of the Chinese media system after more than thirty years of reform. Upon closer examination, however, the target has both undergone dramatic mutations in its shape and shed much of its original colour. Moreover, in the context of a highly unstable and rapidly evolving global order, the target has not only repeatedly defied conventional expectations in terms of the direction of its movement, but also is realigning its geopolitical relations with other objects and streams of flow in the global media universe. Which direction to look at? What does the target look like at a particular moment? What lenses to use and how to aim? What kind of shooting guns do we have in hand and are they adequate for the purpose? No less important, isn’t it the case that the shape and colour of the target, our ways of approaching it, even the very language we use to define and describe it, very much depends on who we are and where we stand as scholars? Finally, beyond the imperative of surviving the academic curse of publishing or perishing, what is this analysis for? Rather than writing a conventional chapter on a specific topic, I would like to take this opportunity to re-examine my own endeavour in this adventure of shooting at a changing target. In doing so, I hope to exercise intellectual self-reflectivity and discuss both the substantive and methodological issues involved in studying the Chinese media. Although I will inevitably discuss many of my own publications, I must stress at the outset that this is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of my own work, let alone a review of the state of the field – which, after all, is an objective of this handbook.

Media, market and democracy in China: the power of existing frameworks

Born in China a year before the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, I received my secondary education during the transition years between the Mao era and the reform era (1975–80), and completed my undergraduate education in journalism at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute (now the Communication University of China) in 1984. After finishing graduate studies in communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada from 1986 to 1996, I had the privilege to pursue research in the field first at the University of California, San Diego, from 1997 to 2000, and since then at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Starting from the mid-1990s, I have had the opportunity to visit China frequently to conduct field research and to participate in a wide range of scholarly activities, from teaching intensive graduate seminars to giving guest lectures and participating at conferences.

By the time this particular volume appears, it will be more than twenty years since I decided to study China’s post-Mao media transformation for my doctoral dissertation, which was published as Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and Bottom Line (Zhao 1998). I did not intend to write my dissertation on the Chinese media to begin with. With a plan to return to China to teach after my graduate studies in Canada, I was eager to find out what the western media system is really about, in particular how it claims and practises ‘objectivity’, in contrast to the Chinese media system’s self-proclaimed and (by then) much-challenged partisan stand, instrumentalist mentality and propagandist mission. By the time I finished my MA work on journalistic objectivity and started my doctoral programme in autumn 1989, the dominant narrative about China’s media reform process, that is, the struggle for greater freedom and autonomy by established journalists and liberal intellectuals, had come to an abrupt end with the 4 June crackdown that year. Realising that even the possibility of going back to China to pursue fieldwork could no longer be taken for granted, I spent the first few years of my doctoral programme doing further research on the ethos and practices of journalistic objectivity and issues of media and democracy in the Anglo-American context. This led to the co-authored book, Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity (Hackett and Zhao 1998). This volume not only deconstructs and demystifies journalistic objectivity as a Foucauldian knowledge–power regime that is deeply embedded both in the political economy and everyday practices of Anglo-American media, but also depicts what we call the ‘regime of objectivity’, along with its underpinning political economic structure and ideological framework, that is, capitalism and liberal democracy, as in deep crisis.

This work had an enduring impact on my own subsequent approach to studying the Chinese media. Just as we all use an ‘other’ to construct the self, we presume certain knowledge of the western, and to be more precise, Anglo-American media in studying the Chinese media. My critique of the Anglo-American media did not result in a blind endorsement of the Chinese media system; however, it does mean that I treated liberal justifications of the Anglo-American media model as an ‘ideology exhausted’ (Hackett and Zhao 1998: 180), and I refused to simply accept the then prevailing ‘end of history’ thesis by using liberal press concepts as taken-for-granted normative standards in analysing the Chinese media. These justifications include the liberal notion of press freedom, the watchdog role of the press, the notion of the press as an information smorgasbord providing people with diverse viewpoints and neutral, non-ideological and apolitical information for rational individual decision making in a democratic polity, the notion of the press as an eyewitness on behalf of the public and, above all, the notion of consumer sovereignty, that is, ‘the media best serve society when market mechanisms are unleashed from regulatory constraints, so that the media’s programming reflects the tastes and preferences of their audiences’ (Hackett and Zhao 1998: 186).

I had armed myself with the arguments in Sustaining Democracy? when I recast my gaze on the Chinese media in early 1994. The year 1992 marked a turning point in China’s reform history when Deng Xiaoping’s ‘southern tour’ (nanxun) spearheaded the acceleration of market-oriented development of the Chinese political economy in the post-1989 era. As part and parcel of this process, China’s media reform process took a dramatic turn towards commercialisation and market-driven transformation. So, by mid-1994, when it was time for me to finalise my doctoral dissertation topic and when it was clear that returning to China to do research was not a problem, I felt I had a compelling new story to tell: commercialisation under party control, or the intertwined state and market dynamic in shaping the structure and content of the Chinese media. I had a unique perspective from which to tell the story as well: while I was aware of the modernisation theory-inspired perspective about the liberalising impact of market forces, I could not help but be influenced by the critical perspective I have developed through my study of the regime of journalistic objectivity in the Anglo-American media and my critique of the class bias of an advertising-supported and market-driven media system. Critical media scholarship on post-communist media transitions elsewhere, especially Slavko Splichal’s timely book, Media Beyond Socialism: Theory and Practice in East-Central Europe (Splichal 1994), also emboldened me to go beyond the dominant paradigm of ‘transitology’. Thus, while I described the positive changes brought by state-directed media commercialisation and documented in great detail how the introduction of market forces in the Chinese media had ‘made some parts of the system more responsive to readers and audiences’ and ‘modified the elitism of media professionals and given rise to populist sensibilities’ (Zhao 1998: 182), I had no hesitation in analysing the problematic dimensions of media commercialisation. These include the disturbing fusion of state and market power in various forms of journalistic corruption, the social biases of the market as a new mechanism of media control, as well as ‘evidence of reification of the market in much of the literature advocating commercialisation of the Chinese news media’ (Zhao 1998: 181).

Thus, it is not fair to say that I only critique the market, not the state, which had become the most common way that domestic Chinese students, who barely had any chance to read my work in English and may have learned my work at second-hand, challenged me when I lectured in China in the first decade of the new century. Among other reasons, such an understanding was clearly caught in a conceptual framework that espouses a simplistic state versus market dichotomy. To be sure, at the time of my dissertation work my own reading of the western critical political economy literature was rather media-centric. For example, I had not read Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation (Polanyi 1944/1957) which offered a powerful analysis of the indispensability of state intervention, even state violence, in establishing a capitalist market economy. Indeed, as Radhika Desai put it well in a recent book, even though ‘the bourgeoisie could not do without the state’, ‘opposition between politics and economics and between markets and states have critical ideological functions in capitalist society’ (2013: 29). In a post-Mao China where the most famous neoliberal doctrine complains how the state’s ‘visible foot’ has stampeded the proper function of the market’s ‘invisible hand’, I would now go so far as to argue that such a dichotomy serves an even more powerful ideological function for the rising ‘new bourgeoisie’. Still, my basic critical political economy of communication learning at the time of my dissertation work had led me to conceptualise state and market as mutually constitutive mechanisms of power and allowed me to see how the media commercialisation process in China was driven by the state from the very onset, just as it was the post-Mao Chinese state which decided to install market relations in the broad Chinese political economy in the first place. Nor was I so naive that I was unable to make a distinction in media criticisms within the western and Chinese contexts by blindly following the calls of western critical scholars and applying the critical framework to China. I questioned any simple historical linearity in understanding China’s transformation and I was adamant in refuting the dominant liberal framework on the relationship between capitalism and democracy:

While some people still believe that China’s capitalist revolution will eventually lead to a democratic political system, there is no necessary relationship between capitalism and political democracy even though capitalism and liberal democracy have been ideologically and historically fused together in the West. Indeed, there is a real possibly that global capitalism will become increasingly authoritarian. Although the current hegemony of neoliberalism makes it difficult to imagine and discuss alternatives, capitalism is not the only possible future for humanity.

(Zhao 1998: 188)

While I was not persuaded by criticisms against my 1998 book on the basis of a ‘state versus market’ dichotomy or from a neoliberal market fundamentalist perspective, in retrospect this book has omissions and blind spots. First, although my education in critical media scholarship in Canada had led me to be wary of any assumption of a necessary linkage between marketisation and democratisation, I could not help but be influenced by the prevailing neoliberal intellectual currents of the 1980s that had begun to sweep across east and west alike. This was the moment of the death of the ‘Third World Project’ (Prashad 2008) and the disintegration of the struggle for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO). Within the academy, this was the moment of the decline of critical political economic analysis, and the ascendency of postmodernism and cultural studies. At Simon Fraser University where I received my graduate education, not only had Dallas Smythe, a pioneering figure in the critical political economy tradition, retired and was no longer teaching any graduate course, but also the very first advice I got from a fellow Chinese student was to avoid Smythe altogether because he had a leftist perspective on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As a matter of fact, I did not have any political economy class in my MA and PhD transcripts. At the same time, I had not been able to fully dispose of the intellectual and ideological baggage I carried from China, with its heavy load of the intertwined elitist ‘New Enlightenment’ intellectual consciousness and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official ‘reform consensus’ of the early 1980s. Although there was the ‘reformer versus hardliners’ division within the Chinese political field in the 1980s, and I had come to note the coexistence of reform Marxist, democratic, neo-authoritarian and technocratic tendencies within the broad reformist intellectual field after the mid-1980s (Zhao 1998: 42), overall there existed in the 1980s a ‘highly unified historical and cultural consciousness’ in the Chinese intellectual field (He 2010: 5). Humanistic scholars were at the forefront of articulating this new consciousness which held a historical nihilist perspective on the Chinese Communist revolution and the entire Mao era and constructed the post-Mao era as a second May Fourth period of Chinese Enlightenment (in an analogy to the western Enlightenment that had brought the west out of its medieval Dark Ages). In this perspective, the Communist revolution and the Mao-era attempt to build socialism represents a dark chapter of Chinese history. Specifically, it brought a violent disruption to China’s search for modernity and its integration with the modern world, the first attempt having culminated with the May Fourth Movement (wu si yundong) of 1919. Fortunately, with the death of Mao in 1976 and the launching of the reform process in 1978, China was to enter an era of new enlightenment, presumably following the old one of the May Fourth period. This, as He Guimei contended, is ‘one of the biggest “myths” constructed by the intellectual circles of the 1980s’ (2010: 18). Through this myth, the process of reform and openness to the global capitalist market by post-revolutionary China, which as a third world country attempted to break away from the Cold War geopolitical blockage and developmental impasse, was described as a process whereby China as a traditional empire suddenly awoke from self-imposed isolation and joined the world in the process of modernisation (He 2010: 18). This new consciousness bid farewell to revolution and mobilised the language of humanism to criticise the Maoist class struggle discourse and the socialist vision. Concurrently, it embraced the grand vision of modernisation – neither as a ‘theory’ nor a ‘school of thought’, but as ‘a matter of historical fact itself’ (He 2010: 278). Thus, as Jing Wang pointed out, although the utopian vision of modernity embedded in this new consciousness was in the end ‘modernity on paper, not in reality’ because it failed to acknowledge the necessary unsavoury process of modernisation, elite intellectuals, who assumed themselves a vanguard role in China’s modernisation project, ‘took for granted that their interpretation of the modern … did a tremendous service to the program of modernisation’ (Wang 1996: 55). Moreover, this ‘new enlightenment’ intellectual consciousness emerged both in tandem and tension with the official modernisation-centred and market-oriented ‘reform consensus’ forged by Deng Xiaoping. This ‘reform consensus’ does not abandon socialism in principle. Nor does it negate the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist revolution. Nevertheless, it was built around an ideological campaign against the ultra-leftism of the Cultural Revolution and the repudiation of the Mao-era class struggle discourse. This reform consensus was consolidated not only through the top-down process of the ‘truth criteria’ debate launched by the official newspaper Guangming Daily in May 1978, but also through Deng’s eventual suppression of the more radical bottom-up Democracy Wall (minzhu qiang) movement of 1978–79. Spearheaded by a wide range of critical voices that aimed to reflect upon the Mao era, especially the Cultural Revolution, movement activists had mobilised both ‘big character posters’ (da zi bao) and unofficial publications – called ‘people’s publications’ (minjian kanwu) – for the expression of popular ideas on the directions of China’s post-Mao transformation, including the fulfilment of the promise to build a socialist democracy or people’s democracy in China. As is well known, the movement got its name for the big character posters mounted on a wall in Beijing’s Xidan district.

To be sure, I was intuitively critical of the manifestations of the ‘new enlightenment’ consciousness in the Chinese media reform literature. Thus, in my assessment of the theoretical arguments of media reformers, I exposed the limits of the press reform discourse as advocated by reformist liberal media scholars and journalists of the 1980s, noting how ‘this emerging democratic discourse was burdened with potential contradictions and inconsistencies’ (Zhao 1998: 42). Specifically, in addition to critiquing their blind trust in the potential of the market in liberating them from party-state control, I pointed out that ‘many reformers who took part in the pro-democracy movement are neo-authoritarians and technocrats’ and that ‘there is a fundamental gap between these reformers, many of whom are within the party, and grass-root elements’ (Zhao 1998: 43). For example, I discussed how the press reformers’ apparent ‘democratic sensibilities often intermingle with elitist sensibilities’, as in the case of former People’s Daily chief editor turned press freedom adv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Members of the Editorial Board
• Editorial note
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The development of the study and the structure of Chinese media
• PART II Journalism, press freedom and social mobilisation
• PART III The Internet, public sphere and media culture
• PART IV Market, production and the media industries
• PART V Chinese media and the world
• Appendix: Chinese dynasties at a glance
• Chinese glossary: selected Chinese names and terms
• Index