Why History Matters
To start a book on Chinese media with a section on history may not be the most obvious choice. China and many of its keen observers are so preoccupied with looking into the country’s future that they do not always have time to contemplate the past. For those who study Chinese media in particular, the focus is usually on either critiquing the status quo or anticipating possible change, especially change enabled by digital communication technologies, which for many are the key to the future. What I shall call for here is not just that the history of media and communication in China be treated as the object of research, which in itself is much needed. More important is that we develop historical sensitivity and a historical approach as part of our epistemology even when analyzing contemporary issues.
Sewell (2005) points out that the term “historical” has two distinct meanings in everyday and academic language. On the one hand, “it designates happenings that take place over time, as in ‘historical continuity’, or ‘historical narrative’” (p. 182). On the other hand, it implies “in the past,” as in “historical novel” or “historical costume.” Therefore to “think historically” may mean to recognize more explicitly that the matters under discussion took place in the past, or it may mean to “place the happening you are thinking about in a temporal sequence of transformations” (p. 183). Here I want to invoke both history as transformation and history as context in order to highlight “the ways this history casts a long shadow over today’s reality” (Y. Zhao, 2009, p. 176) , including the characteristics of media and communication in Chinese society.
The long shadow of history manifests itself in three main ways. First of all, as the only Communist Party in the world that retains its ruling power while managing the largest capitalist economy, much of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s current policy stand has a huge unresolved tension with its own socialist and revolutionary history. Deng Xiaoping’s famous “cat theory”1is an ingeniously pragmatic way of circumventing ideological debates for the purpose of economic development. Yet generations of CCP leaders since Deng, as much as they have been adhering to Deng’s dictum that “development is the hard truth,” have each tried in their own way to reconcile the present with the past. In 2000, the Jiang Zemin leadership proposed the “three represents” (三个代表) thesis—that the CCP has always represented the developmental requirements of China’s “advanced productive force,” the orientation of China’s “advanced culture” and the fundamental interest of the majority of Chinese people. This also became the starting point for Jiang Zemin to expand the class base of the CCP by welcoming “advanced members” of the entrepreneurial class to join the Party. After coming to power in 2002, amidst growing inequality and social conflicts, the Hu Jintao leadership put more emphasis on reconnecting with the socialist tradition. Slogans like “constructing a harmonious socialist society” (建设社会主义和谐社会) and “constructing a new socialist countryside” (建设社会主义新农村) reflected the CCP’s continuous efforts to “selectively draw upon its revolutionary legacies to sustain its rule at both the normative and the tactical levels” (Zhao, 2011, p. 208).
Viewed against this backdrop, the recent call of the Xi Jinping leadership for the reinvigoration of “red spirit” (红色精神) and promotion of the “core socialist value system” (社会主义核心价值观) are hardly the “great leap backward” that some China commentators have claimed (Fallows, 2016). On the one hand, the regime suppresses with a heavy hand any public debate about key historical events such as the Cultural Revolution or the 1989 Student Movement . On the other hand, revolutionary history continues to be the crucial source from which the CCP derives its legitimacy, which must therefore be carefully curated and constantly mobilized. As Timothy Cheek (2006) has observed,
While foreign observers and Chinese intellectuals alike scoff at these tortured formations, they reflect the efforts of the still-ruling CCP to explain the massive changes of reform in terms that do not patently contradict Chinese Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. If we utterly dismiss the slogans of the Party as “political rubbish” or mere window-dressing, we will miss the actual polices of China’s leaders and, more so, fail to understand how the CCP maintains its public legitimacy without democracy. (p. 43)
Secondly, mainstream media institutions, especially news media, are still carrying out the historical function of propagating party lines and party policies. Yet, as the CCP completes the transformation “from party-state to state-party” (Wang, 2009), the agitating and mobilizing role previously assumed by the mouthpiece of a revolutionary party has given way to the maintenance of social stability by a bureaucratic authoritarian state. Three decades of media marketization have given rise to a dual press system comprised of party-organ news media such as the People’s Daily and the Xinhua News Agency alongside commercial media such as metropolitan newspapers and Internet news websites. The former group plays the crucial ideological role of “setting the tone” (定调子) on current affairs while being subsidized financially, as they do not enjoy popularity on the news market. The market-oriented metropolitan newspapers feature a much wider range of content and more dynamic reporting style. But the fact that these commercially lucrative newspapers are subsidiaries of the provincial Party press groups means that they are still under the leadership of the CCP. To be sure, the expedited media commercialization in the last three decades has reconfigured to a great extent the orientation of news production as well as the professional ethos of Chinese journalists. Many have written about how the news media in China negotiate between the party line and the “bottom line” (Lee, 2007; Lee, He, & Huang, 2006; Zhao, 1998) . Increasingly, journalists are also exploiting the social capital and cultural capital associated with their profession for personal gain (I will discuss a few cases of this in Chapter 3). To make sense of such a sea change since the 1990s, and to understand the complex forces that shape the status quo of Chinese journalism, a historically informed analysis is needed.
One incident that epitomizes how deeply the media are involved in the ideological struggle over the invocation of revolutionary history is the high-profile Bo Xilai scandal that developed from early 2012 to the summer of 2013, when Bo’s trial was webcast on sina.com (Meng, 2016). The controversial policies carried out by Bo when he was mayor of Chong Qing, a major city in southwest China and one of the five central cities, centered on reclaiming the socialist legacy. On the cultural front, Bo banned commercials on Chong Qing Satellite TV and turned it into a public service broadcaster. He initiated the “red song campaign” (唱红歌), promoted Maoist doctrines (读经典) and encouraged the retelling of revolutionary stories (讲故事). The economic and social policies Bo implemented were also oriented towards the socialist ethos of “people’s livelihood” (民生) and “common prosperity” (共富). Conflicts thus emerged over who had the right to claim which part of revolutionary history and for what purpose. During the 18 months when the Bo Xilai saga was unfolding, both print and online media were ideological battlegrounds where different claims about Bo and his Chongqing Model clashed. Journalistic narratives, far from being neutral, objective reports, were framed from certain ideological viewpoints (Meng, 2016). When analyzing media and social change in Central and Eastern Europe, Jakubowicz argues in favor of “incorporating the historical perspective in trying to understand the reasons for development involved in the collapse of Communism and everything that has happened since” (p. xiii). If history matters for countries where the Communist Party is no longer in power, it matters equally, if not more, for a country where the Communist Party retains ruling power.
Third, history plays an important role in shaping Chinese people’s assessment of the present as well as their aspirations for the future. On September 3, 2015, when a military parade was held in Tiananmen Square to mark the 70th anniversary of victory in the World War II, one microblog (Weibo) entry was reposted close to a million times. The post features a black and white photo of former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and the text reads: “Isn’t this time of prosperity what you wished for?” Hundreds of thousands of people commented on how emotionally they had reacted to the original post. Some recalled the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China, when Zhou famously came up with a solution to the shortage of aircraft by asking every pilot to make two circuits passing over Tiananmen. The contrast between the past and the present brought out national pride, a tribute to the first generation of CCP leaders an...