Chinese Media, Global Contexts

Lee Chin-Chuan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415303347
• eBook ISBN: 9781134412402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Virtually every major media, information and telecommunications enterprise in the world is significantly tied to China. This volume provides the most expert, up-to-date and multidisciplinary analyses on how the contemporary media function in what has rapidly become the world's biggest market. As the West, particularly the United States, tries to integrate China into the global market economy, the book examines how globalizing forces clash with Chinese nationalism to shape China's media discourses and ideology. It also analyses the role of the media as a site of resistance within China to the ruling elite.

1 The global and the national of the Chinese media: Discourses, market, technology, and ideology

Chin-Chuan Lee

China and its media have been caught in the crosscurrents of nationalism and globalism in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War milieux. Having lost its way politically in Tiananmen Square, China has had to embrace capitalism in order to save socialism (particularly after 1992). Economic growth and nationalism have come to form the raison d’être of the regime’s legitimation, replacing the bankrupt Communist ideology that finds very few true believers in China today. On the other hand, the end of the Cold War has undermined the strategic alliance between China and the United States against the Soviet Union as a common enemy. The United States shifted its policy from containing China in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown to engaging with it in the mid-1990s, culminating in the looming vision of “peaceful evolution” through global integration (see Chapter 4). At the same time, even as it is locked into antagonistic relations with the United States, China is embracing global capitalism and is seeking to elevate its international status in the new world order. Its eagerness to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) and to sponsor the Olympic Games symbolizes a national yearning to cross the threshold into the elite power club. There is nothing new in such a yearning, but it takes the new form of inclusion in the post-Cold War, neo-liberal world order.

Nationalist and globalist sentiments represent a unity of contradictions, coexisting with and struggling against each other. This chapter aims to foreground and contextualize the ensuing chapters by outlining the major ambiguities and contradictions in the interplay of “the national” and “the global” of the Chinese media. ¹ It addresses two central issues. First, how do such contradictions shape Chinese media’s ecology, discourses, market, and ideology? Second, how do the media, as a window to understanding China’s vast changes, show a process of contestation and coalition between conflicting forces in Chinese society striving for advantages, often in the guise of national interest? Interwoven with these two issues are the following six sections:

1. How have the Chinese media been profitably peddling anti-Americanism to cater to the market dynamics that brew populist nationalism? On the other side of the coin, how do they flaunt China’s national pride in front of the United States and the world at large?
2. Since economic reform has produced a sea change in the class structure, how have the media discourses heeded the plight of peasants and workers who will bear the brunt of pain from China’s accession to the WTO?
3. Will China’s attempt at grooming state media conglomerates succeed in preempting competition from international capital?
4. How will the WTO impact on international capital in terms of its ability to encroach on China’s coveted media and telecommunications markets, which have so far largely been closed to foreign and private investors?
5. How do the media and journalists negotiate ideologically with the changing political and economic realities? What is the impact of the emerging technology on media structures and ideologies?
6. What is the landscape of the emerging media debates among competing intellectual camps (liberals, the old left, the new left, in addition to reformist Marxists) over China’s place in the global-national nexus?

1 National pride and global politics

There is no Communism in China any more. All that remains is the Communist Party, a gigantic organization emptied of revolutionary idealism but retaining monopoly over tremendous coercive power and resources. The propagandaweary Chinese do not trust fraudulent Party rhetoric; they treat it with indifference, ridicule, or situational compliance to protect their self-interest. The only exception occurs when national sovereignty is at stake: the populace joins forces with the regime to achieve “patriotic nationalism.” By mixing state-inculcated nationalism with populist reactive nationalism, it blurs the boundaries between nation and state while exhibiting “a high propensity toward aggression” (Chang, 2001:182). Even many of China’s overseas “democratic” exiles can be rigidly nationalistic and authoritarian. The media have served as a meeting ground upon which these two forms of nationalism surge, fuse, and converge in portraying China as being encircled by an ocean of potential enemies who are out to destroy it, often mixing collective victimhood and historical memories in seemingly contradictory modes of xenophobia and narcissism. In the more open news environment of Guangzhou, for example, people live with a confluence of what Michel Foucault calls conflicting “regimes of truth,” but national sovereignty appears to glue official legitimation to popular sentiment (Latham, 2000). No wonder the media vehemently condemned the United States as a real or imagined enemy over a series of crises: the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; the row over human rights, trade, and Taiwan; the alleged Chinese espionage on U.S. nuclear intelligence, and a U.S. spy plane crashing into a Chinese fighter plane. Set against (yet compatible with) these nationalist feelings is China’s genuine hunger for international status, with the media profusely hailing the 2008 Olympics and WTO membership (despite their huge domestic cost) as milestones of national importance.

Peddling nationalism

Focusing on “the other” serves to divert public attention away from “our” discontent. Nationalism renews and affirms the state-defined boundaries between “us” and “them,” repelling the perceived foreign intrusion and suppressing subnational (Taiwanese or Tibetan) or pan-ethnic (Pan-Turkish) identities. To the extent that populist and statist forms of nationalism band around national sovereignty, the populist voice from below may be so pumped up as to vilify the “weak” foreign policy of the top. In such cases, the authorities have tried to contain the popular contour within the official trajectory, fearful that an unrestrained spate of mass feelings might detour or even endanger the state’s other policy interests and, worse yet, could turn inwards against the regime itself. Mindful of historical precedents (for example, the well-known anti-Japanese student rallies of 1919 transplanted their fury at corrupt and incompetent Chinese warlords), Beijing has given a cold shoulder to periodic outbursts of media and mass protests from overseas Chinese communities against Japanese occupation of the disputed Diaoyu Islands. Taking to heart Mao’s admonition that a small fire may burn the prairie, Beijing is resolute in its determination to crush any rival mass organization such as Falun Gong. Little comfort can be taken in the Internet chat-rooms filled with vehement denunciation of Premier Zhu Rongji, who brokered the WTO deal, as a “traitor” too soft on the United States. Within the state apparatuses, foreign affairs and trade bureaucracies are less belligerent and more conciliatory toward the United States than the hardline propaganda and military establishments. ² Anti-foreignism has historically been associated with perceived domestic weaknesses (Liao, 1984), and the current situation in China is potentially explosive with the prospect of mass (if also uncoordinated) protests against widespread unemployment and corruption.

Examining a series of opinion surveys, Stanley Rosen (Chapter 5) surmises that urban Chinese youth have been drawn into the global culture, but they have also developed two disparate images of the United States: a highly negative view of American hegemonism abroad alongside a highly positive assessment of American values and lifestyles at home. This ambivalence toward America—widely shared around the world—stems in part from the paradoxical coexistence between the United States’ progressive domestic politics and its arrogant, go-it-alone, at times illiberal foreign policy (see Herman and Chomsky, 1988; Nye, 2002; Said, 1981). But why did China move from pro-Americanism in the 1980s to anti-Americanism in the 1990s? My interpretation is that both the end of the Cold War and the Tiananmen crackdown have put the two countries on a collision course, making China look like a major stumbling block to the U.S.-led world order, such that China’s human rights conditions have come to the forefront of U.S. political and media concerns (Chapter 4). Dai Jinhua (2001) of Peking University attributes this change of culture more to the outgrowth of a domestic agenda: that is, a China which had craved America’s romantic love in the 1980s transformed herelf into another China which resented the lost love with the United States in the 1990s. To stretch her metaphor a bit further, China was one of many potential targets for the United States to court, but China pursued America in the 1980s as if it were her only target, and that made rejection so much more painful. Thus, America the angel became America the demon. Both interpretations seem complementary rather than contradictory.

The return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 was a fitting with broad market appeal. The event was presented as a supreme exhibition of national triumphalism, presumably marking the end of western imperialism in the glorious leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the beginning of China (i.e., a lost child returning to the warm embrace of the motherland) under moment and site for the media to produce the biggest nationalistic extravaganza national reunification with Taiwan under Deng Xiaoping’s ingenious “one country, two systems” policy. This reductive and essentialized narrative has lost sight of Mao’s crucial decision in maintaining the colonial status quo—for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) needed Hong Kong to circumvent western blockades during the Cold War—against the world trend of post-war decolonization. The glaring paradox between Beijing’s rhetoric of national independence and the reality of a rotten capitalist colony at the socialist door was reviled by Moscow in the early 1970s. Ultimately, China’s media narratives have neither acknowledged Britain’s amazing achievements in Hong Kong, nor answered the lingering doubts of Hong Kong and Taiwan about the “one country, two systems” policy (Lee et al., 2002).

Zhou He (Chapter 10) shows that even the top official organs, including Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily, were testing the state limits to exploit nationalist sentiments over the downing of the U.S. spy plane for market advantages. But nationalistic oratory is delivered not solely by the Party apparatchik; more important, state-orchestrated nationalism has managed to drip into popular consciousness by drawing on dramatized external events. A more affluent China is a more self-centered and depoliticized China, yet also one more receptive to nationalist and anti-American discourses. Peddling populist nationalism being a safe and profitable enterprise, the market-driven media and tabloids are in the vanguard of manufacturing sensationalized and aggressive nationalist discourses. From the mid-1990s onward, such hysterical popular writings as China Can Say No and Behind U.S. Media Demonization of China became instant best-sellers and spawned many other imitations, all dangerously anti-liberal and anti-democratic, arrogantly nationalistic and self-righteous, definitely anti-Western, and emotionally explosive without reasoned analysis (Huang and Lee, 2002).

Each incidence of major confrontations, skirmishes, and crises with foreign powers (principally the United States and Taiwan) has iurnished the media with a fantastic opportunity to commodify and thus appropriate the surplus value of populist nationalism. Just imagine the kind of international diplomatic wrangling and military maneuvers that would have followed if the People’s Daily had carried a prominent front-page story on “Tensions over the Taiwan Strait” with a provocative photo of alleged landing operations by the People’s Liberation Army! This news treatment did not come from that chief Party organ, but from the Global Times in jury 1999, after President Lee Tenghui (Li Denghui) declared a “state-to-state relationship” between China and Taiwan. Designed as a profitmaking outfit of the People’s Daily group, the Global Times seems to presume that it is entitled to package news in an irresponsibly sensationalized and market-driven manner without regard for political consequences. As if to outwit it, the Science Times, a weekly published by the Chinese Academy of Science, was headlined, “PLA’s New Guided Missile Able to Directly Attack Li Denghui at his Desk!”

National face: the Olympics and presidential summits

The mood was somber and subdued, with a sense of relief rather than ecstasy (realizing that the hard work was just about to begin), when China concluded fifteen years of hard bargaining to become a member of the WTO. In sharp contrast, President Jiang Zemin presided over a televised gala on July 13, 2001 to announce the anxiously awaited news that China would host the 2008 Olympics. Although the WTO will profoundly transform China’s political economy while the Olympics ostensibly has much less to do with the life of ordinary people, both events have been touted as symbolizing China’s rise to the world stage. The Olympics afford China an opportunity to “go out,” and the West an opportunity to “bring China in.” China spent U.S.$25 million hiring an international public relations firm to spruce up its application package, and will spend upward of U.S.$25 billion on the preparations leading up to 2008—thus, the urban rich (particularly in Beijing this time) will gain in the name of national interest. The United States did not oppose China’s application as it had in 1993, allegedly in the interest of pushing Beijing toward further reform. (“If you let a rascal attend a gentlemen’s game,” a commentator sneered, “he will pick up some civilized etiquette.”)

Sports, as a media event, is ceremonial politics that “expresses the yearning for togetherness, for fusion” (Dayan and Katz, 1992: viii). Within China, the mass-mediated Olympic Games will enhance the status of the authorities and integrate social groups, as all eyes are “fixed on the ceremonial center” (p. 15). This calendar journalism—planned in advance, with a festive atmosphere most likely to enthrall large audiences— commemorates a sense of awe and communal experience, while silencing different interpretations of the historical past and national status (van Ginneken, 1998). China hopes that this televised spectacular will draw world attention to the nation’s “progress” and its “rightful place,” thus turning an athletic competition into a national showcase. To that end, it will strive to produce an extraordinarily strong team at almost any cost.

Warming up to the Olympics, when the Chinese national football team advanced to the final World Cup competition on October 7, 2001, it nudged away the United States’ war on Afghanistan as the top news story with all the hyperbole ranking it alongside the 2008 Olympics and the WTO entry as a third major national event. ³ As Judy Polumbaum shows in Chapter 3, the story of the 2008 Olympics—which includes the process leading up to the Games, the staging of the Games, and the aftermath—is a cauldron for all the elements of “globalization.” The Olympics provide a focal point for local, national and transnational exchanges of people, products, capital, images and information. Intensely focused through electronic technologies, these exchanges will be significant at the local (Beijing’s identity and import vis-à-vis other urban centers, mainly the rival center of Shanghai) to the national (China’s self-conception as well as its identity projected toward the rest of the world) to the transnational levels (China’s relationship and position in the constellation of global status and power).

Polumbaum argues that Beijing will use the media to construct benevolent versions of the financial and technological requisites of the Games as accelerating modernization schemes, while masking growing inequities and stratification in Chinese society. In facing greater challenges to projecting its message worldwide, particularly to the centers of transnational power, China will endeavor to shape coverage through such forums as the opening and closing ceremonies as well as through technological and public relations apparatuses. Meanwhile, by granting Beijing the sponsorship, the International Olympic Committee can claim its magnanimity toward Asia and the developing nations, foster partnership between public and private interests with little practical risk, distance itself from recent corruption scandals, and renew Olympic mythologies of internationalism. Since the Los Angeles Games in 1984, the Olympics have become recognized as a business bonanza, and Beijing reiterates and magnifies this story. From the perspective of international business, the Games will foster conditions for China’s expanded participation in global trade, travel, labor migration and capital flows. This is a double-edged sword for China, as this accentuated integration holds forth prospects for enhanced prosperity as a big player in global commerce along with admonitions to “behave” in the community of economic powers.

The chilled U.S.-China ties gained temporary relief from two highly publicized presidential summits, which coincided with President Bill Clinton’s policy shift toward Beijing (Chapter 4). Presidential summits are ceremonial politics of sorts, strategically performed on television for the consumption of the main domestic and foreign audiences. They are staged pseudo-events of political significance: while the real negotiations take place outside the limelight, such ritualized dramas afford the media an opportunity to insert often official-cum-national perspective into the past and the future (van Ginneken, 1998:122). As Tsan-Kuo Chang (Chapter 6) demonstrates, ABC constructed Jiang’s visit to the United States “according to U.S. specifications and satisfaction,” seeing him overall as coming to get a democracy lesson. Likewise, Chinese Central Television (CCTV) viewed Clinton’s visit as affirming the bilateral relationship and the host country’s rising profile in the world. Despite their differences in the linguistics and semiology of news stories, both media outlets use the “media spectacle” of presidential summits to highlight their own “enduring values” (Gans, 1979) and national interest, as well as to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Chinese Media, Global Contexts
• Asia’s Transformations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1 The global and the national of the Chinese media: Discourses, market, technology, and ideology
• 2 “Enter the World”: Neo-liberal globalization, the dream for a strong nation, and Chinese press discourses on the WTO
• 3 Capturing the flame: Aspirations and representations of Beijing’s 2008 Olympics
• 4 Established pluralism: U.S. elite media discourse on China policy
• 5 Chinese media and youth: Attitudes toward nationalism and internationalism
• 6 Political drama and news narratives: Presidential summits on Chinese and U.S. national television
• 7 Globalization and the Chinese media: Technologies, content, commerce and the prospects for the public sphere
• 8 Administrative boundaries and media marketization: A comparative analysis of the newspaper, TV and Internet markets in China
• 9 West Lake wired: Shaping Hangzhou’s information age
• 10 How do the Chinese media reduce organizational incongruence?: Bureaucratic capitalism in the name of Communism
• 11 Localizing professionalism: Discursive practices in China’s media reforms
• 12 The future of Chinese cinema: Some lessons from Hong Kong and Taiwan
• 13 Marketing popular culture in China: Andy Lau as a pan-Chinese icon