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Chinese Newspaper Groups in the Digital Era: The Resurgence of the Party Press
Abstract
This article reviews the impact of digital technologies on Chinese newspapers. The diffusion of the smartphone has precipitated severe economic problems for the printed press. There have been falls in both readership and advertising revenues, which have had an effect on the structure of provincial-level press groups. The decline in economic viability has been felt most acutely by the commercially-oriented titles, while the more politically-oriented papers have led the way in finding new sources of funding. These sources tend to tie journalism more tightly to political and economic power, and lead to commercial goals replacing journalistic ones. This shifting balance of economic power has important consequences for the possibility of independent and critical journalism. The empirical material is specific to China, but it highlights more general theoretical questions as to the political economy of the media.
... Some scholars are optimistic that digitalization and online market competition may open up new possibilities for Chinese journalists to resist censorship (e.g., Hassid 2015; Hassid and Repnikova,2016;Stockmann 2013). Others argue that the Chinese government can contain challenges brought by the digital transformation Wang and Guo 2021) and that pressures from online competition may even weaken journalistic autonomy (Wang and Sparks 2019). However, in the context of Hong Kong, how digital transformation may affect news media has remained underexplored. ...
... On the other hand, others counter that the government did not loosen its political control of Chinese newspapers during their marketization and digital transformation Wang and Guo 2021). Some even content that fierce online competition might precipitate financial problems for legacy newspapers, thus weakening their professional autonomy (Wang and Sparks 2019). What remains unclear is how we may apply these insights to the case of Hong Kong, where its journalism is also heavily pressured by the politics of authoritarian China and fierce competition of online readership. ...
... Because the Chinese government can disproportionally influence the advertising market in Hong Kong, it can consequently exert a strong influence on news organizations struggling to survive in the fierce competition of online readership. My findings thus echo the notion that fierce online competition may weaken the financial independence of legacy newspapers, as well as the professional autonomy of their journalists (Wang and Guo 2021;Wang and Sparks 2019). ...
Studies about media self-censorship typically focus on its mechanism in traditional newsroom settings. But how media self-censorship may evolve in online journalism has remained largely unexplored. Using Hong Kong as a case, I examine the digital evolution of media self-censorship in a unique non-democratic context. Drawing on interviews with online journalists, my findings reveal that digital transformation has provided new valences for media self-censorship. With the financial hardship of legacy media in the digital age, Hong Kong online journalists are more directly exposed to external threats such as advertisement boycotts orchestrated by the state, and hence increasingly reluctant to offend external powerholders out of the fear of political and financial retaliation. Moreover, as online journalists adopt business-driven norms that favor the generation of clicks, political or policy news are further marginalized. These stories are often deemed boring, non-engaging to online audiences, and are not “sensationalizable” due to political risks, especially when compared to soft news types like crimes and lifestyles stories. Adapting to these changes, news managers are increasingly used to avoiding professional editorial debates that results are unpredictable but using “objective” web metrics as persuasive devices to discourage the production of sensitive news. Lastly, the dissemination of sensitive news is curbed in the social media gatekeeping process. These findings suggest that an authoritarian state can effectively influence online news production by controlling the capital that drives digital transformation, thereby limiting the liberating potential of the media in the digital age.
... The proliferation of the Internet and social media has resulted in the decline of newspaper circulation, and attracted both readership and advertising revenue away from the printed press. Statistics show that the expenditure on advertising in the printed press fell from about RMB 40,000 million in 2010 to about RMB 10,000 million in 2016 (Sparks et al., 2016;Wang and Sparks, 2018). In turn, this has resulted in newspapers publishing more paid content, that is articles written for advertisers which look like a professional news report, to maintain their commercial viability. ...
... In return for more money on paid content by local governments, though, party newspapers agree to give positive coverage of local government, such as high efficiency of the government, the positive social trend, and economic development in the region Sparks, 2018, 2020;Han, 2017). In order to demonstrate achievements to the central government, the local authorities are willing to pay for news coverage, which is a win-win situation for both sides (Wang and Sparks, 2018). The increasing significance of paid content has diminished the autonomy of journalists. ...
Based on a critical review of empirical studies on how political authorities in China influence news media practices and shape news content, this chapter proposes an integrated model of political control on news production in China. The model delineates how different forms of political control on news production, including government news censorship, journalism education, appointment of media management, and control of political information dissemination, would have an impact on the news selection autonomy across different news organisations and on journalists’ news reporting strategies, which will then shape the news media content, for example news agendas and frames built by news organisations. The theoretical model built on findings from existing studies on the particular topic, that is political control and news production, suggests that news media control in China remains effective, but news media marketisation in the country has considerably increased the autonomy of news organisations in the reporting of some types of issues, for example wrongdoings of local cadres or political scandals at the local levels of government. The autonomy is accompanied with the negotiation of journalists to expand news reporting boundaries in the background of state-led marketisation which essentially safeguards the legitimate ruling of the Party-state yet provides news organisations leeway to the reporting of news issues that do not challenge state legitimacy. Such news control practices partly symbolise the sophisticated methods of governance of the Chinese Party-state and the activeness of news media practitioners in the face of manipulation.
... Due to the persistent reinforcement of media control since 2012, and the significant diversion of public opinion guidance and market profits from state-owned media to new media, these state-owned media have presented a great reliance on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government's resources and support (Wang and Sparks, 2019). This not only shifts media's primary role to publicize government services, but also limits its expression of public interests that may challenge the political authority. ...
... Due to the persistent reinforcement of media control since 2012, and the significant diversion of public opinion guidance and market profits from state-owned media to new media, these state-owned media have presented a great reliance on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government's resources and support (Wang and Sparks, 2019). This not only shifts media's primary role to publicize government services, but also limits its expression of public interests that may challenge the political authority. ...
This article delves into the strategies of different Chinese news organizations’ (e.g., state-owned media, we-media, private news organizations) engagement with audiences in data journalism, aiming to attain dual legitimacy (identity legitimacy and institutional legitimacy) within the unique landscape of the digital media era in China. Utilizing the lens of organizational legitimacy, qualitative interviews were conducted with 26 Chinese data news practitioners. The findings reveal that news entities have adopted “restrictive involvement” and “substitutive involvement” strategies to limit audience engagement to superficial interactions within the consumption process of data journalism. Identity legitimacy has traditionally served as the primary incentive for news organizations to engage audiences, while institutional legitimacy has constrained the forms and degrees of audience engagement. The study posits that audience deployment by news organizations is more of a rhetorical maneuver than a practical engagement, symbolically involving audiences in China’s data news production. This research contributes an institutional perspective to the understanding of data journalism and audience engagement dynamics, shedding light on the intricate interactions between news entities, audiences, technology and the state within China’s context.
... The manipulation of emotions is frequently used to mobilize pro-state and anti-foreign sentiments (Chen & Wang, 2019;Mattingly & Yao, 2022), and nationalism has long served as the "last resort" of media persuasion (Shen & Guo, 2013). From a perspective of political economy, Wang and Sparks (2019) argue that with the diffusion of digital devices, especially smartphones, commercial incentives overwhelm journalistic ones, leading to more "politically safe" entertainment contents in the press. On the receiving end, China's propaganda has exceeded stereotypical expectations for a strictly bureaucratic neo-traditionalist regime. ...
... On the other hand, private news organizations in China still have some space and agency for autonomous action, which is different from the state-owned news media in China that relies mainly on the state/government for funding and other resources for survival (Wang and Sparks 2019). Compared with state-owned news media that are under the direct state control, private news organizations are less constrained. ...
... The total number of newspaper titles shrank from 1,918 in 2012 to 1,810 in 2020, while advertising revenues experienced a precipitous drop with its 2021 income at 1/15 of what it was in 2011 (Cui & Chen, 2022). In responding to the changing media ecosystem, Chinese newspapers embarked on a new round of innovative reform initiatives in boosting revenue sources and restructuring organizations, including reconsolidating newspaper groups, partnering with the state and commercial entities for direct and indirect subsidies, strengthening side-line businesses, redefining their daily operations from journalism-focused to (information) service-focused missions, and, more importantly, repurposing content for mobile delivery (Fang & Repnikova, 2022;Wang & Sparks, 2019). ...
The field of local news is often associated with news deserts, commonly defined as geo-based communities without newspapers or other legacy media as providers of locally oriented news and civic information. This phenomenon is expanding in global society due to the diminishing presence of newspapers at moments of accelerated digitization. This study examines the multiplex nature of news deserts in rural and suburban areas in China. Data were collected through a multi-methods approach combining two focus groups and 44 semi-structured in-depth interviews. Patterns of engagement among inter-viewees reveal that smartphone-based social media applications and digital platforms function as viable sources of news, and incidental exposure to news has become the norm of digital news use. Government-orchestrated convergent media services and WeChat channels are preferred choices by most research participants for local news. We argue that a media ecology perspective may be a productive approach to understanding community news and local newspapers.
... Referring to Hallin and Mancini's (2004) classification of media systems in democratic countries, the media system in China is close to the Mediterranean Model, i.e., low professional autonomy with high state intervention. In general, China's news agencies are nationalized with central or local government financial support (Wang and Sparks 2019), and the private capital has always been prohibited from news gathering, editing, and releasing by laws and policies (The State Council of the People's Republic of China 2022). Therefore, the term Chinese official media in this article essentially refers to all professional news agencies in mainland China, which are directly or indirectly managed by the Communist Party of China (CPC). ...
As algorithm-driven content platforms sweep the world, what is changing in journalism? This article investigates news production of the Chinese official media on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok). From the perspectives of news gathering, professional role, and news value, we conducted a manual content analysis (N = 991) of four representative Chinese official media (People’s Daily, China Youth Daily, Southern Metropolis Daily and Sichuan Observer) to reveal the commonalities and heterogeneities of their news production on Douyin. Then, through an automated content analysis of Sichuan Observer (N = 16,045), we illustrate how district media convergence centers have fought for public attention as emerging actors in the news ecosystem. Overall, we map the current practices of Chinese official media on the emerging algorithm-driven content platforms, focusing on how they pursue a new type of news orientation and popularize the Party’s message while disseminating entertainment content. Contributions, such as the expansion of the classification framework of Chinese official media, and the catering of journalism to platforms, are discussed.
... Such Maoist media rhetoric and associated media policy have concerned many critics. Notable criticisms include the 'resurgence' of the propaganda-oriented Party newspapers and the 'death' of the commercially oriented popular newspapers (Huang, 2021;Wang & Sparks, 2018), the proactive involvement of the Chinese Party-state in China's journalism education and training (Xu, 2018), and the 'almost extinct' of Chinese investigative journalism/journalists (Gao, 2018;Hernández, 2019; see also Cheek & Ownby, 2018;Svensson, 2017;Tong, 2019). ...
The ‘Marxist view of journalism’ notion as the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rebranded media ideology has remained a trendy phrase and hot topic in China’s official, media, and academic research discourse since the early 2000s. Despite its marked and prolonged public presence and significance for the understanding of the Chinese Party-state’s media policy, a specific and systematic critique of the notion has remained absent in the literature.
Aiming to bridge this research gap, this study argues that being designed to attempt to theoretically justify the CCP’s shift to retighten its control over China’s increasingly market-oriented and self-minded media industry in the era of globalisation and digitisation, this high-profile ‘new’ notion is little more than a conveniently refurbished version of the very same old authoritarian press tradition of the Party, illustrating the ruling elite’s lack of theoretical courage and capacity to engage in long-delayed yet much-needed media ideological innovation. The study also offers some general suggestions in relation to how the notion may be revisited and redeveloped.
... Such funding sources result in the tight interconnection of politics and economic power with journalism, and consequently, the journalistic objectives of media are replaced by commercial goals. Therefore, the possibility of critical and independent journalistic practices is affected by this shift in financial and socioeconomic power balance (Wang & Sparks, 2019). ...
Like other walks of life, digital media has revolutionized journalism altogether. The internet has made social media a crucial part of contemporary journalistic practices. Different media firms are becoming highly dependent on the content created on different social media platforms. Today media space is accessible to everyone, and one can create and publish their own content, which is available on online platforms such as blogs or social media. As a result of this opportunity, a huge amount of content is published and available on the web, which certainly lacks value and quality. This study explores journalistic practices in the new information arena. This study focuses on research objectives; to locate the scope of digital journalism in the contemporary media industry, to compare the difference created by the new information arena and traditional journalism and to assess the challenges created by the new information and technological revolution towards journalism. Purposive sampling was used to draw a sample from the population, and in-depth interviews were conducted to structure the results of the study. The findings of the study reveal that though a huge difference has been made by contemporary digital journalistic practices, there is a need to reconsider certain things to get full out of this huge opportunity. Pages: 149-161 ISSN (Print): 2789-441X ISSN (Online): 2789-4428
... As the competition pressure against newspapers from digital media intensifies, commercially oriented titles like WCCN, while continuing to be tightly politically controlled, have received little policy and financial support from the government. Meanwhile, the propaganda-oriented Party organ sector has surprisingly resurged against market logic as a result of government subsidy and policy support (Wang & Sparks, 2018). ...
This chapter contributes to the volume’s theme “digital journalism in China” from an angle of examining Chinese newspaper publishers’ approach to their traditional print editions in their digital transition through a Sino-Western comparative perspective. It is argued that newspaper publishers’ strategies/experiences in relation to their print editions in their digital transition are complex and diverse in different contexts. While digitisation and platformisation may be what the future holds for newspaper publishers, they do not necessarily have to choose between their traditional print editions and online editions. Whenever possible, keeping a quality print edition while focusing (more) on online operation may well serve their overall journalistic and business interest.
https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Journalism-in-China/Zhang/p/book/9781032162157
... Second, the loss of jobs has happened mainly in commercial media, due to economic downturn and political censorship, which in general provide more opportunities and a relatively equal environment for women as discussed above. The rapid rise of social media leads to the sharp decline of printed press in China since 2012 (Wang and Sparks, 2019). When Chinese government subsidizes party media to maintain control over ideology and politics, commercial media is struggling in a more repressive political environment and economic crisis, with some titles even having closed (Wang, 2021). ...
This study aims to explain the puzzling discrepancy between the large number of female journalism students and the comparatively fewer female journalists in the workforce in China today. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 graduates in journalism from the same class, we investigate the female students’ professional socialization process and analyze the external and internal factors that led most of them to choose a journalism major but not to join the journalism industry. Along the three significant phases in a funnel-shaped model—admission, college education and internship, and job market—we identify the combined influences of structural gender inequality and female students’ increasing gender awareness and agency. We further examine female students’ situation through the conceptual lens of precarity and discuss how it is manifested in ways that differ from those in the West. Our findings reveal a mixed picture of gender reality in Chinese journalism and in Chinese society.
... In the Xi Jinping era, the state has rolled back this space, reimposing discipline on marketized media. Commercial media such as Southern Weekly, which earned a strong reputation for public interest journalism, have also been harmed by journalism's financial crisis, which has tilted the balance of power back toward state-funded party organs (Tong, 2019;Wang & Sparks, 2019). Nearly all quality newspapers devoted to public service journalism, most notably the Southern Media Group's Southern Weekly and its sister publication Southern Metropolis Daily, have been cleansed to make sure they toe the party line. ...
Journalism’s financial crisis has killed news organizations at an alarming rate. Most digital-born news ventures, once touted as the profession’s saviors, have also been short-lived. These trends threaten the viability of public interest journalism. The crisis is especially acute in settings where a free press was not deeply entrenched to start with. One hopeful countertrend is the effort of journalists to pass on their professional values to new organizational hosts, even as the media companies that employ them die or drift away from professional principles. Our case studies in Taiwan, China, and Indonesia reveal that the normative assets of terminated or fading organizations are partially preserved or revived in new hosts. We suggest that a social movements perspective—which helpfully distinguishes between a movement and its constituent organizations—can help illuminate how professionals try to survive threats to public interest journalism during periods of abeyance. This perspective is not intended to gloss over the crisis within the news media industry, but to spotlight the drivers of the journalistic movement that require support.
... This phenomenal game still faced scathing criticism and immense pressure from the official media, which forced it to make a series of changes. Previous studies have suggested that Chinese media, especially official media, tend to tie themselves tightly to the political power, serving as the mouthpiece of the Party-state (Wang and Sparks 2019;Zhao 2008). ...
Previous studies on eSports have essentially focused on its “sportiness” without giving attention to aspects such as media, information, and technology. By assessing the emerging research field of eSports through the lens of Actor-Network Theory, this study regards the Chinese eSports industry as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Accordingly, this study disassembles and unpacks eSports to understand how it is assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. Using research methods such as participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study evaluates the material actors and relational networks of the Chinese eSports industry to trace how the actors come to be assembled, how they associate and exercise force, and how they persist or decline each other's effects. Thus, it suggests that material actors and relational networks with an agency are not simply mediating, but also structuring eSports, indicating the explicit and implicit dynamics of power within the actor-network.
... The government has encouraged the media to embrace a financially independent and market-driven model (Zhao, 2000). News agencies have received fewer state subsidies, becoming more dependent on subscriptions and advertising as their revenue sources (Wang & Sparks, 2019;Wang et al., 2018). Nevertheless, all media outlets remain subject to government supervision (Sparks et al., 2016). ...
Facing the challenges and opportunities brought by the launch of the WeChat subscription account in 2012, Reference News (hereafter RN), a Chinese official news agency publishing selected translated foreign news, has responded quickly, becoming one of the most successful WeChat accounts. Among the various contents produced by RN’s WeChat account, there is a type of news report that quotes social media comments posted by foreign netizens on China-related topics. This study investigates the translation of those comments. Using a dataset containing news articles quoting translated comments published between 1 August 2019 and 31 July 2020, we analysed the selection of news topics and comments and investigated the translated comments by drawing on appraisal theory and framing strategies. It was found that RN tends to cover more soft news and quotes positive comments towards China. These selected comments were then rendered and reframed to play up the pro-China stance in the original and presented to the readers with screenshots of their source texts. In a highly marketized, digitalised, and competitive social media context, these strategies have facilitated RN’s efforts to represent China’s positive global image among foreign netizens to their WeChat account followers.
... This is possibly because journalists who strongly identify themselves as propagandists are those who work for the party-affiliated media. They may have experienced more challenges from citizen journalism to their authority in guiding public opinions; they may also have experienced less economic pressures as official news media are defined as "public" institutions and are therefore privileged to obtain direct subsidy from the government (Wang & Sparks, 2019). Under pressure from professional disruption, official news media have secured their status and clientelism, the patron-client relationship between the party-state and official media (Lee et al., 2007), have been strengthened. ...
This study investigates whether the declining economic performance and social status of traditional news media, which are two dimensions indicating the professional disruption of journalism, are associated with journalists’ engagement in public relations (PR). The results of a cross-sectional survey reveal two paths to the PR-journalism boundary crossing, although the level of boundary crossing is overall controllable. First, economic disruption indirectly predicts journalists’ engagement in media pitching and media event planning through their identification with colleagues who have engaged in PR. Second, perceived waning social status both directly and indirectly predicts their engagement in media pitching and media catching, with their disidentification with PR practitioners as a mediator in the indirect relationship. These findings suggest that, while professional disruption may induce journalists to seek more information subsidy, their professional identity can be a source of both resistance against and support for this trend. Theories on social identity and intergroup relations are adopted to explain this dilemma.
... Although multivocal technologies, theoretically, may eventually lead to systematic change when radically innovative practices become acceptable to even the most conservative, this possibility within China's Party press is yet to be seen. In the short term, the space for contestation within the system is narrow, considering the tightening ideological control in the current era (Wang & Sparks, 2019). ...
Propaganda has been increasingly digitized, popularized, and aestheticized globally. This article focuses on the restyling of propaganda in China, particularly the role of Chinese state-run media in the making of soft propaganda – propagandistic content packaged in sleek and entertaining formats. Building upon Bourdieu’s field theory, this article illuminates Chinese state-run media’s capacity to refract external pressures, such as digitization, to enhance their status and the resilience of the political regime. It reveals their brokering role in a heterogeneous ‘thought work’ network, comprised of state-affiliated units and private actors, where different forms of capital are exchanged. Drawing on in-depth interviews with online news staff in three central-level state-run outlets in China, my analysis challenges the discourse of digital technologies as inherently liberating forces and accentuates their multivocality, namely the flexible ways in which technological innovation is interpreted and practiced in concrete institutional contexts, serving pre-existing priorities and interests. It shows how innovation can function as a legitimation device serving organizations’ and individuals’ quests for political and symbolic capital within bureaucratic systems.
... The space for critical and investigative reporting has undoubtedly shrunk as Xi Jinping tightened media control and Internet companies took the advertising revenues away from media outlets (H. Wang and Sparks 2019), and yet the scrutiny of official governance across different sectors has persisted, albeit in a more muted and narrower form. The reporting of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is a good example of the fragile perseverance of critical journalism in China, with many outlets producing highquality investigations of the crisis prior to being censored and redirected to publish positive success narratives (Repnikova 2020). ...
Digital innovation has been widely considered as a key solution to the current journalism crisis. While most innovation projects in democratic regimes receive funding from media organizations, venture capital firms, and foundations, many of China’s digital journalism projects are funded and led by the state—a model we define as “state-preneurship.” In this study, we compare this model with other digital innovation models on three dimensions: the amount and sustainability of funding, the extent of newsroom restructuring, and the transformation of journalistic culture. We focus on the early national success case, Shanghai-based news outlet Pengpai, as well as on eight of its regional copycats. Based on interviews with forty-three executives, journalists, propaganda officials, media investors, and scholars, we argue that while in the short run, state-preneurship has produced fast and large-scale transformations in the digital journalism industry, these changes appear as largely unsustainable in the long run. This is due to (1) the political contingency of state investments and (2) the limited transformation in journalistic culture.
This study evaluates hotel guest perspectives on adopting personalised technology-enabled hospitality services by using a quantitative survey methodology. Applying unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model constructs, the questionnaire gauges 200 guest views on performance benefits, usage effort and conditions influencing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT) and mobility. Descriptive and correlational analyses highlight innovation by capability and reveal barriers around complexity, privacy and reliability. Findings can inform hotel technology investment decisions and strategic planning to effectively leverage data-driven customisation capabilities across the entire guest journey — from pre-arrival trip planning to post-stay loyalty building. It will also help towards the Hospitality 2.0 vision of balancing digitisation with human connections. This empirical assessment aims to advance sector transformation and next-generation experience elevation through prudent prioritisation guided by evidence-based user willingness going beyond speculative innovation.
This study analyzes what we call the “think-tank turn” of Chinese newspapers, a popular path of digital transformation that many media organizations have been undertaking in response to the multi-faceted crisis of the media in the past decade. Based on a case study of Paper N, a provincial commercial newspaper in southeast China that has been praised for having organized one of the most successful media-based think-tanks in the country, this study explores how Chinese journalists legitimize their think-tank roles and in the process redefine their relationship with the government. It argues that by turning the newsroom into a policy research hub and the journalists into policy analysts and consultants, Chinese newspapers further subordinate themselves to the institutions of political power, becoming not only their loyal propagandists but also fully-fledged dependents. Implications of the think-tank turn for journalistic legitimacy and the relationship between Chinese media and state in the digital era are discussed.
Chinese youths––the “mobile internet generation”––are increasingly exposed to news incidentally through mobile social media. Based on the theory of incidental news exposure and semi-structured interviews with 41 Chinese youths, this study inductively explored the effects of incidental news exposure on news diversity and expression on social media from an audience-centered perspective. The results question previous findings of positive impacts of incidental news exposure on democratization, evidencing potential negative effects of incidental news exposure on news diversity and civic expression. This paper indicates possible reasons for those effects, highlighting the influence of citizens’ trust in official information sources and the social media censorship environment in China.
Studies on the “protest paradigm” have long explored how a society's mass media system frames the social movements occurring within that society. This study adopts a social movement diffusion perspective to sharpen the transborder dimension of the protest paradigm. Specifically, we introduce the concept of the “diffusion-proofing” protest paradigm, given that an understudied and undertheorized function of the protest paradigm is the prevention of the import of exogenous social movements. Taking the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as an example, we investigate how mainland China's mass media acted to prevent movement diffusion. Four transborder components of the diffusion-proofing protest paradigm are proposed: reactions, attributions, consequences, and solutions. Through content analysis, we argue that by highlighting these transborder components, China's newspapers attributed the movement's rise to foreign intervention, emphasized the movement's negative effects on both Hong Kong and mainland China, and revealed the uncompromising nature of China's reaction and the urgency of cross-border cooperation for containing the movement and its diffusion. Further, we identify two modes of reporting: a mainly descriptive mode that relied on a local framework to depict the movement and its local context and an evaluative mode that emphasized the level of deviance and foreign intervention, thus amplifying the movement's transborder effects and the need to prevent its diffusion. Notably, the level of deviance acts as a mediating channel between the two modes, transforming the local framework into a transborder one. The diffusion-proofing protest paradigm is also found to vary across media types and periods.
This chapter seeks to explicate cross-border journalism in China in regard to its production, dissemination, reception, and impact. China’s media system, as a form of networked authoritarianism, is a combination of advanced information technologies and traditional media under the strict control of the Chinese Communist Party. The effective blocking of news and information from outside China and the huge output of official news about itself by its propaganda machine have served to make it a case of unidirectional news flow. In the general absence of alternative information, the Chinese people’s understanding of the world is susceptible to the influence of nationalistic party-state propaganda policies. Meanwhile, the world’s media have to work extraordinarily hard in order to have a deeper understanding of China.
The rise and reign of the popular tabloid metro paper sector at the expense of the Party press organ sector during the 1990s–2000s as discussed in the previous chapter was significant. However, this by no means suggests the disappearance of many old concerns as well as new challenges facing China’s journalism industry, particularly the newspaper sector. This chapter identifies these concerns and challenges and examines how they led to the surprising fall of the metro paper sector and ‘resurgence’ of the Party organ sector and the implications of these extraordinary developments.
Through a comprehensive critical review of literature, this chapter defines the term ‘popular journalism’ and applies it to conceptualize popular journalism in contemporary China. The chapter also identifies the research gap in the literature and sets the goals that this book aims to achieve.
Using the analogy of an orchestra, the book looks at the ways in which the Party-state conducts communications in China. Rather than treating China’s communications system as purely one of centralised top-down control, this book proffers that it is the combination of the government through its state policies, the propaganda bureau’s campaigns, commercial consumer culture, digital and traditional media platforms, celebrities, entertainers and journalists, educators, community interest groups, and family and friends, who all contribute to the evolution of how ideas are perpetuated, enforced, and legitimised in China. Covering themes such as censorship, surveillance, national narratives onscreen and in everyday life, political agency, creative work, news production, and gender politics, this book gives an insight into the complex web of conditions, objectives, and challenges that the Chinese leadership and commercial interests face when orchestrating their visions for the nation’s future. As such, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of media and communication studies, Chinese politics, and Chinese Studies.
This study explores how the Chinese media have legitimated the Chinese government’s anti-COVID policy at home by constructing the spectatorship of foreign countries’ suffering during the pandemic. Using the Oriental News of Shanghai Media Group (SMG), a leader in Chinese provincial media, as a case study, the present study reveals that the core countries within the world system have been reported on more often than the semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. News about core countries also precedes news about non-core countries during the parts of broadcasts that concern the global COVID-19 pandemic. China’s specific geopolitical and national political contexts have significantly influenced the mediation of COVID-19 suffering in various countries. While the US is represented as experiencing multiple forms of “chaos” during the pandemic, African countries are represented as “allied others” or “weak others.” News about India, a country with national conditions similar to those of China, reminds Chinese spectators that the Chinese government’s strict controls are correct and effective. The mediation of other countries’ sufferings has produced various degrees of emotional involvement on the part of the Chinese public.
This study examines Chinese journalists’ use of video blogs (vlog) for news reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Situated within the “visual turn” of storytelling in the digital era, the vlog has risen in popularity as an audiovisual format on social media and video-sharing platforms, attracting followers’ attention through its attributes of apparent authenticity and intimacy. Journalists have also been riding the wave by employing the amateur-style vlog for professional purposes. Based on a case study of 224 journalists’ vlogs about the Wuhan lockdown, we found that the j-vlog, as a hybrid form of professional-amateur reporting, affords an alternative space for journalists to perform journalistic transparency through self-disclosure of their life and work routines, increasing intimacy and engagement with audiences. This study contributes to current research in innovative practices of digital journalism and expands existing debates on journalistic transparency by delineating its nuances in different digital news formats and national contexts.
Digital technology can empower citizen journalism as well as state media in authoritarian regimes. China’s propaganda apparatus has undertaken a series of transformations to adapt itself to the changing media environment. This study investigates this adaptive process by drawing on over five million Weibo posts created by 103 newspapers between 2012 and 2019. Results show that through the digital transformation, newspapers are deliberately distancing themselves from their Orwellian past of abstract dogmatism to openly embrace infotainment. A soft-news-centered production model has emerged as the new journalistic paradigm on social media. Not only commercialized outlets but also mouthpiece newspapers produce more soft news than hard news. Regression results further substantiate that soft news is a gateway to propaganda, whose popularity can spill over into propaganda news. For every 100% increase in soft news popularity, propaganda popularity will rise by 38.5% in the following month. News outlets that have garnered attention to soft news can transfer that attention to their subsequent propaganda. These results illuminate how propaganda works in the digital realm, how authoritarian propaganda could be enhanced by infotainment, and why a less political platform could be more susceptible to political intervention.
China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, The Currency of Truth brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals. In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to rethink contemporary news, arguing that rather than setting out from the assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its publics, we should explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.
China's approach to environmental regulation relies heavily on campaign-style enforcement and blunt-force regulation. While considered effective in the short run, this approach is often inefficient and generates unintended regulatory outcomes in the longer run. At the same time, China continues to experiment with the use of market-based approaches that are theoretically more efficient and have the potential to facilitate sustained reductions in carbon emissions. Arguably the most high-profile example is the Guangdong Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which was launched in 2013 as a national pilot scheme. We construct a synthetic control of Guangdong and analyse 51,076 party-led newspaper reports to show that while the ETS reduced emissions in the short run, these reductions were systematically associated with political signalling. Notably, emissions reduced substantially upon the announcement of the ETS in 2011 – a full two years before the scheme was scheduled to begin – before rebounding to near pre-ETS announcement levels by 2017. The presence of an anticipation effect and the systematic association between political signalling and emissions reductions mirrors findings on China's more direct approaches to environmental regulation. Our findings suggest that market-based mechanisms in China may not be qualitatively different from more direct forms of environmental regulation.
This paper content analyzed 1584 news samples from 10 newspapers in China in 2012 and 2018 with the aim of exploring how the style of news has changed concurrent with the rapid expansion of digital media. The results showed that newspaper journalism in China is currently undergoing de-professionalization. Among six conventional indicators of professional news, three (brevity, immediacy, plurality of sources) are in significant decline, and the other three (adherence to conventional news structure, objectivity, and public orientation) are in partial decline. Such a shift can be interpreted as a decline in news quality, or alternatively, the formation of new journalism.
This study looks at how investigative journalists practice gatekeeping in the context of China. By combining with the hierarchical model of influence (Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014), this study revisits the relationship between influential factors from the aspects of politics, markets, and organizations, which are across all the levels. Based on the interviews with 25 investigative journalists in Beijing, this research suggests that influential factors do not always have a strong hierarchical relation between each other regarding what sort of information could turn out to be news. This situation is because journalists share varied perceptions about what influential factor can convert into a particular constraint.
Government and market are the two main factors that drive the practices of the Chinese media system and influence the news construction process. A dramatic, socially disruptive event like the 2014 Kunming terrorist attack has the potential both to damage the government image and to attract readers. Analyzing how different types of media, more specifically the state-sponsored and the market-oriented press, construct a terrorist attack may therefore reveal essential characteristics of the Chinese media system and its relationship with both government and market. In doing so, the present study makes a contribution in terms of methodology, resources, and empirical description. From a methodological perspective, drawing on a dataset of 275 news articles about the Kunming attack that was collected from 16 mainstream Chinese newspapers, we explore the possibilities of combining computer-assisted techniques (i.e. part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis, collocation, and concordance) and Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), based on which we identified 699 Chinese lexical indicators distributed across ten news values. The open-source wordlist produced by this procedure will facilitate future quantitative DNVA, but also fills a resource gap in non-English news values studies. After calculating the mean normalized frequency of indicators under each news value on a more empirical level, we found that the state-sponsored and the market-oriented press converge in foregrounding the news values of Eliteness and Personalization, in line with public expectations, while at the same time diverging in their use of the news values of Positivity, Negativity, and Superlativeness, which we can relate to the different aims and responsibilities of these two types of newspapers.
“Un-news” is a Chinese newsroom jargon that refers to the process as well as the product of aggregation. It encapsulates clashes between digital and legacy journalism, challenges posed by and responses to technologies in the media industry. It differs from aggregation news elsewhere because of dynamic media environment in China. This ethnographic study closely analyzes manifestations of “un-news” churned out by digital aggregators who have to work under management of legacy print journalists and editors in a local Chinese press. The hierarchy of influences model is used to decompose the meanings and complexities of “un-news.” Fieldwork observations have confirmed our expectations that the hierarchy model remains structurally valid, although the content and meaning of influence have changed drastically within each level.
Often analysing ‘the Chinese Internet’ as a national entity, existing research has overlooked China's provincially oriented web portals, which have supplied information and entertainment to substantial user populations. Through the lenses of the critical political economy of media and critical media industry studies, this article traces the ascendance of China's provincial web from the late 1990s to the early 2000s by analysing industry yearbooks, official reports, conference records, personal memoirs, archived webpages, and user traffic data. We uncover interactions between Internet service providers, legacy media organizations, commercial Internet companies, and the central and local governments – each driven by discrete economic interests, political concerns, and imaginaries about the new technology. Delineating the emergence and consolidation of China's provincial web, our study foregrounds the understudied political economy of online content regionalization at scale. Further, it sheds new light on Chinese media policy, Internet governance, and Internet histories, especially the widely noted conservative turn of online cultures after the mid-2010s.
The Chinese cybersphere is one of the world’s most active online spaces. On one hand, there are traditional mainstream media outlets, which are part of the State or either subject to commercial market needs. On the other hand, social media platforms have arisen: there, users are empowered, and they even allow journalism without the need for journalistic organizations. Using content analysis, we examined the interactive features of 20 English-language media located in mainland China. We found that the media incorporated more options related to usability or promotion through social media than user-generated content. Through hierarchical cluster analysis, we identified a new typology for understanding the roles adopted by the selected media: we observed a distinctive category of online information organizations—source-oriented media. Such media do not attempt to establish user communities: their target is consultation and shared social media platforms.
When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949, the Communist Party’s press policy banned private newspapers. Therefore, two influential newspapers in mainland cities, Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, relocated to Hong Kong. There, they became the external propaganda mouthpieces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the control of the party’s Hong Kong and Macau Working Committee and publishers dispatched from Beijing (He, 2020). In 2016, the two newspapers merged to form the Hong Kong Dagong Wenhui Media Group under the direct control of the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which is an organ of the State Council of the PRC in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). After Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, the control of the media by the central and local governments increased. The Shenzhen Press Group brought the Hong Kong Commercial Daily in 1999. Even earlier, in 1996, Phoenix Satellite Television was founded in Hong Kong by Liu Changle, a former People’s Liberation Army officer who was suspected of maintaining extensive links to the Chinese military (Ma, 2007).
This article reports a case study on how government-sponsored native advertising influences everyday practices of journalism and journalists’ role identification in China. The process is the result of the state attempt to centralize control in response to digitalization that is, changing the press landscape. Building on social identity theory, we undertook an ethnographic fieldwork in a local party newspaper to observe how news organization and journalists make sense of the changes. Analyses show that, in addition to gains in material resources, the politics of native advertising also symbolizes new salient values for journalists whose professional identity swings between idealism and realism. The complexity of the phenomena under study reveals a plurality of meanings of the interplay among native advertising, journalistic routines, and the ever-shifting state-media relationship in China.
This paper reports a content analysis of ten mainland Chinese newspapers compared with their respective news applications. The newspapers were analysed in 2012 and 2018, and the news applications were from 2018. The paper explores the extent to which a shift from print to digital distribution has altered the practice of journalism. Contrary to the widely-held view which stresses the transformational nature of the shift, the results of this analysis show that there are more commonalities than differences between offline and online journalism. There were some changes to the printed versions between 2012 and 2018 but reports in the news applications remained in most respects close to those in the printed newspapers. There were changes in the way that news was presented, notably the use of more illustrations and emotion-driven expressions and markers. But there were no significant differences in terms of substantial dimensions of content, including the pattern of the sources used, the depth of the contexts and orientation of the reports. The use of distinctive online affordances, like hyperlinks, was found to be infrequent.
To embrace the digital transformation, the Party press in China started to set up official accounts on social media platforms, hoping to strengthen the CCP’s legitimacy while satisfying audiences’ expectations. This study focuses on the case of Xiake_Island, an official WeChat account affiliated with the Party newspaper, People’s Daily, and tries to explore how new media technology redefines its journalistic practices. Through close observations and in-depth interviews, this study found that propaganda still dominates the production process, but the editors have incorporated some elements of commercialism and professionalism into their practices. They pay more attention to the objectivity and attractiveness of the stories in an attempt to weaken their mouthpiece role. To seek the balance between the political mission and audience demand, the editors of Xiake_Island have developed some strategies. Targeting elite audiences, Xiake_Island produces only high-quality, in-depth stories. When covering negative stories, it criticizes policy implementation by the local government while avoids questioning the legitimacy of the Party’s policies. Being firmly subordinate to the CCP, the editors will continue to accomplish their propaganda mission more subtly and softly in cyberspace.
The media industry has been ravaged by the economic crises. Some media, mainly those covering tabloid fare and digitally savvier than others or those backed by deep-pocketed investors, are surviving or even thriving. But independent journalism outfits, particularly outside the Western world, have been grappling with serious financial problems. This article is an analysis of how government uses funding, directly and indirectly, to capture the media. It describes trends in how governments use funding to control media by not financing independent journalism, but choosing to fund instead media outlets that advance the government agenda and the interests of its allies and supporters, either political groups or businesses.
This article argues that discourses of a newspaper “crisis” should not be regarded simply as descriptions of the actual state of the press but also as a means by which strategic actors frame the situation. The emerging frames can have substantial consequences for media policy making. The study identifies four key frames used to portray the newspaper “crisis” and discusses their relevance for public debates in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Similarities and differences are examined through 59 in-depth interviews with policymakers and industry executives as well as a qualitative analysis of policy documents and relevant media coverage. The study demonstrates that debates on the newspaper “crisis” are only partly influenced by (1) economic realities and (2) media policy traditions in the six countries but also reflect (3) the strategic motives of powerful actors and (4) the diffusion of frames across borders, particularly those coming from the United States. A transnationally uniform paradigm emerges according to which the state is expected to play the role of a benevolent but mostly passive bystander, while media companies are expected to tackle the problem mainly by developing innovative content and business strategies. This liberal market paradigm displays one blind spot however: it does not seriously consider a scenario where the market is failing to provide sustainable journalistic quality.
In this essay, I attempt to shed light on Michael Schudson’s theoretical and political position vis-à-vis commercialism as a shaping force of journalism. I document and analyze Schudson’s criticisms of market pressures on journalism, his criticisms of other critics of commercialism whom he sees as going too far, and then, the limits of the position he stakes out for himself—which is effectively, given his position as the authoritative synthesizer of the sociology of news, a position for journalism studies as a whole. In homage to Schudson’s classic alliterative model of “How Culture Works,” through five magic “R” words (rhetorical force, resolution, retrievability, retention, and resonance), I argue that the letter “C” unites the five reasons why Schudson is reluctant to overemphasize commercialism’s negative effects on journalism. It’s Complicated. There are Countervailing forces outside of the market and even when there are not, the market itself is self-Contradictory. Don’t underestimate the power of Contingency. And if all else fails, blame it on Culture.
This article analyzes a case of media supervision in China. The case shows that in the context of economic and bureaucratic decentralization, central and local governments as well as central and local media have respective interests in what is known as 'public opinion supervision'. The article concludes that the development of public opinion supervision (yuiun jiandu) is a result of strategic alliances among government bodies and the media. However, in a specific media supervision event, every party involved will evaluate their own potential gains and losses as well as their relationship to the other parties concerned and make decisions accordingly. The result of such deliberation between the party-state and the media propels the development of a public sphere in China. The different interests and goals of central and local government and media institutions, and the dynamic restructuring of power and interests in a society undergoing dramatic transformation create significant space for public opinion supervision in contemporary China.
Partial political liberalization presents a double-edged sword for authoritarian regimes: it can increase the risk of democratization and it can also facilitate regime adaptability. This article examines this phenomenon through the prism of the media—an important yet an understudied variable in the study of transition processes. Specifically, the article compares two opposite cases of media opening up: the Soviet policy of glasnost, which facilitated a democratic movement, and China’s reform-era policy of media supervision, or yulun jiandu, which has thus far contributed to regime durability. The paper demonstrates how the two policies, while similar on the surface, differed significantly in their modes of implementation. In particular, the Chinese approach of allowing media to take on an oversight role has featured a more careful strategic calculus as well as more ambiguity combined with continuous, intensive guidance over the media. The article, therefore, highlights the importance of the practices of implementation of media liberalization, in order to explain political outcomes.
Public media's contributions to democracy are well established. Less widely known are the specific policies that make these contributions possible. This study finds that professional autonomy and civic accountability in public media are supported by (1) funding established for multiyear periods; (2) legal charters that restrict partisan government influence while also mandating the provision of diverse, high-quality programming; (3) oversight agencies, whose " arm's length " independence from the government in power is bolstered through staggered terms and the dispersal of authority to make appointments; and (4) audience councils and surveys designed to strengthen links to diverse publics. Public media governed by policies that continue and extend, rather than depart from, these best practices will likely be the most successful in maintaining their civic mission online.
This project examines the practice of taking red-envelope cash in contemporary Chinese journalism, which involves journalists accepting cash wrapped in an envelope that is provided by sources or other social agents. On the basis of focus group interviews, in-depth interviews, and personal communication, this project brings journalists’ perceptions on this practice to the fore. Journalists predominantly attribute the practice to Chinese cultural factors, especially the Chinese emphasis on guanxi. However, this research argues that culture alone is an insufficient explanation. This project incorporates sociological studies of “informal relationships” to enrich our understanding of the practice.
Chinese newspapers are beginning to feel the effects of digital media both on their circulations and advertising revenues. In contrast to the west, where newspaper circulation has been problematic for some years, this represents a new situation since they have enjoyed 25 years during which both circulation and advertising grew very rapidly. The response of Chinese newspapers has some similarities with that experienced in the West, and notably the United States, but it also has major differences. Newspapers elsewhere have responded to the situation primarily as economic units, but in China, the political dimension has had a central role. The article reviews the comparative impact of the crisis and gives an overview of the Chinese response in terms of cost cutting, raising new revenues and changing journalistic practices. Alongside the technological and economic factors, it notes that the Xi leadership has taken a much more interventionist stance on editorial content and that this has further constrained newspapers’ possible responses. It concludes by considering some of the implications of the changed situation and the ways in which newspapers have responded to it.
During President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's administration, the military was called on to confront organized crime, and dozens of journalists were killed in Mexico. Attacks on journalists have continued under the new administration. This study focuses on the erosion of the democratic institution of the press in Mexico's northern states, for the majority of journalists murdered in the last decade worked in that region. Utilizing Shoemaker and Reese's hierarchy of influences model, this study examines pressures constraining the press working in a tide of violence. The thirty-nine semistructured, in-depth interviews with Mexican journalists, who report in five of the northern states, indicate the strongest influences came from outside newsrooms, where intimidation and unthinkable crimes were committed against the press along the entire border. Individual-level influences, such as lack of conflict-reporting training, safety concerns, and handling the trauma of covering violence, were among the strongest pressures often leading to self-censorship. Organizational-level influences, including newsroom policies and financial arrangements with government and business, also influenced journalistic practice. The study added an inter-media level for analyses of news organizations and individual journalists working together to increase safety. Additional findings show major disruptions in border reporting where news "blackouts" exist amid pockets of lawlessness. Keywords violence and the press, hierarchy of influences, conflict reporting, democratic institutions in Mexico, press–state relations 509285H IJ19110.1177/1940161213509285The International Journal of Press/PoliticsRelly and González de Bustamante research-article2013
The Chinese press, instead of acting purely as a state propaganda instrument, now functions as ‘Party Publicity Inc.’ – that is, a quasi-business that seeks to make huge profits on the one hand and to legitimate the Party mandate by promoting its image on the other. The accelerated pace of media conglomeration following China's accession to the World Trade Organization has sharpened this trend. This study examines the impact of press ecology in Shenzhen, a national trend-setter for ‘Party Publicity Inc.’, before and after conglomeration. We observe that press conglomeration has (a) engendered a more centralized management structure and operation; (b) replaced duopolistic competition with market monopoly and greater price-fixing abilities; (c) continued to rely on state office subscription; (d) dampened journalists’ enthusiasm for political reform in favor of economic interest; (e) developed a two-tier Publicity Inc. to serve both the Party and the market; and (f) provided an opportunity for overseas expansion. Marketization does not trigger political reform, but pre-empts pressure for political change. The Party Publicity Inc. in its conglomerate form represents a complicitous accommodation between power and money engineered by a post-Communist bureaucratic-authoritarian regime.
A B S T R A C T ! This article addresses the implications of the movement towards enter- tainment-centred, market-driven media by comparing what is reported and what the public knows in four countries with different media systems. The different systems are public service (Denmark and Finland), a 'dual' model (UK) and the market model (US). The comparison shows that public serv- ice television devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas, than the market model. Public service television also gives greater prominence to news, encourages higher levels of news consumption and contributes to a smaller within- nation knowledge gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. But wider processes in society take precedence over the organization of the media in determining how much people know about public life. !
In seeking to explain why Shanghai, China's economic capital, has a more timid media system than its sibling cities, we examine the political economy of the Shanghai media from the perspective of clientelism in the post-Communist and cultural milieus of what we call “party-market corporatism.” Through field work we analyze four aspects of clientelism, including media conglomeration, elite circulation, resource allocation, and (lack of) media professionalism.We conclude that Shanghai is at once a “big city” and yet a “small place:” a resource-rich city governed by one layer of power authority, hence the distance from the epicenter of power to various media organizations is so short and direct as to make media control through clientelism very effective and powerful. Clientelism represents one of the three major patterns of party-market corporatism in China's media sector.
This article examines certain key features of the political communication system of the de Gaulle presidency (1958–1969). It situates the Gaullist approach within a four-part typology, consisting of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, statism and liberalism, with the Gaullist model presented as a French example of the statist approach. The article argues that the concept of statism has had a lasting influence on political communication in post-Gaullian France. The article also represents a plea in favour of the view that important differences remain between national political communication systems and that a democratic system is freer and more desirable than non-democratic alternatives.
■ This article addresses the implications of the movement towards entertainment-centred, market-driven media by comparing what is reported and what the public knows in four countries with different media systems. The different systems are public service (Denmark and Finland), a `dual' model (UK) and the market model (US). The comparison shows that public service television devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas, than the market model. Public service television also gives greater prominence to news, encourages higher levels of news consumption and contributes to a smaller within-nation knowledge gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. But wider processes in society take precedence over the organization of the media in determining how much people know about public life. ■
While scholars of both Chinese politics and contention have occasionally recognized the power of the media in shaping or suppressing protests, they have largely ignored the possibility that media workers themselves can be contentious actors. Despite a prominent Chinese government media crackdown, contentious action among China's newspaper journalists - including open letters, refusal to cover specific topics and even a strike - has become dramatically more visible. The actions of China's contentious journalists have implications for mainstream social movement theory and illuminate the importance of grievances in spurring contentious action.
New communication technologies have had a major impact on the newspaper press in China. They have lost readers and advertisers and have experienced economic difficulties. These have been more severe for the commercially-oriented newspapers than the official party papers. In response to the loss of advertising they have adopted three strategies. The first is internal reorganization. Editorial and business departments have been merged into sections charged with producing both newspaper content and advertising revenue and which have been set explicit revenue targets. The second has been a heavy stress on non-news gathering activities. These include trading favourable coverage for advertising and using the newspaper to develop other non-news businesses. Thirdly, journalists have been encouraged to adapt to business roles and undertake directly commercial tasks. These have included the sale of advertising space and, more indirectly, the exploitation of their professional contacts as leads for their business colleagues. These strategies have eroded, and sometimes completely removed, the firewall between the journalistic and business goals of the newspapers. Journalists are increasingly subordinated to the needs of revenue raising rather than news reporting.
Who watches over the party-state? In this engaging analysis, Maria Repnikova reveals the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than merely a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. Drawing on rare access in the field, Media Politics in China examines the process of guarded improvisation that has defined this volatile partnership over the past decade on a routine basis and in the aftermath of major crisis events. Combined with a comparative analysis of media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, the book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xiera.
Previous studies on the influence of media convergence in China either took a market- or norm-oriented approach. From a news production perspective, the current study analyses the interaction between the top-down design and bottom-up practices of journalists to disclose the influence of the dominant path of media convergence within the press industry of Fujian Province. A survey and 20 in-depth interviews show that the current media convergence practices of Fujian’s press industry fail to receive the support of journalists because of institutional, organisational and individual complexities, rather than technological reasons. This study discusses the implications of this finding for media convergence in China.
In this book, specialists and scholars present a comprehensive account of the latest developments in Chinese new media. The articles explore important areas such as security of cyberspace in China; the development of WeChat and micro-blogs; public opinions of social media and the transformation of traditional media. It also summarizes the development of the new-media industry, including digital TV, mobile games, the online video industry, IPTV, new-media advertising and mobile news applications. It is a valuable reference work for researchers and professionals working in media.
This article examines how the interplay between political, economic and technological factors in China has resulted in the taming of critical journalism since the rule of Xi Jinping in 2012. While trying to reduce ideological ambiguity and revive Maoist ideology, the authorities operate overt and covert mechanisms of media control that dramatically limit reporting space. Market and digital communication technologies are currently contributing to tightening media control by worsening the context for critical journalism. The threat of the market to critical journalism that began in the early twenty-first century has deepened. The capitalisation of digital platforms, outperforming the empowering potential of digital communication technologies, has led to the pursuit of entertainment and capital in the media environment where critical journalism is practised. A hostile political climate and the pursuit of profit have radically diminished the necessary conditions for sustaining critical journalism. With this institutional crisis, critical journalism has little capacity and foundation to struggle with the party-state over reporting space. In this case, therefore, with neither the market nor digital media technologies being a liberalising force, they have helped the state to wield political power and to consolidate media control.
Introduction 1. Modernisation, Environmental Problems and Chinese Society 2. Twenty-years of Environmental Investigative Reporting: Agendas, Social Interests and Voices 3. The Discourse of Risk: Environmental Problems and Environmentalism in Chinese Press Investigative Reports 4. Environmental Investigative Journalists and their Work 5. Offline Investigative Journalism and Online Environmental Crusades 6. Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony: Investigative Journalism between Modernisation and Environmental Problems Bibliography
The practice of investigative journalism in China burgeoned in the early 1980s in the wake of the economic reforms, and it has been growing rapidly since the mid-1990s. Today, it is one of the most vibrant parts of Chinese media. As a thermometer for press freedom and a crucial site for examining the media‒state relationship in China, investigative journalism has attracted a substantial amount of scholarly attention during the past three decades. This article critically reviews research, published both in mainland China and overseas, on the topic from 1978 to 2013. We first present a quantitative analysis outlining certain basic characteristics of the field of investigative journalism research based on a sample of 112 mainland publications and 14 overseas publications. We then present a qualitative review of existing knowledge about investigative journalism in China. Finally, we highlight some of the newest developments in the phenomenon and discuss several directions for future research.
Ever since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012, the government has tightened social, political, and economic controls in China and placed a renewed emphasis on CCP ideology. To what extent are Xi’s measures a continuance of policies established by his predecessors Jiang Zemin (1989–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–2012)? Do they reflect a new direction for CCP media management? What is the agenda behind these changes and what do they tell us about the CCP’s hold on power? This paper analyzes trends in media control during the Jiang and Hu eras and then examines to what extent Xi’s initiatives are a new direction.
Drawing on fieldwork at the Beijing News, this paper examines how emerging economic pressures facing newspapers, the increasingly draconian political climate under the new leadership, and the development of new media challenge Chinese investigative journalists. In order to remain competitive, the investigative reporting unit of the Beijing News has reshuffled its organization and readjusted its reporting strategy. The paper concentrates on the interplay between political and economic factors in defining the context of Chinese investigative journalism. It argues that studies of Chinese journalism should not only consider the enduring political control that trammels journalistic practice, but also pay attention to the impact of other factors, notably technological developments and economic pressures.
Despite operating in one of the most tightly controlled media environments in the world, Chinese journalists sometimes take extraordinary risks, braving the perils of job loss or imprisonment to report sensitive stories. As a result, a group of journalists stands at the forefront of some of China's most dramatic social and political changes. This book is the first to systematically explore why some Chinese journalists decide to challenge Communist Party power holders and the censorship system. Based on 18 months of fieldwork, interviews with over 70 Chinese journalists and academics and analysis of nearly 20,000 Chinese newspaper articles, it investigates the motivation behind news workers who often brave the perils of challenging an authoritarian system. Rather than being driven by commercial pressures or financial inducements, the book suggests that many aggressive journalists push the limits of acceptable coverage because of their sense of public spirit and their professional role orientation. It argues that ultimately, these advocate journalists matter because they challenge specific policies and are changing China, one article at a time. By investigating these path-breaking journalists, the book engages with literature across the social sciences on contentious politics and social movements, political communication, media theory and the sociology of professions. Therefore, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Politics and Media Studies.
This article reviews the findings of current literature on Chinese media. The central issue in this literature concerns the impact of the commercialization of Chinese media. This commercialization began in the early 1980s and accelerated after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 "Southern Tour." Commercialization has stimulated some degree of diversification, the introduction of new media technologies, and some measure of globalization. While preliminary assessments indicated that each of these changes would challenge the Party's control of the media, recent literature finds that the Party has managed to find relatively successful means of limiting or managing the impact of each of these trends. Despite this success in managing commercial media, however, the relationship between the Party, citizens, and information is changing in ways that have fundamental implications for Chinese politics. The Party's authority is increasingly indirect and diffuse. At least some citizens are gaining increasing access to information.
Against the background of media and social transformation, this study examines Chinese press journalists' ethical orientation and tolerance for ethically controversial practices. The former captures journalists' theoretical conception of ethics along a consequentialist versus absolutist spectrum; the latter speaks to journalists' ethical judgment in relation to concrete practices. Analysis of a survey of press journalists (N = 2,109) found that a substantial minority of the respondents were subscribing to ethical relativism. Different types of controversial reporting practices were tolerated to different extents. Multivariate analysis shows that those working in online newsrooms, those who perceived substantial commercial influences on news work, and those who valued the advocacy role of the press exhibited a stronger relativistic orientation, whereas respondents who valued the information dissemination role of the press exhibited a stronger absolutist orientation. But there are mixed findings regarding the impact of other predictors, which hint at the complexities of the evolution of journalism ethics in China.
This article argues that the concept of national media systems, and the comparative study of media systems, institutions, and practices, retains relevance in an era of media globalization and technological convergence. It considers various critiques of ‘media systems’ theories, such as those which view the concept of ‘system’ as a legacy of an outdated positivism and those which argue that the media globalization is weakening the relevance of nation-states in structuring the field of media cultures and practices. It argues for the continuing centrality of nation-states to media processes, and the ongoing significance of the national space in an age of media globalization, with reference to case studies of Internet policies in China, Brazil, and Australia. These studies indicate that nation-states remain critical actors in media governance and that domestic actors largely shape the central dynamics of media policies, even where media technologies and platforms enable global flows of media content.
This article analyzes recent research on the newspaper crisis. It discusses how authors have examined the sources, manifestations, and implications of this crisis, and the proposals to resolve it. In addition, the essay critically examines this body of work by assessing the main spatial and temporal contexts that researchers have studied, the theories and methods that authors employ, and the analytical tropes they have deployed to make sense of the crisis. Building on this assessment of existing research, the article outlines an agenda for future work that fosters an analysis of the process, history, comparative development, and manifold implications of this crisis, and advances various empirical strategies to examine some of its most under-theorized dimensions.
Based on the perspective of political economy, this work traces the history of the gacetilla, advertising disguised as news, also known as `reading notice', a key feature in the finances of contemporary Mexican print news media. The work contends that gacetillas have been the key ingredient in a system of governmental press subsidy, essential in explaining the way in which the Mexican press has served as a propaganda tool for both the Mexican government and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) throughout most of the 20th century. The work also characterizes how the gacetilla system works and how it affects press content and journalistic routines. Finally, the work speculates about the current transition in the political economy of the Mexican press and the implication of this process for future media studies.
This article discusses the transformation of the media system in three countries moving away from the classical “communist” model: Poland, Russia and China. Despite very significant differences, all three of these societies displayed similar starting points in terms of economics, politics and media. The dominant political science tradition has discussed post‐communism as part of a more general theory of “transitology”, seeing the processes involved in these cases as examples of a world‐wide transition from dictatorial regimes towards western‐style democracy. An alternative is to see the shift away from communism as an example of “elite continuity”, in which the former bureaucratic ruling class attempts to restructure itself as the owners of private capital. The article tests the two theoretical views in these three cases. It is demonstrated that transitology gives very little insight into the prevailing situations, and that the theory of elite continuity accounts much better for major features of the media systems.
This paper uses Beijing Youth Daily, the second biggest local newspaper in Beijing, as a case study to examine Chinese news people's perceptions of their professional roles and unethical practices. The author argues that Chinese journalistic professionalism has developed. Journalists see their most fundamental role as that of disseminator. Their concepts of professional roles and virtues are surprisingly similar to those held by journalists in liberal democratic countries. However, Chinese journalists' partial representation of the party/state and their tolerance towards unethical practices such as paid journalism or “red envelopes” suggest they are more likely to be under pressures from both politics and commerce.
This research paper examines the emergence of an advertising revenue gap between party and mass‐appeal newspapers in China, and analyses its political and economic antecedents. It finds that traditionally dominant communist party newspapers are falling increasingly far behind their mass‐appeal counterparts in advertising dollars. The revenue gap formed is common across different regions, consistent in timing, and invariant in scale. Based on longitudinal data, the analysis shows that a suitable explanation for the observed revenue polarization lies in the combined impact from advertising market maturity, shifts in government policy, and the changing media system and operating environment.
This paper examines the trajectory of Chinese Communist party-controlled press commercialization in China and discusses the active role of the Chinese state in incorporating market-based press forms and practices into the existing press structure. Although market-oriented press developments in the past 2 decades have created a dynamic mass appeal sector catering to the urban middle class, it has also inadvertently led to a fragmented and decentralized press structure that undermined core party organs and their capital accumulation. Consequently, the party engineered a market rationalization campaign and pushed for press conglomeration. Both are aimed at enhancing political control on the one hand and facilitating press capitalization on the other. These developments are not only counter-intuitive to laissez-faire notions of free markets versus state control, but also have profound implications for emerging class and power relations in China.
That market forces drive the news is not news. Whether a story appears in print, on television, or on the Internet depends on who is interested, its value to advertisers, the costs of assembling the details, and competitors' products. But in All the News That's Fit to Sell, economist James Hamilton shows just how this happens. Furthermore, many complaints about journalism--media bias, soft news, and pundits as celebrities--arise from the impact of this economic logic on news judgments. This is the first book to develop an economic theory of news, analyze evidence across a wide range of media markets on how incentives affect news content, and offer policy conclusions. Media bias, for instance, was long a staple of the news. Hamilton's analysis of newspapers from 1870 to 1900 reveals how nonpartisan reporting became the norm. A hundred years later, some partisan elements reemerged as, for example, evening news broadcasts tried to retain young female viewers with stories aimed at their (Democratic) political interests. Examination of story selection on the network evening news programs from 1969 to 1998 shows how cable competition, deregulation, and ownership changes encouraged a shift from hard news about politics toward more soft news about entertainers. Hamilton concludes by calling for lower costs of access to government information, a greater role for nonprofits in funding journalism, the development of norms that stress hard news reporting, and the defining of digital and Internet property rights to encourage the flow of news. Ultimately, this book shows that by more fully understanding the economics behind the news, we will be better positioned to ensure that the news serves the public good.
The Political Economy of Communication provides a thorough coverage of an important area of communication studies: the political economy approach to media. This highly successful text has been thoroughly updated, restructured and rewritten in this new edition, clearly demonstrating how power operates across all media, from newspapers to Facebook, and how media power intersects with globalization, social class, race, gender and surveillance. Key Features; Provides a summary of the field of political economy, looking at its history and major schools of thought; Highlights the work of key figures and differences that established the divide between economics and political economy; Explains the necessity of media students to understand the general political economy tradition and the way in which it informs the political economy of communication; Addresses the interdisciplinary nature of the field, with its links to economics, geography and sociology, and cultural and policy studies This book offers a unique overview of the field of political economy of communication and will be of use to upper level undergraduate and graduate students of media and communication.
The taming of critical journalism in China
- Tong
Silencing Mexico: A study of influences on journalists in the northern states
- Reilly
The rise and fall of investigative journalism in China
- Svensson
- Brady