Journalism via Systems Cybernetics: The Birth of the Chinese Communication Discipline and Post-Mao Press Reforms

Abstract

In China's reform era (1979-), to revitalize the newspaper for economic modernization, journalism scholars turned to American mass communication study after Wilbur Schramm's visit in 1982. This familiar story of the birth of the Chinese communication discipline missed a critical thread. Faced with constant political contractions, systems cybernetics crept in: the supposed founder of communication Wilbur Schramm spoke in Claude Shannon's name; China's "King of Rocketry" Qian Xuesen pledged to augment Norbert Wiener; and Engels's writing on dialectical materialism was seized upon as part of official Marxism. 1980s China is known for the revival of humanism. However, in the tightly controlled news sector, reformist scholars conjoined systems cybernetics and Engels's Marxist philosophy, dismantling the human subject in the process. This articulation of the epistemology and ethic of newsmaking, which has persisted to this day in the disciplinary assumptions of Chinese journalism-communication, allowed the regime to depart from Maoism and legitimate a state-managed marketization. Excavating an unknown episode in the global history of cybernetics, this revisionist study sheds new light on the post-Mao trajectories of journalism and media governance. It also dislodges the ossified binaries between science and political ideology, between socialist centralism and capitalist liberalism, which are prevalent in (post-)Cold War narratives.

Full text

This is a preprint of a forthcoming article, please cite as
Wu, A. X. (2022). Journalism via systems cybernetics: The birth of Chinese communication
discipline and post-Mao press reforms. History of Media Studies.
Journalism via Systems Cybernetics:
The Birth of the Chinese Communication Discipline and Post-Mao Press Reforms
Angela Xiao Wu
New York University
In China’s reform era (1979-), to revitalize the newspaper for economic modernization, journalism scholars
turned to American mass communication study after Wilbur Schramm’s visit in 1982. This familiar story of
the birth of the Chinese communication discipline missed a critical thread. Faced with constant political
contractions, systems cybernetics crept in: the supposed founder of communication Wilbur Schramm spoke
in Claude Shannon’s name; China’s “King of Rocketry” Qian Xuesen pledged to augment Norbert Wiener;
and Engels’s writing on dialectical materialism was seized upon as part of official Marxism. 1980s China is
known for the revival of humanism. However, in the tightly controlled news sector, reformist scholars
conjoined systems cybernetics and Engels’s Marxist philosophy, dismantling the human subject in the
process. This articulation of the epistemology and ethic of newsmaking, which has persisted to this day in
the disciplinary assumptions of Chinese journalism-communication, allowed the regime to depart from
Maoism and legitimate a state-managed marketization. Excavating an unknown episode in the global history
of cybernetics, this revisionist study sheds new light on the post-Mao trajectories of journalism and media
governance. It also dislodges the ossified binaries between science and political ideology, between socialist
centralism and capitalist liberalism, which are prevalent in (post-)Cold War narratives.
Acknowledgments
At various stages, this paper benefited from the insights from Lily Chumley, Timothy Cheek, Finn Brunton,
Sigrid Schmalzer, Joseph Man Chan, Julie Yujie Chen, Fred Turner, He Bian, Yige Dong, and Elizabeth
Lenaghan. I am also grateful to audiences at the conferences “Post(?)socialist Horizons,” “Exclusions in the
History and Historiography of Communication Studies,” and the SHOT/HSS panel "Systems Thinking in
Cold War East Asia and Beyond," especially Alexei Yurchak, Masha Salazkina, David Park, Jefferson
Pooley, Peter Simonson, and Egle Rindzeviciute for their comments. Thanks also goes to the anonymous
reviewers and editors of History of Media Studies. This research was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation
and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the American
Association of University Women.

2
In the warm spring of 1982, as universities scrambled to reinvigorate themselves from the ruins of
the Cultural Revolution, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) welcomed the American scholar-educator-
administrator Wilbur Schramm (1907-1987). In the 1980s, the press, journalism scholarship, and
government propaganda units, which later functioned more discretely, were still intimately entwined.
Overlapping groups of academic researchers, news workers, and cultural cadres comprised the media
sectors’ “establishment intellectuals.”
1
To reinvent journalism and revitalize the newspaper, these media
thinkers turned to Western communication study, more precisely the American mass communication
tradition represented by Schramm. Today, this turn is the familiar story of the disciplinary formation of
Chinese communication study or chuanbo xue.
2
While textbooks portray this formation as a moment of
intense intellectual enlightenment, critical voices at the margin, mostly from scholars outside of China,
consider it an unfortunate adoption of the positivist scholarship of liberal capitalism propelled by the
resolution to negate socialist legacies.
3
It is not an either-or story.
This article illuminates a key component that is missing from existing accounts: during sporadic
political contractions, systems cybernetics crept in: the supposed founder of American communication
Wilbur Schramm spoke in Claude Shannon’s name; China’s “King of Rocketry” Qian Xuesen pledged to
augment Norbert Wiener; and the good old Engels’s writing on dialectical materialism was seized upon as
1
Hamrin and Cheek, China’s Establishment Intellectuals.
2
To prevent confusion, the discipline of communication focuses on humans not machines (e.g., “telecommunications”).
The Chinese term for the then-newly imported concept of “communication” is chuanbo, a translation that evokes
certain meanings while displacing others. Chuan means “transmission” and bo “to propagate far and wide.” Chuanbo’s
closest English equivalent is perhaps “dissemination.” While the English word “communication” connotes exchange
between actors not necessarily different in power, chuanbo centers on the ability to distribute to a wider audience,
assuming a powerful disseminator. Chuanbo thus conveys a narrow focus on the operations of broadcast media or
“mass communication,” a distinct though dominant subarea of communication study. Peters, “Institutional Sources of
Intellectual Poverty in Communication Research”;
This terminological equivalence effectively steered the Chinese field away from other communication phenomena. After
all, unlike “anthropology” or “sociology,” “communication” designates the discipline’s intellectual focus. Also notably,
chuanbo suggests a proximity to xuanchuan, the signature phrase for doing socialist cultural work that is typically
translated as “propaganda.” However, Chinese xuanchuan is really a broad, non-pejorative concept that refers to
authoritative entities making something known to and resonant with the people. In the socialist context, “propagation”
is a closer phrase: to promote what one believes to be true, with a centuries-long tradition wherein scholar-officials
“propagated” the dynasty’s moral line in the orthodox language of the day. Cheek, Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s
China: Deng Tuo and the Intelligentsia.
3
E.g., Lin and Nerone, “The ‘Great Uncle of Dissemination’: Wilbur Schramm and Communication Study in China”; Hu, Ji,
and Zhang, “Building the Nation-State: Journalism and Communication Studies in China”; Zhao, “批判研究与实证研究
的对比分析 [Comparing Critical and Empirical Approaches]”; Liu, “‘传播学’引进中的‘失踪者’：从 1978 年—1989 年批判
学派的引介看中国早期的传播学观念 [The ‘Missing Persons’ in the Import of Communication].”

3
part of official Marxism. In the (often overlooked) absence of a countervailing social science tradition, I
demonstrate, the post-Mao discipline of journalism-communication has been profoundly shaped by systems
cybernetics. By “systems cybernetics” I mean a highly infectious mixture of ideas from cybernetic and
information theories that was, crucially, accompanied by gusto for system-level visions.
This revisionist history of the Chinese communication discipline adds an important but unknown
case to the global history of cybernetics and systems theory. For its interdisciplinary propositions, this set of
knowledge acquired extraordinary political flexibility and appeal in the hands of historical actors. It fostered
cross-pollination between knowledge fields in postwar US,
4
transcended the Cold War’s divide as a
“neutral” toolbox,
5
and helped inoculate Soviet sciences from ideological attacks.
6
In China’s “post-Mao
military-to-civilian conversation,” systems cybernetics also informed the one-child policy.
7
Complementing
this extensive literature, I delineate the Chinese import of cybernetics through a kind of artful “rediscovery”
of Friedrich Engels, exemplified in Qian Xuesen’s writings. This history brings to the fore the resonance
and overlapping genealogies between systems cybernetics and dialectical materialism,
8
which have been
written off in the history of science and technology because the Cold War lens views Marxist philosophy as
“ideology” and “unscientific.”
9
With it, I highlight the structural and discursive conditions conducive for
contemporary Chinese social governance to incorporate systems cybernetics, a broader historical process in
need of collective research efforts.
This is also a sociohistorical study of how the moral and political commitments of journalism, a
normative interpretive institution, found their articulations in languages of science and technology. What
unfolded as China transitioned to postsocialism, however, bears little resemblance to the historical
discovery of objectivity in American journalism.
10
In the Mao-era, it was understood that, despite its claim
4
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision”; Heyck, Age of System: Understanding
the Development of Modern Social Science; Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information
Age.
5
Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile; Rindzeviciute, The Power of Systems: How
Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World; Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet
Internet.
6
Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics.
7
Greenhalgh, “Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy,” 253.
8
Levins, “Dialectics and Systems Theory.”
9
Yurchak, “Communist Proteins: Lenin’s Skin, Astrobiology, and the Origin of Life”; also see Taylor, “Dialectics of Nature
or Dialectics of Practice?”
10
Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers.

4
to represent reality objectively, the capitalist nature of the Western press inevitably led to thoughtless
reproduction of fragmented appearances, which was at best “superficial truth” (biaoxiang zhenshi). The
Chinese socialist press, in contrast, was aimed at assisting class struggle by delivering “substantial truth”
(benzhi zhenshi), which exposed the fundamental state and relationships of society according to official
Marxist insights (i.e., “the inherent logic of reality”). After Mao, Chinese journalism theory appropriated
systems cybernetic ideas, but this appropriation never led to pronouncing any form of “scientific objectivity”
in reporting. Rather, it held onto the cybernetic notion of ontology and, contingent on that, control.
11
The
rise of these normative conceptions about news media in the 1980s has been lost to the extant
historiography on Chinese media reforms, which centers on media marketization and advocacy for liberal
professionalism in the 1990s.
Indeed, this history troubles not only the binary of science and political ideology, but also the
binary of socialist centralism and capitalist liberalism that characterizes many postsocialist narratives.
Known as China’s “New Enlightenment,” the 1980s is defined by a “humanism fever”—beginning with
Marxist humanism and taken over by liberal humanism.
12
Even science’s wide appeal in the 80s has been
examined for breeding humanist values amenable to democratic politics. Many scientists, such as Fang Lizhi,
became liberal dissidents and spearheaded the 1989 pro-democratic movement.
13
In the meantime, critics
on the left see the roots for China’s neoliberalism: “the abstract concept of human subjectivity and the
concept of human freedom and liberation, which played significant roles in the critique of Mao’s socialist
experiment, lack vigor in the face of the social crises encountered in the process of capitalist marketization
and modernization.”
14
What happened to the news sector, which the Party placed under its most intense,
unwavering scrutiny, deviates from this understanding. To battle Mao-era constrictions, reformist scholars
wound up conjoining systems cybernetics and Engels’s Marxist philosophy, dismantling rather than reviving
the human subject in the process. This articulation of newsmaking’s epistemological and ethical grounds
allowed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to depart from Maoism and legitimate a state-managed
marketization, with a far-reaching legacy.
11
See Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision”; Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain:
Sketches of Another Future; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and
the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
12
Davies, “Discursive Heat: Humanism In 1980S China.”
13
Miller, Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge.
14
Wang, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, 167; also see Rofel, Desiring China : Experiments
in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture; Shih, “Is the Post in Postsocialism the Post in Posthumanism?”

5
Knowledge Upgrade for Party Journalism: Communication without Baggage
From late April to early May of 1982, Wilbur Schramm visited the PRC in the company of his wife
and Timothy Yu (1920-2012), translator and enabler of the “icebreaking” trip. Yu was Schramm’s former
student at Stanford and then-retired chair of Department of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong.
15
In Beijing, thanks to a request put through by the Chinese Academy of Social
Science (CASS), Schramm met Bo Yibo, Vice Premier in charge of science, technology, and finance.
16
Having led multiple UNESCO endeavors in Asia and the Middle East, Schramm’s emphasis on
communication for “development” understandably appealed to the CCP leaders.
17
In the uncertain early-
reform period, the Vice Premier’s explicit support made Schramm’s sermon for communication all the
more phenomenal. Schramm delivered a speech to hundreds of scholars and propaganda cadres that packed
the top-floor auditorium of the People’s Daily’s main building, then located on Wangfujing Street, a central
area of Beijing studded with aristocratic residences from the Qing Dynasty. He also spoke at Renmin
University and CASS.
Schramm certainly knew how to strike a chord with his audience, which mostly consisted of
scholar-educators who were experienced news workers in the Mao-era and the first cohorts of graduate
students back to school, eager to learn and innovate. Before diving into his topic, he typically began by
proudly retracing his past life as a reporter and an editor: “The blood of journalism flows in my veins. In
other words, I am a newsman upside-down and inside-out.”
18
Schramm then characterized journalism
studies, supposedly concerned with one variety of human communication, as a subarea and “precursor” of
communication study.
19
He demonstrated this through an opportunistic telling of its American history:
“American journalism departments turned to communication, integrated it into their journalism education,
15
Much has been written on this historic visit and the role of colonial Hong Kong as the nodal point mediating the import
of communication scholarship. Yu et al., “中国传播学研究破冰之旅的回顾：余也鲁教授访问记 [Chinese
Communication Study’s Icebreaking Trip in Retrospect]”; Lin and Nerone, “The ‘Great Uncle of Dissemination’: Wilbur
Schramm and Communication Study in China.”
16
Xiaoling 晓凌, “他们精心治学 [They Devote to Scholarships].”
17
A rarely noted detail was that, as a conservative veteran, Bo’s unusual interest in the subject had been cultivated by his
son, Bo Xilai, who happened to be among the first cohort of graduates studying at the CASS Journalism Institute,
launched in 1979. See Wang and Hu,
中国传播学
30
年
[Chinese Communication: 30 Years], 613, 632. Three decades
later, this princeling son, mayor of Chongqing Municipality and a CCP Politburo member, was sensationally purged by
Xi’s administration.
18
Schramm, “美国"大众传播学"的四个奠基人 [Four Forefathers of American Mass Communication],” 2.
19
Zhou, “西方传播学的产生及其与新闻学的关系 [Western Communication’s Origin and Relations with Journalism
Study]”; Chen, “施拉姆的理论对我的指引 [How Schramm’s Theory Guided Me].”

6
and established communication research centers.”
20
This was a far cry from his own past and future English writings. Schramm had always been explicit
that it was the lavish resources from governments, commerce, and the military that drove the social
sciences to splinter and form a separate foundation for communication as a discipline.
21
As “skills
departments,” journalism coalesced with communication to increase their academic status.
22
Many practice-
oriented faculty, however, continued to view their research-focused colleagues as irrelevant for producing
good journalism—a perennial tension once popularly referred to as the “green eyeshades vs. chi-squares”
division in journalism departments.
23
Chi-squares failed to see much merit in letting green eyeshades play
their games either: “The fact that a single individual can teach courses in, say, magazine editing and research
techniques in social psychology [a dominant approach of mass communication] is a tribute to human
adaptability, not to a well-conceived academic discipline.”
24
This jab was literally pages away from
Schramm’s own historical narrative in Journal of Communication, both drafted within months of the latter’s
China visit. In short, at American universities it was institutional politics that coupled journalism and mass
communication, and their internal division persists. For the Chinese ears, however, Schramm changed this
organizational story to one about meant-to-be intellectual development. The Chinese inquired keenly about
whether turning to communication might hinder journalism studies. “There is neither conflict nor tension
between the two,” assured Schramm, “but only mutual enhancement. [...] Communication is journalism’s
flesh and blood.”
25
In fact, mass communication was indeed a godsend. In the early 1980s, the main hurdle faced by
reform-minded journalism scholars was the incommensurability between “Marxist proletarian (or socialist)
theory of the press” and its “bourgeois” counterpart. The two were considered incommensurable because
the Maoist epistemology maintained that norms of the press, or the press theory of a society, were
20
Xu, “施拉姆对中国传播学研究的影响：纪念施拉姆来新闻研究所座谈 30 周年 [Schramm’s Impacts on Chinese
Communication Research],” 10.
21
Schramm, “The Unique Perspective of Communication: A Retrospective View,” 7; also see Peters, “Institutional Sources
of Intellectual Poverty in Communication Research.”
22
Schramm, “Human Communication as a Field of Behavioral Science”; also see Tankard, “The Theorists”; Carey, “Some
Personal Notes on US Journalism Education.”
23
The green eyeshade is the headgear that used to be worn by copy editors to cut the glare from the overhead lights.
The chi-square comes from a statistical test. Highton, “‘Green Eyeshade’ Profs Still Live Uncomfortably with ‘Chi-
Squares’; Convention Reaffirms Things Haven’t Changed Much.”
24
Tunstall, “The Trouble with U.S. Communication Research,” 93.
25
Schramm, “美国"大众传播学"的四个奠基人 [Four Forefathers of American Mass Communication],” 2.

7
determined by the given political economy. Therefore, to appropriate any journalistic norms from the
“Western bourgeois society” invited ideological attacks. But thanks to its decontextualized abstraction, the
Schrammian strand of mass communication provided a fresh start. Its circumscribed diagrams of the
dissemination process invariably trace symbolic content from point A to point B. Whereas critical scholars
across the Pacific increasingly recognized and critiqued this oblivion to fundamental questions about the
relationship between media and broader structures of power,
26
early-reform China found it particularly
palatable.
What was remarkable about this affinity, if we can call it that, was that it resulted from American
communication’s own disciplinary formation during the Cold War. It was military and corporate patronage
that spawned its growth, directing the discipline’s latent assumptions about when and where the effects of
mass media shall be investigated. Meanwhile, communication scholarship persistently veils the capitalist and
imperialist constitution of media operations, a kind of “ideological work” performed in service of power.
27
In a sense, the relationship between American communication and China was epitomized by Schramm’s
own life. During World War II and the early years of the Cold War, he was deeply involved in US security
establishments. He co-wrote Four Theories of the Press (1956) which offered a typology of ideas that
supposedly encapsulate both government and the press of a given society. It classified the Chinese press as a
follower of the “Soviet communist theory,” described as an expanded version of the “Authoritarian theory”
originating in feudal Europe.
28
In the late 1960s and 1970s, as he moved to the “development paradigm” of
communication, Schramm became intrigued by China’s economic growth and relied on his Taiwanese and
Hong Kong students for material.
29
During his time at CASS in 1982, the Chinese brought up his Four
Theories book. Did his classification change? As Timothy Yu recalls, “To this Schramm responded
humorously, ‘it’s been decades and I almost forgot about this book. If I write it today, I wouldn’t say China
is authoritarian. I’d think of another phrase. I’ll tell you once I have it.’”
30
26
A string of such reflexive essays appeared in “Ferment in the Field,” the 1983 landmark issue of the flagship Journal of
Communication.
27
Peters, “Institutional Sources of Intellectual Poverty in Communication Research”; Rajagopal, “Communicationism: Cold
War Humanism.”
28
Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm, Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and
Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do.
29
Schramm, Chu, and Yu, “China’s Experience with Development Communication: How Transferable Is That?”; also see
Lin and Nerone, “The ‘Great Uncle of Dissemination’: Wilbur Schramm and Communication Study in China.”
30
Yu et al., “中国传播学研究破冰之旅的回顾：余也鲁教授访问记 [Chinese Communication Study’s Icebreaking Trip in
Retrospect],” 7.

8
However, by opening itself up to communication in the 1980s, Chinese journalism studies did not
embark on behaviorist empirical research on journalism phenomena because no such research paradigm was
available. Early American communication PhDs typically did coursework in sociology, political science, and
psychology departments, where social scientific methods were inculcated. These empirical scholars then
assumed leadership roles in flourishing communication departments.
31
But Schramm himself had little
experience in frontier research. His yearning, instead, was the intellectual integration of communication as
a field.
32
His preaching of communication study by and large glossed over the nitty-gritty of research design
and execution. This omission of methodological issues went unnoticed in China due to the impoverished
state of its social sciences.
33
The “chi-square” had been missing in the picture for decades; the Chinese
socialist “green eyeshades” could not educate themselves about it even if they wanted to.
34
As a result, it was Maoist press theoreticians and China’s most ideologically entrenched literary
workers who took over “communication” as a resource for their own project: to envision and justify media’s
imminent reforms. The chief challenge in this appropriation has to do with values. Journalism is a socially
grounded institution reputed for its normative aspirations, whereas mass communication as a behaviorist
research program “presupposes the victory … of means without ends.”
35
This means Chinese reformists had
to search amidst whatever they took as communication for normative “ends” to supplant existing journalism
ideals. This search was eventually completed on engineering terms, a turn seeded in Schramm’s visit.
Information and Feedback: Phasing out the People
To assert his vision of an all-encompassing communication study, Schramm presented an eclectic
mix of concepts and ideas, among which were information theory and cybernetics. Absent sufficient
31
Rogers, History of Communication Study, chap. 12.
32
Even in the eyes of his most ardent colleagues and proteges, Schramm’s contribution to communication study was
more organizational than intellectual. Rogers, History of Communication Study; McAnany, “Wilbur Schramm, 1907-1987:
Roots of the Past, Seeds of the Present.”
33
Since the 1950s, the Mao regime had denounced Western social sciences such as sociology as well as probabilistic
statistics as distorting social reality for capitalist domination. Liu, The Mirage of China: Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and
Corporeality of the Contemporary World; Ghosh, Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic
of China.
34
Little wonder that Chinese communication considers its breakthrough in the “quantitative research tradition” a study
that conjured up a mathematical formula for determining news values, without even trying it out on actual news. Chen
and Wang, “我国新闻传播学量化研究的艰难起点”; In parallel, commentary and philosophical critique had long been
seen as “qualitative research.” Li, “新闻传播学研究方法的构造 [Research Methods of Journalism-Communication].”
35
Allen Tate, quoted in Carey, “Some Personal Notes on US Journalism Education,” 21. Communication majors usually join
marketing, public relations, and audience analytics firms. Whereas Carey calls out the “economic” end of American
communication, early-reform Chinese journalism education must look elsewhere.

9
context, the Chinese were left with an impression that communication study had its foundations in these
areas. One and half years after his departure, in the winter of 1983, triggered by a broader intellectual
advocacy for Marxist humanism, the CCP’s conservative fraction struck to curb the rapid spread of
Western-inspired liberal ideas. Communication study was attacked for “negating class struggle” and being
particularly dangerous as a potential replacement of Chinese socialist press theory. This “Anti-spiritual
Pollution Campaign” was short-lived but admonitory for sensitive domains such as journalism. Thought
experiments in journalist periodicals started segueing along this impressionist link to systems cybernetics,
blowing it out of proportion. Specifically, the narrow technical definitions of information and feedback
were mobilized to define “news value” as leveraging journalism from propaganda, a feat indispensable for
media reforms. This constitutes a significant divergence from its American counterpart.
At CASS, Schramm declaimed that “two physicists” Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver
established information theory in order to “study the feedback phenomenon in the communication of human
society”: “Through their hands, information theory has migrated from natural sciences to social sciences.
Their goal is to scientifically measure the circulation of information among people.”
36
This, however, could
only be a knowing mischaracterization. Schramm edited the composite book The Mathematical Theory of
Communication (1949) at the University of Illinois Press, which contains a reprint of Shannon’s 1948 Bell
Labs paper, preceded by Weaver’s attempt to narrate the former’s intimidating mathematics in lay terms.
37
Notably, whereas Shannon insisted on limiting the application of information theory to technical
communication because the theory excludes the “semiotic aspects,” Weaver optimistically called to expand
its reach to human communication.
38
But actual attempts to conceptualize human communication with
information theory began with Schramm,
39
extended in a few studies mostly by his students.
40
The Shannon model of technical communication illustrates the transmission of a message from the
source to the destination, which entails changing the message into the signal and converting it back upon
reception. Admittedly, this model resembles the vision of dissemination in mass communication that
features elements such as source, channel, message, and receiver. But Shannon’s mathematical theory
36
Schramm, “传学与新闻及其它 [Communication Study and Journalism, and Other Issues],” 20.
37
Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
38
Rogers and Valente, “A History of Information Theory in Communication Research”; Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or
Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, 126.
39
Schramm, “Information Theory and Mass Communication.”
40
Rogers, History of Communication Study, 434, 440.

10
focuses on the channel capacity of technical systems such as the telephone system. It is also for this purpose
that Shannon defines information as something that reduces uncertainty for mechanical functions (measured
by its ability to eliminate alternate options). American mass communication scholarship, by contrast, is
predominated by its focus on the effects of communication, typically indicated by the audience’s opinion or
behavioral change. This is not surprising, given that much of the field grew not to (re)structure media
systems (which characterizes Chinese media reforms as I will explain in greater detail below), but to aid
administrative tasks faced by media organizations, government agencies, and corporations.
Feedback is a key term in cybernetic theory developed by Norbert Wiener during wartime to
improve anti-aircraft fire. To control a system through a feedback mechanism means the system’s future
conduct is constantly adjusted based on information of its past performance, so that the system continues to
approximate its goal. “Feedback” was made popular as a construct in mass communication through the
widely used textbook The Process of Communication (1960) by David Berlo, one of the earliest communication
doctorates under Schramm’s supervision.
41
Berlo modified Shannon’s original model by inserting “feedback”
(while also omitting “noise”). Schramm further replicated this hybrid model in his own teaching and
monographs as the “Shannon model of communication” (Fig. 1). This tinkering was, again, led by
communication’s preoccupation with effects; having “feedback” in a dissemination model represented a
progress from the one-way notion of mass communication to account for media producers’ consideration of
audience reactions when producing new content. But in reality, such consideration is neither inevitable nor
predetermined.
Figure 1. The “Shannon model” with “feedback” but no “noise” in 传播学概论 [Introduction to Communication] (1984),
242, the Chinese translation of Schramm’s co-authored volume Man, Women, Messages, and Media (1982).
Simply put, besides the ubiquity of colloquial usage of these terms in communication scholarship
41
Berlo, The Process of Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Practice.

11
(and everyday life), the field of communication developed largely independently from information
science,
42
and more from cybernetics still.
43
But the original engineering conceptions about information and
feedback—such as optimizing channel capacity and utilizing signal transmission intrinsic to the system—
quickly captured Chinese journalism scholarship.
After several years of striving, the debate over (socialist) “substantial truth” versus (capitalist)
“superficial truth” proved intellectually unproductive and politically precarious.
44
Journalism scholars
concurred that issues about “truth” should be left to propaganda/propagation work, which was tasked with
spreading the right thought. But what set journalism and propaganda apart? Or were they indeed different?
Scholars used the Cultural Revolution to illustrate what happens when the two are treated as the same.
Newspapers were filled with long, plodding polemical essays full of stock phrases, lengthy coverage of the
party’s guiding principles, government achievements, and the heroic deeds of exemplary individuals. Being
“timely” meant letting political consideration determine the “right” moment of publicization. Even the
above content easily took months to get in print. As the reform-era derision went, the press ended up
supplying nothing but “political ravings”, losing touch with both the goings-on of the world and with the
masses. This, theorized the reformers, was journalism abiding by “political value” alone. While both
propagation and journalism should operate according to political value, what defined journalism was “news
value” (xinwen jiazhi or xinwenxing).
But describing worthy news as immediate, crisp, and fresh sounded too much like a submission to
capitalist journalistic norms. A less vulnerable reform proposition, news value was spelled out in terms of
“information” both in Wiener’s and in Shannon’s senses. On one hand, according to Wiener, information as
feedback of the cybernetic system is a signal automatically issued upon the system’s recent performance; it
is hence treated as epiphenomenal of the motion of things. To consider news as information so defined thus
asserts that news can and should be non-ideological, and that words can be transparent in delivering world
happenings. On the other hand, following Shannon’s definition, information as calculable symbols negates
the amount of uncertainty in a choice situation and, given limited channel capacity, it is important to
increase information content in a given amount of symbols. Chinese scholars came up with various
42
Only toward the end of the 1980s did some boundary-crossing star to appear. Ruben, Between Communication and
Information. No evidence shows that Chinese scholars ever picked up this limited convergence in Anglophone
academia.
43
Rogers, History of Communication Study, chap. 10.
44
Exchanges in a high-profile symposium on journalistic truth appeared in
新闻学刊
(Journalism), no. 2 (1985), after
which the attempts to reconceptualize journalistic truths were largely aborted.

12
mathematical formulas to determine “news information content.”
45
These collective efforts, though
crammed with jargon and technicalities, were meant to drive slogans and bureaucratic trivialities out of
newspaper pages. The new consensus dictated: “The most essential function of news is to bring the latest
occurrences (shishi) to people in order to reduce their uncertainty about objective reality.”
46
Articulating news value through the notion of information, which had never appeared in the
vocabulary of China’s socialist cultural work, marked a watershed.
47
While the aspiration for substantial
truth hails the proletarian class or more broadly, the people, as a collective subject, news value modelled
after information is stripped of embodied experience and concerns about positionality. In 1987, the State
Science and Technology Commission listed the media sector as “information industries.” In 1988, a
nationwide polling of news workers on press reforms showed that more than two thirds believed the
primary function of journalism to be “disseminating information,” and nearly as many rejected the idea that
all news should serve propagation purposes.
48
This normative shift granted journalism some autonomy
from the overarching propaganda imperative as a distinct field of practice.
49
In parallel, Chinese scholars appropriated “feedback”—which Schramm claimed to be “the most
important social science concept” that engineering science had contributed—to legitimate the functioning
of the press beyond perimeters of the Party propaganda apparatus. At the time, the CASS scholar Chen
Chongshan was preparing for Beijing Audience Survey, a pathbreaking exercise of representative sampling
initially framed as following the Party’s mass line: “from the masses, to the masses.” She explained this
Maoist principle to Schramm and asked: “Is this what you call ‘feedback’?” Schramm confirmed.
50
Thirty
years later, in her reminiscence of the birth of the survey project, Chen Chongshan described her thinking
of Mao-era journalism education and theory as
all about the objectives and techniques of news dissemination (chuanbo), ignoring the role of the
audience, ignoring their demand and opinion. This had led to the misalignment between the
45
Arguably the first such attempt, later designated as pioneering Jcomm’s “quantitative” tradition, was Yu, “新闻作品信息
含量问题初探 [Exploring News Information Content].” See note 9.
46
Zheng, “新闻价值相关论 [Thesis on News Value].”
47
Searches in the most comprehensive scholarly database CNKI support my observation, although it should be noted
that my archives extend beyond digitized material. For example, Annals of Journalism Studies and Journalism, both key
venues in the 1980s scholarly discourse and both shut down after 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, remain in print forms
only.
48
Chen and Mi,
中国传播效果透视
[Perspectives on Media Effects in China], 184.
49
Also see Cheek, “Redefining Propaganda: Debates on the Role of Journalism in Post-Mao Mainland China,” 56.
50
Chen, “施拉姆的理论对我的指引 [How Schramm’s Theory Guided Me].”

13
disseminator and the recipient. I [thus] suggested journalism theory research be turned “upside
down.” First, we study the audience. Then based on the law of how the audience receives news
information, we determine the plan and techniques for dissemination, so that news dissemination
and reception align with one another, achieving the optimal effects.
51
On the surface, this might seem a matter of recognizing the agency and preferences of the audience
(i.e., “the feedback”) in a dissemination model.
52
But it is an anachronism to suppose so. Moving from the
Party’s mass line to such a model took radical epistemic changes. (Chen’s wording represented the language
of Chinese journalism-communication that engineering grammars have since infested.)
53
Contrary to how
the reform discourse later paints it, in the Mao-era the press was not conceived in a top-down dissemination
model. Indeed, it possessed the “Party character” (dangxing) that guides and educates the masses along party
ideology. But simultaneously it also assumed the “people character” (renminxing)—that is, it should be the
site for the (proletarian) people to express their worldview and share experiences engaging in social
change.
54
If represented in a model, everything—the Party, the masses, the message—cuddles in the same
spot: within the press; there is no place for directional arrows. How is this possible? Because the
epistemology of Maoism recognizes “no natural or pre-existing collective unity, ready-made and handy.”
55
Instead, it requires continuous struggles, both institutional and discursive, to bridge the singular and the
collective of the people. This is the essence of the Maoist political project, and integral to it is the socialist
press’s constant striving for a simultaneous embodiment of the Party and peoples’ characters.
Therefore the composite dissemination model, and the efflorescence of theoretical discussion that it
ushered in, reflect Chinese journalism scholarship’s enduring discursive efforts to externalize the people
from the press as a distinct object for scrutiny. The Maoist charm, the holistic imagery of “press-as-the
people,” quickly dissipated. In its place was “press-for-the people,” wherein the people ceased to manifest in
the press but came into their own in front of the researcher, who then advised the press with their
51
Wang and Hu,
中国传播学
30
年
[Chinese Communication: 30 Years], 582–83.
52
Also see Zhang, “From Masses to Audience: Changing Media Ideologies and Practices in Reform China.”
53
For a striking contrast, see a contemporaneous account An, “研究我们的读者 [Studying Our Readers].”
54
Admittedly, “the people” was always an abstract construct. When looking closely one may find complex sociopolitical
and technical processes mediating the “people” and what was in the newspaper. But it is crucial to recognize the
investment of Maoist politics in keeping the people character alive, and that in real contestations this conception could
be mobilized as a source of enormous power.
55
Liu, The Mirage of China: Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality of the Contemporary World, 145.

14
knowledge. As per official language, this might still qualify as the press’s “people character,” but we should
note the underlying transformation in how the people are being served. In short, what transpired in the
early 1980s was a (literally) “scientific” dissection that pulled much of the Maoist entanglement out of the
press, pinning the audience down next to government directives, both as legible parameters for guiding
press reforms.
Doing so also effectively separated the people from the party. The priority of journalism shifted
from embodying and uniting the collective will through the party organ, as in Maoist representational
politics, to producing information that acts on and preempts an existing collective. This collective, now
external to the Party, awaited being “studied.” The ensuing problem, however, was that seeking to
represent what it thinks and wants faced onerous political risks and implementation challenges. During the
“Anti-spiritual Pollution Campaign,” Chen Chongshan’s surveys were attacked after English media reported
them as capitalist “public opinion polls.” Further, in determining what aspects of the audience to probe,
researchers became liable in very construction of a collective subject. The dilemma was this: audience
surveys were premised on the (newly) assumed misalignment between the press (organ of the Party) and its
readers (the people), and no perfect execution existed when the mission was to flesh out such a
misalignment.
Toward the end of the 1980s, the eventual rise of what I call “systems journalism” bypassed this
dilemma by phasing out the question about audience subjectivity altogether. “Feedback” became associated
with abstracted spheres, specifically the economy, and the significance of journalism was defined not in
relation to human faces, but to the interdependent systems that supposedly comprised society.
Systems Cybernetics in Reform China: Qian Xuesen and Friedrich Engels
If Wilbur Schramm served as a key ingredient and a catalyst for the fusion of disparate ideas into
“systems journalism” in China, a second key ingredient can be traced to certain engineering expertise
uniquely preserved through the Mao-era. In the 1960s and 1970s, the CCP promoted “socialist science” that
instituted participation from the masses.
56
The only group of highly specialized scientists shielded from these
political imperatives (as well as discipline and punishment) were those working on military projects.
Likewise, whereas cybernetics became a pervasive ideological force in shaping Soviet sciences,
57
in China,
Marxist theoreticians and ideologues, albeit somewhat informed of the Soviet trends, never managed to
56
Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution.
57
Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics.

15
interfere with the work led by mostly US-trained scientists.
58
After 1978, the latter’s expertise, and more
crucially their ethos of systems analysis, mounted the front stage and animated broader intellectual debates,
popular science endeavors, and science fiction throughout the 1980s.
59
Absent the social sciences, defense
scientists also cast strong influence over social policies for modernization.
60
The tide was led by Qian Xuesen (1911-2009), who was likely oblivious to Wilbur Schramm’s visit
and the fermentation in journalism scholarship. Known as H. S. Tsien in his American life, Qian was an
aerodynamicist trained at MIT and an endowed professor at the California Institute of Technology
conducting missile research for the US Army. Qian was persecuted under McCarthyism and managed to
return to China in 1955. After the 1960 Sino-Soviet fallout and departure of Soviet advisors, Chinese
military projects were entrusted to Qian and other returning scientists. The successful construction of the
carriers of atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, and satellites, in a just few years, earned him the title of “King
of Rocketry.” Qian was also a major figure that brought cybernetics to China. In the early 1950s, after
becoming a communist suspect and shut out of military research in the US, he turned to the design of
mechanical and electronic systems using cybernetic theory, culminating in his groundbreaking monograph
Engineering Cybernetics.
61
Its Chinese edition appeared in 1958, serving as a foundation for numerous research
projects. As China reoriented itself for economic development and promoted “modern” science as a “force
of production,” Qian’s proven political fidelity and scientific prowess made him the post-Mao “model
intellectual.” The state honored him as something of a national treasure.
62
Systems cybernetic ideas began to
overspill.
In September 1978, Qian’s landmark article “The Techniques of Management and Organization:
Systems Engineering,” ran pages in Wenhui, a major newspaper targeting educated readers.
63
Building on
their experience in directing massive military projects, Qian and his coauthors promoted “systems
engineering”—an array of techniques including systems analysis, management science, and operational
research—as a key approach to develop the national economy.
64
Soon after, Qian began to talk about social,
58
Peng,
控制论的发生与传播研究
[The Origin and Dissemination of Cybernetics], chap. 7.
59
See Liu, Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China.
60
Greenhalgh, “Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy.”
61
Tsien, Engineering Cybernetics.
62
Wang, “The Making of an Intellectual Hero: Chinese Narratives of Qian Xuesen.”
63
Qian, Xu, and Wang, “组织管理的技术—系统工程 [Techniques of Organizational Management: Systems Engineering].”
64
Qian later confided that it was the second author Xu Guozhi who penned the article and invoked “systems
engineering” as a category. Qian, “我对系统学的认识历程 [How I Came to Systematics ]”; Xu was a mechanical

16
on top of material, transformation, and especially addressed the relevance of cybernetics:
In 1948, Wiener considered the idea that [his] cybernetic theory may have social efficacy “false
hopes,” and that “extend[ing] to the fields of anthropology, of sociology, of economics, the methods
of the natural sciences, in the hope of achieving a like measure of success in the social fields” “an
excessive optimism.” The modern development of cybernetic theory has proved that Wiener’s
1948 view was too conservative. Applying engineering techniques to social domains is not “an
excessive optimism,” but a reality.
65
These words come from the preface of the latest and substantially expanded Chinese volumes of Engineering
Cybernetics. In contrast, in the original edition of Engineering Cybernetics, he referenced the French origin
cybernétique (“the science of civil government”) and remarked: “[this] grandiose scheme of political sciences
has not, and perhaps never will, come to fruition.”
66
Apparently, decades in China made him change his
mind.
By that time, Song Jian, Qian’s disciple, colleague, and the new Engineering Cybernetics’s co-author,
had used missile science to project population growth—with severe oversights—and led the CCP
leadership onto the track of implementing the stringent one-child policy.
67
This amounted to a concrete
success of what Qian called “social cybernetics,” “a new science” for accelerating China’s socialist
modernization and the accompanying technological revolution. “Scientific decision-making” cast in systems
cybernetic language came to be framed as progressive governance. “The scope of ‘engineering’ keeps
expanding,” Song wrote complacently in a 1984 encyclopedia entry, “problems traditionally reserved for
the social sciences can be solved through engineering methods; in all cases [using these methods] achieves
more precise, prescient outcomes than leaving them to mere bureaucratic judgments.”
68
Two years later,
Song became State Councilor, which ranks immediately below the Vice Premiers.
Undergirding this ascension of systems cybernetics on the political stage and official culture were
some crucial discursive gymnastics that also informed the formulation of systems journalism. Qian welded
engineer and mathematician who Qian first met on the cruiser from America to China. Ye,
走进钱学森
[Qian Xuesen: A
Biography], 440. But history prefers to not remember this humble beginning; Qian Xuesen is seen as the brilliant mind
behind it all.
65
Qian and Song,
工程控制论
[Engineering Cybernetics], xiv; also see Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication
in the Animal, 162.
66
Tsien, Engineering Cybernetics, vii.
67
Greenhalgh, “Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy.”
68
Song, “工程控制论 [Engineering Cybernetics],” 3.

17
systems cybernetics to the official doctrine. Remarkably, he did it in a way that grafted “modern”
technoscience, which the CCP now craved, onto convictions from its revolutionary past, and thus boosted
regime legitimacy amid economic and political uncertainties. Qian’s rootstock here, when looked at
closely, were the ideas of Friedrich Engels, not Karl Marx, nor Mao Zedong.
To correct Norbert Wiener’s above-quoted reservation, for example, Qian resorted to Engels’s
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:
Engels once predicted, under the circumstances of socialism, “anarchy in social production is
replaced by conscious organization on a planned basis.” The regulatory capacity of the socialist
economy enables a self-sustaining economic system, which is essentially an automatic system. [...]
The systemic dynamics that cybernetic theory tackles can be found in high-level systems (i.e., social
systems). Therefore it is unreasonable to call the social efficacies of cybernetics “false hopes.”
Instead, it is an actual hope that has already dawned on us.
69
Engels’s passion for science and technology, and inspired by these topics, his law-like prediction
about history, were what made him so apt for promoting a systems cybernetic conception of society. In the
PRC and the Soviet Union alike, Marx-Engels existed as a mystical joint identity for orthodox enunciation.
The history of global Marxisms, however, shows that Marx’s reception was usually mediated by Engels’s
“defining influence.”
70
Rather than authoritative accounts of Marx’s ideas, Engels’ Dialectics of Nature and
Anti-Dühring (particularly its last section Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) were immensely popular
simplifications and extrapolations of Marx’s often dense writings. Instead of giving voice to Marx
posthumously, Engels was in fact elaborating his own. And it was a voice that centered on the subject that
he, but not Marx, appeared genuinely interested in—natural science. According to Engels (in Marx’s
name), both the human and the natural are subject to the law of dialectics, and they make up a totality
where history is made through human mastery of nature, pushing back its boundaries.
71
For example,
according to Engels the socialist replacement of anarchy with conscious planning (which Qian quoted)
amounts to historical progress for “man finally [...] leaves the conditions of animal existence.”
72
Inspired by
Darwin, Engels upholds the victory of socialism and communism as the teleological logic of history.
69
Qian and Song,
工程控制论
[Engineering Cybernetics], xiv.
70
Carver, Bekerman, and Eubanks, “Marx and Engels. The Intellectual Relationship.”
71
By contrast, Marx’s arguments are largely confined within the capitalist mode of production. Thomas, Marxism &
Scientific Socialism: From Engels to Althusser, 39–40; also see Taylor, “Dialectics of Nature or Dialectics of Practice?”
72
Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), 318.

18
The Engels portion of the Marx-Engels orthodoxy was invoked for local needs. Neither the Russian
nor Chinese Bolshevik Revolution followed Marx’s original arguments. But Engels’s scientific socialism
proved much more assimilable in the ruling ideology of these Marxist regimes.
73
Stalin furthered this
scientistic orientation by differentiating historical materialism from dialectical materialism, positing the
former as the extension of the principles of the latter.
74
This unequivocally implied the inferiority of the
studies of history to the studies of science.
75
In early 1950s China, fixated on the lost skull of Peking Man
and inspired by Engels’s “labor created humanity” theory, the newly-in-power CCP enlisted the scientific
elite to propagate that the apes of China evolved into modern Chinese through hard labor, a belief that
brought together the entire nation.
76
Although the USSR’s augmentation of Engels had profoundly
influenced the doctrine of Chinese communism, Mao himself did not care for all that talk about science and
scientific laws. By contrast, Mao awarded huge weight to human will and agency; for the Maoist dialectics,
history is unpredictable, always unfolding as the willful human subject struggles against the power
structure: there is no end to the revolution.
77
In this sense, the reform rhetoric was the most efficient when official Marxism displayed the face of
Engels and hid that of Mao. By resorting to Engels of the “theory of Marx-Engels,” epistemological
consistency was maintained. This was how Qian built on Xu Guozhi’s ideas. In late 1979, he broadened
Xu’s initial notion of the “system” to include both human practices and natural processes. In 1985, during
the launch of the Chinese Association for Systems Engineering, Qian outlined his vision for “systems
science,” a synergistic whole that leveraged the “messy assortment” of related areas in the West to the plane
of philosophy. Qian’s systems science has three interdependent layers, moving from the most concrete
techniques to the foundational basic science that Qian called “systematics” (xitong xue), which he bridged to
Marxism (Fig. 2).
78
By ironing out this chain of articulations and using Engels as an interface, Qian
demonstrated a dialectic relationship between the development of science and technology and that of
Marxist philosophy. This insistence actually made Qian the conservative stronghold in the prolonged
73
Thomas, Marxism & Scientific Socialism: From Engels to Althusser.
74
Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
75
Taylor, “Dialectics of Nature or Dialectics of Practice?”
76
Schmalzer, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China.
77
Pang, “Dialectical Materialism.”
78
Qian, “我对系统学的认识历程 [How I Came to Systematics ].”

19
debates about whether Marxism might serve as the totalist structure for scientific knowledge.
79
On the
opposite side were relatively young scientists who advocated a non-instrumentalist view of science as
intrinsically valuable and autonomous from Marxism.
Figure 2: Qian Xuesen’s Systems Science
With his scheme of systems science, Qian undertook a grand journey to appropriate and reinterpret
bits and pieces from a variety of fields including cognition, physiology, behavioral science, architecture,
aesthetics, education, and ecology. He insisted on thinking across boundaries between machines and bodies,
nature and society, promoting a fundamentally posthumanist outlook.
80
Qian’s enormous state support and
cultural prestige helped popularize a distinct way for conceptualizing the world: it framed all things in
relation to larger complex, hierarchical, nested systems that are interconnected (co-variant) via flows of
information (in a cybernetic sense). In an incidental and ironic manner, viewing society in terms of
interdependent systems enabled an intellectual current free from the yoke of Marxist economic
determinism.
81
Systems Journalism
In the aftermath of the 1983 Anti-spiritual Pollution campaign and the suppression of American
references to mass communication, journalism scholars similarly grafted systems cybernetics onto Engels’s
scientistic Marxism. Engels’s general evolutionary take on the development of science and technology was
leveraged to promote information technologies and press infrastructures as proxies for historical progress.
His claim that motion in nature and human history, as well as the motion of thought, all abide by one
79
Miller, Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge.
80
On Qian’s take on qigong, see Liu, Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China, chap. 1.
81
See He, “
新启蒙
”
知识档案
——80
年代中国文化研究
[Knowledge Archives of the “New Enlightenment”], 309–33.

20
unitary set of dialectic laws became the final seal to a view of news production, distribution, and
consumption that leaves no role for human subjectivity.
One of the first such pieces, entitled “information dissemination and historical materialism,”
performed acrobatics like Qian’s systematics and in the process assimilated systems thinking in the
scholarship.
82
Journalism was “the subsystem of social information dissemination,” the author specified, and
hence was interwoven with other subsystems such as politics, economy, and ideology. He further opposed
considering journalism part of the superstructure or ideology, a bold conclusion reached with seemingly
Marxist analytics. Quoting Engels on the industrial revolution, he argued that because the press of a given
society inherited the same relations and means of production, the relationship between the resulting
information system and society should be more precisely described as “isomorphic.” This arc of arguments
smacks of the cybernetic flavor of information (i.e., news as signals generated by a system in motion),
glossing over the ideological negotiations by media owners and producers from certain class positions.
Importantly, while the press as the subsystem processed output from the economic subsystem (rather than
audience feedback), the press itself functioned as the feedback central to the evolution of the larger
cybernetic system that is society. The author’s objective was to push for press reforms by arguing that
actively restructuring this crucial subsystem would effect desirable changes of the suprasystem.
In response to student demonstrations demanding political, additional to economic, reform, from
January to May 1987 the CCP wielded another campaign to “combat bourgeois liberalization.” After this
round of political contraction, major journalism periodicals saw a burst of works integrating systems
cybernetics through Qian-styled ideological acrobatics. In 1988, a renowned annual academic publication,
Annals of Journalism Studies, dedicated the entire volume to “analyzing journalistic phenomena using ‘systems
science.’” Many even set out to reconstruct typical concepts and propositions from American
communication in terms of systems cybernetics. “Evidently,” wrote one, “Schramm has underestimated the
value of information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory in building the theoretical frameworks of
[human] communication study.”
83
In early 1989, a monograph entitled Systems Theory of Journalism (xitonglilun xinwenxue) came out, one
of the first publications with similar titles. Using the vocabulary of Engels’s materialist metaphysics, the
author stated that news is the agentic reflection of the objective reality in the mind of the reporter: “When
both ‘natural information’ and ‘cultural information’ [of motion in nature and in society, respectively] come
82
Fan, “信息传播与历史唯物论 [Information Communication and Historical Materialism].”
83
Wu, “传播学理论架构初探 [Exploring Communication’s Theoretical Frameworks],” 28.

21
into contact with the reporter’s thinking brain, news is the register left on his brain.”
84
The book went on to
spell out news value using Engels’s Darwinian-Marxist argumentation about humans’ continued
transformation of nature: occurrences in news (xinwen shishi), after coming to public attention, affect the
public’s inner world and spur action to change the material world; if these changes are positive, the news is
deemed to have “social effects,” which was the ultimate measure of news value.
85
News value was no longer
defined by how much information about world happenings it contains, as was argued when Shannon’s
formula was the main influence. It was now measured by the news’s effects on the larger system.
Depending on the selection of actual occurrences in the news, its dissemination could aid or hinder system
functioning, by which the author meant the state-led modernization project. Importantly, in this
conception, neither news production nor reception involves meaning making and more generally, “the
anthropological principle of human interaction with the world.”
86
Yet the logic of systems journalism consolidated from a position of structural power. In the first
Hong Kong journalism conference joined by mainland colleagues, local scholars were deeply impressed
when the deputy director of the CASS Journalism Institute started drawing the plan for Chinese press
reforms.
87
Commissioned by the central propaganda department, CASS surveyed newspapers across the
country and mapped bureaucratic affiliations (all state-owned) and specialties of the rapidly expanding press
universe (CASS 1986). Through reform, announced the team, this universe should develop into a “party
press-anchored, multi-layered press system” that efficiently disseminates information to meet the variety of
needs of economic modernization. Importantly, with the anchoring layer of party organs in place, the whole
press system shall allow localized management experimentation.
88
In line with this general aspiration, other
scholars pointed out that, as modernization begot an exponential information growth, the conventional
mode of linear media control hindered timely transmission and response to feedback. Employing concepts
such as noise and filter, they advocated that each newspaper was itself a cybernetic subsystem that must
have necessary decision-making power to adapt to its changing environment, so that the whole press system
84
Wang,
系统理论新闻学
[Systems Theory of Journalism], 54–56.
85
Wang, 110–14.
86
Taylor, “Dialectics of Nature or Dialectics of Practice?,” 290.
87
Chu, “香港新闻传播学界的成名与想象(1927-2006) [Fame and Imagination in Hong Kong Journalism and
Communication Research].”
88
Xu et al., “关于新闻体制改革的设想 [Envisioning Journalism Reform].”

22
remains resilient and constantly improves information delivery for the suprasystem.
89
Put differently, the
press needed some autonomy for “self-organization” in order to better fulfill its obligation as a state
apparatus. At once strikingly totalistic and excitingly open-ended, this vision can only emit from the center
of a press universe where all the outlets are legible, responsive, and subject to large-scale coordination. It is
also a vision of technocracy, held liable for the role of media in society and its “subsystems.”
These conditions hardly exist in liberal capitalist societies. Chinese journalism scholars had been
enthralled by a bird’s-eye perspective of mass media even before the CCP’s repetitive censures against
“liberal-capitalist” influences (in 1983, 1987, and finally, 1989). In 1982 they were introduced to “The
Structure and Function of Communication in Society” by Harold Lasswell, a political scientist that Schramm
canonized as a “forefather” of communication study. Inspired by postwar structural functionalism, this
article discusses mass media by “viewing [it] as a whole in relation to the entire social process.”
90
This high-
level conceptualization of media as an (oddly holistic) institution found resonance among Chinese scholars.
The dearth of such structural analyses about “the media system”
91
from American mass communication in
the intervening decades was keenly noticed in 1980s China.
92
And it was Chinese journalism scholarship’s
institutional position, rather than mere intellectual curiosity, that explained its preoccupation with media-
society relationships. In a sense, it resorted to systems cybernetics to displace a perceived vacuum in mass
communication study. Moreover, whereas functionalism provided little inspiration for initiating structural
transformation, systems journalism was premised on continued evolution. Even better, it regarded the
press as a locus to initiate changes in other interdependent systems and eventually society’s material
development, effectively granting agency to media reformers (and later the propaganda leadership).
Weeks after the release of Systems Theory of Journalism, protesters filled Tiananmen Square.
Appropriating systems cybernetic ideas, the 1980s journalism reformers painstakingly loosened restrictions
over organizational management, format, and genre—what we may call newsmaking infrastructures. This
limited amount of “press freedom” they had achieved, it may not be far-fetched to say, was seized upon by
the broader cultural currents—an explosive combination of liberal and Confucian humanism—to demand
political reforms. Following the crackdown on June 4th, the CCP took a series of drastic measures to “tidy
89
Yu, “试论建立具有中国特色的社会主义新闻事业体制 [Building Chinese Journalism with Socialist Characteristics].”
90
Lasswell, “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society,” 38.
91
This differs from empirical studies of mass communication in institutional and organizational settings, or of audience
behavior in its social location, also see Holz and Wright, “Sociology of Mass Communications.”
92
It was, for example, lamented that after Lasswell, no American communication scholar seemed to care about media-
society relationships. Wu, “传播学理论架构初探 [Exploring Communication’s Theoretical Frameworks],” 27.

23
the house,” and the media sector was hit hard. Scholarly conversations in Chinese Journalism again went
through severe rectification, particularly of its “blind” adoption of Western communication study.
But the systems journalism strain remained intact. It was particularly telling that, in the post-1989
climate, Systems Theory of Journalism kept releasing reprints into the new millennium.
93
With regard to news
value, the functioning system made further headway to displace “objective reality.” In a 1993 theory article
entitled “The Ontology of News,” the author builds on Engels and Qian’s argumentation to contend that
news was “information” rather than “actual occurrences” (shishi, typically translated as “facts”), as
information represents human praxis transcending the object-subject binary. News is worthy if people, “as
they set goals and make plans for themselves, can utilize the information” to “constantly adjust the
relationships between the system and its environment and between various subsystems, in order to optimize
the overall benefit and steadily improve their self-organization.”
94
There was little mention about “objective
reality”; journalism was enclosed in the system. This was never what Wilbur Schramm had in mind, despite
his interest in integrating information theory into communication study. As early as 1955, he acknowledged
a chasm between Shannon’s information, “concerned with the number of binary choices necessary to specify
an event in a system,” and “our concept of information in human communication,” which was really
“concerned with the relation of a fact to outside events.”
95
The CASS Institute of Journalism became “the Institute of Journalism and Communication” in
1992, a naming convention immediately followed by numerous journalism departments across China. The
juxtaposition indicated by “and” quickly came off as redundant. Significantly, it was also in 1992 that the
Ministry of Education confirmed xinwen chuanbo or “journalism communication study” as a first-tier
discipline, a direct signal of academic stature and resource allocation.
96
In Chinese, this phrase literally
means the “study of news dissemination.” I hereafter use “Jcomm” to avoid its easy conflation with
“communication” in Anglophone context.
Legacies of Systems Journalism
As “icebreaking” as Schramm’s visit was later portrayed to be, the birth of Jcomm entailed much
more than a takeover by—or, depending on one’s stand, a critical adoption of—American communication
93
A winner of several provincial-level awards, the book first appeared in March 1989, running the 4th reprint in 1993, and
had new editions in 1996, 1999, and 2003.
94
Chen, “新闻本体论——关于事实与信息的比较研究 [The Ontology of News: Comparing Facts and Information],” 16.
95
Schramm, “Information Theory and Mass Communication,” 144.
96
Hu, Ji, and Zhang, “Building the Nation-State: Journalism and Communication Studies in China,” 388–90.

24
study. It entailed reformist journalism scholars carrying forward normative notions about journalism with a
series of articulations relayed through the ideas of Schramm, Qian Xuesen, and Engels.
Systems journalism may only have emerged in the broader cultural currents of 1980s China. First
was the dream of unified science, shared by all three men. Schramm assured the Chinese that
communication would eventually integrate all other social sciences and announced it as part of a broader
convergence between social and natural sciences.
97
This prediction tapped right into the particular zeitgeist,
with Qian Xuesen on his bandwagon to synthesize all the disciplines, albeit in his own comfort zone of
engineering and systems analysis. And given the precarious political environment, all this cross-border
knowledge hybridization nonetheless gained momentum because Chinese Marxism consisted of Marx’s
arguments about human history and Engels’s conjectures from the non-humanistic dimension of natural
science. Literally a “worldview,” this Marxist orthodoxy revered universal iron laws (i.e., dialectics) on
moral and ideological grounds. Further, the Deng Xiaoping regime shared with Engel’s natural dialectics
the pragmatism in human’s unfolding interactions with technology. Finally, the post-Mao regime’s
characteristic predilection (i.e., “Cross the river by feeling the stones”) bore some “ontological affinity” with
cybernetics—that is, leaving the “black box” closed but instead preoccupied with continuous performative
engagements between heterogeneous agents.
98
In Euro-America, by contrast, this goes against the “modern
ontology” presumed by scientific and bureaucratic establishments, which explains cybernetics’ quick retreat
into in “nomad sciences” and countercultures.
99
The formulation of systems journalism also hinged on institutional conditions. Qian Xuesen
believed that “social cybernetics” would never emerge in capitalist societies (“because the problem with
capitalism is that from the onset of production there is no conscious social regulation”).
100
To be clear,
however, in liberal democracies systems approaches had heavily influenced human sciences and state
bureaucratic management.
101
The adoption of operational research in the US, for example, was entwined in
97
See Xu, “施拉姆对中国传播学研究的影响：纪念施拉姆来新闻研究所座谈 30 周年 [Schramm’s Impacts on Chinese
Communication Research].”
98
For “ontological affinity” see Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future; Also on the ontological stance
of cybernetics, see Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.”
99
Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand,
the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
100
Qian and Song,
工程控制论
[Engineering Cybernetics], xiv.
101
Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science.

25
the rise of the military-industry-academic complex.
102
Social administration by systems cybernetics,
therefore, is less productively explored as a feature of authoritarianism (or according to Qian, socialism).
Rather, it boils down to its interaction with the concrete political, economic, and discursive contestations in
a domain, and the consequences of the exact engineering measures.
103
In the case of Chinese population
control, for example, systems cybernetics triumphed because the state’s intervention in reproduction was
perceived legitimate, the bureaucratic capacity at its disposal extraordinary, and competing social science
expertise weak.
One finds similar circumstances in China’s news sector, where Party propagandists took it upon
themselves to revamp the normative injunctions about the press. But journalism also is distinct for it
belongs to the realm of the symbolic. Systems cybernetics had to wiggle its way through a congestive
discursive terrain. On the one hand, acknowledging the importance of relationality and societal betterment,
systems journalism rejected the image of individuals in isolation, the purported flaw of Western
communication. At the same time, by leaning on the CCP’s agenda to phase out the planned economy and
push for marketization, it refused to succumb to top-down propaganda imperatives. Most remarkably,
while systems journalism steered away from the “Maoist” view that valorized the press for providing a voice
on behalf of the people and for fostering the socialist revolution, it also distanced itself from the “capitalist”
view that evaluated news media in the market of attention where all players act out of competing interests.
Finally, it had foreclosed on issues of social actors’ positionality in meaning-making.
In the ensuing decades, explicit references to systems cybernetics took a backseat, but its legacies
have prevailed in powerful forms.
104
It is beyond this article’s scope to delineate these manifold
developments, but I offer a few observations as provocation. First, the ways in which China’s media
reforms transpired in the 1990s bore much resemblance to the ideas inspired by systems cybernetics.
China’s fast swelling media sector underwent state-regulated marketization involving system-level measures
such as administrative consolidation of party organs and radical commercial experiments at the margins.
These “structurally focused” moves are often sidelined by discussions concentrating on overt censorship
“aimed at politically dissenting publications.”
105
One also ponders the similarity between the liberating
102
Rau, “The Adoption of Operations Research in the United States during World War II.”
103
Also see Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.
104
This means rather than tracing “citational network” of specific theories, we may more productively examine these
legacies as constitutive of a “culture,” in the form of shared parlance, tacit knowledge, and unspoken assumptions.
105
Zhao, “From Commercialization to Conglomeration: The Transformation of the Chinese Press Within the Orbit of the
Party State,” 15; Wu and Li, “Localism in Internet Governance: The Rise of China’s Provincial Web”; As foreseen by

26
vision of the socialist press comprised of numerous outlets as self-organizing cybernetic systems and the so-
called “one head, many mouths” landscape in reality, where market-induced media decentralization was
wielded for state propaganda purposes.
106
As economic disparity increased, media marketization led to the
demise of outlets for underprivileged groups.
107
But another contributor may be the orientation of press
reforms toward information delivery for an economic (sub)system, unconcerned with audience
subjectivities and identities.
Systems journalism has sedimented in the now exceedingly resourceful discipline and popular major
of Jcomm, and the language of systems cybernetics continues to percolate its authoritative texts. China’s
latest national textbook Introduction to Journalism continues to define news as “the information about the
recent actual occurrences (shishi)” in which information does not go by its colloquial usage, but specifically
means “the thing that reduces the recipient’s uncertainty,” “as per its narrow definition by Shannon.”
108
The
reference to “objective reality,” which disappeared with the pervading systems journalism, remains absent
from the current definition. In a methodical content analysis of Chinese textbooks, one Taiwanese
researcher was deeply confused by the ubiquity of “information” in Chinese Jcomm textbooks, compared to
its scarcity in Taiwanese counterparts.
109
He also noted that the phrase “social control” (shehui kongzhi)
appeared hundreds of times and suspected it to reflect Chinese authoritarianism,
110
without realizing
Jcomm’s invocation of its cybernetic meaning—purposeful influence toward a predetermined goal through
information processing.
111
However, the “goal” here, or journalism’s principled priority of “systematic
benefit,” is hard to pin down. In textbooks, official documents, and authoritative commentaries, it shifts
between economic prosperity, social stability, and international rivalry. Whereas this flexibility may echo
the notion of adaptable, learning systems, the assumed “oneness” is a far cry from Marxian dialectics’
Cheek, “control of order as much as suppression of free ideas are on the minds of [state propaganda] officials” for
press reform. Cheek, “Redefining Propaganda: Debates on the Role of Journalism in Post-Mao Mainland China.”
106
Wu, “One Head, Many Mouths: Diversifying Press Structures in Reform China”; Stockmann, Media Commercialization
and Authoritarian Rule in China.
107
Zhao, “From Commercialization to Conglomeration: The Transformation of the Chinese Press Within the Orbit of the
Party State.”
108
Li,
新闻学概论
[Introduction to Journalism], 66–67.
109
Liu, “國科會專題研究：中國大陸高校教科書中政治思想教育之研究 [Political Ideologies in Chinese College
Textbooks],” 193–94.
110
Liu, 203.
111
Ironically, it was American psychologists who applied cybernetics to develop techniques of “coercive persuasion” by
experimenting with “extreme environmental control.” Lemov, “Running Amok in Labyrinthine Systems: The Cyber-
Behaviorist Origins of Soft Torture.”

27
attention to contradiction and historicity.
112
It is especially so when the system’s shifting goals are invariably
seen as hindered by internal/domestic protests and grievances, which journalism is tasked to assuage
through dispensing people’s “uncertainty.”
Finally, the understanding of truth inherent in this conception of newsmaking is about neither
correspondence nor coherence.
113
First, it is not about sorting out facts in pursuit of accounts that
comprehensively correspond to (an outside) reality. While the informational ideal of Western journalism
aspires to display disciplined impartiality,
114
news in China can be justifiably partial as long as the selection
of “actual occurrences” for dissemination contributes to the vitality of the larger system. This understanding
of truth is also not about coherence. The imperative for coherence in Chinese press history manifested most
vividly in the notion of “substantial truth,” which had a high tolerance for fabricating details as long as the
produced account better reflects “the inherent logic of reality” according to official ideology. But when
viewed as system-enhancing cybernetic information, news is not ideological, at least not in the sense that
ideology means “seeking to efface contradiction and produce an ostensibly coherent, readable account of the
world.”
115
In the end, such newsmaking is not interested in the real. It is highly malleable, essentially
indifferent to the actual content, and has no place for normative value judgments hinged on something
external to the system.
We may see such a conception of truth as performance, as in “performative ontology,” which Andrew
Pickering uses to name the ontology staged by British cybernetics.
116
Throwing wayward the need to
comprehend and articulate the working principles of the cybernetic project and its surroundings alike—in
our case journalism and the world it operates in—actions can still be consequential, as the world changes
through continuing interlinked performances. Importantly, the resulting performative relationship is not
symmetric, as envisioned by cybernetics-inspired theorists such as Haraway,
117
but “imperative.”
118
because
norms and commitments of journalism are, foremost, furnished by the overriding priorities of the regime
suprasystem. While such an ontological vision has manifested in many material and ideational forms,
112
Levins, “Dialectics and Systems Theory.”
113
See Fuller, News Values: Ideas for an Information Age.
114
Schudson, Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers.
115
Cherniavsky, Neocitizenship: Political Culture after Democracy, 141.
116
Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future.
117
Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness.
118
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” 256.

28
Chinese news media may be a site to explore how it plays out in the practice of the (re)production of reality
and, in turn, of the public culture that this reality animates.
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