China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation, by David Shambaugh. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xvi + 234 pp. US$39.95/£23.95 (hardcover). At a recent conference, a Sunday-morning panel met to discuss the current state of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The conclusion was that either the CCP was in its death throes or it had adapted to changing conditions and retained a substantial degree of power. The tension generated by these seemingly irreconcilable conclusions drives veteran China- watcher David Shambaugh's most recent book, China 's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation. The book's organization is straightforward. The first third looks at scholarly assessments of the CCP in light of domestic events in China (particularly during 1989) and international events (specifically - but not limited to - the breakdown of Communism in Europe from 1989 to 1991). The second part of the book discusses the lessons learned by analyzing the elite intellectual party discourse about these events and the many prescriptions to allow the CCP to avoid the same fate. The final section looks at the two most important Party systems Propaganda and Organization - to illustrate how these lessons have shaped the CCP's tenure from 1990 to about 2005. Shambaugh's conclusion is that the CCP is simultaneously atrophying and adapting to changing circumstances but that, for the moment at least, adaptation is getting the upper hand. The scope of Shambaugh's description of the CCP at the national level is impressively expansive. He deftly maps out the contemporary Party apparatus in Beijing. Among many other things, Shambaugh traces the ways in which Hu Jintao has been able to manipulate what Jiang Zemin had carved out as his particular legacy - the "Three Represents" - to serve Hu' s own agenda. He also makes a strong case that CCP intellectuals' critiques of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s were simultaneously - and subversively - criticism of China, and nicely reproduces the fearful lens through which China's leaders watched as the rest of the socialist world withered away before their eyes. Of course, in any work of scholarship on a subject as complex as the CCP, there will inevitably be some shortcomings. Perhaps it is unfair to criticize a book aimed as much at the policy community as at the academy, but there is a striking paucity of theory. Shambaugh does not establish a causal relationship between the fall of the Soviet bloc, lessons learned, and the subsequent CCP recasting of itself. Nor does he conceptualize the CCP's learning process in response to these external events. Rather, we are given a set of events, a series of scholarly debates and internal policy recommendations, and a discussion of adaptation undertaken by the Party. There is no causal argument; nor is there much of a discussion at all about how these national-level decisions were implemented or absorbed by the CCP apparatus writ large. …

China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation

.Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, by Daniela Stockmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxii + 334 pp. US$95.00 (hardcover), US$76.00 (eBook).This book is essential reading for scholars interested in the rapid development of China's media industry and its implications for China and authoritarian regimes around the world. Using a mixed-method approach that combines extensive fieldwork and interviews with an impressive quantitative analysis, the book wades confidently into ongoing debates about the nature and consequences of China's increasingly commercialized media.Previous scholarship has established the basic outline of China's media commercialization and press control. We know that China's press is heavily censored, and the general mechanisms of this censorship are well established. We know that, since the Chinese Party-state eased off direct media funding in the 1990s and 2000s, media outlets increasingly rely directly on market mechanisms, mainly advertisements and subscription fees. Stockmann breaks no new ground in briefly rehearsing this story, but provides a good overview of these critical developments.Stockmann's key innovation is to examine the direct consequences of China's newly vibrant media market on the attitudes and beliefs of Chinese media audiences. In other words, how does a competitive market-based press coexist with an authoritarian political system? The answer is both counter-intuitive and simple. The book's "core finding", Stockmann writes, "is that the commercialized look of branding of marketized media induces readers to perceive media sources as more credible" (p. 5) than they find direct state media like the Peoples Daily to be.Stockmann has presented this argument-that a commercialized press actually helps strengthen authoritarian rule-elsewhere in article form, but here she gathers diverse evidence masterfully to drive the point home. Content analysis data indicate that minimal differences exist in the actual news content between "marketized" and "state" newspapers; branding differences, by contrast, are vast. On most issues, the book argues, there is little tension between market and audience demands on the one hand and the demands of official censors on the other. "Only when it comes to negative news do media practitioners experience tension between market demands and the goals of the state" (p. 98). In other words, on most issues there is little need for direct state control of the press, as even a marketized press delivers the message which the Party-state wants to send-and delivers it more convincingly than does official propaganda.This argument is based around an examination of two key areas: China's relationship with the United States, and labor law. Both are chosen as semi-sensitive areas where the Party-state provides clear guidance but also leaves a lot of room for individual journalists to maneuver. In the case of China's labor law, authorities have made a concerted effort in recent years to highlight the law's success and to encourage disgruntled workers to use the law rather than extrajudicial mechanisms to redress grievances. …

Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China

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