Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Yuezhi Zhao. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 255 pp. $44.95 hbk. $19.95 pbk. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union around the early 1990s and amid its continuing reform and openness even after the heavy-handed crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square prodemocracy movement, both the academic and journalistic communities have been searching for new concepts and ways of making sense of the structure and processes of mass media in China, the last stronghold of communist ideology and the world's fast emerging economic power. By all measures and through various accounts, China's changing media landscape within the larger socio-political context continues to defy conventional wisdom and contemporary conceptual fixation. With a variety of approaches, numerous articles and books have attempted to determine, either quantitatively or qualitatively, how the Chinese media system strives to strike an uneasy balance between the unyielding political control dictated by the necessity of state domination in an authoritarian system on the one hand and the unrelenting momentum unleashed by the market forces on the other hand. This book by Yuezhi Zhao, a native of China and an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, represents an insightful and challenging addition to a significant body of literature on China research in social sciences in general and in mass communication/ journalism in particular. It presents a skillful synergy of what is and what should be in the Chinese media system in both the political and economic sense. For anyone who follows the spirit and practices of Chinese journalism, the book makes a fascinating, and to some extent provocative, reading of the tension, negotiation, and accommodation of the willing bedfellows between the highly politicized Communist Party and the increasingly commercialized mass media in China. Its approach is a combination of historical description and critical analysis of the form and content of the Chinese media system over time and across space. Relying heavily on such publications as books, academic journals, and trade magazines, however, the author provides little original or systematic data. The book is nevertheless full of useful anecdotes and circumstantial evidence culled from Chinese sources not readily available to mass communication researchers outside China. They are helpful in story telling, but are insufficient in theory building, especially when the book argues for a new mass communication model in China. …

Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line

Folk devils and moral panics

.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

The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, by Guobin Yang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xviii + 302 pp. US$29.50/£20.50 (hardcover). In this useful and interesting study, the author shows how online activism enables "new forms, dynamics, and consequences of popular contention" in China and how Chinese people have attempted to "transform personhood, society, and politics" through the medium of cyberspace (p. 1). The author refutes the view that Chinese government control has led to the internet being primarily a space for apolitical entertainment and commerce. Of course there is control, and Yang gives a detailed description of the government's extensive monitoring and censorship regime in Chapter 2, "The Politics of Digital Contention", yet at the same time he demonstrates numerous ways that ordinary Chinese citizens have managed to circumvent this control to get their messages across. Moreover, the sheer numbers of netizens, blogs and bulletin boards in China today mean that the government is frequently fighting a losing battle even to keep track of online contention, let alone suppress it. In order to capture the complexity of the online environment in China, Yang makes use of the concept of multi-interactionism - interactions between online activism and state power, culture, the market, civil society and transnationalism (pp. 6-8). Not only are there multiple parties, but the influences between them "go in multiple directions" (p. 7). Yang demonstrates how this multi-interactionism works in subsequent chapters. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the rituals, genres and styles of contention online. Yang compares online rituals and genres with earlier forms of protest in China, and also identifies innovative practices, such as blogs, that would not have been possible without the development of the internet. Particularly interesting is the use of parody, humorous verses and flash videos satirizing corrupt government officials. The author of one such satirical verse about officials in Sichuan Province was arrested but later released and compensated after numerous netizens expressed their support for him publicly (pp. 78-79). The fact that such an arrest could happen at all shows the highly circumscribed nature of freedom of expression in China. Yet Yang provides many other examples where online exposure by netizens has resulted in government officials reversing their decisions, with officials occasionally even arrested and charged with corruption. He also shows how Chinese citizens have used their creativity to outwit government monitors, for example by taking advantage of homonyms and code words that allow them to discuss sensitive topics without being caught by the government's automatic word filters (Chapter 4). One important point implied by many of Yang's examples, but not explicitly stated in the multi-interactionism model, is that online contention or activism in China includes moral debates among netizens themselves, with no overt political overtones. Examples include the "sex diary" published by a woman calling herself Muzimei, which led to a widespread online debate about sexual mores in Chinese society (p. 79). In this sense, the internet becomes a public space for expressing and sharing opinions that might not be tolerated in "real" life. …

The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online

Through two experiments, this study examines the relationship between linguistic choice and attribution perception in organizational crisis. Experiment 1 demonstrated that abstract (vs. concrete) l...

Linguistic Crisis Prediction: An Integration of the Linguistic Category Model in Crisis Communication:

This study aimed to test linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) in the Chinese media. Language abstraction of crime stories was compared between the propaganda model and the commercial model. The results revealed LIB in Chinese language and Chinese journalism. They can be explained by both motivational and cognitive mechanisms in LIB. Moreover, the study explored the impacts of two contextual factors on LIB – time and occupation. The analysis of time illustrated the development trend of Chinese journalism, where the propaganda model has been revealed to be invading and eroding the commercial model. The analysis of occupation indicated the mutual influence between language abstraction and stereotypes, and discussed its impacts over the images of particular social groups as well as the challenges it brought to the state and the Party. This study further explained how and why the journalistic models manipulate language abstraction in order to meet their communication goals as well as the political needs of social ...

Tian Zhang

Papers

Linguistic intergroup bias in Chinese crime stories: propaganda model vs. commercial model