-Draft-
Pressing Back:
The Struggle for Control over China’s Journalists
Dissertation Prospectus
Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
-Draft-
I. Introduction and Research Questions
Western reporters and academics often refer to the Chinese press as “state media,”[1] “state-controlled,”[2] or “official,”[3] assuming – or stating outright – that news media outlets are simply an appendage of the party/state. This usually reflexive assumption, however, is both empirically and conceptually problematic. Recent years have brought momentous changes in how Chinese journalists see their political role,[4] and evidence has mounted that the press now responds to market pressures and public opinion, rather than being influenced solely by Beijing’s dictates.[5] More visibly, an upsurge in overtly contentious acts aimed squarely at the government has dramatically illustrated that some journalists, at least, reject the old model of a docile communist press. These changes strongly suggest the need for new models of the Chinese news media that disaggregate the system and illuminate the changes taking place in an understudied corner of an increasingly important nation.
These changes also immediately suggest a swarm of critical questions: Why are some Chinese newspapers far bolder in their political coverage than others, despite a superficially uniform press environment? What is the relationship – if any – between market pressures and assertive news coverage? What strategies do journalists and news outlets use to expand the political space available for news coverage or press claims upon the state? Why do reporters privilege one strategy over another? Similarly, what drives some journalists from “contained” or “boundary-spanning” to “transgressive” contention?[6] What is the impact of increasingly globalized norms about state and media behavior in China? And how is the internet changing the answers to these and other important questions? Finally, these changes suggest proposal A,[7] which helps frame most of this project’s key issues:
Proposal A: Despite the (usually unexamined) conventional social science wisdom that the Chinese media are simply an arm of the party/state, I propose that media outlets and individual journalists can be, and often are, independent actors. This independence takes two forms:
- The media can be contentious actors in their own right, both overtly and otherwise. This does not mean that the media are always – or even often – contentious actors, but merely that they are have the potential to do so.
- And perhaps more intriguingly, the media – whether consciously or not – (potentially) systematically skew or bias communications between state and society to fit their own agenda.
Because Western scholars have thus far largely – though not entirely – ignored the Chinese media, these questions have many potential answers but few available clues on where to look. Those relatively few formal studies on the media that do exist tend to be written by journalists[8] rather than social scientists,[9] making them often more descriptive than analytical. While there is a good deal of work, especially among scholars of contentious politics that touches on news media issues incrementally, there are few studies that tackle the media head-on. This gap has begun to be addressed recently, especially with legal scholar Benjamin Liebman’s prominent piece on the media and courts, and political scientist Ashley Esarey’s work on media control.[10] But even with these recent additions, such work remains sparse. Given the immense importance of the media to modern politics, this lacuna is surprising – especially given that scholarship on the Chinese media ties into so many important aspects of political science. From elite politics and policy analysis (“the media … have greatly affected CCP decision-making”[11]) to studies of collective action among the peasantry (“even publication of a single letter or report detailing a case … can instantly nationalize and legitimize a focus for popular action”[12]), the media play a crucial, but still poorly understood, role.
This study aims to narrow this gap. In examining how market pressures have affected the Chinese newspaper business, this study will contribute to some of the most important questions of political economy, including current debates about the relationship between markets and democracy. The explorations of power and control inherent to this approach lie at the heart of political science and administrative theory.[13] And an investigation of reporters’ attempts to resist state control has instant relevance for the literature on contentious politics and social movements. Finally, by delving into the changes caused by increased information flows and the new electronic media, this study should shed further light on larger questions of globalization and the international impact of technological and norm diffusion. And this norm analysis itself has two potential components that need disaggregation, since both state and media actors are receiving international signals on how to interact with one another and with society more generally. In short, an examination of how the Chinese media react to an increasingly harsh state control regime provides a perfect – and neglected – empirical vehicle to delve into many of social science’s most important issues and debates.
II. The Chinese Media in Historical Perspective
(A)Background
From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has practiced extensive control over media and news content, viewing control over information flow as a key factor in shaping desired societal outcomes.[14] Before Deng Xiaoping initiated the reform era in 1978, all media outlets were controlled by the state, the numbers of media sources were tightly regulated, and such outlets as newspapers were restricted not only in content but even overall length and format.[15] Furthermore, during the Mao era all news providers were funded entirely by the state, either through direct subsidies or though a policy of forced subscriptions that kept circulation numbers artificially high. All told, these mechanisms helped the Maoist Chinese government achieve during “normal” times[16] “a technologically-conditioned, near complete monopoly of control … of all means of effective mass communication,” a hallmark of totalistic autocracies and an extremely effective way to control internal dissent.[17]
Many aspects of this relationship began to change with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Beijing allowed increasing commercialization of the media and a proliferation in the number of media outlets and the types of acceptable content. For example, the number of newspapers alone has risen from 140 in 1978[18] to over 1800 in 2004,[19] with the number of television stations, radio stations, satellite dishes, etc. also proportionally increasing, and this does not even take into account new electronic sources of news from commercial websites to private blogs to cell phone SMS information services.
The range of content has also greatly enlarged from a time when news providers were essentially limited to government pronouncements and entertainment options were restricted to “eight plays, eight songs, and three film clips.”[20] As the number and content of news access points has increased, so has their financial clout and monetary independence from the government. While under the Mao ere all journalism relied entirely on government money, today the Chinese news business is market-driven, with advertising revenue increasing from zero at the start of the reform era to US $3.5 billion today, with projected revenues of US $8 billion by 2010.[21] In other words, the vast majority of news outlets now have complete financial independence from the government.
(B)How Beijing (More or Less) Controls the Media
Despite the complete commercialization of most media outlets, the Chinese state has managed to avoid the overt “pushback” against the government that took place even in other late Leninist systems like the Gorbachev-era USSR.[22] Conventional political science wisdom from its earliest days has held that marketization and commercialization of an industry (or entire economy) means nearly automatic pluralization of control and a loss of the government’s hierarchical influence in favor of an emphasis on market signals. This teleology gained renewed currency with the rise of modernization theory in the early post-war period, with scholars predicting, in the vein of Marx, that societies that successfully “developed” through reliance on the market were destined for political liberalism.[23] And this viewpoint, albeit in a modified form, is hardly a forgotten relic within the discipline. “Until quite recently, conventional wisdom held that economic development, wherever it occurs, will lead inevitably – and fairly quickly – to democracy,” write Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs.[24] While China’s economic development over the past twenty-five years has gone some way toward dispelling the claim that democratization is a foregone[25] – or even desirable[26] – result, adherents remain.[27]
If conventional political science explanations fail to explain how Beijing can control a commercialized, self-financing media, a turn toward administrative theory helps provides an answer. Administrative theory has a long history engaging with questions of organizational control,[28] and is better able to provide more answers along these lines than mainstream political science. The administrative theorist Amitai Etzioni categorizes methods of control (“compliance means”) into three categories, coercive, utilitarian[29] and ideational, and argues the latter is the most powerful.[30] To the extent that Communist ideology has lost traction since the reform era began – and no scholars of China think otherwise – the CCP is forced to rely more heavily on coercive and utilitarian compliance means to keep Chinese journalists in line, a problematic trend because “the use of coercive power … is more alienating to those subject to it than is the use of utilitarian power,” which in turn “is more alienating than the use of identitive power.”[31]
The decline of Maoism’s idealistic pull therefore automatically creates control problems in a country where no new identitive source of power has yet taken its place.[32] Indeed, a recent survey by a Chinese job site found that 80% of journalists want to change jobs, tired of work both “considered less desirable,” and “more risky and unstable” than other professions.[33] And “in the late 1980s, a series of surveys conducted by Chinese universities suggested that journalists started to downplay the mouthpiece role and saw their most important roles as (1) an information provider; (2) a check on political power; and (3) an entertainment provider,”[34] responses that suggest a fundamental attitude change in the way journalists view their jobs – and the state.
Although the incentive structure has changed, some media scholars argue, the CCP’s retention of coercive means of control explains the paradox of marketization without liberalization. Unlike the former Soviet Union, the Chinese press has never extensively used pre-publication censorship as its primary media control. Instead, the CCP rightly expects most articles to toe the Party line, and those occasional publications that go too far are subject to post facto suppression and the responsible journalists punished. Frank Smyth of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a Washington-based NGO and think tank, illustrates a typical view among Western journalists and academics: “In decades past, Chinese authorities reliedon censorship[35] and legal action as the main tools to silence the press, but in today's dynamic climate, the Communist Party has increasingly resorted to jailing journalists in order to silence some of the nation's most enterprising reporters.”[36] Zhou He writes that “coercion – in such forms as imprisonment, exile, purge and unemployment – has become the main means of safeguarding the supremacy of the Chinese version of Communist ideology. This is particularly true in the media.”[37]
But this is only part of the story. It is true that Reporters sans Frontières, a French-based NGO, claims that China has more journalists imprisoned than any other country, and ranks 159th out of 167 rated countries on press freedom.[38] But at the same time, the jailing of thirty-two journalists[39] in a country of 1.3 billion people represents a vanishingly small percentage of all reporters. Ultimately it is not the limited coercion itself that makes such an impact, but instead the central government’s massive and deliberate obfuscation of the boundaries of acceptable media discourse that is so effective in controlling most reporters’ behavior. Organization theorist Michel Crozier writes: “The power of A over B depends on A’s ability to predict B’s behavior and on the uncertainty of B about A’s behavior.”[40] In an environment where the Central Propaganda Department (CPD),[41] the state agency in charge of most media regulation, is able to create this uncertainty in reporters, these reporters are often more conservative in reporting stories than they might otherwise have been.[42] By demarcating the boundaries of the acceptable in a deliberately fuzzy way, the CPD effectively narrows most Chinese journalists’ perceptions of their political space.
Specifically, without pre-publication censorship it is often impossible for reporters to know ahead of time what will be an acceptable story. It is true that the CPD sends out a daily, specific briefing outlining which current topics are unacceptable, and some topics are so clearly off-limits[43] that the media know better than to attempt them. But without clear guidelines on every single topic or story, and with subtly shifting political winds, even long-time journalists can often get in trouble for stories they and their editors thought were acceptable or that had passed unnoticed in the past. “It’s something we are all aware of, we sense it, but we can’t really express it,” one veteran reporter says about which topics are acceptable day-to-day,[44] though this ad hoc approach naturally fails at times. Because the CPD uses its agenda-setting power to change its standards about acceptable topics so often, a story praised yesterday or last week might get a reporter into trouble the next time it is published.
One long-time editor, himself fired for publishing a politically unacceptable story, agrees that not only is the government vague in its instructions and capricious (but often harsh) in enforcement, but also this strategy is almost certainly deliberate. Indeed, he claims one central official is supposed to have stated that a central media law should be explicitly rejected, “because then they would know everything,” and reporters’ uncertainty would be dramatically reduced.[45] One of the major scholars of the Chinese media – writing about much freer Hong Kong – writes
“Self-censorship, given its huge social cost, is used as a preventative defense [by journalists]. The external pressure can be real, imagined, or both. Real pressure is exerted behind the scenes, if possible, to avoid public criticism. Imagined pressure can sometimes be more intimidating because the consequences of failing to succumb to it are ambiguous. Self-censorship is directly related to the ‘imagined boundaries’ of how tolerant China will be and what it will do in the way of reward and punishment.”[46]
It is clear that the CPD – and journalists themselves – recognize the power of uncertainty, coupled with judicious use of harsh coercion, to produce a solid regime of self-censorship, and this regime is the government’s most effective weapon in its struggle to control a marketized media.[47]
III. How Do Journalists Push Back?
- Pushing the Limits of Acceptable Reporting (Boundary-Spanning Contention)
There is a potential problem for the Chinese government, however. A control regime that relies on muddying the limits of the acceptable runs the risk that journalists – especially the canniest or best protected ones – will take advantage of opportunities to deliberately push the margins of acceptable discourse in a way that they cannot quite be pinned down for punishment. And this is indeed one of the most common forms taken by that journalistic pushback against the government, and more or less falls into O’Brien’s definition of “boundary-spanning contention” that “(1) operates near the boundary of authorized channels, (2) employs the rhetoric and commitments of the powerful,[48] and (3) hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within officialdom,” though Chinese journalists’ fulfillment of requirement (3) is still somewhat speculative.[49]
This general strategy of producing reports on the edge of acceptability is the least risky – and most common – general strategy most reporters take when (and if) they behave as political actors in their own right. Boundary-spanning contention, however, has several common sub-strategies, themselves with varying degrees of visibility and risk. In practice, two sub-strategies are easily identifiable: 1) cloaking bold articles in drab cloth, or 2) simply publishing daring articles with no cover at all. Naturally the second strategy is somewhat riskier than the first.
The idea of hiding challenges to the dominant Chinese regime is not new, for the use of historical allusion to score contemporary political points is a very old technique indeed in Chinese culture.[50] As late as the mid 1970s a mass campaign concentrated on criticizing Confucius, though the actual target was Premier Zhou Enlai, then seen by some CCP members as an anti-Cultural Revolution rightist.[51] And this ancient pastime is not dead; in late 2005the influential Freezing Point [冰点周刊] supplemental magazine “published an essay describing the ‘White Terror’ of authoritarian rule in Taiwan during the 1950s and democratic Taiwan's efforts to cope with that history of political repression. The contrast with events in mainland China was obvious but unstated.”[52] Besides historical allusion, journalists will sometimes criticize officials in other provinces or countries in an effort to make unstated parallels to the situation at home,[53] or even hide political news in other sections of the paper.[54]