Chin-Chuan Lee

‘Chinese Party Publicity Inc.’ conglomerated: the case of the Shenzhen Press Group

The Chinese press, instead of acting purely as a state propaganda instrument, now functions as ‘Party Publicity Inc.’ – that is, a quasi-business that seeks to make huge profits on the one hand and to legitimate the Party mandate by promoting its image on the other. The accelerated pace of media conglomeration following Chinas accession to the World Trade Organization has sharpened this trend. This study examines the impact of press ecology in Shenzhen, a national trend-setter for ‘Party Publicity Inc.’, before and after conglomeration. We observe that press conglomeration has (a) engendered a more centralized management structure and operation; (b) replaced duopolistic competition with market monopoly and greater price-fixing abilities; (c) continued to rely on state office subscription; (d) dampened journalists’ enthusiasm for political reform in favor of economic interest; (e) developed a two-tier Publicity Inc. to serve both the Party and the market; and (f) provided an opportunity for overseas expansion. Marketization does not trigger political reform, but pre-empts pressure for political change. The Party Publicity Inc. in its conglomerate form represents a complicitous accommodation between power and money engineered by a post-Communist bureaucratic-authoritarian regime.

Party-Market Corporatism, Clientelism, and Media in Shanghai:

In seeking to explain why Shanghai, Chinas economic capital, has a more timid media system than its sibling cities, we examine the political economy of the Shanghai media from the perspective of clientelism in the post-Communist and cultural milieus of what we call “party-market corporatism.” Through field work we analyze four aspects of clientelism, including media conglomeration, elite circulation, resource allocation, and (lack of) media professionalism.We conclude that Shanghai is at once a “big city” and yet a “small place:” a resource-rich city governed by one layer of power authority, hence the distance from the epicenter of power to various media organizations is so short and direct as to make media control through clientelism very effective and powerful. Clientelism represents one of the three major patterns of party-market corporatism in Chinas media sector.

One Event, Three Stories Media Narratives of the Handover of Hong Kong in Cultural China

This article analyzes how the media from the Peoples Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong constructed their respective narratives about the handover of Hong Kong - based on their institutional configurations, the relevance of the story to their home constituencies, their conventions of news-making and the cultural repertoire on which they drew to make the event intelligible. Domesticating a global media event reflects and reproduces each society as a discursive community; in a defining moment like this, the media bind each society through their shared ways of interpretations and expression.

Press Self-Censorship and Political Transition in Hong Kong

Hong Kongs handover has induced self-censorship among the press in order to curry favor with and avoid coercive pressure from China. Based on a comprehensive survey, this article shows that many journalists perceive their colleagues as being afraid to criticize China but think of themselves as being more courageous. Journalists from the party press are systematically different from those from the market-oriented press. However, market-driven “information newspapers” are moving toward apoliticization and toward accommodating the new sovereign, thus blurring their differences with market-driven “story newspapers.”

Symbolic Use of Decisive Events: Tiananmen as a News Icon in the editorials of the elite U.S. press

The Tiananmen crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989 was a decisive event that has provided an enduring prism for the world media to interpret China. This article examines how two of the most preeminent U.S. newspapers—New York Times and Washington Post—editorially invoked Tiananmen as a “news icon” in the past twenty years. We contend that the meanings of Tiananmen were reconstructed over twenty years partly but not completely in line with the changes in the United States’ policy toward China. Specifically, Tiananmen symbolized Communist dictatorship in the initial years after 1989 and then became an example of China’s human rights abuse in the late 1990s. Into the 2000s, the significance of Tiananmen faded away. But it remained as part of United States’ ritualistic memory of China’s repression that invokes the moral bottom line of U.S. foreign policy. In theoretical terms, this study shows how a news icon, in the course of an extended life cycle, may exhibit both continuities and changes in its meanings, and there can also be subtle variations in the relationships between a news icon and the dominant power structure over time.

Media Discourse on Globalization in China: A Social–Psychological Analysis

China’s economic liberalization reforms and quest for global status have raised concerns over ideological inconsistencies (the adoption of market economy is discrepant from China’s avowed belief in socialism) and image problems (the world that China wants to embrace perceives her as a menace). Official media discourse makes frequent reference to globalization and uses it to manage the inconsistencies and to bolster China’s global image. These discursive functions, though related to media discourse’s meaning-making functions, are sufficiently distinct from the latter to merit their own analysis. This article provides a theoretical discussion of the functions derived from social—psychological research on inconsistency justification and intergroup relations, with illustrative examples from relevant articles published in the People’s Daily between 1996 and 2006.

Beyond Orientalist Discourses: Media and Democracy in Asia

Abstract This editorial introduction provides a framework for the later articles. It is concerned to address critically a number of the ways in which the issue of media and democracy in Asia is currently discussed. The sheer variety of the experience of Asia is emphasised, and explanations that seek to account for the past and present shortcomings of democratisation in some Asian countries in terms of general categories are found to be wanting. For example, the use of idea of the influence Confucianism to explain important social phenomena is shown to be insensitive the complexity of the ideas that are lumped together under the single term “Confucianism” and to the evidence both of differences in media behaviour observable in societies undoubtedly influenced by it and to similarities across countries with different backgrounds. The introduction goes on to consider some of the problems about the relationship between state, media, market, globalization and democracy that remain to be explored in detail. It is pointed out that none of these categories is self-evident, and that one and the same phenomenon can have a different meaning in different social circumstances.

Remembering Tiananmen and the Berlin Wall: the elite U.S. press’s anniversary journalism, 1990–2009

This article examines how the New York Times and the Washington Post have in the past two decades presented discourses of anniversary journalism to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both of which occurred in 1989 and had global implications. These two events ideologically signified the failure of Communism and the victory of the West. However, they posed different challenges to the U.S.-orchestrated “new world order.” Insofar as the Tiananmen crackdown was remembered as an “unfinished revolution” and fell within the “sphere of legitimated controversy,” the elite U.S. press had greater leeway in presenting the views of elite factions, albeit all within the orbit of “established pluralism.” In contrast, since European integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall was an issue of broad elite consensus, the press constructed its perspectives more closely aligned with those of official foreign policy. Anniversary journalism connects personal reminiscences of distinguished journalists to the dominant narratives. The ideological structure of the elite U.S. press has been highly stable, even though the narratives may appear to shift periodically. The legacy of the anti-Communist frame remains an important constituent of the elite U.S. press’s prisms for viewing and interpreting the post-Communist world.

American pragmatism and Chinese modernization: importing the Missouri model of journalism education to modern China

Journalism education was anAmerican invention, oriented from the beginning toward the training of vocational skills. Older European and elite US universities had rejected journalism education for a perceived lack of a specialized body of expert knowledge. Harvard, for example, turned down an endowment from Joseph Pulitzer for establishing a journalism school; the money was accepted reluctantly by Columbia to launch the now-renowned Journalism School in 1912. Boorstin (1978) argues that applied vocational fields (notably, agricultural colleges) gained their academic legitimacy mostly in Midwestern land-grant state universities, where one of the proclaimed missions was community service, which was regarded as being as important as teaching abstract knowledge. The development of journalism education might have paralleled the legitimization process of applied fields in American universities. Missouri founded the world’s first journalism school in 1908, and by the 1930s journalism education was firmly established in major Midwestern land-grant universities. Part of the impetus came from strong lobbying efforts of state press associations and publishers who saw a university journalism curriculum as a way to enhance the occupational prestige of the trade (Carey, 2000). Even though many countries came to adopt American journalism education, it has continued to be met with suspicion. None of the Ivy League institutions in the United States has joined Columbia to offer a degree in practical journalism. What’s most intriguing is that US-style journalism education

Partisan Press Coverage of Government News in Hong Kong

t Hong Kong has no grass-roots democracy. It is a n “administrative state,” with the machinery of government effectively built on the traditional colonial administration.’ Along with its economic noninterventionism, the bureaucratic polity is careful not to intrude upon the social domain of Chinese life.* Content with setting the rules of the game, the polity often has t o walk a fine line, perform a delicate balancing act, play one element against the other to gain some room for maneuver, and respond to change in a highly paternalistic and defensive way. Thus, sympathizers of mainland China and Taiwan are permitted to organize trade unions, publish partisan newspapers, distribute propaganda within the confines of the law and the legitimacy of British rule. Although the Hong Kong government cannot be voted out of office, it has t o maximize popular consent of its policy or, a t a minimum. find a compromise that gives least offense. The government is therefore painfully attentive to public opinion, claiming that it may not be a