Fen Lin

Information differentiation, commercialization and legal reform: The rise of a three-dimensional state-media regime in China

Scholars have recognized the importance of commercial news media in disseminating diversified information to challenge state censorship. However, these observations fail to explain adequately how and why the authoritarian regime in China is able to strengthen its capacity to control information even after information flourished dramatically since the 1990s. From a state perspective, I argue that besides disseminating information, commercialization also differentiates informational and state–media conflict, which transforms the previous single-dimensional state–media regime into a three-dimensional one. During this process, the development of the court system and the labor market have played a significant role in shaping state–media dynamics and offer the state the structural resilience to survive these information challenges. The implications of the new state–media regime are further discussed.

Social Movements as a Dialogic Process: Framing, Background Expectancies, and the Dynamics of the Anti-CNN Movement

Abstract: In 2008, CNN’s reports on the Lhasa Riots angered Chinese students and triggered the large-scale Anti-CNN Movement. By examining posts on the movement’s website, 310 news articles, and eighteen in-depth interviews, this study identifies the prevailing mentalities of the episode’s primary actors–the U.S. media, students, and the Chinese media, and analyzes how their mentalities shaped their framing strategies and their interpretations of others’ frames. We call for a shift of focus from the traditional media frame and movement frame to a perspective that sees the dynamics of media-related social movements as a dialogical process bounded by actors’ background expectancies.

The Impact of Accompanying Text on Visual Processing and Hedonic Evaluation of Art

This study explores how accompanying text affects the way an individual views and interprets a painting. We randomly assigned participants to view 20 paintings from the classical era with factual information, contextualized background information, or no information displayed next to them. We then recorded their visual gaze using an eye-tracking device and asked them to evaluate the paintings. The results show that how people view a painting and how they evaluate a painting are two distinct cognitive processes. The contextual information serves to orient the viewing process. The accompanying text influences the visual attention and gaze pattern but has limited impact on the hedonic evaluation of paintings. Instead, hedonic evaluation is more of a taste acquired through education and socialization. This study offers an empirical footnote to discussions on the cognitive assumptions in sociological studies of art and cultural phenomena.

The Losing Media? An Empirical Study of Defamation Litigation in China

Following a well-established research tradition on court decisions, this study analyses 524 defamation cases in China from 1993 to 2013, explores the medias success possibilities, and investigates the role of party capacity, political influence and the medium effect. Contrary to the existing assertions, we find that the media are not necessarily losing. On average, from 1993 to 2013, the success rate of news media in Chinese defamation courts was 42 per cent, and this rate has been increasing since 2005. We also find that government officials and Party organs had consistent advantages in court, while ordinary plaintiffs, magazines and websites had less success. The medium of the media (i.e. print, broadcast, internet) makes a difference, as do the government policies governing the media. In addition, local protectionism exists, but it is less rampant than expected. These findings compel us to rethink the dynamics among the media, the courts and the state, and their implications on Chinas institutional resilience.

Income Inequality in the People's Republic of China and Its Decomposition: 1990-2004

This paper estimates income inequality in the People’s Republic of China at the national, regional, and provincial levels using extrapolated unit-level household income data covering urban and rural populations of 23 provinces during 1990–2004. The estimates indicate that income inequality increased significantly during the last two decades, but the extent of the increases was lower than reported in most sources by about 20 percent when regional differences in cost of living are adjusted. The major sources of the increases in inequality were found to be within urban inequality and between urban and rural inequality, with their contribution increasing, respectively, from 15.7 and 12.0 percent in 1990, to 34.0 and 30.4 percent in 2004. The betweenregion and between-province inequality only accounted for 3.8 and 11.2 percent, respectively, in 2004.