Yuezhi Zhao

Dances with wolves? China’s integration into digital capitalism

Wonders whether, owing to severely restricted access, China’s government policy towards digital communications will remain in a constant state of flux – or will it gain economic benefits without a social penalty? Concludes that China has to link the forces of change to channel and deflect domestic resistance.

Transnational Capital, the Chinese State, and China’s Communication Industries in a Fractured Society

Abstract China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation has significantly accelerated the countrys integration with global capitalism through its bureaucratically-controlled and market-driven communication industries. The specific terms and conditions of this integration has meant that a newly reconstituted power bloc — consisting of the bureaucratic capitalists of a reformed Party state, transnational corporate capital, and an emerging urban middle class, whose members are the favoured consumers of both domestic and transnational capital — has assumed hegemonic dominance of the communicative processes both in and out of China. At the same time, this process has been highly contentious, and continues to be mediated by both nationalistic and leftist ideolo/gical legacies of the Chinese state and emerging forms of social and cultural contestation. This paper examines this integration from a transnational and transcultural political economic perspective. It begins with a critique of the Chinese nationalist and democracy frameworks in analyzing this integration, and then moves on to analyze the structural and ideological dimensions of Chinas semi-integrated communication industries and markets and identify new patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the distribution of communicative power. At the centre of this analysis lie tensions between national and class interests; betvveen the imperatives of capital accumulation and the communication needs of an increasingly fractured society; and, betvveen horizontal and vertical communication among different social groups in a globalising context.

Caught in the Web: the public interest and the battle for control of China’s information superhighway

Analyses the evolution of China’s telephone and cable systems, in terms of the public interest, discussing current bureaucratic conflicts and policy debates over convergence, and construction of an independent broadband cable network. Looks in depth at China’s problems and the different problems for its citizens with regard to poverty levels and access to the Web.

The Struggle for Socialism in China: The Bo Xilai Saga and Beyond

From Tahrir Square to Wall Street, from Athens to Montreal, dreams of emancipation are mobilizing a new wave of revolts all over the world. Simultaneously the forces of repression are being unleashed everywhere to impose “new mechanisms of social control” with the aim of establishing “new conditions for achieving surplus value” in the aftermath of a protracted capitalist economic crisis.1 Some anticipated a Chinese popular uprising following the Arab Spring. Instead, since spring 2012 the world has seen a sensational drama of elite struggle surrounding the ousting of the Chongqing head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Politburo member Bo Xilai, including a crackdown on his Chongqing Model of development. Even though the CCP has been able to contain large-scale social unrest, divisions amongst the elite became a focal point of political struggle during this dangerous year of power transition in China. [T] This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

MEDIA AND ELUSIVE DEMOCRACY IN CHINA

Abstract This paper delineates the multiple meanings of democracy and offers a social historical analysis on media and democratisation in China. Notwithstanding conventional perceptions about a disjuncture between economic liberalisation and political repression in China, the suppression of popular quests for political participation and the deprivation of media freedom for a majority of the Chinese population preceded waves of capitalistic developments in post-Mao China. The notion of democracy, meanwhile, has undergone significant transformations. Many activists in the late 1970s advocated popular and participatory democracy. By 1989, democracy had taken an elitist and liberal character among its advocates. Since the mid-1990s, Chinese discourses on democracy have assumed more complicated dimensions with accelerated capitalist developments, deepened social stratification, and the replacement of students and intellectuals by disenfranchised workers, peasants, and Falun Gong practitioners as the main forces of social contestation. Many regime protesters no longer appeal to the liberal democratic discourse. Some reformers, meanwhile, embrace liberal democracy as a means of popular containment. Today, China’s state-controlled and commercialised media are deeply embedded in the established market authoritarian social order. While the Party makes every effort to prevent horizontal communication between disenfranchised groups and established intellectuals confine their debates to elite journals and cyberspaces, the role of Chinese workers and peasants and their voices remain a key problematic for media and democratisation in China.

“Universal service” and China's telecommunications miracle: discourses, practices, and post‐WTO accession challenges

Purpose – To examine “universal service” as a policy objective in post‐WTO accession Chinese telecommunications and analyze the challenges of the Chinese telecommunications system in defining and promoting public service ethos in a country that is marked by staggering disparities.Design/methodology/approach – A range of media, academic, industry, and policy discourses on “universal service” and a broader notion of “public service,” together with recent government efforts in promoting “universal service,” are examined and assessed to develop an analysis of the uneven nature of Chinas telecommunications development and reveal the dynamics of “universal service” policy formation, as well as the impetuses and impediments in developing any notion of public service telecommunications in China.Findings – Public service issues in China need to be situated within a continuing process of uneven development which comprises dimensions other than residential telephone access. Although the ultimate policy goal appears...

China’s Quest for “Soft Power”: Imperatives, Impediments and Irreconcilable Tensions?

Abstract From establishing Confucius Institutes all over the world to mounting an advertising blitz in New York’s Times Square, the Chinese state’s multifaceted endeavour to strengthen its “soft power” has been highly visible and the subject of much recent political, journalistic, and scholarly attention. This paper locates the Chinese state’s “soft power” quest within historical and geopolitical contexts and explores the profound contradictions in its underpinning political economy and cultural politics. While this campaign’s state, industry, professional and moral imperatives appear self-evident and there are converging elite and popular interests in the project, its structural impediments seem to be insurmountable. Furthermore, there are irreconcilable tensions between a drive to pursue an elitist, technocratic, and cultural essentialist approach to global communication and a capacity to articulate and communicate an alternative global political and social vision that appeals to the vast majority of the world population in a deeply divided and crises-laden domestic and global order.

Journalistic objectivity and social change

Despite constant critique, objectivity remains part of the defining ethos of North American journalism. Within the dominant model of commercial journalism and concentrated corporate media power, journalistic objectivity is viewed as essential to democratic self‐government; the news media provide factual and impartial information to allow citizens to make independent and rational decisions. The current crisis of liberal democracy, however, calls into question the adequacy of news objectivity as a model for democratic communication. Rather than serving as a cornerstone for democracy, objectivity has in many respects contributed to its current crisis. It sometimes unwittingly serves to reinforce undemocratic or destructive power relations and to promote questionable values that instead should be subjected to close scrutiny. It has important “conservatizing” implications, and impedes progressive social change.

Chinese modernity, media and democracy

Lu Xinyu was my most obvious choice as a Chinese scholar I would like to have a dialogue with ever since the founding of Global Media and Communication, when a decision was made to have interviews with scholars outside the West. Yet, emblematic of the Western-centric problem that this journal endeavours to overcome, I realize I cannot assume that her work is already known to most of the readers of this journal. Despite the proliferation of media studies on regions outside the West in the English language literature, it remains that, while Western scholars theorize about the ‘world’ and speak of ‘universal’ categories such as ‘globalization’, nonWestern scholars continue to be seen as providing ‘local’ knowledge. Similarly, while there are Western translations of non-Western classics, it remains a norm that contemporary scholars in the West write books and scholars from outside the West, often students of these Western scholars, translate these books into their respective native languages. I cannot also help noticing that most of the Western scholars we have interviewed so far do not hail from communication as their academic disciplinary home. To be sure, things are slowly changing. Contemporary intellectual flows, like global media flows, are no longer strictly one way. Trickles of nonWestern modern intellectual thoughts are flowing in from the nonWestern world. A number of mainland Chinese scholar Wang Hui’s essays on contemporary Chinese politics and culture, for example, have been translated into English. Lu Xinyu, however, became my first choice not just because she is a Chinese communication professor who won a scholarly achievement award for one of her books and is the chair of the Radio and Television Department at Fudan University’s School of Journalism, one of China’s leading communication programmes, but also, most importantly, she is a Chinese communication scholar whose work has a reach beyond field specialists both in the West and inside China. INTERVIEW

The "end of ideology" again? The concept of ideology in the era of post-modern theory

If one specific consequence of (Michel Foucault)s thought is the claim that the concept of ideology is inadequate as an analytical tool, and if post - structuralism and post - Marxism purport to make the concept meaningless and without theoretical foundations, then post - modernisms reformulation of the relations among rationality, interests, and power along neo - Nietzschean lines threatens to render the whole concept of ideology redundant ((Terry Eagleton), 1991: xii). Such a reformulation is not specific to a particular school of thought. It is an impulse widely shared by many theorists in the theoretical development of post - modernism. Marxist theories of ideology are deeply grounded in the Enlightenment tradition, with a belief in reason, rationality, and the possibility of objective knowledge. In the wake of the post - modernist rejection of the Enlightenment tradition and related concepts of rationality and truth, however, the distinction between knowledge and ideology becomes problematic. Since we can only know the world through language and discourse, and as Foucault has suggested, discourse is always power - laden, we end up with a dark Nietzschean vision: all thoughts are ideological because they are all expressions and rationalizations of particular interests. Ideology, then, becomes pervasive and all - encompassing. But if every discourse is ideological in the sense that it is always power - laden, and if ideology explains everything, then it explains nothing. The concept is expanded to the point of meaninglessness. It is redundant and without any sense of critical specificity. The logical conclusion, then, is that one might be better off to simply write off the concept altogether. And this is indeed what some post - modernists have proposed. Richard Rorty, for example, suggests that we follow Foucaults suspension of ideology and focus on detailed historical narratives of the operation of power. After enjoying a period of resurgence in critical social theory in the 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of ideology has been increasingly contested by critics variously associated with post - structuralism, post - modernism, and post - Marxism. These critics