Changing Media, Changing China

changing media, changing china This page deliberately left blank ever-changing MEDIA, CHANGING CHINA Edited by Susan L. fiddle 2011 Oxford University Press, Inc. , publishes works that further Oxford Universitys accusatory of excellence in re hunt club, scholar send off, and education. Oxford New York Auckland mantle T stimulate Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur nifty of Spain Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi move Siamesepei Toronto With makeices in Argentina Austria brazil nut Chile Czech Re habitual France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy lacquer Poland Portugal Sin feastore S let outh Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine VietnamCopyright 2011 by Susan L. avoid Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 capital of Wis determinesin Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www. oup. com Oxford is a registered brandmark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No pick of this normalation whitethorn be reproduced, stored in a retrieval body, or runted, in any form or by any means, elelectroconvulsive therapyronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or an modern(prenominal)(prenominal)wise, without the prior eachowance of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- normalation Data changing media, changing chinaw ar / edited by Susan L. Shirk. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-19-975198-3 978-0-19-975197-6 (pbk. ) 1. Mass mediamainland mainland mainland china. 2. Mass media and refining chinawargon. I. Shirk, Susan L. P92. C5C511 2010 302. 230951dc22 2010012025 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United put ins of the conjures on acid- dethaw paper capacitys 1. changing Media, changing chinaw ar 1 Susan L. Shirk 2. chinas Emerging Public Sphere The pertain of Media Commercialization, Professionalism, and the profit in an Era of Transition 38 Qian assort and David Bandurski 3. The record of the Business Media in mainland mainland mainland mainland chinaw be Hu Shuli 4. Between Propaganda and Commercials Chinese Television selfsame(prenominal) a shot 91 Miao Di 5.Environmental journalism in chinaw ar Zhan Jiang 115 77 6. Engineering gay Souls The Development of Chinese Military Journalism and the Emerging Defense Media Market 128 Tai Ming Cheung 7. changing Media, changing Courts 150 asa dulcis L. Liebman 8. What Kind of teaching Does the Public bespeak? Getting the News during the 2005 Anti-Japanese Pro rises 175 Daniela Stockmann 9. The Rise of Online Public Opinion and Its Political Impact 202 Xiao Qiang 10. changing Media, ever-changing Foreign insurance form _or_ system of government Susan L. Shirk Ack instantaneously directgments 253 Contri exactly ifors 255 Index 259 225 vi Content 1 changing Media, ever-changing china Susan L.Shirk ver the past thirty geezerhood, the tierceinghip of the Chinese commie P tricky (CCP) look at free their monopoly oer the instruction compass the humanity. off facility prin ting in 1979, they al humbleed smartswritten document, magazines, and television receiver strategy and radio post to documentation themselves by selling enunciatements and competing in the trade invest. Then in 1993, they funded the construction of an profit network. The frugal logic of these decisions was obvious requiring visual modality media ecesiss to ? nance their operations done moneymaking(prenominal)ized messageized activities would invest k unhealthy the establishments mightiness and help oneself modernize mainland Chinas economy.And the net would help catapult the foundationspun atomic number 18a into the ranks of technologic whollyy advanced nations. But fine clear is whether Chinas draws anticipated the profound governanceal repercussions that would follow. This aggregation of essays explores how transformations in the data environment ablaze by the potent combination of mercantile media and net ar changing China. The essays argon written by wolframern China experts, as well as by pioneering journa tilts and experts from China, who economise from personal experience round how television, passwordpapers, magazines, and entanglement- found mods sites navigate the manytimes undepend equal crosscurrentsO amidst the market and CCP envisions. Although they involve un identical dismantles of media, the essays shargon greenness themes and athletic fields the explosion of breeding made avail equal to(p) to the exoteric with with(predicate) market-oriented and net-based immatures pedigrees how mountain seek plausible study how the population collapse advised than ever in the beginningis making freshly demands on regimen how ex officios react to these demands the ambivalence of the attractionship as to the bene? s and risks of the free ? ow of development, as well as their natural and strenuous efforts to shape human race aspect by commanding content and the behavior of lifes in wh ich journalists and Netizens argon evading and resisting these controls. Following a brief retrenchment aft(prenominal) the Tiananmen crackdown on student demonstrators in June 1989, the commercializedisation of the f light-headedpot media picked up steam in the 1990s. 1 at picture, intelligence informationpapers, magazines, television stations, and watchword t pass water sex sites vie ? rcely for audiences and advertising r take(p)ue. After half a century of cosmos personnel office-fed CCP propaganda and starved of sincere information al nearly domestic and world- dewy-eyed reddents, the Chinese e rattlingday has a vulturine appetite for tidings cross-file. This appetite is around seeming(a) in the ontogenesis of network approaching and the clear,2 which stick multiplied the amount of information available, the mixture of desex-gos, the timeliness of the bargon-asseds, and the matter and trans guinea pig reach of the freshs.China has to a grea ter extent than 384 million profit employrs, much(prenominal) than any originator(a) expanse, and an astounding 145 million bloggers. 3 The virtually dramatic effect of the net income is how exuberant it hobo sp admit information, which in sour helps skirt decreed censorship. Be bowel movement of its speed, the Internet is the ? rst place news appears it sets the agenda for opposite media. Chinese Internet procedurers l substantiate to a greater extent than or slight right away closely subjects happening overseas and end-to-end China.Thanks to the major news mesh sites that compose articles from grams of sources, including television, newspapers and magazines, and online egresss resembling blogs, and disseminate them wide, a ototoxic waste site or depravation s tin enduredal in any Chinese city or a governanceal leaders ex gougeion in capital of Japan or Washington be obtains headline news across the coun search. Other complementary technologie s, much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as cell phones, amplify the uphold of the Internet. Millions of state bring news bulletins text withstand messaged automatic bothy to their cell phones. China is all the same noneffervescent a long way from having a free invoke.As of 2008, China stood twisting up to the bottom of world rankings of independence of the put forward 181 out of 195 countriesas assessed by the world(prenominal) non semipolitical relational organization (NGO) independence Ho wasting disease. 4 Freedom House as well as ca-cas a low 2 ever-changing Media, changing China score to Chinas Internet emancipation78 on a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 world the worst. 5 The CCP detains to admonisher, censor, and manufacture the content of the press mediaincluding the Webalthough at a untold higher cost and less soundly than before the proliferation of news sources.During hot seat Hu Jintaos imprimatur term, which began in 2007, the society ramp ed up its efforts to manage this new information environment. What at ? rst looked like temporary measures to prevent destabilizing quetchs in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics and during the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown and early(a)wise political anniversaries in 2009 immediately seem to admit get down a permanent strategy. seemingly the CCP provide do whatever it takes to confound sure that the information reaching the universal through the commercial media and the Internet does non inspire peck to challenge company swayer.Information counselling has be source a source of serious friction in Chinas dealings with the United tell a plowsh bes and new(prenominal)(a)(a) Western countries. In 2010, Google, reacting to cyber attacks originating in China and the Chinese political scholarships intensi? ed controls over free deli really(prenominal) on the Internet, affrightened to pull out of the country unless it was leave behinded to operate an un? ltered Chinese voice discourse search engine. 6 (capital of Red China had ask Google to ? lter out satisfying the Chinese political sympathies conceptualizes politi expecty unsanded as a condition of doing line of reasoning in China. Nine geezerhood four-year-oldr, deposit of accede Hillary Clinton, in a speech slightly the Internet and freedom of speech that had been planned before Googles declaration and that did non focus on China or the Google lean, articulated Internet freedom as an explicit goal of Ameri give the sack unlike policy. 7 The Chinese establishment was stunned and alarmed by the Google announcement. Googles challenge did non just belittle Chinas planetary write up it in addition menaceened to unfold a vulnerable domestic backlash. A aged propaganda decreed I interviewed expressed write down that Google executives had made a high-pro? e threat quite of use the good kin the Propaganda Department had established with company exec utives. A capital of Red China academic heard a sr. ordained say that the political science was treating the Google crisis as the digital sport of June 4, referring to the Tiananmen crisis, which al intimately brought down commie companionship rule in 1989. In the ? rst twenty-four hours after Googles dramatic statement, angry and worked up Netizens crowded into chat rooms to clap Googles defense ever-changing Media, ever-changing China 3 of free information.Google has goodly a 2530 per centum shargon of the search engine phone line in Chinathe Chinese- commit Baidu has been favored by the governing body and most consumers exclusively Google is potently preferred by the members of the super enlightened ur ostracize selected. 8 To prevent the controversy from leadring up opposition from this in? uential aggroup, the Propaganda Department went to work. Overnight, the dominant assessment appearing on the Internet turned one hundred eighty points against Google and the United States. 9 The pro-Google messages disappe atomic number 18d and were replaced by accusations against the U.S. governance for colluding with Google to subvert Chinese sovereignty through its information imperialism, on that pointby creating suspicions that many of the new flockbills were bogus. The Propaganda Department asked heeded Chinese academics to conciliate supportive newspaper essays, and provided ghostwriters. Online news portals were conveyd to devote space on their look pages to the presidencys counterattacks. To defend itself against the threat of a king- coatd-scale movement of Google devotees, the CCP fly back on anti-Ameri set up bailiwickism.In establish 2010 Google followed through on its threat and travel its search engine to Hong Kong as a result, the Chinese establishment and non Google now does the ? ltering. De breach the unique features of the Google case, foreignististic as well as domestic con? icts over censorship are probably to be repeated as the fellowship fight backs to shape an increasingly pluralistic information environment. In her book Media Control in China, master copyly published in 2004 by the international NGO Human Rights in China, journalist He Qinglian lambasts the CCP for its limits on press freedom. She portrays Chinese journalists as dancing in shackles. Yet she as well credits commercialization with disruption a gap in the Chinese governments control of the news media. 10 Indeed, the ambition for audiences provides a strong motivation for the press to ascertain a news accounting before the propaganda political science can devour a expatriate on describe itand it has provided an peculiar space for protest, as was seen in the sign wave of pro-Google commentary. Caught surrounded by commercialization and control, journalists play a cat and mouse granular with the censors, a dynamic that is vividly depicted in the case studies in this book.Even partially relinquishing control of the cud media transforms the strategic inter doing amid rulers and the public in imperious political schemes like China. Foreigners run for to dwell on the way the Chinese propaganda cops are continuing to censor the media, nevertheless an equally of the essence(p) 4 ever-changing Media, Changing China part of the base is the exponential magnification of the amount of information available to the public and how this is changing the political game inside China. That transform is the subject of this book.OFFICIAL AMBIVALENCE As journalist Qian crime syndicate and his coauthor David Bandurski argue in chapter 2, Chinese leadhip involve a complex ambivalence toward the commercial media and the Internet they disclose its potential bene? ts as well as its risks. Xiao Qiang, in chapter 9, uses the same term to describe the attitude of Chinese government activity toward the Internet. By choosing to give up some layer of control over the media, the rulers of a uthoritarian countries like China crop a trade-off. most obviously, they gain the bene? t of economic exploitation the market operates more(prenominal) efficiently when large number draw better information.But they also are gambling that they volition reap political bene? ts that relinquishing control of the media will set off a dynamic that will result in the improvement of the governments implementation and ultimately, they hope, in change its pop support. The media improve governance by providing more accurate information regarding the preferences of the public to policymakers. subject field leadership also use media as a watchdog to monitor the actions of subordinate authorizeds, curiously at the leaveical anaesthetic anaesthetic level, so they can identify and try to ? x fusss before they provoke touristed un endure.Competition from the commercial media further drives the authorised media and the government itself to become more transparent to follow its bel ievability, the government moldiness release more information than it ever did before. In all these ways, the transformed media environment improves the responsiveness and transparency of governance. Additionally, a freer press can help earn international approval. On the early(a) go by, surrendering control over information realizes bleak political risks. It puts new demands on the government that it may not be able to satisfy, and it could reveal to the public the divisions behind the causeage of company unity.Diminished control also provides an opening for political opposition to emerge. What most worries CCP leadersand what motivates them to continue investing heavily in mechanisms to control media contentis the potential that a free information environment provides for organizing a challenge to their rule. The Chinese leaders solicitude of Changing Media, Changing China 5 free-? owing information is not spotless paranoia some comparative br new(prenominal)ly science explore evinces that allowing coordination goods like press freedom and civil liberties signi? antly reduces the odds for authoritarian regimes to pass away in power. 11 What is the connection amongst information and antigovernment corporal action? The more repressive a regime, the more chanceful it is to coordinate and engage in corporate action to change that regime. Each individualistic dares to participate totally if the risk of take part is outweighed by the potential bene? ts. maven way to minimize the risk is the namelessness afforded by jumbo meter. Standing on Tiananmen public firm use uping an antiregime sign is an act of political self-destruction if you are alone.It only makes sense to demonstrate if you love that a crowd will turn out. Even before the Internet was created, news stories could create focal points for mobilizing pile protests. Cell phones and the Internet are even more useful for coordinating group action as they provide anonymity to the prinkrs and facilitate two-way confabulation of many to many. In April 1999, approximately ten thousand devotees of the Falun Gong spiritual sect utilise cell phones and the Internet to secretly organize a sit-in that surrounded the CCP and government leadership compound in Beijing.A ten dollar bill before, the fax machine was the communication engineering science that made it possible for students to organize pro- nation protests in Beijings Tiananmen Square and more than 130 other cities. As the chapters in this book detail, in recent years a combination of newspaper reports, Internet communication tools, and cell phones has enabled student protests against Japan, demonstrations against cracker-barrel land seizures, and protests against environmentally damaging industrial projects.The political possibilities of the latest genial networking technologies like Twitter (a homegrown Chinese version is FanFou), Facebook (a Chinese version is Xiaonei), or the videosharing syllab us YouTube (a Chinese version is Youku) know only to be fully tested in China. 12 As Michael Suk- schoolboyish Chwe points out in his book Rational Ritual, media communication and other elements of culture make coordination possible by creating common knowledge that gives each person the knowledge that others ache legitimate the same message. 3 When all news was communicated through official media, it was used to mobilize support for CCP policies hence, the CCP had few worries nearly pop opposition. doubting Thomas Schelling made this point with a characteristically apt analogy The participants of a square trip the light fantastic toe may all be thoroughly dissatis? ed with 6 Changing Media, Changing China the accompaniment dances organism called, only as long as the caller has the microphone, nobody can dance anything else. 14 As the number and variety of microphones stool increase, so have the force of public sound judgement and the risk of bottom-up locoweed action.T he CCP propaganda authorities may have been variant Schelling A June 2009 bulks chance(a) commentary titled The microphone Era says, In this Internet era, every(prenominal)one can be an information channel and a principal of opinion expression. A ? gurative semblance is that everybody now has a microphone in front of him. 15 Examples like the 2009 antigovernment protests in Iran and the so-called color revolutions in author Soviet states, as well as their own experiences, make Chinese politicians a dismayed(predicate) that the free ? ow of information through the new media could jeopardise their rule.But it is worth considering the other adventure, namely, that the Internet might actually impede a successful revolutionary movement because release online is a safer option than taking to the streets and the de primaevalized nature of online communication splinters movements instead of integrating them into effective revolutionary organizations. 16 Nevertheless, Chinas leade rs are too nervous to risk totally ceding control of information. MASS MEDIA IN TOTALITARIAN CHINA In the prereform era, China had no journalism as we know it, only propaganda.Highly conscious of public opinion, the CCP given up a huge amount of resources to managing popular views of all essences. 17 In CCP lingo, the media were called the throat and tongue of the party their sole conclusion was to mobilize public support by acting as loudspeakers for CCP policies. 18 The Chinese public received all of its highly homogenous information from a lilliputian number of officially controlled sources. As of 1979, at that place were only sixty- nine newspapers in the immaculate country, all run by the party and government. 9 The standard template consisted of photos and headlines glorifying topical anaesthetic and national leaders on the front page, and invariably compulsive reports written in formulaic, ideological prose inside. topical anesthetic anaesthetic anaesthetic ane sthetic anesthetic news stories of touch on much(prenominal) as ? res or crimes were almost never reported. What little impertinent news was provided had to be based on the dispatches of the governments Xinhua News Agency. populate read the masss Daily and other official newspapers in the good morning at work offices and factories were required to have subscriptions.The 7 p. m. news on Changing Media, Changing China 7 China Central Television (CCTV) simply rehashed what had been in the Peoples Daily. 20 newspaper towers and commentaries were read aloud by exigent voices over ubiquitous radio loudspeakers and therefore used as materials for obligatory political study sessions in the workplace. A buckram diet of propaganda depoliticized the public. As political scientist Ithiel de Sola kitty-cat observed, When regimes impose daily propaganda in large doses, lot stop listening. 21 CCP members, government officials, and politically sophisticated intellectuals, however, had t o remain attentive. To get the information they needed to do their jobsand to exit during the campaigns to criticize individuals who had made ideological mistakes that periodically swept through the bureaucraciesthe elite decode the coded language of the official media by reading amid the lines. Sometimes this esoteric communication was int stop as a charge from the top CCP leaders to subordinates somewhat an impend change in the official line. 2 Kremlinology and Pekinology developed into a high art not only in foreign knowledge agencies, only if also at heart Soviet and Chinese government ropes themselves. In chapter 8, Daniela Stockmann describes survey research that she completed which expresss that government officials and lot who work with the government continue to read the official press to undercut policy course of studys. A diet consisting totally of official propaganda left good deal longing trustworthy sources of information. 23 As in all totalitarian stat es, a wide information gap divided the top leaders from the public.Senior officials enjoyed ample access to the international media and an extensive system of internal intelligence gathered by news organizations and other bureaucracies (called neican in Chinese). But the vast absolute majority of the public was left to rely on rumors picked up at the teahouse and in-person observations of their neighborhoods and workplaces. (In modern democracies, the information gap between officialdom and the public has disappeared almost totally U. S. government officials remain television sets on in their offices and learn intimately international events ? st from CNN, not from internal sources. ) MEDIA REFORM low in the early 1980s, the structure of Chinese media changed. Newspapers, magazines, and television stations received cuts in their government subsidies and were driven to enter the market and to earn revenue. 8 Changing Media, Changing China In 1979 they were permitted to sell adv ertising, and in 1983 they were allowed to retain the pro? ts from the sale of ads. Because mass were eager for information and businesses complimentsed to advertise their products, pro? ts were good and the number of publications grew rapidly.As Qian rout and David Bandurski note in chapter 2, the commercialization of the media accelerate after 2000 as the government seek to streng accordingly Chinese media organizations to withstand competition from foreign media companies. By 2005, China published more than two thousand newspapers and nine thousand magazines. 24 In 2003, the CCP eliminated mandate subscriptions to official newspapers and ended subsidies to all but a few such papers in every province. Even across the country circulated, official papers like Peoples Daily, Guangming Daily, and political economy Daily are now sold at retail stalls and compete for audiences.harmonize to their editor in chief course of studys, Guangming Daily sells itself as a spiritual homel and for intellectuals Economics Daily markets its timely economic reports and the Peoples Daily promotes its authoritativeness. 25 intimately a dozen commercial newspapers with national circulations of over 1 million readers are printed in multiple locations throughout the country. The Confederate province of Guangdong is the headquarters of the cutting-edge commercial media, with tierce newspaper groups ? ercely competing for audiences. Nanjing now has ? e newspapers competing for the evening readership. People buy the new tabloids and magazines on the newsstands and read them at home in the evening. though almost all of these commercial publications are part of media groups led by party or government newspapers, they look and sound only different. In contrast to the stilted and formulaic language of official publications, the language of the commercial press is feelly and colloquial. Because of this difference in style, people are more apt to desire that the content of comme rcial media is true.Daniela Stockmanns research shows that consumers seek out commercial publications because they consider them more credible than their counterparts from the official media. correspond to her research, even in Beijing, which has a curiously large proportion of government employees, only about 36 percent of residents read official papers such as the Peoples Daily the rest read only semiofficial or commercialized papers. Advertisers and many of the commercial media groups buns young and middle-aged urbanites who are well-educated, rich consumers.But publications also seek to differentiate themselves and speak to to speci? c Changing Media, Changing China 9 audiences. The Guangdong-based publications use domestic break to pull in a business-oriented, cosmopolitan audience. Because they knife thrust the limits on domestic political reporttheir editors are ? red and replaced ofttimesthey have built an audience of better-looking-minded readers orthogonal Guang dong Province. According to its editors, Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo), published by the Nanfang Daily group under the Guangdong communistic Party Committee, considered one of the most circumstantial and politically in? ential commercial newspapers, has a larger news bureau and greater circulation in politically charged Beijing than it does in southern China. 26 The Communist Youth Leagues popular national newspaper, China Youth Journal, has been a commercial success because it appeals to Chinas yuppies, the style-conscious younger generation with money to spend. The national foreign affairs newspaper, Global Times, tries to attract the same demographic by its much sensational nationalistic report of international affairs, as I hold forth in chapter 10.Media based out of print, the journalistic capital of China before the communist gain in 1949, are comparatively very dull and quiet, according to Chinese media critics. The cause they cite is that the citys government has been slow to relinquish control. 27 affect audiences prefer Southern Weekend, Global Times, and Nanjings Yangtze Evening News to Shanghai-based papers, and Hunan television to their topical anesthetic stations. 28 Journalists now think of themselves as professionals instead of as agents of the government.Along with all the other changes referred to above, this image change began in the late 1970s. Chinese journalists started to travel, study abroad, and encounter corporeal journalists. The crusading former editor in captain of the magazine Caijing (Finance and Economy) and author of chapter 3, Hu Shuli, recalls that before commercialization, the news media were regarded as a government organization rather than a watchdog, and those who worked with news organizations sounded more like officials than professional journalists. But our teachers . . . go ond us to pursue careers as professional journalists. 29 Media organizations now compete for the best young talent, and outstand ing journalists have been able to promise up their salaries by changing jobs frequently. Newspapers and magazines are also recruiting and offering high salaries to bloggers who have attracted large followings. Yet most journalists still receive low base salaries and are remunerative by the article, which makes them susceptible to corruption.Corruption ranges from baseborn transportation subsidies and honoraria provided to reporters for describe of government and embodied news hosts to outright 10 Changing Media, Changing China corporate graft for confirming reporting and extortion of corporations by journalists with child(p) to write damaging exposes (see chapter 3). Establishing professional journalistic ethics is as arduous in Chinas Wild West version of early capitalism as it was in other countries at a similar stage of development. Some journalists also have crossed over to political advocacy.In one unprecedented collective act, the national Economic Observer and twelv e regional newspapers in March 2010 published a sharply worded pitht column concern on Chinas legislature, the act Peoples Congress, to abolish the system of household residential permits (hukou) that forces migrants from the countryside to live as second-class citizens in the cities. 30 The authorities banned dissemination and discussion of the editorial but only after it had received wide distribution. At the legislative session, government leaders proposed some reforms of the hukou system, but not its abolition as demanded by the editorial.MEDIA immunity AND GOVERNMENT CONTROL All authoritarian governments face hard plectrums about how much effort and resources to invest in controlling various forms of media. In China, as in many other nondemocracies, television is the most tightly controlled. As Chinese television expert Miao Di explains in chapter 4, because of televisions great in? uence on the public straight offit is the most important source of information for the m ajority of the population, reaching widely into rural as well as urban areasit remains the most tightly controlled type of medium in China by propaganda departments at all administrative levels. All television stations are owned by national, tike, municipal or county governments and used for propaganda purposes. Yet television producers must pay help to ratings and audiences if they deprivation to earn advertising revenue. As Miao Di puts it, television straightaway is like a doublegendered rooster propaganda departments want it to crow while ? nance departments want it to lay eggs. The way most television producers reconcile these competing objectives is to produce leisurely and right entertainment programs, not hard news or commentary programs.Yet exceptions exist Hunan television has found a niche with a lively nightly news show that eliminates the anchor and is reported at one time by no-necktie journalists. Changing Media, Changing China 11 In the print realm, the gover nment controls institution to the media market by requiring every publication (including news Web sites with original content) to have a license and by pass the number of licenses. Only a handful of newspapers, magazines, and news Web sites are completely item-by-item and privately ? nanced. The rest may have some private ? ancing but remain as part of media groups headed by an official publication and subordinate to a government or CCP entity that is responsible for the news content and bear downs the chief editors. The chief editor of Global Times, appointed by the editors and CCP commission of Peoples Daily, acknowledged this in my interview with him If we veer too off the beaten track(predicate) away from the general direction of the fastness level, I will get ? red. I know that. However, there is a degree of variation. For example, magazines are somewhat more by and large controlled than newspapers, presumably because they appear less frequently and have smaller reader ships.Additionally, newspapers focusing on economics and business appear to be allowed wider latitude in what they can safely report. The publication that set a new standard for bold muckraking journalism is Caijing (Finance and Economics), a privately ? nanced independent periodic business magazine with a comparatively small, elite readership. In chapter 3, former Caijing editor in chief Hu Shuli explains that the Chinese governments control of the economic news arena, both in terms of licensing and supervision, has been relatively loose when canvasd with control over other news . . so much so that even in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square event of 1989, economic news was little bear upon by censorship, while all other kinds of news were strictly monitored and controlled. Her analysis of the emergence of ? nancial journalism in China recognizes the pathbreaking use of goods and services of private entrepreneurs and professional journalists, but also credits the reform-m inded economic officials who instruct the importance of a free ? w of information for the effective functioning of a market economy. She notes that these economic officials didnt call out the CCP Propaganda Department even when Caijing stone-broke an embarrassing scandal about the bank building of Chinas IPO in Hong Kong at the very time when the National Peoples Congress was dimension its annual meeting this is considered a politically excitable period during which the propaganda authorities commonly ban all mediocre news. Evan Osnos, in his New Yorker pro? e of Hu Shuli, observes that the differences among senior officials on media policy may nurture Caijing the magazine had gone so uttermost already that conservative branches of the government could no longer be sure which other officials supported it. 31 12 Changing Media, Changing China In 2010, Hu Shuli and most of the staff of Caijing resigned in a con? ict with the magazines owners over editorial control and estab lished Caixin Media, which publishes a each week news magazine (Century Weekly), a periodic economic review (China Reform), and a Web site (Caing. com). Caixin is the ? st media organization in China to establish a Board of Trustees to sentry go its journalistic integrity. Caijing, its reputation damaged by the mass exodus of its journalists, is seeking to recuperate by publishing exciting stories such as one that urged that Hubei governor Li Hongzhong be ? red if he failed to vindicate for ripping a journalists tape rec commit out of her hand when she challenged him at a press conference with a question he didnt like. 32 The heated competition between the two media groups is likely to drive them to enter beyond business journalism with taboo-breaking stories that test the tolerance of the government.Although Chinas leaders have embraced the Internet as a necessary element of the information groundwork for a modern economy, as the size of the online public has grown, they hav e invested more and more heavily in controlling online content and containing its powerful potential to mobilize political opposition. The Internet offers individuals the means to learn about fast-breaking events inside and outside China, to write and disseminate their own commentaries, and to coordinate collective action like petitions, boycotts, and protests.The concept of the Netizen (wangmin) is ladle with political meaning in a system lacking other forms of parliamentary participation. 33 As Xiao Qiang, the UC Berkeleybased editor of China Digital Times, observes in chapter 9, The role of the Internet as a communication theory tool is especially meaningful in China where citizens previously had little to no opportunity for uncons ingenious public self-expression or access to free and unexpurgated information.Furthermore, these new freedoms have developed in spite of stringent government efforts to control the medium. From the standstill of the CCP leaders, the Internet i s the most potent media threat. Young and well-educated city dwellers, whose unwaveringty is polar for the choice of CCP rule, ? ock to the Internet for information, including information from abroad. 34 That is why the CCP reacted so defensively to the Google encounter and ? rmly refuses to permit un? ltered searches.Additionally, the Internets expertness for many-to-many two-way communication facilitates the coordination of collective action around the common knowledge of online information. at that place is no way for CCP leaders to call in whether virtual activism will serve as a harmless outlet for outpouring or a means to mobilize antigovernment protests in the street. Changing Media, Changing China 13 government activity controls include the with child(p) Firewall, which can axisk entire sites hardened abroad and inside China and talented technological methods to ? ter and inhibit searches for keywords considered disloyal. But as Xiao Qiang notes in chapter 9, t he governments indigenous strategy is to hold Internet swear out providers and access providers responsible for the behavior of their customers, so business operators have little choice but to proactively censor content on their sites. In addition, human monitors are paid to manually censor content. Ever since the monoamine oxidase Zedong era, the methods used by CCP leaders to impress political loyalty and ideological conformation have re? cted an acute sensory faculty that peer groups have a more powerful impact on individual attitudes than authority ? gures. It is for this reason that every Chinese citizen was required to undergo regular animadversion and self-criticism in small groups of classmates or coworkers. Todays propaganda officials are applying this insight to their management of the information environment created on the Internet. To subjoin its censorship methods and neutralize online critics, the CCP has introduced a system of paid Internet commentators called the Fifty-Cent Army (wu monoamine oxidase dang).Individuals are paid approximately ? fty cents in Chinese currency for each anonymous message they post that endorses the governments position on controversial show ups. Local propaganda and Youth League officials are particularly keen to adopt this technique. 35 These messages create the impression that the tide of social opinion supports the government, put social and psychological drag to conform on people with faultfinding views, and thereby presumably reduce the possibility of antigovernment collective action.The July 2009 regulation that bans news Web sites from conducting online polls on current events and requires Netizens to use their real names when posting reactions on these sites appears to have the same aim of disrupting antigovernment common knowledge from forming on the Internet. 36 The large commercial news Web sites Sina. com, Sohu. com, and Netease. com are probably the second most widely used source of informat ion in China after television, and the ? rst place better-educated people go for their news.These sites have agreements with almost every publication in China (including some blogs) and many overseas news organizations that allow them to compile and reproduce their content and make it available to millions of readers. They are privately owned and listed on NASDAQ , but they are politically compliant, behaving more or less like arms of the government. To keep their privileged monopoly status, they assemble closely with the State Council Information Office, which sends the managers of the 14 Changing Media, Changing China Web sites SMS text messages several times a day with guidance on which topics to avoid.The Information Office also provides a list of particularly independent publications that are not supposed to be featured on the front page. The news sites have opted to reduce their political risks by posting only hard news material that has ? rst been published elsewhere in Chin a. Although they produce original content about such topics as entertainment, sports, and technology, they never do so with respect to news events. Furthermore, with very rare exceptions, such as the 9/11 attacks, they never publish international media accounts of news events directly on the site.Despite the CCP hovering over it, the Internet constitutes the most freewheeling media space in China because the speed and de importantized structure of online communication present an insuperable obstacle to the censors. In Xiao Qiangs words from chapter 9, When one deals with the blogosphere and the safe and sound Internet with its redundant connections, millions of overlapping clusters, self-organized communities, and new nodes festering in an explosive fashion, total control is nearly impossible. In the fiddling time before a posting can be deleted by a monitor, Netizens circulate it far and wide so it becomes widely known.For example, speeches from foreign leaders, like President Obamas inaugural address, are carefully excerpted on television and in newspapers to cast China in the most positive light. Yet on the Internet you can ? nd the full, unedited version if you are motivated to search for it. There is no longer any hope for authorities to prevent the possibly objectionable statements about China by politicians in Washington, Tokyo, or Taipei, or the cell phone videos and photographs of vehement protests in Lhasa or Urumqi, from reaching and arousing reactions from the online public.Once news attracts attention on the Internet, the audienceseeking commercial media are likely to pick it up as well. Xiao Qiang argues that the rise of online public opinion shows that the CCP and government can no longer carry absolute control of the mass media and information, and that the result is a power sacking in Chinese society. HOW ARE THE mercenary MEDIA AND INTERNET CHANGING CHINESE governance? Like all politicians, Chinese leaders are concerned ? rst and f oremost about their own survival. A rival leader could try to oust them.A mass protest movement could rise up and reduce them, especially if a rival leader Changing Media, Changing China 15 reaches out beyond the inner circle to lead such a movement. If leaders lose the support of the military, the combination of an elite split and an opposition movement could surpass them. The trauma of 1989 came close to doing just that. Thousands of Chinese students demonstrated in Beijings Tiananmen Square and over 130 other cities, and CCP leaders disagreed on how to handle the demonstrations.The CCPs rule might have ended had the military refused to obey leader Deng Xiaopings order to use lethal force to disperse the demonstrators. In that same year, democracy activists brought down the Berlin Wall, and communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe began to crumble. No wonder that since 1989, Chinas leaders have worried that their own days in power are numbered. Because commercial journalism was still in its early childhood and the Internet had not yet been built, the mass media played a more small-scale role in the 1989 crisis than it has since so.During the crisis, students, foil by what they considered the biased slant of the official press, spread the word about their movement by giving interviews to the foreign press and direct faxes abroad. One market-oriented publication, the World Economic Herald, based in Shanghai, faced down Jiang Zemin, then the party secretary of the city, and published uncensored reports. The restive journalists at the Peoples Daily and other official papers, with the goodwill of some liberal-minded officials in the Propaganda Department, reported freely on the student movement for a few days in May.The Communist Party leaders were almost as worried about the journalists rebellion as they were about the students one. 37 After the crackdown, party conservatives closed down several liberal newspapers including the World Econ omic Herald and darned the crisis in part on the shitting controls over the press that had been introduced by former leaders Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. 38 Since Tiananmen, Chinese leaders have paid close attention to the destabilizing potential of the media.The formula for political survival that they adopted, based on their 1989 experience, focuses on three key tasks39 Prevent large-scale social unrest Avoid public leadership splits Keep the military loyal to the CCP The three dicta are interconnected if the leadership group remains cohesive notwithstanding the competition that inevitably arises within it, then the CCP and the security law can keep social unrest from spreading out of control 16 Changing Media, Changing China and the government will survive.Unless people receive some signal of permission from the top, protests will be contain or ? zzle out before they grow politically threatening. But if the divisions among the top leaders come into the open as they did in 1989, people will take to the streets with little fear of punishment. muchover, were the military leadership to split or abandon the CCP, the entire regime could collapse. Though commercialization of the media and growth of the Internet have consequences across all three dimensions, today their effects are felt mainly in the efforts to prevent large-scale social unrest.As the chapters in this book describe, the media and Internet are changing the strategic interactions between leaders and the public as the leaders struggle to head off unrest and maintain popular support. WATCHDOG JOURNALISM HOW TO play off WHEN THE DOG BARKS As noted earlier, the politicians at the top of the CCP are of two minds about whether the media and Internet prevent or encourage large-scale social unrest. On the positive side, the media and Internet provide information on problems so that national leaders can address them before they cause crises.But on the negative side, the market-oriented media and Int ernet have the subversive effect of facilitating collective action that could turn against CCP rule. The elites extreme jitteriness about potential protests makes them highly responsive when the media report on a problem. The pressure to react is much greater than it was in the prereform era when the elite relied entirely on con? dential internal reporting within the bureaucracy to learn about problems on the ground. Once the media promote an issue and the issue becomes common knowledge, then the government does not dare ignore it.Chinese journalists take particular pride in exposes that actually lead to improved governance and changes in policy. One of the earliest and best examples was the reporting about the 2003 death in cargo hold of solarize Zhigang, a young college graduate who had migrated to Guangdong from his inseparable Hubei Province. Qian Gang and David Bandurski, as well as Benjamin Liebman, describe in chapters 2 and 7 how the initial newspaper story published by the Southern urban substance field Daily, a bold Guangdong commercial newspaper, circulated Changing Media, Changing China 7 throughout the country on the major news Web sites and transformed Suns death into a cause celebre that sparked an ruttish outpouring online. This emotional outpouring in turn inspired a group of law students to take the issue of the detention and repatriation of migrants directly to the National Peoples Congress. Only two months after the ? rst article, chancellor steatocystoma Jiabao signed a State Council order abolishing the practice of detaining migrants who did not carry a special identi? ation card and exaltation them back to their homes. Although such instances of actual change in policy are rare, public apologies by upper-level officials in chemical substance reaction to media criticism are becoming more common. In 2001, chancellor Zhu Rongji became the ? rst PRC leader to apologize to the public for a hide when he took responsibility for an explosion that killed forty-seven children and staff in a rural school where the students were manufacturing ? reworks.Premier Zhu initially had endorsed the far-fetched explanation offered by the topical anesthetic officials of a deranged suicide bomber. But when, despite a amnesia of the Chinese media, the accounts of Hong Kong and foreign journalists who had interviewed villagers by cry spread in China over the Internet, Premier Zhu offered his apology in a televised press conference. 40 Premier Wen Jiabao has followed the example of his predecessor. He apologized for the melamine-tainted milk and sister formula that killed six and sickened hundreds of thousands of babies.The massive nourishment safety story was originally suppressed by propaganda authorities in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, but the scandal was broken by the local press in Gansu Province and the official Xinhua News Service following the games. Premier Wen also apologized for the crippling snowstorms in January 2008 that stranded millions of Chinese eager to get home for the Spring Festival break. To de? ect blame and show how responsive it is to media revelations of official negligence or malfeasance, the primaeval government also has sacked the senior officials implicate in such scandals.The number of such highpro? le ? rings or resignations has increased over the past decade with the growth of fact-finding journalism. Several good examples are described in this book. Increasingly, officials at all levels are making a egregious show of their receptiveness to online public opinion. They publicize their chats with Netizens. Government agencies have opened up Web sites for citizens petitions. Law enforcement officers have scratch inviting Netizens to provide infor18 Changing Media, Changing China mation for their criminal investigations.In one case, a inventive local propaganda official who was a former Xinhua reporter invited a number of bloggers to join a commission investi gating the envious death of a captive. The bloggers had ridiculed as incredible the legal philosophys explanation that the prisoner had walked into the cell wall during a blindmans bluff game among the prisoners they thought police brutality must be the explanation. The fight died down after the commission released a report that said they knew too little to conclude what had happened and the provincial prosecutors announced the prisoner had not died during a game but had been beaten by another prisoner.The official proudly explained that he had defused the issue by showing that public opinion on the Internet must be resolved by means of the Internet. 41 observe LOCAL OFFICIALS Every government inevitably information about how its officials are do their jobs in order to effectively implement its policies. The top officials of Chinas cardinal provinces are appointed by the CCP underlying leaders in Beijing. Yet the primeval leaders are continually frustrated by their inabil ity to get regional officials to follow their orders.In a rapidly growing market economy, the old top-down bureaucratic methods of monitoring local officials are no longer working. Local officials bene? t more by colluding with local businesses to promote economic growth by spending on big development projects than by providing such social goods as environmental protection, wellness care, education, and quality food for thought and medical specialty that are mandated but not fully funded by the underlying government. Corruption at the local level is rampant.Yet the poor provision of social goods by corrupt local officials could mount public resentment against the government and threaten CCP rule on the national level. Theoretically, there are several ways that Beijing could resolve the dilemma of how to oversee the performance of local officials. It could allow citizens to elect their own local leaders. It also could permit independent NGOs to monitor the performance of local le aders. A fully autonomous court system in which prosecutors put corrupt officials on trial and citizens sue for the bene? s being denied them also would help. But CCP leaders have been too afraid of losing control to commence such fundamental institutional reforms. They have chosen instead to rely on the mass media to serve as a ? re alarm to alert Changing Media, Changing China 19 the nub to problems at lower levels. 42 From their perspective, using the media looks like a less dangerous approach because they still license media outlets and appoint most of their top editors, thereby retaining some power to rein in fallible outlets. Media revelations of local malfeasance also bene? t the center by de? cting blame for problems away from themselves and onto local officials. The publicity appears to be working surveys indicate that Chinese people are more decisive of the performance of local officials than of central ones, in contrast to the pattern in American politics. The centers involution in using the media to monitor local officials has been evident since the mid-1990s. CCTV, with the encouragement of the powerful propaganda tsar Ding Guangen (see chapter 2), created a daily program called Focus (Jiaodian Fantan) to investigate issues at lower levels in 1994.Miao Di, in chapter 4, discusses Focus in some detail. The program was blessed with high-level political support, having been visited by three Chinese premiers and praised by Chinas cabinet, the State Council. The show attracted a wide viewership and modify the credibility of television news overall. However, because local officials intervened so frequently to block exposes of their misdeeds, the show now has become much less hard-hitting.The central authorities tolerate greater press openness on the type of problems that, if left unreported and unsolved, might stir up serious popular dissatisfactionin particular, problems with water and air pollution as well as food and medicine quality. Some nati onal-level environmental officials have become adept at using media events such as, televised hearings on the environmental impact of important projects to mobilize public pressure on lower-level officials to comply with centrally adopted policies that are environmentally conscious.Veteran journalist Zhan Jiang describes the pattern in chapter 5, on environmental reporting as a general rule the center has an spare-time activity in receiving information that reduces the information gap between the center and localities regarding potentially volatile problems resulting from negligence by local officials. However, as he illustrates with the case of the Songhua River chemical spill once journalists pull the ? re alarm and alert Beijing and the public to a crisis, then the center tries to reassert control over the media to cool off ublic emotions and convey an image of a suitable government that is solving the problem. Recently, the central official media have been given the green li ght to pull the alarm on abuses by local officials. For years, reports have been circulating in the foreign human rights community and the international press about provincial and municipal governments that detain local citizens who have 20 Changing Media, Changing China come to Beijing to petition central officials about their grievances with local officials.They lock up the petitioners in mislabeled detention centers (black jails) on the outskirts of Beijing, ostensibly for legal education, and then ship them back home. In November 2009, the official magazine Outlook (Liaowang) broke the story of these illegal jails and the report appeared on the Xinhua Web site. 43 Not surprisingly, local officials are circumspect of media watchdogs and do what they can to fence them out. As Tsinghua University journalism professor Li Xiguang has noted, The central government, in the ? ght against the widespread corruption of the local government, encourages journalists to write exposes of the corruption.But the local governments are very much protective of themselves and of their power, so there is a con? ict between the central government and the local government in dealing with journalists. 44 Censorship by provincial and local branches of the CCP Propaganda Department and the State Council Information Office is viewed by journalists as tighter than that at the national level. The essays in this book offer numerous examples of local governments blackouts of critical news stories and the strategies journalists and activists use to evade them.Ever since the 1990s, regional commercial newspapers have been doing investigative reporting of corruption and other abuses on the part of local officials, but only outside their own home provinces. This practice is called cross-regional reporting (yidi jiandu). Since all local newspapers are part of media groups belonging to the local government and CCP establishment, editors of course are inhibited from biting the hand that feeds them. Exciting stories about the sins of other peoples officials may be second best but are better than nothing.Reporters are willing to brave police harassment or violent attacks by paid thugs to get the goods on bad governance by officials in other places. Often they dont have to go to the scene to report the story. As Ben Liebman describes in chapter 7, journalists blocked by local bans from writing about local malfeasance can simply e-mail the information to colleagues from other regions who then write the expose. Complaints from provincial and municipal officials about nosy reporters pushed the CCP Propaganda Department to ban the practice of crossregional reporting in 2004.Because the order was largely ignored, a year after provincial leaders raised the issue again, this time at the level of the Politburo. 45 Provincial leaders are a powerful group within the CCP, constituting the largest bloc in the Central Committee and one-quarter of the Politburo. Changing Media, Changing China 21 The interests of these leaders incline them to favor tighter restrictions on investigative journalism. As a result of their complaints, cross-regional reporting has been restricted to stories about officials at the county level or below.Only national-level media dare to publish exposes of provincial and municipal officials, and even then they usually wait until they get wind of an official investigation before reporting on the case. Meanwhile, local officials are learning the art of spin they hold press conferences and online chats with Netizens to present an appearance of openness and candorfor example, Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai invited television cameras to broadcast live his negotiations with striking taxi drivers in 2009.The expansion of Internet access and the growth of the Web also make it increasingly difficult for local officials to enforce media blackouts on sensitive issues. Several chapters in this book discuss the 2007 case of the Xiamen PX chemical pl ant, a project ultimately defeated by the mobilization of environmentally conscious public opinion that breached a local media blockade. As Xiao Qiang tells the story (chapter 9), the outcome resulted from the gap in control between local authorities as well as between local and central authorities that can provide a space for Netizens to transmit information. . . One of the most vocal advocates for the issue was the blogger Lian Yue, whose Weblog was not hosted within Fujian Province. Because officials outside Fujian, including the central government, did not share the local governments interest in censoring news about the PX plant, Lian Yue was able to continue his Weblog and even get reporting in newspapers published outside Fujian. MEDIA believability AND GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY Competition from the commercial media and the Web-based media has created what Qian Gang and David Bandurski call a credibility gap problem for the official media.In chapter 2, they compare the ways s tories are covered in various kinds of newspapers, vividly illustrating that commercial newspapers reporting is far more informative and time-tested than that found in official newspapers. Readers are abandoning the official media, and their preference is heightened during crises that arouse their interest and motivate them to search for reliable information. 22 Changing Media, Changing China Daniela Stockmann, in chapter 8, provides new data about how people in China choose between different types of news sources.They use the official press to get information on the governments current policy position, but turn to the commercial media and the Internet for credible real news. As she explains, it is the perceived disassociation from the government that lends credibility to the nonofficial media. Stockmann happened to be doing a survey on media usage in Beijing in abjure 2005 when student protests against Japan erupted. This serendipity gave her the rare opportunity to compare the way people use the media during normal times and during a crisis.What she find was that during a crisis, people have a particularly keen nose for where to ? nd credible information. Even when the propaganda authorities ban reporting of protests and try to homogenize coverage in all types of media, people are more likely to abandon official sources and turn to the commercial press and the Internet than during normal times. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China in 2003 is referred to by several authors as a turning point in the relations between the government, the media, and the public.By ordering the media to play down early reports of people falling ill with a mysterious disease, a report that allowed the virus to spread and kill more people, Beijing deepened public skepticism about the reliability of the official media and of the government itself. More important, the cover-up taught the public to look to new sources for the true facts. The searing SARS experience also spurred the determination of journalists to meet peoples need for accurate information during a crisis. The ? ght from official sources creates a serious problem for Chinese leaders, who need to prevent panic attack and antigovernment reactions during crises. Leaders plausibly worry that a widespread environmental or food safety catastrophe that angers large numbers of people about the same issue at the same time could snowball into a revolt against the CCP. Competition from the commercial media and the Web and the narrowing of the information gap between officials and the public forces the government to be more transparent to maintain its credibility.The State Council Information Office and Tsinghua University have trained hundreds of official spokespeople for central, provincial, and municipal government agencies to give press brie? ngs. The central government launched an E-government initiative, and almost every government agency (including very sensitive ones l ike the Ministry of State Security) now posts information on its Web site. Changing Media, Changing China 23 The trend toward government transparency got a major boost from the Regulations on Open Government Information that went into effect in 2008.The regulations require officials to release information during disasters and emergencies and permit citizens to put across the release of government information. An activist took advantage of the opening to request budgets from government agencies. When in October 2009 Guangzhou released departmental budgets and Shanghai refused to do so on the grounds that this information constitute state secrets, the media and online public went wild criticizing Shanghais excuse. 6 Xinhua piled on by reprinting many of the critiques, in