Abstract
As the world enters the second decade of the 21st century and the global economic crisis deepens, a wide range of social and cultural shifts have taken place both in the West and the rest of the world. For a critical analysis, the centre of those changes is a shift in the structure of global power relations involving the reconfiguration of the triangular relationship of state, market and society. At the same time, the on-going crisis provides a severe test of political and cultural institutions’ ability to prevent revolutionary transformations of society.
China’s position in a world of crisis
China, along with other countries that are undergoing large-scale social change, is ‘rising’ in terms of rapid growth of the economy and increasing political and cultural impact on international affairs. These emerging economies are considered to be capable of reshaping a global power structure that has long been dominated by a developed West, itself today caught in a web of economic and social crisis. However, considering the increasing complexity of both internal and external social problems, it is still too early to say that these fast-growing economies, and notably China, are moving to the centre of what Zhenglai Deng called ‘the world structure’ (Deng, 2009: 179).
The world is far from flat. The past 30 years of social reform in China, characterized by openness to the West and the introduction of capitalist market mechanisms, has been far more complicated than is suggested by a macro-developmentalist narrative of success, understood in a narrow sense of mere growth in the national economy. Alongside the Chinese economic miracle, the costly national branding campaigns, and the increasing numbers of the urban middle class who have become the major consumers of luxury brands on Oxford Street and Fifth Avenue, there are the Chinese peasantry, together with more than 230 million migrant workers as well as hundreds of thousands of the traditional working class, who are living through tough times. These latter are the ‘disfranchised groups’ generated by social reform. It has been increasingly evident that Chinese policy makers believe that, before making any further major changes, it is necessary to question this development model. They seek to find alternative means of ‘scientific and sustainable development’ that can balance the interests of enfranchised and disfranchised social groups. Furthermore, moving away from an essentialized concept of the ‘state’ and relocating the complex social class reconfiguration as the centre of social transition is seen as crucial to understanding an increasingly globalized Chinese society.
Against this background of the unsynchronized development of an increasingly globalized China, communication studies, with its long-standing tradition of articulating Chinese experiences into western paradigms, at least since late 1970s, is facing more challenges than ever before. In the following paragraphs, some prominent western-based theoretical traditions that underpin contemporary Chinese communication studies will be discussed. We argue that the hybridization of different theoretical paradigms is a defining feature of today’s Chinese communication research. In order to define Chinese subjectivity to build theories specific to concrete Chinese experiences, it is necessary to understand those paradigms in the first place. No matter whether they start from the US-centric modernization paradigm or critical approaches such as anti-imperialist and postcolonialist ones, Chinese communication scholars are obliged to confront a new conjuncture that requires a new paradigm in order to combine theory and practice on the basis of ‘Chinese characteristics’.
Soft power and ideology as entry points
Rather than beginning from the hybridization of different western-based paradigms in Chinese communication studies, it is helpful first to focus on two theoretical arenas – soft power and ideology – in which it is easy to demonstrate the contradictions involved in the technical introduction and unconscious internalization of western paradigms in Chinese academia.
Soft power: who decides the definitions?
Over the past decade, the concept of ‘soft power’ has become a prominent component of both theoretical and practical concerns in global communication research. It has also been a keyword for different levels of policy making. The Report of the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (Hu, 2007) announced that China will ‘enhance culture as part of the soft power’. Subsequently, the government devoted substantial funding and other resources to support, directly or indirectly, its media and cultural arms, in an effort to establish a modernized media system (xian dai chuan bo ti xi). This is supposed to compete in both the regional and global markets with its western counterparts.
Paradoxically, while ‘soft power’ has been considered central by both the government and the majority of Chinese global communication studies, Joseph Nye, the creator of the concept, gives a low evaluation of China’s soft power and its future. In his recent lectures and articles (Nye, 2011a, 2012), Nye declares that China cannot replace the US as a new hegemonic power because of its weakness in soft power. He does not deny that China has significantly improved its economic and military power, that is, its ‘hard power’. He argues, however, that China has not improved its hard power to an adequate level to be a global power and, more importantly, has not developed its soft power sufficiently to play that role. He believes that only a balanced development of hard and soft power, which he defines as ‘smart power’ in his new book (Nye, 2011b), can allow a nation-state to attain global status. China’s weakness in soft power can be demonstrated by a simple fact – the more developed China’s hard power is, the more worried its neighbours become.
There are three interesting areas of agreement between Nye and his Chinese followers. First, they all agree that China has achieved astonishing growth, at least in the economic area. Second, they all acknowledge that a negative national image, a hostile attitude to Communism derived from the Cold War era and an increasing ‘China threat’ theory has never really disappeared from western perspectives on China. Third, they all believe that China can never become a global leader without developing its soft power.
However, the most interesting thing is the way in which the concept ‘soft power’ has been articulated into the Chinese context. Through the efforts of academics, the mass media and politicians, it has gradually been adopted, appropriated and articulated into the mainstream discourse in China. It might be argued that this is a typical demonstration of globalization, but the word and its uses are significantly different in western political science and in China.
Communication studies today is expected to make a clear structural analysis of global communication, regarding both China and other players, and it is of fundamental importance first to clarify the meanings of ‘soft power’ in different contexts. For China, the international expansion of state-owned media conglomerates is considered as one of the core elements of ‘soft power’. Mainstream western media groups, on the other hand, are still constructing narratives of a ‘China threat’ that imply deeply rooted stereotypes of ideological conflict (Hu and Ji, 2012). How to deal with these kinds of interactions between western knowledge and Chinese experience has become one of the key challenges for contemporary communication studies.
The paradoxical dynamics of ideology in China
The other area it is important to discuss is ‘ideology’. The concept seems obsolete or unimportant to most Chinese people, who are living in a society that has made a neoliberal turn. But it is still a widely and uncritically used term, at least rhetorically, both in politics and everyday life. The Chinese translation, yi shi xing tai, however, has an unclear meaning, so it is usually taken for granted and fails to stimulate theoretically meaningful debates. Obviously, it is deeply rooted in the propaganda-oriented Marxist mainstream, which has been dominant in China since the 1950s, but if we subject the concept to a more rigorous investigation, we find that there are in fact a wide variety of ideologies which are subject to fierce debates in the Chinese social space.
First of all, the old traditions of Chinese culture are intertwining with those of western civilization. Although the socialist transformation in 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in 1960s and 1970s undermined traditional Chinese culture, this tradition, which has survived for more than 3000 years, could not be easily swept aside and persists right up to today. In the rural areas of China, there is a marked influence of traditional culture. Despite rapid urbanization, an understanding of contemporary Chinese society must still incorporate classic theoretical and cultural forms, for example ‘rural China’ (Fei, 2006), in order to understand relations between China and the outside world. The entirety of contemporary China cannot be explained without taking account of the old traditions, which are increasingly marginalized in studies of communication and Chinese society.
Another prominent challenge, stemming from the launch of the openness and reform policy in late 1970s, is the interplay of the Party line and the bottom line (Zhao, 1998). A consequence of the rediscovery of ideology in communication and media studies in China is a focus on the intense debates between the socialist ideological claims of the Marxist party-state and an effectively capitalist social transition, which brings with it a set of supportive ideologies, including neoliberalism. These ideological conflicts have been central to any mapping of the superstructure of Chinese society since the 1990s. For example, in the realm of media communication, as noted by James Lull in 1991, television tried to advance socialist values in news programmes, while at the same time promoting consumerism via advertisements and entertainment. Along with the commercialization of almost all industries, these contradictions between socialism and capitalism are attracting more attention and have become one of the major social contradictions.
In global communication studies the ambiguity of ideological concerns is much more evident. On the one hand, China-based studies have to deal with the fact that the country is integrating into a globalized world economy in which market-oriented communication systems are driving entertainment industries around the world towards an ideology of consumerism. On the other hand, they also have to give theoretical space to the Chinese state’s claims of sovereignty over information and communication that have been central to the formation of the state. As Li Congjun, leader of China’s official news agency Xinhua News Agency, argues: ‘we need a mechanism to coordinate the global communications industry, something like a “media UN”’ (Li, 2011). Li’s contemporary call for a new world media order resonates with the 1970s’ New World Information and Communication Order in UNESCO, although both the domestic and global contexts have been transformed since then.
Ideology in Chinese communication studies exhibits dynamics that are not only diverse but also to some degree paradoxical. It deserves careful examination in order to make sense of particular studies within their historical context. In order to do this, a broader view on key issues, such as globalization, world history, and the ever-changing structure of Chinese state and society, is essential.
The hybridization of paradigms
A number of themes can be identified as shaping communication studies in China, among them what we call the ‘the hybridization of paradigms’. By this we mean the way in which a group of theoretical paradigms have simply been introduced from the developed West without any critical examination of their historical contexts. The articulation between those paradigms and Chinese social reality is accordingly superficial, which suggests the need for a careful archaeology of how knowledge comes to be produced in a certain way.
First, a classical notion of modernization, together with developmentalism, is a dominant paradigm in Chinese communication studies. For mainstream communication studies, no matter whether they focus on internal or external issues, the ideal of a mass communication system and its surrounding social institutions is presupposed as the one existing in the developed western world. In this account, China is still on the way to becoming a fully modernized society, and the Chinese communication systems lacks the supportive systems needed to guarantee either a market-centric media system or a ‘public sphere’ involving every citizen’s voice in a democratic public discussion. However, the modernization paradigm cannot be realized in China for a number of reasons: (1) this paradigm is deeply rooted in a globalized capitalist world system which features a centre–periphery power relationship between developed and developing countries; (2) this paradigm prioritizes the developed West as the ‘end of history’ in terms of the best form of society, while ignoring or underestimating other forms of civilization; and (3) this paradigm represents a systematic effort at depoliticization, through which key political issues have been marginalized by a process of development towards an apparently inevitable future.
Second, as a society with a legacy of decades of socialist construction and anti- imperialist revolution, the Chinese state still gains its legitimacy from critiques of imperialism, in both its old and new forms (Harvey, 2003). Rather than seeing this tradition simply as a means to stoke nationalist sentiments in order to sustain political stability, we contend that anti-imperialism is key to legitimizing media and communication practices on various levels of state, market and society. Take the Chinese media ‘going-out’ project for example. One of the reasons for building Chinese media conglomerates in the world market is the judgement that the global media and communication order is dominated by American and transnational companies. These are in effect acting as imperialist agents in both in their news reporting and through the entertainment commodities they produce and disseminate.
Third, according to the discourse of globalization, media convergence is the established and definite future. No matter how different existing media institutions and political traditions are, the world will eventually be harmonized into a global village. Among the driving forces that are pushing globalization forward, the internet is considered the most important, not only in terms of its technical capability to liberate and exchange information, but also through its social influence. It is argued that it will lead to both the improvement of the global economic structure, enabling it to overcome periodic crises, and to the interaction of different political and cultural traditions that will gradually form a global community characterized by mutual understanding. Using this paradigm, the focus of some Chinese communication studies is shifting from a clearly defined model of modernization and imperialism to embrace the processes of globalization by conceptualizing and theorizing a series of dimensions of a globalized Chinese state and society.
All three paradigms are sometimes used separately and sometimes intertwined with each other but there are few reflections on the historical relations of the three paradigms and all of them are accepted as ‘natural’. Our definition of ‘the hybridization of paradigms’ in Chinese communication studies implies that there is no substantial critique of any of those paradigms, simply their uncritical introduction and use.
A Chinese paradigm of communication studies?
It is important to identify the ways in which the Chinese experience is unique both in its theoretical and practical dimensions. This is an area of research that has developed very rapidly in the last few years and here we attempt to begin that task within the field of communication studies. In the following paragraphs we cannot claim to present a fully developed new paradigm. Rather, we attempt to synthesize a macroscopic approach, utilizing historical analysis, epistemological rethinking and the recombination of theories and practices in a modern Chinese context. We hope that these efforts will provoke others to engage in rethinking the ways of doing communication studies today, especially concentrating on the limitations of existing theoretical paradigms and the possibility of building new paradigms which can characterize a Chinese subjectivity.
Contextualizing western communication and journalism theories
Instead of seeing western paradigms as ‘advanced experiences’ which have universal value and applicability from a developmentalist perspective, Chinese communication scholars must first contextualize the theories that have been introduced and translated into Chinese. They must also pay careful attention to the processes of literature selection and translation in order to examine the assumptions underlying the historical juncture of the ‘Opening to the West’. For instance, Four Theories of the Press (authoritarianism, libertarianism, social responsibility theory and Communism) has been one of the classical texts in journalism studies in China. It seems that a Chinese journalism textbook cannot be structured systematically – particularly the chapter on international media institutions – without including the framework of the four theories and simultaneously making a linkage between China and one of them, in most of the cases, that of authoritarianism. But the history of China and the current social transition has demonstrated that reality is far more complicated than is assumed by the liberal framework. In this case, Chinese communication scholars have responsibility to discover the comprehensive context in which the four theories were developed in the West, and in particular the prevailing international political order, as well as the reasons why the four theories have been articulated into Chinese journalism and communication theories.
In order to advance the reconstruction of communication theories, the other essential task for Chinese scholars is to temporally and spatially contextualize a set of key concepts in communication and society studies. Key concepts like journalism, communication, state, party, freedom, democracy, modernization, market, public spheres, soft power and globalization are fundamental components of current communication theories, yet less serious academic attention has been paid to the historical and social backgrounds where the concepts emerged and made sense. They are considered as common sense and can be used directly and without modification. In China, because of the ‘No-debates’ policy in choosing and maintaining the single developmental model of economic modernization, those basic elements of constructing social theories have not undergone careful consideration. These fundamental concepts have been widely used in academic writing and publishing, while contextual issues, sometimes including the institutional prejudices that accompanied their formation, were ignored or underestimated. As a result, what began as local knowledge and specific theoretical formulations have in practice become universalized during the process of modernization.
Seeking a consistent historical interpretation: combining the pre-reform and reform periods
History is not a collection of fragments, but a continuum. The conceptual framework that divides Chinese contemporary history into two or more segments is characteristic of some historical thought. For most communication studies, the beginning of the neoliberal reform is a watershed and what happened before and after display totally different historical logics. Accordingly, the stories of modernization can only be narrated within the context of the reform. Only in this context, can Chinese communication theories be structured and justified. However, the increasing difficulties and misappropriations of those theories in interpreting both current and historical issues demonstrate that Chinese scholars must seriously re-examine the situation with a longer view of history. In communication studies, first we have to look closely at Party journalism, its multi-layered legacies and modern variants rather than simply criticizing it from a liberal perspective. Second, we have to combine concepts of Party journalism and market-oriented journalism in order to analyse how different social agencies have influenced public policy towards reform. Third, we have to rediscover the influence of ideologies in an increasingly depoliticized media environment, empowering ideology as a critical concept for understanding the relationship between state, market and society. Finally, it is necessary to shift the academic focus from social elites (the upper class and the growing middle class) to the mass of the people, who used to be the base for the successful operation of Party journalism. Today they have become a powerful agency, reshaping media and journalism institutions in China, for example through social networking on the internet. As Andrew Feenberg once noted in the Chinese preface of his book Alternative Modernity: No matter what their intentions, an isolated technocratic elite in a developing country can only imitate foreign models since the West is ultimately the source of its legitimacy. Only the rich and complex interaction of a whole people can innovate an alternative modernity suited to China. (Feenberg, 2003: 7)
In this sense, looking for a new paradigm requires a fundamental reorientation of academic attention.
To illustrate these connections and the continuity of history in communication studies, we think that the internet-based communication is an excellent instance for discussion. The internet not only involves the convergence of media technologies, symbols and functions, but also the integration of social communication forms. With the growing population of Chinese netizens, more and more Chinese people are participating in public discussions. For optimistic observers, the increasing use of the internet for individual expression opens up an unprecedented space for the democratization of China. BBS, blogs and microblogs permit the publication of widely diverse views and opinions. More broadly, the internet has played a key role in rebuilding social communication systems that will bring universal benefits in the long term. On the other hand, some traditional communication patterns that were widely employed in China during the pre-reform period demonstrate a degree of historical continuity. For example, as Martin Hala put it: ‘Some Chinese observers have likened the cacophony of voices on the Chinese Internet, and especially blogs, to the chaotic spectacle of “big character posters”’ (Hala, 2007). The invention and wide usage of microblogs in recent years has given weight to such views. Leaving aside questions of elite and mass politics, the similar forms of individual expression displayed in different historical periods should remind Chinese scholars that some apparently ‘old’ categories are still at the centre of discussion. The attempt consciously to ignore particular Chinese histories in journalism and communication studies fails to catch the most significant dimension of the reform.
It is impossible simply to isolate the reform period from a longer history of contemporary China. To borrow a definition from Hui Wang, China is, in the longer historical view, a social process with multiple subjectivities that play distinct roles in its evolution. The focus of Chinese journalism and communication studies should not, in future, operate with arbitrary special and temporal boundaries. It rather should concentrate on those agents, both individuals and social groups and the social organizations and processes that surround them.
Positioning China and Chinese communication issues in a world structure and a world history
China has become one of the two poles for the growth of world economy (the other is ICT industries), and the economic importance of China can only be understood within a world structure. Regarding the media industries, although traditional mass media sectors (radio, TV and printed media) are still encountering limitations to their growth in terms of scope and scale, some innovations have attracted both local and global capital. Digital cable television, for example, which is the prioritized segment for digitizing China’s broadcasting system, is of increasing importance on both global and regional stages. The internet economy is another example of China’s economic growth relying on new media technologies. According to economic orthodoxy, as China upgrades its economy, the mass media and the broader cultural economy will become major drivers of future development.
China has for years internalized the political and economic philosophy of neoliberalism which underlies the current processes of globalization. Journalism reforms, however, have not only followed the logic of global market-oriented media development but also displayed some distinct Chinese characteristics. The growing global impact of China raises the possibility that the Chinese model of development, including media development, may become more influential on a global stage. In 2011, the Chinese leadership announced a series of national projects aimed at developing cultural industries over the next decade. Coupled with the media ‘Going-out’ policy launched in 2009, Chinese journalism aims to influence the world as part of national cultural expansion. Xinhua is designated to become a world news agency with global influence; China Radio International will have more branches in Third World countries; CCTV will have the chance to expand its overseas influence in news reporting, programming and programme exchanges. When these domestic news organizations reposition themselves on a global stage, the relationship between Chinese journalism’s handling of domestic and international communication will become particularly complicated.
We would like to end by pointing to a binary mode of thinking that is continuously present among Chinese communication scholars. That is the two major dimensions of the past 30 years’ communication studies: internationalization/globalization and localization. Chinese scholars have realized the difficulty of simply employing western theories into Chinese contexts. It is essential to transcend this dualism and find new ways innovate theoretically on a basis of a globalized China and its unique historical practices in communication.