The ‘authoritarian determinism’ and reductionisms in China-focused political communication studies

Introduction

This commentary article, which is both critical and reflective in its aims and approach, examines a hotly debated research topic in political communication studies, namely, political communication in contemporary China. Because of its remarkable successes with respect to national regeneration and increasing its international influence, China has attracted substantive research interest from almost all fields of social science, including economics, sociology, political science, and communication studies. In media and communication circles, there is wide agreement that within the global context of digitally networked connectedness brought about by information communication technologies (ICTs), China’s media ecology has been profoundly transformed in terms of the ownership and organizational structure of news agencies, the way that political information travels within and across national boundaries, and, most importantly, the increasing number and radical diversity of communicative participants (e.g. Lagerkvist, 2010; Shirk, 2011; Yang, 2003, 2009; Zhao, 2008, 2012).

Despite these changes in the media field, this study suggests that a persistent and general problem still mars the current literature on China’s political communication. This problem concerns the ‘authoritarian determinism’ perspective adopted by many of these studies or the view that China’s communist political system (specifically, the absence of multi-party elections in the country) is the defining feature of China’s media–politics relations. This approach assumes that this authoritarian apparatus determines the fundamental logic and operational mechanisms of China’s communication sphere, wherein multiple participants interact within a highly censored and hierarchical environment and structure, and it imagines that coercion and repression are the main bases upon which the regime has been built ever since the Mao era.

This study argues, however, that this ‘authoritarian determinism’ perspective is a sort of Cold War legacy in communication scholarship. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of electoral democracies throughout most of Central and Eastern Europe, the Cold War frame (which was used for interpreting and distinguishing the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, or ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’) lost its intellectual coherence and narrative power (Norris et al., 2003). However, taking the ‘democracy versus authoritarianism’ dichotomy as both the starting and end point has been retained as a legacy of Cold War discourses in studies investigating diverse social realities and political phenomena in non-Western contexts – especially in China. Thus, although the old-style view that the Chinese media are nothing but the government’s ‘brainwashing apparatus’ has been dismissed, an ‘authoritarian determinism 2.0’ which focuses on struggling relations between the repressive state and digitally armed (albeit otherwise powerless) groups has prevailed within the research framework of ‘liberation and control’.

Therefore, within the radar of research on China’s media–politics relations, emphasis is usually placed on the antagonistic relations between an authoritarian regime (which employs pervasive surveillance and censorship in the communication sphere), on one side, and a resistant commercial media (who pursue journalistic independence) and a deliberative and digitally literate public (Luo, 2014; Zhang and Lin, 2014; Zhou and Moy, 2007) on the other. Since the 1980s, the large-scale marketization of the Chinese media industry was expected to have a liberating function, and some suggested that significant economic freedom would undermine strict government control and ultimately lead to political freedom (e.g. Li, 2000; Lynch, 1999). Twenty years later, many have argued that the emergence of increasingly low-cost digital technologies would also play a liberating role in China by empowering ordinary people to organize mass movements and thereby challenge the authority of the government (e.g. Fu and Chau, 2014; Huang and Yip, 2012; Tai, 2007; Yang, 2003, 2009). But, at the same time, the Chinese State’s subtle tactics of utilizing media commercialization and digitalization to spread propaganda and tighten its social control has been explored by other researchers (e.g. Song and Chang, 2017; Tai, 2014; Wu, 2005; Zhou, 2017), many of whom have drawn upon notions from the political sciences and developed new concepts to describe China’s political communication reality, such as ‘adaptive governance’ (Heilmann and Perry, 2011), ‘authoritarian resilience’ (Nathan, 2003), and ‘networked authoritarianism’ (MacKinnon, 2011).

It should be noted that an ‘authoritarian determinism’ approach and ‘liberation and control’ framework have been extensively used to explain some striking aspects of China’s political communication landscape, such as the widespread discontent expressed on social media platforms and the confrontations between established and alternative information providers. They have also contributed to the development of some scientific, large data-assisted apparatuses which can visually demonstrate the manifestation of the Chinese state’s information control in the digital sphere. A profound example is the ‘Weiboscope project’ conducted by the University of Hong Kong, which aims to make some censored Sina Weibo posts publicly accessible (Bandurski, 2018). Nevertheless, this study suggests that within this ‘authoritarian determinism’ perspective, some significant omissions and problems have emerged which prohibit researchers from gaining a comprehensive and dynamic understanding of this issue. I shall refer to those omissions and problems as the ‘three reductionisms’ characterizing Chinese political communication studies, namely, event-based, conflict-focused, and internally homogeneous perspectives.

Specifically, the first form of reductionism, the ‘event-based’ approach, describes those studies that have sought to investigate the democratic potential of China’s digital media by (often) focusing on the role(s) of the media during significant political crises and events. The second reductionism, or ‘conflict-focused perspective’, narrowly focuses on the confrontations that occur within China’s media ecology, differentiating the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the battle for new information and communication, while unjustifiably ignoring how different media actors cooperate, complement, and interact with each other in benign ways. The event-based and conflict-focused perspectives have moreover given rise to a third reductionist misconception which involves viewing the various groups in China’s communication sphere as ‘internally homogeneous’. In most studies, the various communication actors in China’s media sphere have been automatically labeled and divided into several defined groups according to their sociopolitical and media identities, including the repressive government, market-driven media agencies, a digitally armed public, and so on. However, these categorizations and taken-for-granted labels have solidified the stereotyped image of each communicative group, and presented fluid social relations as static, while denying the differentiations and conflicts that exist within the same communication groups.

As a critical reflection on the prevailing perspective of ‘authoritarian determinism’ and the three reductionisms derived from it, this commentary article is part of a more general reconsideration of the current state of political communication in China. It first reviews the three reductionisms seen in Chinese political communication research and then explains their shortcomings. Finally, the implications of these reductionisms and their simplified view of ‘how the media counters power’ are explored.

Reductionism 1: an event-based perspective

Event-based case studies are widely used in media and communication research. Political events and crises such as presidential elections and demonstrations, and other ‘media spectacles’ in which diverse information, viewpoints, and participants converge (Volkmer, 2014) provide research examples that can be used to address questions about media content, media effects, and media–politics interactions. Therefore, numerous empirical studies have been conducted which examine media–politics dynamics through focusing on specific events. In Western democracies, periodic presidential elections and campaigns are often viewed as the most significant political events, thus attracting abundant research attention; examples include Barack Obama’s online campaign in 2008 and 2012 (Chadwick, 2014), and more recently Donald Trump’s social media strategies (Enli, 2017). In authoritarian and hybrid regimes where electoral representative democracy is absent or dysfunctional, social media–sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots have been chosen as research cases to investigate the social changes brought by digital communication (e.g. Eltantawy and Wiest, 2011; Luo, 2014; Wolfsfeld et al., 2013).

The event-based approach in media studies has gained popularity in the Chinese context as well. Numerous studies have investigated the liberating role of commercial and digital media, and the alternative coverage and deliberative/mobilizing functions they provide during significant political crises and mass incidents (e.g. Cairns and Carlson, 2016; Hassid, 2008; Huang and Yip, 2012; Hyun et al., 2014; Liebman, 2011; Svensson, 2012). Some widely cited examples included the Sun Zhigang case (Hassid, 2008; Svensson, 2012), Wenzhou train collision (Shi et al., 2013), Xiamen anti-PX protests (Huang and Yip, 2012), Deng Yujiao incident (Liebman, 2011), Sino-Japanese Diaoyu/Senkaku crisis (Cairns and Carlson, 2016; Stockmann, 2010), and 2010 and 2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations (Hyun et al., 2014).

However, focusing on commercial media- or web-fueled, short-lived mass incidents usually leads to one-sided conclusions about the ‘successes’ or ‘failures’ of Chinese media emancipation solely based on the outcomes of such political events. For instance, just as the Sun Zhigang case has been widely cited as representing a ‘victory’ for the commercial media and a digitally savvy public in terms of promoting change in China’s legal system (Hassid, 2008; Svensson, 2012), the Wenzhou train collision has been highlighted as evidence of the inability of commercial and online media to exert influence within China’s political sphere (Shi et al., 2013). This event-based, outcome-oriented approach has contributed to an increasingly dichotomous picture of Chinese media–politics relations in the relevant literature, with the two sides in the debate supporting their viewpoints simply by providing more empirical evidence, that is, further events and crises.

Furthermore, this event-based perspective tends to ignore or downplay the long-term and moderate effects brought about by media commercialization and digitalization on China’s political landscape and society. Here, it is important to affirm the utility of event-based approaches in media research, and this article does not suggest that this perspective is wholly problematic. Rather, it argues that the results of event-based case studies must be complemented by careful investigations that explore the long-term, indirect, and moderate changes that occur within China’s political communication sphere. For instance, Punathambekar (2010) has suggested that the participatory cultures surrounding reality TV shows have created new cultural and political possibilities concerning the renewal of everyday forms of interaction in public settings in Northeast India. However, everyday, informal political discussions are under-researched in the Chinese context because they do not typically lead to immediate political actions, even though their crucial role in fostering a culture of public debate has been recognized by a few studies (Graham, 2015; Wu, 2012). Moreover, Lee (2016) highlights the significance of an emerging lifestyle political culture in the Chinese online sphere, namely, the ‘online satirical campaign’. He suggests that this campaign should be viewed as ‘a participatory activity involving multitudes of people interacting through digital networks’, but it has received little systematic attention (Lee, 2016, p. 1062).

Therefore, this study suggests that when researching China’s media–politics dynamics, focusing on specific events or crises is likely to produce a biased understanding. A notable example is the Chinese media’s practice and function in regard to Sino-Japanese relations. Many studies argue that the Chinese media have demonstrated a unanimously hostile attitude toward Japan, and that this has played a significant role in deteriorating Sino-Japanese relations. Those studies usually focus on the Chinese media’s reporting during significant bilateral events such as the Diaoyu/Senkaku dispute in 2012 and China’s anti-Japanese demonstrations in 2005, 2010, and 2012 (e.g. Cairns and Carlson, 2016; Lye and Wu, 2013; Reilly, 2011). However, as the ‘rally around the flag effect’ suggests that the media and public usually uncritically stand with the government during periods of international crisis or war (Mueller, 1970), it is problematic to generalize about Chinese media practices and the influence of such ‘crisis reporting’. Broadening the scope of studies to embrace wider time periods which include peacetime Sino-Japanese relations might provide some alternative findings regarding the differentiation and segmentation of views within the Chinese media and related public discussions. Guan’s (2018) longitudinal analysis of the news coverage of Sino-Japanese relations between 2001 and 2015 by the People’s Daily illustrates that, during this period, conflictive, cooperative, and neutral frames were employed equally in the People’s Daily’s reporting of bilateral relations. Furthermore, the People’s Daily framed Sino-Japanese conflicts as localized to the political arena, portraying other areas of bilateral relations as benign and cooperative and narrowing the scope of bilateral conflicts to an ‘either/or’ choice between historical disagreements or controversies over contemporary interests, rather than a combination of such factors. As Guan (2018) contends, this suggests that the People’s Daily, as the dominant actor responsible for ‘framing’ Japan in China’s media space, attempted to de-radicalize attitudes toward Japan and thus stabilize Sino-Japanese relations.

Reductionism 2: conflict-focused viewpoint

The event-based approach has also contributed to a second form of reductionism – a conflict-focused perspective whose research scope and approach are narrowly focused on the confrontations between various communicative participants and differentiating ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the battle of new information and communication in the Chinese context. The reductionism of this conflict-focused viewpoint also represents the most distinctive feature of the authoritarian determinism perspective.

While some studies suggest that the unprecedented level of access to and use of digital media have dramatically changed the power relations in China, empowering journalists and citizens and contributing to social upheaval, others oppose this viewpoint by highlighting the continuing influence and power of the Chinese government in repressing the media and public debate despite the emergence of a globalized digital communication sphere (e.g. Chen and Reese, 2015; Esarey and Xiao, 2011; Guo and Chen, 2011; Hyun and Kim, 2015; Wu, 2005). Those studies usually conclude that there are some linear causal connections between the existence of a ‘digital-savvy grassroots’ and the ‘victory of democracy’, and between the government’s advantageous adoption of new media and authoritarian resilience. The premise of this conflict-focused reductionism is that access to diverse and alternative sources information should automatically lead to the public’s critical attitudes toward the government and a desire for democratic change. Therefore, this approach seems to view ‘challenging, dissenting voices’ as the overwhelming outcome of China’s media commercialization and digitalization.

However, several studies have recognized the problems associated with this conflict-focused perspective and have hesitated to talk about the resistant and liberating potential of the commercial and digital media just because they provide alternative information and opportunities for civic engagement (e.g. Hyun and Kim, 2015; Li et al., 2016; Wang and Shen, 2017). Their findings show that in China, commercial or new-media-facilitated mass deliberation and civic participation can coexist, and even positively interact with the existing political systems. For instance, Li et al. (2016) describe the dual political impacts of social media and the compatibility between civic culture and system support in Chinese online ecology. They argue that public affairs communication via social media relates positively to civic culture, and that social media–based political discussion does not undermine system support but is even strongly related to optimism about the Chinese government. Similarly, Wang and Shen’s (2017) findings illustrate that online criticism leads to an increase in perceived communication freedom and citizens’ satisfaction, rather than dissatisfaction, with the government in China.

With its traditional culture and censored media environment, the Chinese context provides two explanations for this ‘criticism-leads-to-satisfaction’ viewpoint. First, in feudal China, a governor who was willing to listen to the public was considered benevolent and received public praise (Zhang and Sun, 2011). Therefore, at that time, showing tolerance toward critical comments would have been regarded as a sign of good governance and fostered a positive assessment of the authority. In addition, in the context of the present decades-long censorship, grassroots criticism of the government signals a loosened control on information flow, which is seen as a sign of protecting citizens’ freedom of speech and therefore exerting positive influence on political judgment (Wang and Shen, 2017).

Here too it is necessary to affirm the value of studying the contentions, competition, and struggle that exist in the Chinese media sphere since such interactions represent some of the most profound changes that have occurred in China’s communication landscape. Media commercialization, globalization, and digitalization have significantly undermined the Leninist-style, rigid propaganda mechanisms in China and diversified the previously ‘unified’ political discourse, while also changing the pattern of ‘top-down’ information flow, all of which have contributed to an increasingly vigorous and contentious communication sphere (e.g. Cairns and Carlson, 2016; Denemark and Chubb, 2016; Guo, 2017; Lee, 2016; Shirk, 2011). However, past studies have predominantly focused on the antagonistic relations between the traditional information hegemony (the Chinese government and official media) and emerging information providers and consumers (market-oriented media and a digitally savvy public), while unjustifiably ignoring how those different media actors cooperate with and complement each other and benignly interact.

The conflict-focused approach, then, by ignoring the complex relationships that exist between its numerous actors, is unable to provide a comprehensive understanding of China’s political communication sphere. And nor does it stand the test of time. Twenty years have passed since China embraced the Internet, and China’s political, social, and media spaces have demonstrated a persistent stability in spite of the occasional occurrence of Internet and social media–fuelled demonstrations. Subversive political revolutions such as those seen in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region have not taken place in China. The Chinese government’s successful censorship and other controlling mechanisms cannot fully explain this relative sociopolitical stability. Instead, this study argues, this relatively stable picture illustrates that the conflicts and incompatibility between various media actors represent just one side of the story, the other being all those complementary and reciprocal, but widely ignored, interactions that exist in China’s media sphere. As the conflict-focused perspective is largely derived from the event (crisis)-based approach, some longitudinal observation and analysis could be conducted to overcome this form of reductionism.

Reductionism 3: internal-homogeneity perspective

The event-based and conflict-focused perspectives give rise to the third reductionist misconception which involves viewing the various groups in China’s communication sphere as ‘internally homogeneous’. Many scholars have recognized that the media–politics dynamics in China now unfold in a network-connected space in which a mass of communicative actors engage in reshuffling or reinforcing existing power relations by producing and disseminating political information, deliberating about public affairs, propagating the will of the authorities, and mobilizing collective actions (Esarey and Xiao, 2011; Huang and Yip, 2012; Medaglia and Yang, 2017; Stockmann and Luo, 2015). However, in most studies, various communication actors have been automatically classified into distinct groups based on their sociopolitical and media identities. These include the government, official media, commercial media, and the public (usually equated with social media). The interactions between different communication groups have then been explored using these assumed categories.

However, the differentiation and self-division within the same communication groups in China’s media sphere have been relatively ignored. For instance, the Chinese public has been viewed by many studies as a challenging force in China’s digital sphere in terms of resisting the state’s censorship, while largely ignoring the existence of volunteer, pro-government voices and politically indifferent groups among them. Another communicative group, the Chinese journalists who work in market-oriented news agencies, has usually been seen as pursuing ‘Western-style’ press freedom and professionalism, overlooking a sub-group of the ‘workday journalists’ who are simply interested in money and steady employment and who are politically and socially quiescent (Hassid, 2011). The official Chinese media have experienced considerable transformations and self-divisions in the digital epoch as well, but they are still labeled by numerous researchers as nothing but an old-style propaganda apparatus. While the traditional Party press continually uses the ‘main theme’ as a fundamental standard in selecting and presenting political topics, their social media accounts usually adopt some populist methods (such as using sensationalist language) to provoke netizens’ responses and engagement (Huang and Lu, 2017).

More recently, a small number of empirical studies have pointed to the multiplicity and heterogeneity that exists within/among China’s communication groups (Guo, 2017; Wang et al., 2017). Guo’s (2017) research conceptualizes the use of Wechat among Chinese adults. She examines participants’ attitudes and practices when they encounter alternative political news in the digital world, classifying them into four types, namely, ‘activist’, ‘cautious watchdog’, ‘lurker’, and ‘filterer’. Despite presenting empirical evidence for the diversity of Wechat users in terms of the political content of their discussions, Guo’s (2017) study suffers limitations in regard to its ability to support strong generalizations about China’s media space because her relatively small research sample (35 individuals) targeted a specific age cohort (aged 50 years or older) living in a specific location (Shanghai). Another study by Wang et al. (2017) suggests that Chinese official newspapers should not simply be viewed as an indiscriminate whole which is closely controlled by the Party and plays the role of expounding the political priorities of the sponsoring party body. Their study re-categorizes the Chinese press into three types, namely, the ‘official’, ‘market-oriented’, and ‘popular official’ media. Through investigating the journalism practiced by the China Youth Daily (CYD), identified as a ‘popular official’ media outlet, their results illustrate that it is possible to combine the status of an official newspaper with a news orientation that stresses more market-friendly journalism (Wang et al., 2017). At the same time, though, their study focuses on a specific newspaper, and relatively ignores the distribution of this type of ‘official popular journalism’ in the general media landscape.

The reductionism of this ‘internal-homogeneity’ perspective has solidified the stereotyped image of each communicative group by overlooking the fluid social relations, differentiation, and conflicts that exist within the same groups of media actors. Within this perspective, conflicts between different groups have been exaggerated while the differences within the same groups have been largely neglected. As a result, a picture of the Chinese media landscape as marked by antagonism is produced, such that the features and trends of China’s political communication sphere are overly generalized, thus recapitulating the second type of ‘conflict-focused’ reductionism.

Simplifying China’s political communication as ‘how the media counter power’

This article suggests that the aforementioned three reductionist approaches are the very manifestation of an ‘authoritarian determinism’ perspective which emphasizes the centrality of the ‘repression-resistance’ axis in the formation of China’s political communication sphere. Discussions about China’s media–politics relations, therefore, have been largely simplified in terms of how the media counter power. From this perspective, most current studies on China’s political communication do not so much examine the relations between the media and politics but rather the relations between the media and what the French political theorist Rosanvallon and Goldhammer (2008) defined as ‘counter-politics’.

Rosanvallon and Goldhammer (2008) put forth the concept of ‘counter-politics’ (or counter-democracy) to describe individuals who act as the watchdogs, veto-wielders, and judges (of politicians and policies) but who are less interested in pursuing sustained political actions to achieve positive political goals (Rosanvallon and Goldhammer, 2008). The notion of counter-politics, according to Rosanvallon and Goldhammer (2008), does not imply the opposite of democracy, but rather a form of democracy that complements and reinforces the usual electoral democratic processes through the power of ‘distrust’ – an indirect form of power disseminated throughout society. Unlike in Western nations where electoral democracy is legally guaranteed and counter-democracy is viewed as complementary, in China, where general multi-party elections are absent, some forms of ‘negative’ political participation (counter-politics) have been considered the most profound incentive for, and a result of, democratization (Wu, 2012; Zhang and Lin, 2014). Therefore, the ways that the media function in the context of Chinese ‘counter-politics’ have attracted the most research attention, meaning that other forms of interaction between various participants in China’s political communication space are unjustifiably ignored.

This study suggests that the reductionism involved in the three mentioned approaches to examining China’s digital politics tends to produce a simplified picture of political communication in China’s digital sphere, particularly in regard to ‘how the new media (are used to) counter power’. Such reductionism and simplification, however, represents the conventional model of studying political communication in the Global South context, which usually involves focusing on the radical, rebellious, and visible effects of digital technologies and networked communication, while largely neglecting the long-term, unseen, moderate, and intra-group transitions that result from media globalization and digitalization (e.g. Eltantawy and Wiest, 2011; Mutsvairo and Sirks, 2015; Wolfsfeld et al., 2013).

This equation is based more on a Western perception of media–politics relations in the Global South than on a solid grasp of the sociopolitical realities in China. However, a question arises about whether counter-politics dominates China’s political space or whether the counter-power narrative will prevail in China’s political communication sphere. To answer this question, and to overcome the reductionism in current studies, the author calls for a more comprehensive and dynamic approach to researching political communication in Chinese and other non-Western contexts. Such an approach should involve using careful longitudinal observation and analysis to supplement results derived from event-based studies, exploring the multifaceted interactions between various media actors in political communication sphere rather than solely focusing on their conflict and antagonism, and investigating the within-group differentiation and multiplicity among communicative participants.

Conclusion

Focusing on three interrelated reductionisms in the current literature on China’s media and politics, this commentary article investigated how we might move beyond the stereotyped ‘authoritarian determinism’ perspective and rethink the relationships between the party state, various media actors’ representations of political issues, and individuals’ everyday civic discussions and engagements in contemporary China. This article is part of a broader reconsideration of the current state of political communication in the Chinese context, and it is inspired by previous ‘de-Westernizing’ efforts in communication scholarship. Some studies have criticized the provincial and Western-centric viewpoints in Chinese politics and media research which directly applies Western paradigms and arguments about public communication to a largely different social setting in order to evaluate the ‘success’/‘failure’ (or ‘emancipation’/‘nonfeasance’) of Chinese media development. To overcome the shortcomings of ‘Westernizing’ Chinese media studies and to provide an alternative research agenda, methodologies, and explanations, more ‘de-Westernizing’ efforts have been made recently. This includes rethinking some conventional Western notions, categories, and methodologies, and adopting others from within an indigenous Chinese perspective, thus expanding the body of evidence in communication scholarship by considering the local realities in China, as well as foregrounding theoretical frameworks that are original to that context, but absent in media research in the United States or Europe (e.g. Chen and Reese, 2015; Guo, 2017; Hassid and Repnikova, 2016; Yang, 2014; Zhao, 2012).

This article is situated within those ‘de-Westernizing’ efforts and aims to advance them further through positing the term ‘authoritarian determinism’ to describe the general problem with the current trend of China-focused political and communication theory, as well as pointing out three interrelated reductionisms in the past and current research in this area. In doing so, it also aims to provide a systematic, holistic, and critical perspective to the China-focused political communication research agenda – an approach that not only suggests the need for further critical examination but also presents significant implications for the wider Global South context.