Abstract
This book is about activism and change in the Chinese press media. Jonathan Hassid does not question the actual prevalence of contentious behaviour among China’s journalists, but asks why some Chinese journalists have challenged their official role as the ‘mouthpiece’ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From this refreshing perspective, Hassid provides a rich picture of the Chinese journalistic landscape and of the boundary-pushing behaviour of some of its members. His findings are based on 71 interviews which were conducted during 15 months of fieldwork between 2005 and 2013, with reporters, editors and other experts on the Chinese media, as well as secondary sources. The analysis of the causes of journalists’ boundary-pushing behaviour is complemented by a quantitative content analysis of close to 19,000 articles drawn from 26 newspapers between 2004 and 2006.
Originating in a dissertation and including the modified content of three articles published earlier, the book is organized in 10 chapters. Chapter 2 describes the professionalization of Chinese journalists and introduces a typology that distinguishes between four ideal types of journalists differing in perceptions and behaviour regarding their professional and sociopolitical roles. The subsequent four chapters deal with each of these types in detail, namely ‘communist professionals’, ‘workaday reporters’, ‘American-style journalists’ and ‘advocate professionals’. With the exception of the workaday reporters, whom Hassid describes as caring ‘for little but money or steady employment’ (p. 20), and who are most prone to engaging in the different forms of corruption so widespread in the Chinese media, according to Hassid all the other journalist types are becoming professionalized. However, he identifies only the small but apparently growing number of advocate journalists as key drivers of policy change (p. 71). These journalists are concerned with China’s national development and are seeking to resolve China’s social problems. Accordingly, many ‘consider their role as representing “the people”, rather than the Party/state’ (p. 62).
Chapter 7 continues the investigation into boundary-pushing behaviour, or ‘pushback’ (pp. 74–6) by advocate journalists. In order to scrutinize the way in which ‘systemic factors (including journalists’ imputed attitudes) affect the production of sensitive news content’ (p. 85), Hassid carries out a computer content analysis. With the help of 20 categories and existing term lists in the context of the Chinese media, he constructs sensitivity and negativity as dependent variables, and a number of independent variables ranging from the newspapers’ administrative level and market competitiveness to ‘the degree of advocacy journalism within each article’ (p. 87). The regression results do not establish ‘a clear link between market forces and press content’ (p. 91), and Hassid concludes that ‘media reforms have not inclined the Chinese press towards systemic criticism of the political system’ (p. 93). On the other hand, the interviews reveal that political opportunity structures, or the timing of pushback publications, are crucial for advocate journalists.
Chapter 8 looks at cases where journalists ‘deliberately moved beyond the boundaries of the acceptable’ (p. 107) to engage in outright resistance. The focus here is on the open letters published by China Youth Daily (中国青年报) editors in protest against the CCP’s overzealous efforts to exercise control in 2004 and 2005, and on the 2005 strike at Beijing News (新京报) opposing the removal of their editor-in-chief. In his examination of insider reports and interview materials, Hassid emphasizes the significance of specific existing grievances in the triggering of contentious behaviour. In Chapter 9, Hassid additionally discusses the role played by the internet in media activism, arguing that traditional media and online media are strongly interrelated.
Hassid makes another important contribution to the study of the Chinese press media with this book. He combines his earlier findings on the role played by the uncertainty of CCP censorship directives on controlling media personnel and his differentiated typology of Chinese news workers with additional insights drawn from his interviews and a number of Chinese-language publications. Given the wide variety of the arguments, an integrative theoretical framework would have been useful, and some of the arguments presented deserved more systematic attention, notably, the journalists’ use of formal and informal networks for spreading information and norms, and the strategies that they employed vis-a-vis party-state actors. Having said that, the book will serve as a rich source of information for scholars and students of the Chinese or international press media, and will be particularly useful for anyone with an interest in Chinese journalism.