Abstract
Maria Repnikova set out to examine the relationship between critical journalists and the party-state in China. She is an assistant professor of global communication at Georgia State University. Based on data derived from a mixed use of in-depth interviews with journalists and officials as well as textual analysis of news coverage and discourse on journalism, she characterizes the relationship in question as guarded improvisation. Under this model, critical journalists and the state are engaged in a fluid partnership marked by continuous negotiation, improvisation, and mutual adaptation, with the state being the dominating force. Guarded improvisation is allowed in authoritarian China ideologically as the news media are articulated not merely as the party-state’s mouthpieces but also as an integral part of what is called supervision by public opinion. Critical journalism serves the function of overseeing local governance and providing feedback on the overall performance of the state. Critical journalists do not see themselves as independent reporters; they share the same objective with the central authorities to improve the governance of China, subordinating themselves to the party-state organizationally or by way of self-censorship in the last instance. Critical journalism can be negotiated or allowed to the extent that it is not politically destabilizing.
This is not the first report on the improvisational nature of journalistic openings in the seemingly absolute system of China. But the explication one finds in this book has never been so clear, systematic, and focused. The author has taken both the top-down and bottom-up approach in examining the interactive relationship between the critical journalists and the state. On one hand, she has rightly traced the ideological base of guarded improvisation to the articulation of the media as a supervisory agent in China and how critical journalism may serve the state. The account could have been made more comprehensive if the author had also taken into account other ideological resources such as the traditional belief in media’s role in addressing the grievances of the people and the emergent Chinese version of journalistic professionalism. On the other hand, the author has based her investigation on the actual interactions between the critical journalists and the state in daily routines and during national crises. They combine to yield a convincing and rich mapping of guarded improvisation. The two crisis cases, as represented by the huge natural disaster of Sichuan earthquake and the repetitive occurrence of major coal-mining accidents, are well chosen. They show how critical journalism was absorbed and harnessed as an agent for the resolution of two different types of large-scale crises. Although the author has made it clear that the scope of this study is confined to the Hu-Wen period (2002-2012), she adds value to her analysis by dedicating the last chapter to the examination of how guarded improvisation has fared during Xi’s rule. This is not just an update. More importantly, it leads us to ponder over how guarded improvisation may shift within the Chinese system.
The author adds significance to her book by bringing in a comparative perspective to shed light on the typicality of guarded improvisation as observed in China. She does this by comparing the Chinese case with news media during Gorbachev’s rule in the Soviet Union and Putin’s regime in Russia. Critical journalists under Gorbachev were initially agents promoting his cause for open policies and plans for restructuring. However, they separated themselves from Gorbachev when they went beyond working within the system and asked for more radical change. In contrast, Putin has chosen to ignore the critical journalists in the main and let them serve as a cosmetic symbol of Russian journalistic freedom. How do critical journalists fare in different types of authoritarianism? While the author has contributed an insightful answer, she has also succeeded in posting this important research question for future studies. It remains to be seen how media-state relations in authoritarianism as embodied by China, the Soviet Union, Russia, and other countries where power is concentrated can be compared in a more formal manner. We need a more comprehensive comparative analysis of the contingencies giving rise to different modes of media-state interactions in terms of power distribution, ideology, and historical trajectories.
For a book on contemporary media politics in China, social media deserves more attention. The author explains why she mainly focuses on the mainstream media and slights social media by attributing this to the fact that the former are the homes of critical journalists, while social media are not directly involved in reporting per se. Even though there is a grain of truth in the author’s reasoning, one may argue otherwise for two major reasons. First, social media is so pervasive that it has already changed the Chinese mediascape. It interconnects with mainstream media and journalism through remediation and opinion making. There is reason to believe that the traditional agenda-setting function of mainstream media may have been compromised by the agenda of social media to some degree. The second reason is that studies have demonstrated that new media events were a feature of public opinion expression in China during the Hu-Wen rule. It therefore makes good sense to include new media events straddling social media and mainstream media as an integral part of the infrastructure for Chinese journalism. Having said this, I have to admit that Repnikova’s approach is good enough as far as the author has made her reasoning clear and refused to make claims beyond her stated scope. Perhaps, this is a comment for the benefit of future studies.