Abstract
This book puts the grimmest possible cast on prospects for any sort of public-spirited journalism existing or evolving in present-day China. Based largely on an accumulation of prior studies of Chinese media, including much of the very best critical scholarship to emerge over the past two decades, it makes a couple of valuable contributions to long-standing discussions of information control. Most illuminating are sections midway through the volume that explain the labor contracting system that has turned journalists into wage-earners alienated from idealistic notions of their occupation, and that clarify how restructuring of media organizations into conglomerates has facilitated both financial flexibility and editorial rigidity. Yet much of the book is a compilation of familiar findings, repackaged, repeated, and accentuated in furtherance of an overall message about the bankruptcy of political ideology in China and the futility of hoping for anything better.
As announced in the book’s title, “media transparency” is ostensibly the concept at the heart of this work. Author Baohui Xie, an associate professor at Jiangxi Normal University and a lecturer at the University of Adelaide, where he completed the doctoral thesis from which the book originates, quickly dispenses with a focus on censorship as less useful—returning later to the interesting notion of “meta-censorship,” or censoring-the-fact-of-censorship, as a curious manifestation of lack of transparency. Indeed, he traces a gamut of ills afflicting journalism, from trivialization and sensationalism to inadvertent malfeasance and intentional corruption, back to the problem of transparency.
Xie spends a chapter explicating the concept of transparency as applied to both governance and media. In his view, genuine transparency requires procedures that generate “substantive openness, credibility, accountability, and relevance in the interests of the public, particularly the disenfranchised groups” (p. 17). In the case of China, he finds an unbridgeable gap between rhetoric and reality, with a proclaimed commitment to media transparency amounting to mere words without substance. His book aims to debunk the official rhetoric of media transparency in China while revealing the mechanisms behind realities of information control.
The disjuncture Xie identifies as the primary dynamic of Chinese media production rests on his broader interpretation of the Chinese polity, which readers familiar with contemporary Chinese political debate will recognize as the so-called “New Leftist” analysis. Xie acknowledges his debt to this perspective as an explanation of post-Mao China’s rampant contradictions—including, in the realm of media, an illusion of increasing press freedom even as journalism is ever more in thrall to both political and economic power. To oversimplify, the approach hinges on identification of an irresolvable paradox between what China’s political authorities claim to believe and what they actually do: An ideology labeled “communism” fails to justify what the New Leftists regard as a particularly retrograde form of capitalism. The result for media policy is a fundamental disconnect between what is claimed and how things actually work. In the name of the public, but in the interests of financial gain, on one hand, and political dominance, on the other, China’s media are in cahoots with political elites, operating mainly to make the rich ever richer while excluding the weak and poor from benefit or even notice. The analysis essentially is one of “the emperor has no clothes”—except that the ruler remains quite adept at maintaining his throne, and the rare occasion when a little child may suggest he is naked has no impact at all.
The contention—total absence of media transparency, thorough effectiveness of political content controls along with no-holds-barred pandering to the pursuit of profit—may be extreme, but the idea does rest on solid groundwork completed by scholars who have scrutinized the complex relationships among China’s political regimen, private sector and media. In this vein, Yuezhi Zhao, C.C. Lee, and others have documented and analyzed commonalities of purpose, mutually beneficial negotiations, and intricate alliances that have emerged among agents and organizations of the Party and state, commercial interests, and the actors and institutions producing media content, including news. Xie draws liberally on such studies and cites conclusions approvingly when they concur with his. But even while attempting to reframe the discussion around the central concept of transparency, the book offers little that is truly new. With some exceptions as noted above, when the author synthesizes material in a novel manner so as to advance understanding, the analysis comes across as polemical and sometimes tautological.
The monolithic scope of the argument and its easy dismissal of human agency are troubling as well. The author does acknowledge that Chinese citizens’ access to information has grown and space for discussion has expanded, especially with the rise of social media, but dismisses prospects for any truly meaningful journalism to emerge from the Chinese context. He maintains that, aside from occasional hiccups of disruption with no potential for furthering systemic change, editors, reporters, and other media producers are trapped in survival mode, political loyalty and docility being the trade-off for whatever economic benefits they can reap. Political, economic, and even psychic forces have coalesced, it seems, to create a kind of vicious circle of information control from which there is no escape. Indeed, the author goes further—having cautioned that the marketplace offers no solution in the quest for good journalism when the market and the state are working in tandem to squelch it, he suggests that democratic systems as currently constituted are no answer either, given the less visible but still insidious political and economic controls on media that persist in democracies.
After this most dispiriting rendering, the book ends with an original research project comparing use of what are known as skylights—blank space in newspapers indicating omitted content—by activist journalists protesting pre-1949 Kuomintang censorship with instances appearing in the post-Mao decades. The author concludes that, whereas the earlier cases are instances of true “media activism,” which he defines as political opposition at an institutional level, the recent incarnations are isolated and futile efforts by individual journalists and therefore do not represent meaningful social action—to the contrary, he suggests that editorial blank-outs nowadays might even be a marketing ploy to win readers’ sympathies!
Like many scholarly tomes derived from graduate work, this one bears the stamp of those years of intellectual toil not only in substance but also in formal aspects, and makes for slow reading. A bigger lesson might be that, although worthy books have emerged from academic theses, a dissertation does not automatically a book make. Density and absolutist tone aside, however, the book is useful in bringing together a vast array of sources, studies, and findings from the mass communication literature of the post-Mao period. As such, it belongs on the shelf as a resource for other scholars of Chinese media. It is not recommended for the uninitiated.