Abstract
The Politics of Chinese Media offers sharp and succinct analyses demonstrating the ways that the transition and emergence of media and communication systems, institutions and practices are deeply embedded in and shaping the political-economic and socio-cultural transformations in post-socialist China. The book engages in robust conversations with scholarships in political economy, cultural and media studies, and China studies. Going beyond the monolithic and binary views of the repressive state versus repressed society, and liberal democracy versus authoritarian communist Party, Meng Bingchun contends that multifaceted struggles, as well as concurrences, take place among the divergent political groups within the Party-state, domestic and international capital, and the highly stratified Chinese society. Meanwhile, China’s socialist legacy is still haunting the present ideological battlefield.
From the critical perspective of the political economy of communication, Meng reveals how the Party-state proactively collaborates with the domestic and transnational capital to restructure the Chinese media system as a driving engine to develop the country’s market economy while maintaining the utmost political power of the Party. By addressing the transition and development of news media, television and film industry, and the Internet and digital communication system in post-socialist China, Meng summarizes commercialization, conglomeration and convergences as the three common characteristics and trends. Preserving the Party authority and pursuing profit reconcile in the continuous marketization of news media. The socialist journalist principle of ‘serving the people’ was mostly omitted in practices if not completely disappearing in a discursive sense. Since 2000, the Party-state has played a primary role in building domestic media conglomerates, and a group of giant media and Internet companies has emerged as monopolies in the entertainment and digital media market, including Wanda, Huayi, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and so on. These media and telecommunication companies have also become the main actors in the transnational co-production and distribution of global capitalist media.
Whereas liberal views and assumptions anticipate market reform would bring democracy to China, in reality, the capitalist mode of production, distribution and consumption of media and culture only consolidates the power of capital and elites, neglecting public interests and failing to address the rising inequalities in the country. One notable consequence is the erosion of journalism by media convergence on digital platforms. In the attention economy, tech-savvy companies profit over journalists’ labour in news media outlets and serve as news aggregators only to produce individualized newsfeeds to attract readers. News that is supposed to stand for public goods becomes privatized echo chambers on corporate digital platforms. The media reform along with the economic reform also leads to the severely uneven distribution of communication resources between the urban middle-class and rural and working-class populations, with the former being regarded as the ideal consumers of media and cultural products and the latter marginalized as alienated and undesirable others in urban space and culture.
The book provides a compelling account that explicates ideological struggles in contemporary China. Specifically, Meng elucidates the political implication of the Party-state’s discursive project of building global ‘soft power’ and the ideological debates among groups of Party cadres and leading intellectuals. Departure from being the revolutionary vanguard for socialism, the Party-state turns to a depoliticized, pragmatic and technocratic approach to national development in the reform era. In support of China’s integration into capitalist globalization, reformists within the Party line up with liberal intellectuals and media professionals to advocate pro-market policies and liberal democracy. On the contrary, a group of critical intellectuals, who become influential and are often referred as the ‘new left’ in the 1990s, are strongly against China’s capitalist and neoliberal orientations and have been calling upon the Party to restore the country’s socialist legacy and move towards people’s democracy. Resonating voices come from some leftist Party officials who oppose the market reform and urge the Party to stick with its socialist commitment to justice and equality. Despite the contestations, rejecting the socialist past and embracing liberal values of the free market become the dominant ideology in reforming China.
The Party-state and market economy are decisive in the process of making neoliberal subjects and subjectivity through commercialized media and culture. The State-led project on improving suzhi (quality) of Chinese people normalizes the ideas and actions of self-enterprising and turns humans into human capital. Through the networked commercial culture, which is promoted by both the state and market, the neoliberal logic hails the urban middle-class as individualist consumers who project their desired ‘good life’ onto consumption, which often means having extravagant lifestyles. Urban middle-class women, in particular, are the targets of commercial media and culture. Online shopping festivals, parenting discourse widely circulated on social media, discussed as two cases in the book, are among the many discursive sites where middle-class women are interpellated by the patriarchal and capitalist ideologies as gendered consumer subjects.
The four-decade reform has witnessed China’s rapid economic growth and rising global power at the price of the ever-increasing social inequalities and environmental destruction. The hegemonic crisis that the Party-state has faced, as Meng explores through the lens of media politics, particularly lies in the discrepancy between its discursive commitment to socialist egalitarian politics and the actual development routes that underpin structural violence, inequality and injustice. The Party leaders’ ideological claims about the loyalty to Marxism, socialism and communism seem to become empty words along with China becoming the second biggest power in the capitalist world economy. As Meng has discussed that, in the US-led international media environment, China’s authoritarian political system continues to be depicted as a threat to Western democracy, where political power is concentrated in monopoly corporations. Such discourse is undoubtedly a replicate of the Cold War strategy to attack socialism, but the Chinese state’s current effort to build national image is ironically futile just because it circumvents the important political and ideological debates on socialism versus capitalism. The Party-state’s depoliticized, pragmatic approach that Meng overtly criticizes in the book appears not to be an appealing alternative to the capitalist liberal democracy for both domestic and international publics. Perhaps the only road ahead for China to restore hegemony and engage international alliances is to build socialist democracy that guarantees mass political participation, economic equality and social justice.
