Hegemony is ‘a relation, not of domination by means of force, but of consent by means of political and ideological leadership. It is the organization of consent’.Footnote 1
A popular depiction of Chinese media in the past decade has been that of a fearful, loyal agent of the ruthless party-state, which exudes no tolerance towards its critics. Indoctrinated to channel official propaganda to the public, silenced by censorship and threatened by coercion, Chinese journalists function in one of the world’s toughest places when it comes to media freedom. The few dissidents who are brave enough to challenge China’s omnipowerful party apparatus are quickly crushed by it, as manifested by harassment and arrests of activists, widely documented in the Western press.Footnote 2 The latest global press freedom assessments rank China at the bottom of their lists, alongside Somalia, Iran and Vietnam.Footnote 3
What goes unnoticed beneath the stark imagery of collision between the mighty state and the fearless, isolated critics, however, is the web of complex negotiations taking place between some Chinese journalists and party officials. Specifically, whereas the majority of Chinese reporting still adheres to the propaganda model, in the past three decades, an exceptional practice of what I term ‘critical journalism’,Footnote 4 including investigative, in-depth, editorial and human-interest coverage of contentious societal issues, has emerged in China amid the restrictive environment. Critical journalists comprise a diverse group, with the majority of them based at successful commercial news outlets,Footnote 5 but some also working for investigative units of official party outlets, and others contributing individual reports as freelancers and social media commentators. The group includes such different individuals as Miss Xi, a twenty four-year-old Beijinger and recent journalism graduate who has dug into high-level official corruption cases at Nanfang Dushibao and Caixin, and Mr He, a fifty-year-old Gansu native who never studied journalism but has headed investigative bureaus at the China Economic Times and The Economic Observer, where he exposed issues ranging from coal mine disasters to improper vaccinations in Shanxi. While their professional pressures, regional bases and personal struggles may differ, what unites these journalists is their pursuit of social justice and their quest to push the envelope of permissible reporting.
Their photographs rarely appear in Western newspapers, as they tend to avoid exposure while carrying out enduring battles within the system. Instead of protesting on the streets, they often gather and share their experiences on university campuses or in the Western-style coffee houses that are mushrooming all over Beijing. You are more likely to find them in dimly lit Soviet-style lecture halls that resemble meeting rooms of propaganda officials, or in corners of a local Starbucks, than in openly subversive spaces for political critique. While not publicly fighting the regime, these journalists delve into sensitive areas, such as corruption and societal inequality, and provide an alternative framing to that deployed by propaganda journalists on issues of high importance to Chinese citizens. In the past decade alone, they exposed stories such as the 2002 AIDS epidemic in Henan province, the 2003 Sun Zhigang case of a migrant worker illegally detained and beaten to death in Guangzhou,Footnote 6 the scandalous school demolitions in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the 2008 milk-poisoning scandal, widespread environmental protests, and food safety crises, among other contentious issues.Footnote 7 In most cases, their stories raised a wide public outcry, as manifested in active discussions online, and in some cases they also produced a moderate policy shift.
Given the obsession of the Chinese party-state with maintaining political stability and its deeply entrenched suspicion of liberal media, what motivates it to tolerate critical voices? And considering the high risks associated with probing the system and the meagre chances of changing the political status quo, what drives some journalists to undertake personal and professional risks and engage in critical journalism? Most importantly, how do the key actors – journalists and central officials – manage their delicate relationship and what explains its continuing perseverance? This book is the first sustained attempt at examining the relations between China’s critical journalists and the party-state in the past decade (2002–2012) – a period associated with official effort in building a ‘harmonious society’ amid rising levels of public discontent.Footnote 8 Whereas the 1990s are known as the golden age of watchdog journalism in China,Footnote 9 the period since 2000 has been more tumultuous for journalist-state relations. As the costs of the fast economic growth of the past two decades began to sink in and give rise to social mobilisation, critical journalism has carried higher risks and opportunities for both the state and media professionals. The tensions, which are already escalating as China continues to strive for a balance between sustained economic growth and political stability, make the puzzle of journalist-state relations ever more interesting and timely to examine. In the past three years, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, for instance, the coexistence of critical voices and the state is facing new challenges, as manifested in Xi’s renewed emphasis on upholding stability and in journalists’ persisting push for official accountability, recently demonstrated in courageous investigative reporting of the major chemical explosion in Tianjin.Footnote 10
Beyond correcting popular misconceptions about Chinese media, the pursuit of this book is driven by three overarching intellectual objectives. First, the relationship between critical journalists and the state is an important dimension of Chinese politics on the boundary of the permissible, and thereby can inform us as much about the evolving bottom-up activism as about the modes of adaptation of the Chinese party-state when faced with impending pressures from below. While China’s critical journalists constitute a fraction of Chinese media professionals, they are deeply entrenched in the wider network of China’s activists, which includes the more contentious non-governmental organisation (NGO) leadersFootnote 11 and lawyers,Footnote 12 among others who have consistently probed the limits of the regime’s tolerance through questioning, criticising and transforming some aspects of governance. At the same time, critical journalists are distinct from other activists or critical actors in a way that makes them theoretically important for analysing the Chinese political system. They carry a heightened political sensitivity for the regime, as they are capable of not only exposing public grievances and governance failures but also of galvanising certain causes and social movements. They can not only provide communication linkages across different activist groups but can also connect these groups with the larger public and empower social movements, especially in the fast-speed age of social media. In the past ten years, the internet has further facilitated the journalists’ mediator role, which in turn has arguably spearheaded more contention amongst the Chinese public.Footnote 13 Grasping how critical journalists engage with the regime and how the party-state interacts and responds to these critics, therefore, allows us to map out a more comprehensive picture of ‘boundary spanning’Footnote 14 activity and the mechanisms behind the regime’s persisting adaptability and resilience.
More broadly, the study of critical journalists and the state in China is an account of limited political openings for public participation under authoritarianism – a phenomenon widely examined in comparative authoritarianism literature in the context of elections,Footnote 15 but much less so with regard to other channels, such as the media. The media is often treated as one of the variables influencing electoral outcomes,Footnote 16 or, when analysed in more detail, it is either portrayed as a democratising force,Footnote 17 or, on the opposite, as a tool of public opinion manipulation.Footnote 18 What is evident is that media openings are always highly contested spaces under authoritarianism, as regimes regard them with schizophrenic vision, both as potential threats to and as necessary tools for their continuing survival in the interconnected world. The aspiration of this book is to examine these tensions in more depth by stepping beyond the analytical focus on the outcomes of liberalisation versus resilience and illuminating the processes of negotiation and mutual adaptation of different actors involved in contesting these openings. A better grasp of these processes in turn facilitates a deeper understanding of potential risks and opportunities that the presence of some critical journalism, and bounded political openings for participation more broadly, entail for authoritarian regimes. By focusing on the case study of media politics in China, moreover, the ulterior objective is to question the conceptual categories of ‘hybrid’ versus ‘full authoritarian’ regimes dominating the existing comparative analysis,Footnote 19 as will be explained in detail in the following chapter. The China case demonstrates that even those regimes that lack national elections can still combine state control with moderate tolerance of political participation – aspects of which, like the media, can be compared across cases, as demonstrated in the comparison with Russia and the Soviet Union in Chapter 7.
Finally, this book’s undertaking is rooted in a motivation to take another step in the direction of de-Westernising media studiesFootnote 20 by examining the role of media oversight, which is most closely associated with Western liberal democracies, in the radically different and improbable context of China’s one-party state. Investigative journalism and critical reporting are largely linked to the notion of the fourth estate and the conception of accountability in democratic systems.Footnote 21 The majority of the existing studies on this subject, not surprisingly, are situated in Western contexts.Footnote 22 When strides towards non-Western comparisons are made, they tend to be focused on conceptualising and categorising media systems rather than media practices and production processes.Footnote 23 Marginalised journalism practices, like critical reporting, often get absorbed into meta-level systemic comparisons. By documenting the micro- and macro-characteristics of critical journalism in China, the analysis presented here not only complements system-level comparisons but also invites more comparative work between Western and non-Western contexts, as well as across non-Western contexts on the dimension of journalistic practices and actors engaged in them, which reside beneath the large and often opaque umbrellas of media systems.
A Fluid Collaboration and Guarded Improvisation
In the past decade, the field of Chinese media studies has undergone a revival, with scholars moving beyond the examination of party institutions responsible for media control towards analysing commercial aspects of media practices,Footnote 24 and most recently engaging with multifaceted dynamics of the internet, including online activism,Footnote 25 modes of internet management by the regime,Footnote 26 and the implications of advances in social media for state-society relations.Footnote 27 Although the focus of enquiry has expanded and diversified, the dominant frameworks for engaging with Chinese media have not significantly changed over time. They continue to feature an emphasis either on the party-state tactics or on bottom-up practices, resulting in an analytical dichotomy of control versus resistance.Footnote 28 Specifically, whereas one set of scholarly works interrogates censorship, ranging from the study of official directives to experiments with keyword filtering, the other illuminates journalists and netizens’ contenstation of control via a myriad of creative practices.Footnote 29 This two-sided analysis of Chinese media, which tends to portray the relationship between the state and liberal-minded journalists and netizens as one of perpetual struggle, reflects the dominant approach in the field of Chinese politics more broadly, whereby either a top-down or a bottom-up lens is employed in delineating the modes of control and resistance, as will be explained in detail in Chapter 2.
This study examines the relationship between critical journalists and the state at both the top-down and the bottom-up levels of analysis, and thereby theorises about the key features of their engagement. In fusing the two perspectives together, this book portrays the relationship between critical journalists and central authorities as a fluid, state-dominated partnership characterised by continuous improvisation. The two actors are analysed as operating within a common political framework and aspiring towards a shared goal – the goal of improving governance. Party officials grant journalists an ambiguous consultative role in the system, and journalists align their own agenda to that of the central state. These actors are capable of maintaining collaborative ties in large part due to the flexible nature of this arrangement, which is defined here as ‘guarded improvisation’. Journalists and officials make ad hoc creative adjustments in response to one another, with the state maintaining ample room for modification in endorsing, constraining and responding to watchdog reporting, and with journalists improvising by reinterpreting official policies and working to bypass political restrictions in the haze of dynamic ambiguity. The party-state, however, consistently and carefully guards or leads the direction and the scope of this creative manoeuvring,Footnote 30 whereas journalists limit their improvised resistance to ‘tactical’ strategies undertaken within the structures imposed by the state.Footnote 31
In putting forward this new framework for characterising the relations between critical journalists and the party-state, this study doesn’t aim to dismiss the importance of contention, but rather to propose that the overriding tensions should be examined in the larger context of a cooperative umbrella fusing the interests of central and occasionally also local officials with those of critical journalists. The cat and mouse game is vivid, but it is only one facet of their relationship. This book invites scholars of Chinese media to question and unpack the dichotomous categories (i.e. contestation versus control) and to deconstruct the fluid partnership between the seemingly adversarial forces as an important step in grasping the nuances of the Chinese media system.
This collaborative dimension is not unique to journalists, and feeds into the scholarly analysis of Chinese intellectuals and other activists as being embedded into the political system.Footnote 32 While on the surface having more temptations to embark on open subversion, as they are more readily exposed to global influences in contrast to other Chinese activists, journalists are still deeply entrenched in the system, exhibiting a mix of pragmatism and idealism akin to other contemporary change-makers in China who operate on the fringes of the permissible. Specifically, they acknowledge their role as agents of the central state, take advantage of the loopholes in the political system and avoid issues that immediately challenge or question the party’s legitimacy. This notion of symbiotic relations between journalists and officials echoes studies of artists under censorship in socialist contexts that argue that in contrast to the widely perceived antagonism, the censors and their subjects are fused together in an intricate dance of acquiescence.Footnote 33
At the same time, the analysis in this book shows that the persisting embedding of societal actors into the political system and their collaboration with the regime are contingent on unequal power dynamics in favour of the state, and the presence of mutually embraced ambiguity that allows for the relationship to be continuously adjusted and reinvented. As for unequal dynamics, the study of journalists suggests that activists and critical voices continue to occupy the weaker advisory role and remain vulnerable to the shifting political objectives and sensitivities. Though journalists can be the ones sparking the improvised engagement with authorities by outrunning censorship and re-navigating the grey zone, the party-state intensely and meticulously guides their relationship. Throughout, the book illuminates how the party crafts the space for media supervision by framing it as a party-led mechanism in the official discourse and by carefully pre-empting and reacting to journalists’ improvised acts both on a routine basis and especially in times of major crisis events.
As for the importance of ambiguity, the arguments put forward here echo and build on other recent works on ‘political ambivalence’,Footnote 34 ‘mixed signals’Footnote 35 and ‘uncertainty’Footnote 36 as characterising China’s ‘politics at the boundary’.Footnote 37 As explained in detail in the following chapter, the framework of ‘guarded improvisation’ is an attempt at further crystallising the process of this fluid engagement between the state and societal actors. While ambiguity undoubtedly limits activism and especially critical journalism to the narrow grey zones demarcated by the party, it also facilitates its continued existence in a system that prioritises political stability above all. Uncertainty, therefore, should not only be understood as a mechanism of control via self-censorship, as already widely documented in other works, but also as an enabling condition for limited forms of activism to coexist with an authoritarian system.
The book further demonstrates that the fluid partnership between journalists and officials appears to be rooted in ‘fragmented’,Footnote 38 ‘consultative’Footnote 39 and ‘adaptive’Footnote 40 features of China’s political system. As for the fragmented feature, fluid collaboration is in part a product of the decentralised nature of China’s political system, which has long been conceptualised as that of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’,Footnote 41 displaying significant gaps between central-level initiatives and their local-level implementation. These gaps create opportunities for alliances to form between central authorities and societal actors, including critical journalists, that target policy gridlocks and governance failures at the local level. Local officials, as demonstrated in the following chapters, often serve as the common target of journalists and central authorities. At the same time, decentralised policy-making inspires opportunistic behaviour on behalf of local officials, who attempt to safeguard their interests by applying pressures on the centre and on individual reporters to halt and mitigate negative coverage. Whereas in the realm of economic policy-making, experimentation has been noted as an important by-product of fragmented governance,Footnote 42 when it comes to media and social activism, this book suggests that improvisation is a more fitting term, as it captures the less structured and the more dynamic modes of negotiating political boundaries.
Journalist-state relations are also a manifestation of a fusion of China’s consultative and adaptive features, whereby limited public feedback is incorporated into policy-making, while flexibility is prioritised in most dimensions of decision-making and policy implementation. In fact, the analysis of journalists demonstrates how these two parallel but seemingly disparate modes of governance work to reinforce each other in the Chinese context. As the next chapter theorises in more detail, bounded consultations can facilitate the adaptability of the party-state, as they invite prompt adjustments of state policies in accordance with public preferences and help enforce top-down accountability, while a flexible mode of carrying out these consultations is what makes them tolerable to the regime in the first place, as authorities can bend their responses while maintaining a grip on political stability.
Beyond highlighting the persisting characteristics of China’s activism and political governance, the analysis of China’s critical journalists further links the China case to comparative studies on participatory channels under authoritarianism, offering new ways of understanding this phenomenon. By highlighting the potential for societal actors to shape authoritarian governance in a constructive manner, even if not managing nor intending to pave the way for a democratic transition, this book shows that state-sanctioned openings for political participation can serve different governance purposes, such as those of feedback and accountability channels, beyond destabilising or superficially enhancing a ruling regime. As this account of China’s critical journalists demonstrates, the relationship between critical actors and the state under authoritarian rule can embody flexible collaboration, not only the state domination or high contention portrayed in the existing literature.Footnote 43
The Approach and Sources
The book approaches the dynamic puzzle of critical journalism in four parts: conceptual and theoretical frameworks, the key parameters of journalist-state relations in China, case studies of crisis events, and comparative dimensions of state-media relations in Russia and the Soviet Union and of media politics in the Xi Jinping era. The first part of the book which encompasses this introductory chapter and the following theoretical discussion, unpacks the conceptual framework of a fluid partnership and guarded improvisation and explains the theoretical pay-offs of this study for the scholarship on Chinese society, political governance and comparative authoritarianism.
The second part introduces the overarching objectives for media oversight held by central party officials and critical journalists (Chapter 3), followed by the analysis of routine constraints on their relationship, as experienced by practising journalists and editors (Chapter 4). Chapter 3 discusses the notion of a fluid collaboration between critical journalists and the party-state as being rooted in their shared vision of media oversight – a vision that is overshadowed by ambiguity but nonetheless frames critical journalism as a channel for improving the party’s governance, mainly at the local level. Chapter 4, illuminates day-to-day improvised interactions between journalists and media-regulating officials through journalists’ accounts of political pressures, ranging from pre-publication censorship and withholding of information by authorities to post-publication censorship and coercive punishments.
The third part of the book investigates how the terrain that binds these actors shifts during national-level crisis events.Footnote 44 Chapters 5 and 6, expose the reader to the evolving relationship between journalists and officials as it comes under significant pressure. In times of crisis, the party-state is torn between using the media for two somewhat contradictory purposes: propaganda and public feedback. On the one hand, the authorities are driven to shape public opinion through the media, while, on the other, they rely on the media for accurate and objective reporting in order to effectively manage a crisis and pre-empt public discontent. Chinese journalists, in turn, find themselves in an equally precarious position during crisis events, as they come under severe guidance from the state while striving to deliver timely and objective coverage of complex and emotionally-charged events. These mutual challenges experienced by journalists and officials are not unique to China or to authoritarian contexts. Even in democracies, media plays diverse roles in times of emergency, including that of information provision and investigation, and governments often attempt to set media agenda. In China, these dynamics are amplified. Up until the early 2000s, no major reporting on disasters was tolerated as it was deemed to be potentially destabilising. Historically, major disasters in China were regarded as premonitions of the weakening power of the state or as signs of forthcoming political transformations.Footnote 45 To this day, the regime regards them with acute sensitivity, yet it now realises that in the age of social media and globalisation, a complete cover-up is impossible and unfavourable, and a more nuanced treatment of disaster coverage is in order.
The two crises examined here are the Sichuan earthquake (Chapter 5) and repetitive major coal-mining accidents (Chapter 6).Footnote 46 The Sichuan earthquake (also named the Wenchuan earthquake after its epicentre) was the deadliest natural catastrophe to affect China in the past decade,Footnote 47 with the death of over 5,000 children in poorly constructed schools eliciting wide public scrutiny. Coal-mining safety has been a continuous challenge for the Chinese state throughout the reform era,Footnote 48 turning into a national scandal and getting at the forefront of high-level policy discussions by the mid-2000s.Footnote 49 By intentionally selecting two different types of disasters, with the earthquake inciting an unexpected, immediate and large-scale exogenous shock to the system, and the coal-mining accidents presenting the cumulative effect of continuous governance failures, this book traces some variation in potentially destabilising political effects and the subsequent interactions between journalists and the state during and in the aftermath of major crises.
The concluding part of this book takes a step in a comparative direction by drawing contrasts across authoritarian cases (Chapter 7) as well as between Hu and Xi periods (Chapter 8). Chapter 7 compares the China case to two contrasting cases of journalist-state relations in the late Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in the Russian Federation under Putin. The former is the case of critical journalists playing a democratising role, contributing to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the latter is the case of them coexisting with the regime but having a highly subdued and marginalised position in the political system. These comparative contexts reflect the two common ways of analysing limited political openings under authoritarianism, introduced earlier, with critical actors either being involved in a contentious battle with the state or being manipulated by the regime into serving an image-boosting function. This chapter demonstrates how the fluid collaboration framework and the variables of shared objectives and guarded improvisation help explain the divergent relations between critical journalists and the state in other authoritarian contexts. Beyond its theoretical significance in linking the analysis of China to the wider comparative universe of non-democracies, this chapter illuminates both an anti-model of China’s approach to managing the media – that of the Gorbachev leadership—as well as the new potential model for managing critical voices under authoritarianism—in the form of Putin’s leadership. In the past several years, under Xi’s rule, the Chinese party-state has revived the study of the Gorbachev example to avoid similar mistakes and disastrous consequences,Footnote 50 while closely observing Putin’s mode of governing, and in some ways adapting his personalistic features. Chapter 8 concludes the book by revisiting the key arguments and reassessing them in the context of recent changes in media and state-society relations under President Xi. It introduces the latest shifts, and further explains the continuities in journalist-state relations, the flaring of recent tensions, and what the evolving practice of media oversight tells us about China’s consultative governance, varieties of authoritarianism and comparability of media oversight role across political spectrums.
The sensitivity of the subject of this book made for a challenging process of data gathering, involving twelve months of fieldwork with multiple trips to Beijing from 2008 to 2016, as well as a research trip to Moscow in April 2010. A total of 120 semi-structured interviews were carried out with media practitioners, media and crisis management experts, and party and state officials, lasting from one hour to an entire day. Interviews were secured through a web of introductions, otherwise known as the snowball technique, with initial interviewees helping arrange additional meetings with their colleagues. All interviews were conducted by the author in Chinese and Russian. The anonymity of respondents was ensured by carefully concealing their names throughout the research and the writing process. Some follow-up interviews and informal conversations that inform the concluding part of the book were also conducted via Skype and e-mail correspondence in 2014 and 2015, as well as in person, in the summer of 2016. For the list of guiding interview questions and interviewees, please refer to Appendix B.
Media practitioners, including reporters and editors, who make up the majority of the interviewees, were selected primarily from the outlets nationally renowned for investigative and in-depth reporting on contentious societal issues,Footnote 51 ranging from the more commercial outlets like Nanfang Zhoumo, Nanfang Renwu Zhoukan, Nanfang Dushibao, Caijing and Caixin, to investigative units of official outlets such as that of Jingji Guanchabao, Bingdian of Zhongguo Qingnian Bao and the Xinwen Diaocha programme of China Central Television (CCTV). The analysis also draws on interviews with investigative journalists and op-ed editors at popular mainstream outlets, such as Xinjing Bao, freelance journalists who write for established outlets and online platforms, such as Bolian and most recently, Sohu and Tencent; as well as retired investigative journalists. In addition, interviews with editors at some official outlets, such as Huanqiu Shibao and Xinhua News Agency, were conducted for a contrasting perspective. In Moscow, interviewees included editors and journalists at nationally reputable investigative outlets, including Novaya Gazeta, The New Times, Agentura.ru, Vlast’ magazine and the editorial section of Vedomosti business newspaper. The author has also interacted with retired journalists who were active in the glasnost era. In selecting interviewees, the author has largely opted for journalists from established news outlets as opposed to citizen journalists because in-depth reporting in China is still carried out primarily by news outlets, with social media being largely forbidden from embarking on independent investigations.Footnote 52 Moreover, focusing on established news outlets has helped to illuminate the evolution of the interaction of critical voices and the party-state over a longer time frame, and to contrast journalists’ perceptions with their published writings, which enriches the data and the analysis. At the same time, this study is by no means a synthesis of the workings of the press, but rather it sits at the crossroads of new and traditional media, as the boundaries between the two are increasingly evaporating, with print media actively transitioning to online platforms and well-known newspaper journalists turning into popular online public opinion makers with the help of social media platforms like Weibo and Weixin. It is apparent in this research that the majority of critical reports are read in an online edition, rather than in print, and commercial and official news outlets alike are aggressively adapting to digital audiences. A number of media professionals analysed in this study also have a large individual online following. Hu Shuli, the current editor of Caixin magazine, previously at Caijing, for instance,Footnote 53 has two million followers on Weibo, and Luo Changpin, the former editor of Caijing has 680,000 followers.Footnote 54 Not all media personalities are this popular amongst the general public, but the gatekeepers of critical publications tend to exert significant influence on online public opinion in sharing their reports, as well as their opinions on current events. The personalised sharing, however, tends to be limited, as explained further in Chapter 4. Throughout this book, the analysis of critical journalists is fused with the discussion of social media, and its interactive effects on the evolution of investigative reporting are explained in detail.
The book further draws on rare encounters with Chinese officials in charge of media regulation at the central level, including high-ranking employees at China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP, Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Xinwen Chuban Zongshu, 中华人民共和国新闻出版总署) and the Central Propaganda Department (CPD, zhongyang xuanchuan bu, 中央宣传部),Footnote 55 as well as officials in charge of overseeing mining safety at the State Council. Some interviews were followed up with e-mail correspondence, and a number of conversations were carried out with the same officials over an extensive period (four years). Since the motivation of this book was to sketch a framework of journalist-state relations at the national level, interviews with officials are biased in favour of the centre. The objectives of local officials, however, are richly documented in the study, as they are weaved into the interviews with journalists and central officials, and present an important part of the story.Footnote 56
Finally, the perspectives of well-known media and crisis management experts, as well as representatives of media development NGOs, greatly enrich the analysis and complement the discussions with journalists and officials. The scholars and experts interviewed are based at Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing University, Renmin University, China Communications University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the School of Government at Nankai University, as well as at commercial firms involved in training officials in communication techniques. Many of these experts provide media training to officials at the central and local levels, and carry out research directly linked to the questions at the heart of this study, including the opportunities and limitations for media oversight in China and the state’s evolving approaches to crisis management. A global practitioner perspective is also fused into the analysis through conversations with the director and other employees of the International Centre for Communication Development (ICCD), a Beijing-based international organisation that has led extensive journalism training workshops in China on issues ranging from media ethics to environmental journalism,Footnote 57 and through attendance of a number of events and conferences co-sponsored by foreign embassies and Chinese universities on the topic of journalism and media governance. In Moscow, expert interviewees include those based at the Moscow Carnegie Center, Moscow State University and the Glasnost Foundation, as well as independent commentators and activists involved in advancing critical media agenda.
In-depth interviews are complemented by a close textual analysis of the official discourse on the media (Chapter 3), as well as of investigative and in-depth coverage of selected crisis events (Chapters 5 and 6). The former involves a careful study of selected articles in Qiushi, a fortnightly magazine managed by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and renowned for representing policy statements and carrying official discourse. The latter includes the examination of crisis coverage by two different nationally reputable investigative outlets: Nanfang Zhoumo and Caijing.Footnote 58 The analysis of writings of officials and journalists distills different discourse strategies employed by the two actors, as well as the key frames used in discussing media oversight (in the case of officials) and in formulating critical comments (in the case of journalists). This linguistic component presents a rare attempt at in-depth qualitative study of discourse concerning sensitive issues and subtle contested meanings in the Chinese context.Footnote 59 It enriches and diversifies interview analysis, as it further interrogates the concepts and ideas discussed by the interviewees, and demonstrates some of their practical manifestations, especially in the case of journalists’ reporting on sensitive issues.
In the past six years of carrying out the research for this book, the author has benefitted tremendously from long-standing relationships with generous Chinese and Russian colleagues, who have not only accepted interview requests, highlighted the appropriate media sources and shared their contacts but also have allowed for observing journalism classes, media training workshops, public lectures, as well as participating in private gatherings at their homes and in public spaces. When not referring to a specific interview or media analysis, this book draws on many observations collected over the course of these interactions. The attendance of several annual investigative journalism conferences (yulun jiandu huiyi) was particularly meaningful for this research, as the conference gathered critical journalists and editors from across the country and engaged with different facets of journalists’ work on the boundaries of the permissible, including their perceptions of restrictions, negotiation tactics and general understanding of the nature of media oversight in China. Informal meetings and presentations at the Moscow Carnegie Center have also facilitated unique exposure to different voices in the Russian media community. This book attempts to fuse this multifaceted exposure on the ground with critical analysis of primary sources and theoretical and comparative thinking on Chinese governance and authoritarian regimes.
