Introduction
The Chinese press has gone through several iterations during a history which spans nearly a thousand years. Beginning during the dynastic period as an elite tool of imperial communication, China’s newspaper industry rapidly expanded under colonial tutelage in the 19th century. After a relatively freewheeling period in the 1930s, the communist press took on a consistently Leninist visage for most of the Mao years, acting as an adjunct of the State and a tool of mass mobilisation and propaganda. Since the reform and opening up (gaige kaifang) period began in 1980, the Chinese press has experienced great vicissitudes, liberalising, commercialising and diversifying to various extents at different times. Currently, though journalists and editors are demonstrably conscious of political priorities, China’s newspapers appear more concerned than ever with the needs and desires of their consumers, resulting in a curiously hybrid system which might crudely be described as a heavily-regulated commercial space, or a semi-free press.
The Chinese Press in Historical Context
The Early Press
Of the dizzying number of inventions attributed to China in Needham’s pioneering work, Science and Civilisation in China (1978) none have been as transformative for human development as printing. The manifold political, social and economic changes wrought by Johannes Guttenberg’s popularisation of the printing press in the 15th century could not have occurred were it not for the techniques and technologies he borrowed, consciously or not, from early Chinese innovation. China’s earliest known woodblock printed newspaper, the Kaiyuan Za Bao, originated in the first half of the 8th century under Tang emperor Xuanzong (Chang, 1989: 4) and an early incarnation of Guttenberg’s moveable type printing press was developed in the 11th century by craftsman Bi Sheng (Needham, 1978)12.
12 Bi Sheng’s movable type press was necessarily less flexible than Guttenberg’s on account of the
34 The feting of Guttenberg in historiography inevitably leads to charges of
Eurocentricism, though one need not be so in elevating printing’s importance. Printing has played a vital role in forging China’s historically-constituted and highly literate modern culture. The dissemination of information through printed text both sustained imperial rule in China for more than a millennium13 and, more widely, facilitated the spread of Buddhism across China and East Asia14.
By contrast, modern journalism may be reasonably described as a Western import. Journalism remained largely undeveloped in China until the advent of 19th century colonialism. The changes wrought by European interlopers were twofold:
missionaries brought with them the organisational, technical and commercial competencies associated with regularized publishing. The first Chinese-language monthly was published by a British missionary, William Milne, as early as 1815 (Scotten & Hatchen, 2012: 20)15. Businessmen took over the mantle in the second half of the 19th century, particularly in the port cities16. The first daily newspaper in China, launched in Guangzhou in 1854, was explicitly commercial and the half-century that followed the close of the First Opium War saw the publication of more than 300 periodicals (ibid).
The second inspiration that colonialism provided was as an object of scrutiny, deliberation and discussion in itself. The fact that a range of European powers were able to win ostensibly straightforward military victories and carve out extraterritorial concessions prompted Chinese intellectuals to organise opinion in the form of publishing and pamphleteering. Colonialism itself was not necessarily the target of such published commentary. Rather, the subjects of scorn were the formal
institutions of Chinese society which had been found impotent against foreign incursions. China’s “first modern journalist” (Schell & Delury, 2013: 46), Wang Tao,
13 Hand-written court gazettes, or dibao, are thought to have existed from as early as the Han dynasty
(202 BC to 221 AD). It was under the Tang that these became printed editions (Chang, 1989: 5).
14
The world’s oldest surviving printed text, the 9th century Diamond Sutra, is a Buddhist document found in grottoes near Dunhuang, a remote oasis town at China’s western desert frontier. It is currently (2014) held by the British Library.
15
Merrill claims that the first modern Chinese newspaper was actually the Chinese-language Eastern
Western Monthly Magazine, founded in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1833 (quoted in Chang 1989: 7). There
is, however, agreement over the explicitly religious focus of these early publications.
16
As well as ceding the island of Hong Kong to the British, the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing guaranteed commercial access to five treaty ports for the British. These port cities were Shanghai, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou and Ningbo.
35 epitomises both influences, beginning as a translator in a missionary school, moving to the United Kingdom and returning to establish a daily newspaper in Hong Kong – the Xunhuan Ribao (Circulation Daily) – which regularly featured polemical pieces on China’s perceived weakness.
Though potential reform had been discussed ever since China’s comprehensive defeat in the First Opium War17 (Fenby, 2009; Lovell, 2011; Schell & Delury, 2013) it was the Chinese loss in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 that proved the most important grist to the mill of political debate. Indeed, resistance to the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the war, had coalesced into something approaching a movement by 1898 which called for radical change. The movement’s leading intellectual lights were Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, one-time civil servants who collaborated to publish newspapers which unambiguously advocated sweeping constitutional reform as a response to the perceived ‘national crisis’. Though Kang and Liang were forced from their official positions and saw their publications suppressed (Levenson, 1967: 21-22), a trend had been established which would be repeated over the next generation by luminaries such as (Nationalist leader) Sun Yat- sen, (Chinese Communist Party founder) Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong, who each spent time running radical periodicals calling for revolutionary change.
Thus China’s press emerged from a hybrid and somewhat contradictory tradition, at once a vehicle for capitalist exchange and for polemical politics. This cannot be described as unique. Indeed, there are obvious parallels with the kind of
pamphleteering undertaken by the likes of John Milton in 17th century England. Like China two centuries later, Britain was then on the cusp of radical constitutional change, the franchise was extremely limited in scope and the audience for such writings was mainly traders and merchants. In this respect, fin de siècle China could be said to be undergoing a process experienced in parts of western Europe some two centuries earlier. What was different was what it ultimately produced.
36
The Republican and Early Communist Press
The precise effect of this activist press in the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the so-called New Culture Movement which followed is impossible to quantify. That there was an effect is equally impossible to deny. The ferment of ideas during this period of enormous political and social flux was palpable. By 1919, the transition to a new constitutional arrangement was stalled and beset with factionalism. From Russia came news that the Bolsheviks had captured and consolidated power; the Treaty of Versailles proved, to many, the betrayal of exploitative Western powers, and all the while the significant Chinese diaspora was absorbing and transmuting ideas of syndicalism, Marxism and other radical philosophies into the Chinese context. The burning question that had been asked ever since 1842 – what was needed to rejuvenate an ailing nation – continued to be asked in publications and pamphlets across the land.
The 1919-1949 period has been described as the ‘golden era’ of Chinese media (de Burgh, 2003). Hundreds of people from different backgrounds and from different political persuasions set up periodicals, magazines and newspapers. Though there were almost constant attempts to control public discourse, notably by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party in the 1920s and 1930s, the repression was sporadic and inconsistent. Indeed, lacking the strict ideological rigour of their communist successors, the KMT eventually publish regulations for the protection of press
freedom. “Indeed, in spite of all the restrictions imposed (or half imposed) by Nanjing [in the 1930s], China possibly enjoyed more intellectual freedom than ever before or since” (Gray, 1990, quoted in De Burgh, 2003: 102). By 1947 there were 1,781
registered newspapers across the country, the majority of which were independent of political control or explicit political alignment.
It was in this vibrant intellectual milieu that the Chinese Communist Party was
founded in Shanghai in 192118, though its respect for the idea of unfettered exchange of information and ideas was limited. The party adhered to a Marxist view of the press (see next chapter) – the ‘propaganda model’ – which had already begun to be
18 The CCP was founded in a meeting house within the so-called French Concession, one of Shanghai’s
37 implemented and developed by the Russian Bolsheviks. The core of this belief posited that journalists – regardless of their personal belief or behaviour – were led by the economic superstructure to act as representatives and advocates of the ruling classes. Communist journalists, therefore, must occupy the converse position whereby they represented the interests of the working classes, and work to persuade the masses of their ‘line on truth’. In this task, “[t]he main consideration was not whether
statements be true or false but the consequences they might have and their ‘class nature’” (de Burgh, 2003).
Both of the CCP’s two great 20th century leaders had personal experience of writing, editing and publishing newspapers. During the CCP’s alliance with the KMT in the mid-1920s, Mao Zedong worked as chief editor of the KMT’s central organ, Political Weekly (Chang, 1989: 16), while Deng Xiaoping once served as the chief editor at Red Star, the official organ of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (Xie, 2011: 294). The lessons of these experiences bore fruit in the communist bases of Jiangxi in the early 1930s and, later, in the camps and cave dwellings of Yan’an where the Party rehabilitated itself after the almost-fatal ravages of the Long March. It was here, in the large but isolated and bounded community, that early communist leaders were able to put their theories of information dissemination into practice. These were defined by Mao’s speeches through the middle of 1942, later collated and dubbed ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature’, in which he defined all cultural works, media included, as belonging to the ideological sphere, and that all must take the “correct stand” in the service of the “proletariat and the masses” (Mao, 1960). Critical to Mao’s view was the notion, widely held at the time, that the media had transcendental powers which could change – or ‘correct’ – an individual’s thinking (Schell & Delury, 2013; Chilton et al, 2012: 10).
The Propaganda Model of the Chinese Press
The first few months in the life of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were relatively relaxed as the CCP set about building the infrastructure of statehood. Several
independent publications in Shanghai – home to the most vibrant newspaper industry pre-1949 – attempted to continue business, unbelieving that their commercial and technical expertise would be so readily dismissed by the incoming regime (Brady,
38 2010). By 1951, however, the totalitarian ideological priorities of the incoming regime were clear. ‘New’ China would involve wholesale re-education of the population. An era of “relentless political campaigns aimed at the thought reform of the Chinese people in all aspects of life” (ibid: 37) was underway.
Newspapers played a vital role in signalling, driving and ending the mass campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The Anti-Three and Anti-Five campaigns, the Hundred Flowers campaign, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were all signalled and triggered from newspaper editorials (Scotten & Hachten, 2010: 43). During the Hundred Flowers campaign, newspapers were the primary vehicle in which dissenting views were aired, though correspondents and officials who had heeded Mao’s encouragement to speak out were later purged or punished. In day-to-day propaganda work, newspapers were a vital tool in carrying out re-education work. Study sessions in factories and offices incorporated clippings from official publications (ibid). In this sense, journalists, or ‘news workers’ (xinwen gongzuo zhe) (Xu, 2000: 55), were aware of their responsibilities in nation-building. PRC media focused to an overwhelming degree on positive developments, unity and refrained from contrasting views on a topic (Wasserstrom, 2010: 122-3). In a
posthumously published work, long-time Chinese president19 Liu Shaoqi, (1984: 30) identified four principles of mass persuasion that were at work in the Chinese press during this era: insulation (from competing ideas); emotional arousal; simplification; and politicisation.
The problems associated with an uncritical press were made particularly stark after the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). Journalists were among the few people within China during these years who were able to travel freely and observe first-hand the calamitous effects of the policy of mass collectivisation and large-scale exportation of the grain stock. The grim realities of the resultant famine and failing industrial output were not, however, reported openly by such journalists. Though some produced
19
As ‘president’ Liu was head of state, though his de-facto position during his time at the ostensible peak of Chinese political life was still subordinate to that of Mao. Mao occupied the chairmanship of the CCP throughout his 27-year rule of the People’s Republic of China and, as such, remained firmly at the helm of China’s immense and complex political bureaucracy. Liu can claim to have commanded arguably greater power than Mao in the year which followed Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward (1957-1961), but Mao reasserted his supremacy shortly thereafter during the Cultural Revolution (Fenby, 2009; Shell & Delury, 2013).
39 private neican reports for circulation among the central leaders, many chose to parrot the ‘truth’ that had been decided by central government, regardless of the situation on the ground. Accordingly, journalists came to be seen by some in the political elite as part of the reason why a ruinous policy was not reversed earlier.
The Great Leap Forward drew attention to one of the most enduring characteristics of the Chinese press, that being its role as political battleground at times of national debate. Factional disputes were exposed in terms of often-subtle, occasionally-stark, differences in the tone and content of editorials in differing publications. Where once there had been a blank slate on which China’s supreme leader, Mao Zedong, could project absolutely his own personal philosophy, there was ambiguity and contention. This was to change radically from 1966 onwards during Mao’s infamous experiment in social engineering and decade-long power play, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (wuchan jieji wenhua da geming) between 1966 and 1976.
The bare political power play which underpinned the Cultural Revolution was triggered from an article, planted by Mao, in two newspapers in Shanghai, the Wenhui Bao and the Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao) (MacFarquhar & Schoenhals, 2006: 18). The resulting convulsion engulfed the entire nation, precipitating an unceasing stream of fevered campaigns, crack-downs and organised demonstrations which elevated Mao’s personal status and denigrating, at intervals, almost every other source of potential authority.
The ‘permanent revolution’ of the period engendered two kinds of responses: an initial feeling of “liberation, freedom of expression and freedom of thought” (Brady, 2010: 39), felt by many, followed by a creeping fear of speaking out, an attitude which characterises the response of news workers at all levels. Just as ordinary citizens desperately attempted to adhere to the perceived ‘Party-line’ in public behaviours and pronouncements, editors and journalists abandoned all pretence at independence. Most newspapers ceased publication altogether, with only the 43 party organ newspapers surviving. These, in turn, rarely produced more than six pages per day, and did nothing more controversial than directly ape the output of centrally-controlled media to the point of using identical layouts and typefaces
40 (Scotton & Hachten, 2010: 21). In the words of former Party newspaper editor Qian Gang, media in this era were “merely tools of despotism” (2014).
The Press During Reform and Opening Up
The post-1978 period in the life of the Chinese press has attracted niche scholarly debate. The process that was taking place throughout the 1980s is described by Pan as “breaking the confinement of the Party-press system based on the propaganda model” (2010, 520), characterised by political liberalisation. This was followed by a post-1989 settlement for the Chinese press which is summed up by two words: marketization and de-politicisation.
Liberalisation in the 1980s
The Cultural Revolution proved a profound lesson to China’s leadership in the
immediate aftermath of the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress20 not least in the media field. The response was a conscious rejection of the idea of mass movements and thought reform – two of the underlying principles of media development up until this point – and a retreat from invasive propaganda work (Brady, 2010: 39). Hu
Yaobang, one of the most liberal of China’s leaders and the man whose death sparked the protests of 1989, was appointed, for a short time, as Director of the Central Propaganda Department and, for a lengthier period, senior leader in charge of ideological work. The main ideological guidelines of Zhao Ziyang, CCP General
Secretary through most of the 1980s, were “to give signals that he generally tolerated debate and criticism (both inner-Party and within society)” (Brady, 2010: 41). Even when Fang Lizhi, an academic who had called explicitly for democratic reform, was thrown out of the Party, Zhao defended his right to articulate his views (Schell & Delury, 2013: 307).
This broad ideological shift went in lockstep with the process of radical market-based reform. In 1979 the press, for the first time, was given permission to accept
advertising (Akhavan-Majid, 2005: 557). The development of newspaper advertising, like so much in the early period of reform, was a tentative and ambiguous process
20
This is the Party meeting, held in December 1978, when Deng Xiaoping is generally regarded as establishing his pre-eminence within the political hierarchy and, thus, opening the way to radical market-based reform.
41 (Stockmann, 2013) but the trend became firmly established within the decade. Partly because of new advertising opportunities, the 1980s saw an “explosion of lifestyle news-oriented afternoon tabloids” (Zhao, 2008: 77) which, as profit-making vehicles, appeared to completely reorient the entire concept of ‘news’ in the People’s Republic of China. It may not have been a coincidence that the greatest experimentation took place in Guangdong where media outlets were both influenced by, and – to a limited extent – competing with unfettered media outlets on the other side of the Hong Kong border, and imbued with an entrepreneurial energy influenced by the wider
economic reforms which were being pioneered there (Cao, 1999).
More widely, the 1980s also saw the establishment of journalistic laws, as well as ‘unofficial’ publications which were, for a time, freed from pre-publication Party oversight altogether (Wright, 1990: 121). For the first time, newspapers began to routinely report negative stories of accidents and touched on difficult social issues without immediate fear of punishment. Even national media outlets responded. The People’s Daily called for more critical and investigative reporting (Chang, 1989: 48) and state broadcaster, CCTV, made programmes such as River Elegy (He Shang) which presented a revisionist explanation of China’s fall from geopolitical pre-eminence, relegating the importance of colonial subjugation and echoing earlier calls for China to embrace overseas ideas, technologies and philosophies21. Again, Guangdong media appear as pivotal here, with some southern newspapers taking an explicitly
adversarial stance, calling on Deng Xiaoping to retire and, in rare cases, appealing for the CCP to relinquish power (Chang, 1989).
The Market and the Party, Post 1989
Analysis of the model of the Chinese press appears to hinge around the student