The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation

THE POLITICS OF
CHINESE MEDIA
CONSENSUS AND
CONTESTATION
BINGCHUN MENG
China in Transformation
Series editors
Lin Chun
London School of Economics
Department of Government
London, UK
Carl Riskin
Queens College
City University of New York
Flushing, New York, USA
Rebecca Karl
East Asian Studies Department
New York University
USA
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Bingchun Meng
The Politics of
Chinese Media
Consensus and Contestation
Bingchun Meng
London School of Economics and Political Science
London, UK
China in Transformation
ISBN 978-1-137-46213-8 ISBN 978-1-137-46214-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5
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To my parents, Wu Dazhao and Meng Weishi, with love and gratitude
Acknowledgement
This book would not have come to fruition without the intellectual input
and practical support of colleagues, friends and family. I am grateful to Lin
Chun, an esteemed colleague and one of the co-editors of this book series,
for her initial interest and trust in this project. Lin Chun also took the time
to read the draft manuscript and generously offered her comments. I want
to thank Zhao Yuezhi for being a source of inspiration and guidance over
the years. Throughout the long process of writing the book, I have bene-
fited greatly from exchanges with Li Hongwei, Vincent Ni, Sun Wanning,
Wang Hongzhe, Wu Jing, Yang Guobin, and Elaine Yuan.
I am very lucky to be surrounded by wonderful colleagues at the
London School of Economics and Political Science who have always been
generous in sharing their insights and providing much needed support:
particularly Shakuntala Banaji, Nick Couldry, Myria Georgiou, Sonia
Livingstone, Robin Mansell, Shani Orgad, Terhi Rantanen and Wendy
Willems.
The project took me on many research trips to China. I am indebted to
Li Xiaobing, Ma Haihong, Shan Chengbiao, Wang Qin, Wei Xing, Xia
Ping and Zhang Lifen for helping with logistics and interview arrange-
ments. I am most grateful to all the interviewees who shared their time
and experience.
Research seminars and invited talks organized by the Annenberg School
of Communication at the University of Southern California, the Asian
Creative and Cultural Industries Research Society at King’s College in
London and the Centre for Media Studies at SOAS University of London
served as invaluable sounding boards at different stages of this project.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
At the LSE, I have had the good fortune of working with a group of
brilliant PhD students: Huang Yanning, Li Zhongwei, Wang Ziyan, Zhou
Yang, and Zhu Xiaoxi, and have learned a lot from them. Huang Yanning
and Zhou Yang also provided excellent research assistance for the writing
of this book.
My heartfelt appreciation also goes to Jean Morris for her superb copy-
editing skills as well as her friendship.
My parents, Meng Weishi and Wu Dazhao, have provided unwavering
love and support throughout my lifetime. I owe them more than words
can say. I dedicate the book to them. Last but not least, I want to thank
Wu Fei for being the best companion in life one could hope for and Yichen
for being such an unfailing source of joy. The two of them are the guard-
ians of my sanity.
Contents
1 Introduction: Understanding the Politics of Chinese Media 1
2 The Chinese State: Moving Left? Moving Right? or

Depoliticized? 25
3 Looking beyond the Liberal Lens: News Media

as Contested Discursive Space 57
4 The Cultural Politics of the Entertainment Media 91
5 From Angry Youth to Anxious Parents: The Mediated

Politics of Everyday Life 127
6 Conclusion 179
References 191
Index 219
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of Alipay Weibo entry 145

Fig. 5.2 Spendthrift Chicks vs. Thrifty Wives 146
Fig. 5.3 Spendthrift Chicks vs. Thrifty Wives 147
Fig. 5.4 Korean War poster and its parody 149
Fig. 5.5 Korean War poster and its parody 150
Fig. 5.6 The Legend of the Red Lantern poster and its parody 151
Fig. 5.7 The Legend of the Red Lantern poster and its parody 152
Fig. 5.8 The Worker–Peasant Alliance poster and its parody 153
Fig. 5.9 The Worker–Peasant Alliance poster and its parody 153
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Understanding
the Politics of Chinese Media
Why History Matters

To start a book on Chinese media with a section on history may not be the
most obvious choice. China and many of its keen observers are so preoc-
cupied with looking into the country’s future that they do not always have
time to contemplate the past. For those who study Chinese media in par-
ticular, the focus is usually on either critiquing the status quo or anticipat-
ing possible change, especially change enabled by digital communication
technologies, which for many are the key to the future. What I shall call
for here is not just that the history of media and communication in China
be treated as the object of research, which in itself is much needed. More
important is that we develop historical sensitivity and a historical approach
as part of our epistemology even when analyzing contemporary issues.
Sewell (2005) points out that the term “historical” has two distinct
meanings in everyday and academic language. On the one hand, “it desig-
nates happenings that take place over time, as in ‘historical continuity’, or
‘historical narrative’” (p. 182). On the other hand, it implies “in the past,”
as in “historical novel” or “historical costume.” Therefore to “think his-
torically” may mean to recognize more explicitly that the matters under
discussion took place in the past, or it may mean to “place the happening
you are thinking about in a temporal sequence of transformations”
(p. 183). Here I want to invoke both history as transformation and history
as context in order to highlight “the ways this history casts a long shadow
© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Meng, The Politics of Chinese Media, China in Transformation,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5_1
2 B. MENG
over today’s reality” (Y. Zhao, 2009, p. 176), including the characteristics

of media and communication in Chinese society.
The long shadow of history manifests itself in three main ways. First of
all, as the only Communist Party in the world that retains its ruling power
while managing the largest capitalist economy, much of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP)’s current policy stand has a huge unresolved ten-
sion with its own socialist and revolutionary history. Deng Xiaoping’s
famous “cat theory”1is an ingeniously pragmatic way of circumventing
ideological debates for the purpose of economic development. Yet genera-
tions of CCP leaders since Deng, as much as they have been adhering to
Deng’s dictum that “development is the hard truth,” have each tried in
their own way to reconcile the present with the past. In 2000, the Jiang
Zemin leadership proposed the “three represents” (三个代表) thesis—that
the CCP has always represented the developmental requirements of China’s
“advanced productive force,” the orientation of China’s “advanced cul-
ture” and the fundamental interest of the majority of Chinese people. This
also became the starting point for Jiang Zemin to expand the class base of
the CCP by welcoming “advanced members” of the entrepreneurial class to
join the Party. After coming to power in 2002, amidst growing inequality
and social conflicts, the Hu Jintao leadership put more emphasis on recon-
necting with the socialist tradition. Slogans like “constructing a harmoni-
ous socialist society” (建设社会主义和谐社会) and “constructing a new
socialist countryside” (建设社会主义新农村) reflected the CCP’s continu-
ous efforts to “selectively draw upon its revolutionary legacies to sustain its
rule at both the normative and the tactical levels” (Zhao, 2011, p. 208).
Viewed against this backdrop, the recent call of the Xi Jinping leader-
ship for the reinvigoration of “red spirit” (红色精神) and promotion of
the “core socialist value system” (社会主义核心价值观) are hardly the
“great leap backward” that some China commentators have claimed
(Fallows, 2016). On the one hand, the regime suppresses with a heavy
hand any public debate about key historical events such as the Cultural
Revolution or the 1989 Student Movement. On the other hand, revolu-
tionary history continues to be the crucial source from which the CCP
derives its legitimacy, which must therefore be carefully curated and con-
stantly mobilized. As Timothy Cheek (2006) has observed,
While foreign observers and Chinese intellectuals alike scoff at these tor-
tured formations, they reflect the efforts of the still-ruling CCP to explain
the massive changes of reform in terms that do not patently contradict
INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING THE POLITICS OF CHINESE MEDIA 3
Chinese Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. If we utterly dismiss the slogans of the

Party as “political rubbish” or mere window-dressing, we will miss the
actual polices of China’s leaders and, more so, fail to understand how the
CCP maintains its public legitimacy without democracy. (p. 43)
Secondly, mainstream media institutions, especially news media, are still

carrying out the historical function of propagating party lines and party
policies. Yet, as the CCP completes the transformation “from party-state
to state-party” (Wang, 2009), the agitating and mobilizing role previously
assumed by the mouthpiece of a revolutionary party has given way to the
maintenance of social stability by a bureaucratic authoritarian state. Three
decades of media marketization have given rise to a dual press system com-
prised of party-organ news media such as the People’s Daily and the Xinhua
News Agency alongside commercial media such as metropolitan newspa-
pers and Internet news websites. The former group plays the crucial ideo-
logical role of “setting the tone” (定调子) on current affairs while being
subsidized financially, as they do not enjoy popularity on the news market.
The market-oriented metropolitan newspapers feature a much wider range
of content and more dynamic reporting style. But the fact that these com-
mercially lucrative newspapers are subsidiaries of the provincial Party press
groups means that they are still under the leadership of the CCP. To be
sure, the expedited media commercialization in the last three decades has
reconfigured to a great extent the orientation of news production as well
as the professional ethos of Chinese journalists. Many have written about
how the news media in China negotiate between the party line and the
“bottom line” (Lee, 2007; Lee, He, & Huang, 2006; Zhao, 1998).
Increasingly, journalists are also exploiting the social capital and cultural
capital associated with their profession for personal gain (I will discuss a
few cases of this in Chapter 3). To make sense of such a sea change since
the 1990s, and to understand the complex forces that shape the status quo
of Chinese journalism, a historically informed analysis is needed.
One incident that epitomizes how deeply the media are involved in the
ideological struggle over the invocation of revolutionary history is the
high-profile Bo Xilai scandal that developed from early 2012 to the sum-
mer of 2013, when Bo’s trial was webcast on sina.com (Meng, 2016). The
controversial policies carried out by Bo when he was mayor of Chong
Qing, a major city in southwest China and one of the five central cities,
centered on reclaiming the socialist legacy. On the cultural front, Bo
banned commercials on Chong Qing Satellite TV and turned it into a
4 B. MENG
public service broadcaster. He initiated the “red song campaign” (唱红

歌), promoted Maoist doctrines (读经典) and encouraged the retelling of
revolutionary stories (讲故事). The economic and social policies Bo imple-
mented were also oriented towards the socialist ethos of “people’s liveli-
hood” (民生) and “common prosperity” (共富). Conflicts thus emerged
over who had the right to claim which part of revolutionary history and
for what purpose. During the 18 months when the Bo Xilai saga was
unfolding, both print and online media were ideological battlegrounds
where different claims about Bo and his Chongqing Model clashed.
Journalistic narratives, far from being neutral, objective reports, were
framed from certain ideological viewpoints (Meng, 2016). When analyz-
ing media and social change in Central and Eastern Europe, Jakubowicz
argues in favor of “incorporating the historical perspective in trying to
understand the reasons for development involved in the collapse of
Communism and everything that has happened since” (p. xiii). If history
matters for countries where the Communist Party is no longer in power,
it matters equally, if not more, for a country where the Communist Party
retains ruling power.
Third, history plays an important role in shaping Chinese people’s
assessment of the present as well as their aspirations for the future. On
September 3, 2015, when a military parade was held in Tiananmen Square
to mark the 70th anniversary of victory in the World War II, one microb-
log (Weibo) entry was reposted close to a million times. The post features
a black and white photo of former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and the
text reads: “Isn’t this time of prosperity what you wished for?” Hundreds
of thousands of people commented on how emotionally they had reacted
to the original post. Some recalled the founding ceremony of the People’s
Republic of China, when Zhou famously came up with a solution to the
shortage of aircraft by asking every pilot to make two circuits passing over
Tiananmen. The contrast between the past and the present brought out
national pride, a tribute to the first generation of CCP leaders and an opti-
mistic outlook on the future.
Of course the purpose of historical memory is not just to affirm the
trajectory of China’s development: it can also be evoked by marginalized
groups to remind the CCP of its broken promises to the Chinese working
class. In her book on labor protest in China, Lee (2007) points out that
workers in China’s rustbelt, where large state owned enterprises (SOEs)
used to guarantee job security and social welfare for communities, tend to
invoke socialist discourse in their protests against the massive layoffs
resulting from the privatization of SOEs. In other words, the historical

memory of socialism provides former state workers with the vocabulary
to articulate their discontent with the present and their demands for a
better future.
Even if we recognize the enduring significance of history, however, it is
not always a straightforward task to carry out historically informed analy-
sis. The hurdles stem from the power structure of knowledge production,
as well as from the politics of academia. Mignolo explicitly links the era-
sure of local, non-Western histories with coloniality:
Not only were the histories of other civilizations, coexisting with the Western
one, relegated to the past of world history and to their localities, but by
being placed in the past and being local they were also deprived of their own
claim to universality. Western civilization managed to have the epistemic
privilege of narrating its own local history and projecting it onto universal
history, which in most modern terms was the global history of preexisting
and, since the Renaissance, coexisting civilizations. (Mignolo, 2012, p. ix)
Despite postcolonial scholars’ call, decades ago, for “provincializing

Europe” (Chakrabarty, 2000), the field of media and communication
research is still dominated by Western-centrism. This is not to say that
there has not been much research on media and communication issues in
non-Western contexts. In fact, there have been several anthologies specifi-
cally aimed at “de-Westernizing” or “internationalizing” the field (Curran
& Park, 2000; Thussu, 2009; Wang, 2011). The problem is that, as
Willems (2014) points out, these works “appeared to be more about
extending the coverage of academic inquiry on media and communication
to countries not ordinarily included in the Western canon than about
questioning the centrality of Western theory” (p. 416). Curran and Park,
for example, wanted the volume they edited to be part of “the growing
reaction against self-absorption and parochialism of much Western media
theory” (p. 3), but the typology they use to organize the chapters in the
book is a slight variation on the normative model that Siebert, Paterson,
and Schramm (1956) developed in their influential Four Theories of the
Press, which Curran and Park (2000) critique for its “confident global
generalization” with only limited knowledge of other media systems
(p. 4). If concepts and theories developed in the very specific Western
European context, such as those of the public sphere or of liberal democ-
racy, are expected to hold universal explanatory power across the globe,
6 B. MENG
history is inevitably lost in the spatial expansion of the Eurocentric frame-

work. Harootunian (2005) calls this an impulse of “privileging spatial
dimensions over the temporal” (p. 28). That is to say, social phenomena
that should be explained as the outcome of a historical process have “now
been transformed into the explanation’s premise” (Harootunian, 2005,
p. 24).
Lack of historical awareness restricts the kind of research question asked
and the range of evidence drawn into an analysis. Since his book The End
of History and the Last Man was first published in 1992, Fukuyama’s pro-
nouncement of the inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracy has
been widely critiqued (see Elliott, 2008). Yet when it comes to the politics
of Chinese media, or indeed to research on media and communication
issues in non-Western contexts in general, Fukuyama’s teleological and
Western-centric view, which obliterates local histories with a global design
(Mignolo, 2012), dominates the agenda. For example, when the marketi-
zation of Chinese newspapers started in the early 1990s, much of the aca-
demic research in English centered on the issue of whether
commercialization would lead to a freer press (for critique of this empha-
sis, see Zhao, 1998, 2004, 2008). This was essentially replaying the ana-
lytical framework of Four Theories of the Press, which Nerone (1995)
succinctly summarizes as offering four examples for one theory of classical
liberalism. Nerone points out that “It is specifically in classical liberalism
that the political world is divided into individual versus society or the
state” (p. 21), and “four theories and classical liberalism assume that we
have the freedom of press if we are free to discuss political matters in print
without state suppression” (p. 22). Hopes that a freer media would lead
to democratization in China were further renewed with the diffusion of
the Internet and digital media technology (for critique of this perspective,
see Meng, 2010).
I would certainly not dismiss research questions of this kind as less than
worthwhile, but I am more interested in the new space of inquiry that a
historically informed perspective would open up. This includes the
“process-oriented approach” called for by Roudakova (2012), which is
more attuned to recognizing the indeterminacy of social change. According
to Roudakova, a process-oriented approach would be more sensitive to
both order-maintaining and order-eroding changes that are particularly
useful in theorizing hybrid regimes. And this does not start with a
prescription for the direction of change. The emphasis on historical aware-
ness also brings us back to the legacy of British Cultural Studies. From E. P.
Thompson’s (1966) social history of the English working class, to Paul

Willis’s (1977) ethnographic account of the culture of “the lads,” from
Raymond Williams’s (1961) elaboration on residual, dominant and emer-
gent cultures, to the multilayered analysis by Stuart Hall and colleagues of
British society on the cusp of ascending Thatcherism (Hall, Critcher,
Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 2013 [1978]). The enduring significance of
the best works of British Cultural Studies lies not in the universality these
project, but rather in the historical specificity they made sure to convey.
Having a sense of historicity is more than developing a better under-
standing of what happened in the past. It is also a matter of cultivating
alternative imaginaries of the future. Being fixated on the historical end-
point of liberal democracy, liberal scholars both within and outside China
have rarely engaged with the country’s socialist history when commenting
on issues related to media and communication. The authoritarian state has
been the natural target of their criticism and the dichotomy of repressive
state vs. repressed media/society the default starting point of most discus-
sions. In the media sector, the complex power matrix of international vs.
domestic, Party organs vs. market-oriented media, traditional vs. new, and
elite vs. grassroots is crudely simplified into a battle between censorship
and freedom of expression. As a result, a whole set of important issues are
glossed over. The legitimacy of the Chinese Party-state is not only based
on the economic growth rate it currently delivers, but also derives from
the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist revolution through which the CCP
led the Chinese people. To this day there are still ideological conflicts
among the ruling elites in terms of the future direction of country, and
cliques within the CCP are making increasing efforts to build an alliance
with the media. While the Party-state has a much stronger presence in
people’s daily lives than is the case in many democratic countries, many of
the problems China now faces, including the failure of media institutions
to carry out their public responsibilities, should also be understood in rela-
tion to China’s integration into global capitalism. The particularly visible
political dissidents, whose voices are amplified by the internet and interna-
tional media, constitute only a tiny slice of public opinion in a highly
stratified postsocialist Chinese society. For some segments of the Chinese
population the socialist ideal of equality and justice is very much alive and
they intend to hold the CCP accountable for the promises it made. Hence,
the extent to which we engage critically with socialist and revolutionary
history, including its pitfalls and legacy, will play an important role in shap-
ing our vision of the future.
8 B. MENG
Communication and Power
In liberal democratic contexts, the field of political communication is the
study of the varied roles that institutional communicators, such as govern-
ment, political parties and mass media, play in the formation of public
opinion, voting behavior and political participation. When it comes to
China, unsurprisingly, the focus is on how the state and state-controlled
Party-organ media communicate official ideology to both international
and domestic audiences (Brady, 2008; Lee, 2000; Rawnsley & Rawnsley,
2003; Wei & Leung, 1999). As already discussed, the fast-paced develop-
ment of both media marketization and networked digital communication
have given rise to new strands of research into the extent to which the
combined force of commercial media and digital technology are challeng-
ing the state’s control of political communication. There are three promi-
nent research themes under the rubric of political communication in the
Chinese context. The first of these looks at state policy and regulation
governing the media sector and the communication industries. The sec-
ond theme examines the new initiatives and strategies that the Chinese
state has adopted amidst the evolving communication landscape in order
to sustain the hegemonic control. The third group studies the new tactics
adopted by commercial media and the communicative practices enabled
by digital technologies in successfully, or unsuccessfully, undermining
state control.
Building upon insights from existing research, but also feeling com-
pelled to challenge some of the conventional wisdom, in this book I draw
on a wide range of theories and concepts to present new cases and offer
more nuanced argument about mediated politics in contemporary China.
While not limiting myself to one particular framework, the analytical per-
spectives I adopt in the book imply a few key theoretical premises. These
include: a multifaceted notion of power that emphasizes the allocation of
communication resources and mobilization of meaning; a broader under-
standing of politics that moves beyond institutional players to include the
cultural politics of everyday meaning-making; and a dialectic view of the
relationship between media and society that takes into consideration
media logic itself.
As arguably one of the most important concepts for critical social
research, the theorization of power is extensive and highly sophisticated.
Nonetheless, the way in which power is perceived in the Chinese context
is often simplistic or one-dimensional. Thompson reminds us that “the
importance of state institutions should not blind us to the fact that overt
political power is only one rather specialized form of power, and that indi-
viduals commonly exercise power in many contexts which have little or
nothing to do with the state” (1995, p. 13). The tendency to equate
power with the state’s overt capability to exert control is certainly greater
when studying communication in China. What needs to be discussed
more is the power of capital, considering the extent to which China is now
an integral part of global capitalism. Xi Jinping’s staunch advocacy of glo-
balization in his Davos speech may have come as a surprise to those who
maintain a cold-war image of China (Elliott & Wearden, 2017). In the era
of Brexit and of Donald Trump chanting “America First” at his presiden-
tial inauguration, liberals in the West may even find the irony hard to swal-
low (Momani, 2017). But the praise for capitalist globalization delivered
by the leader of the CCP is the logical outcome of China’s economic
policy over the last four decades. This only demonstrates how much the
regime’s political reasoning is intertwined with its economic reasoning
and why it is important to analyze state power in relation to the power of
capital. Despite the insights that the political economy of communication
could offer, however, only a handful of scholars have critically examined
the functioning of capitalist logic in allocating communication resources
in the Chinese context (e.g., Hong, 2017; Jiang & Okamoto, 2014;
Schiller, 2008; Sparks, 2012; Zhao, 1998, 2008).
In all segments of the media and communication industries, the power
of capital pervades, although the arrangement of production and distribu-
tion differs depending on the negotiations among multiple stakeholders.
At the start of the new millennium when China’s accession to the World
Trade Organization (WTO) was imminent, there was an outcry from both
pundits and industry insiders in the country about “the wolf at the door”
(see Zhao & Schiller, 2001). Many were worried at that time that the
domestic film industry would be crushed by the “invasion” of Hollywood.
Fifteen years on, the anticipated confrontation turned out to be a happy
alliance thanks to the capitalist logic at work. Hollywood continues to
garner the highest box-office revenue in the world’s largest film market
(Brzeski, 2015), and has been exploring new strategies to better capture
the Chinese audience so as to save some financially troubled studios
(Morris, 2016). The Chinese film industry, on the other hand, has suc-
cessfully incorporated many features of the Hollywood model, including
genre-based film making, vertical integration of production, distribution
and marketing, and big-budget blockbusters that draw investors from a
10 B. MENG
wide range of non-media sectors. The three leading Chinese Internet

companies, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, collectively known as BAT, are
all aggressively expanding into content production (Bischoff, 2014;
L. Chen, 2016; McNary, 2016). Riding on the tide of media convergence,
the BAT companies are evolving into multimedia conglomerates with for-
midable control over both infrastructure and content. Moreover, it is now
the Chinese companies’ investment in Hollywood that is raising alarm,
rather than the other way round (Garrahan & Sender, 2016). This is only
one of the many areas where we see the old power structure being dis-
rupted, and to a certain extent reconfigured, but it does not necessarily
mean that the resources of communication are more dispersed or demo-
cratically controlled. On the contrary, new dominant players are emerging
and becoming even more powerful in the communication environment
(see more from Hong, 2017; and Schiller, 2008, for analysis of telecom
and internet industries).
Other aspects of power that need more in-depth research are the pro-
duction of meaning and the maintenance of hegemony. Fairclough (2001)
contends that the exercise of power in modern society is increasingly
achieved through ideology and “more particularly the ideological work-
ings of language.” (p. 2). This is because ideologies are embedded in con-
ventions that serve as “a means of legitimizing existing social relations and
differences of power, simply through the recurrence of ordinary, familiar
ways of behaving” (p. 2). As the most common form of social behavior,
language use relies on many “common-sense” assumptions that take
power relations and power differences for granted, thus functioning as the
primary form of social control. Similarly, Bourdieu ponders on the con-
nection between symbols and social integration. As instruments of knowl-
edge and communication, symbols make possible a consensus on the
meaning of the social world that contributes fundamentally to the repro-
duction of the social order: “‘logical’ integration is the precondition of
‘moral’ integration” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 166).
In the media-saturated contemporary world, ideologically embedded
discursive formations—expressions enunciated from a certain position
within social life—are heavily mediated. On the one hand, the media,
including conventional mass media and social media, supply the
vocabularies, tropes and frames that formulate these expressions; on the
other hand, discourses generated by and disseminated via the media are
themselves articulations of hierarchical social relations. This is why Bourdieu
(1991) calls all relations of communication power relations, which
“depend on the material or symbolic power accumulated by the agents (or

institutions) involved in these relations and which, like the gift or the pot-
latch, can enable symbolic power to be accumulated” (p. 167).
Media marketization and globalization have significantly undermined
the Chinese state’s once monopolistic control over ideology and the medi-
ated discursive field is increasingly diverse and contested. Explicating
Althusser’s notion of ideology as “systems of representation,” Hall (2016)
emphasizes the plurality of these formations. He argues that there is no
such thing as the dominant ideology and the subordinated ideology, since
ideologies do not operate through single ideas, but rather ideological rep-
resentations connote one another. Hall (2016) also cautions against a
static, functionalist view of ideology as “a field of mutually exclusive and
internally self-sustaining discursive chains” (p. 137). The “systems of rep-
resentations” contest one another, “often drawing on a common, shared
repertoire of concepts, rearticulating and disarticulating them within dif-
ferent systems of difference or equivalence” (p. 137). Far from being
reducible to a simple dichotomy of state ideology vs. liberal dissent, medi-
ated politics in China unfolds along multiple, and often intersecting, axes
of power struggle. To make sense of such contestation, one also needs a
broader understanding of politics that goes beyond institutions to con-
sider the daily negotiation over the meaning of lived experience of differ-
ent social groups.
The Cultural Politics of Recognition

A broader understanding of politics and its plurality could start from the
insights offered by political theorists such as Charles Taylor (1994), Axel
Honneth (1996, 2007), Nancy Fraser (1995, 2000; Fraser & Honneth,
2003) or Iris Young (1997) and from appreciating the importance of rec-
ognition for the building of a more democratic and inclusive society. Taylor
emphasizes that human identity is dialogically created and constituted,
and that our mode of being is crucially defined by the ways in which we
relate to others. Hence recognition is not just a matter of courtesy and
respect, but “a vital human need” (Taylor, 1994, p. 26). Non-recognition
or misrecognition, which is “the projection of an inferior or demeaning
image on another”, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in
a false, distorted or reduced mode of being (Taylor, 1994, p. 36). At the
social level, a society is only democratic when it leaves room for individuals
to “deliberate publicly about those aspects of our identities that we share,
12 B. MENG
or potentially share, with other citizens” (Gutman, 1994, p. 7). Honneth

(2007, pp. 138–139) differentiates between three forms of recognition,
corresponding to the three types of “moral injury” that misrecognition
can cause. The first level is to recognize the unique value of individual
needs and desires; the second level is to recognize the moral accountability
of every person; the third level means recognizing an individual “as a per-
son whose capabilities are of constitutive value to a concrete community”
(p. 139).
While Taylor and Honneth lay out the philosophical foundation for the
importance of recognition, Fraser puts more emphasis on the politics of
recognition—the structural inequalities that lead to misrecognition and
the political struggles that may prove necessary to achieve justice.
According to Fraser, misrecognition is a symptom of social subordination.
In other words, to be misrecognized is “not simply to be thought ill of,
looked down upon or devalued in others’ attitudes, beliefs or representa-
tions. It is rather to be denied the status of a full partner in social interac-
tion, as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value that
constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem” (Fraser,
2000, pp. 113–114). This is why, Fraser (1997) insists, any emancipatory
project should always take the “bivalent approach” that combines the poli-
tics of redistribution with that of recognition. Unless economic inequali-
ties are redressed, identity politics alone will not be able to tackle social
subordination. As Young (1997) also points out, “so long as the cultural
denigration of groups produces or reinforces structural economic oppres-
sions, the two struggles are continuous” (p. 159). The realm of media and
communication is one of the most important sites for these continuous
struggles, given the intertwining of symbolic and material aspects of
modern-day communication activities.
The economic reform that started in China in 1978 and the Chinese
state’s retreat since then from the provision of public services and social
welfare, have led to increasing economic and social inequalities (Goodman,
2014). The country’s Gini coefficient, which is the standard measure of
income inequality, increased from 0.20 in 1981, which indicates a high
degree of equality, to somewhere between 0.47 and 0.61 in 2013, depend-
ing on the source (Goodman, 2014; Wildau & Mitchell, 2016). Moreover,
the persistence of the household registration system (Hukou), which dis-
criminates against those with a rural registration, coupled with rapid
urbanization since 1978, has divided China into “two separates castes,
rural and urban, with sharply different rights and opportunities in life”
(Whyte, 2010, p. 13). It may have been possible to talk about the Chinese
media as a whole in the Mao era since social and economic policies during
that time were oriented towards egalitarianism and eliminating the “three
major distinctions” (三大差别).2 In highly stratified contemporary Chinese
society, media and communications are deeply implicated in various forms
of inequality and exclusion, including, for example, class inequality, gen-
der inequality, rural/urban inequality, and their intersectionality. I agree
with Sun and Guo’s assessment in their edited volume Unequal China
(2013), that research on inequality in China has so far concentrated on
economic issues while not paying nearly enough attention to the “unequal
and inequitable distribution of symbolic resources in the production and
use of narratives” (p. 3). Yet the lack of capacity of marginalized groups to
provide an account of themselves and their life experience is both the
result of and constitutive of the unequal distribution of economic
resources. As Fraser (1997, 2000) forcefully argues, the politics of redis-
tribution and the politics of recognition are ultimately inseparable.
Let me use one example to illustrate how social and economic inequali-
ties are implicated in the production of meaning in everyday life. During
the 2016 Spring Festival, an online post headed “Shanghai girl escaping
from the rural village of Jiangxi” trended on Chinese social media. It tells
the story of a family reunion that went sour. The original message came
from a middle-class Shanghainese woman who went with her boyfriend
for the first time to his home town in Jiangxi. The boyfriend was said to
be handsome and able, with a decent professional job in Shanghai. The
young woman’s parents, however, had been trying to talk her out of the
relationship, insisting that since the man came from a poor family he
would never be able to provide the level of material comfort that their
daughter deserved. The woman went to visit her boyfriend’s family against
her parents’ wishes, was shocked by the scenes of backwardness she wit-
nessed, and “escaped” as soon as she could and before the holiday was
over. She included in the post a few poorly lit photos of a family meal to
indicate the deprivation of the family. Within a few of days after the post
first appeared online on Chinese New Year’s Eve, it was viewed more than
a million times and widely reposted and commented on via Weibo and
Wechat. Although some journalists later questioned the credibility of the
account and the motivation behind the post (Zhou, 2016), the heated
debate stirred up by a seemingly mundane story like this is illustrative of
social conflicts at many levels. First and foremost is the class difference,
intersecting with the urban/rural divide—the middle-class Shanghainese
14 B. MENG
parents’ objection to their daughter dating a man from rural working-class

background, the contrast between life in Shanghai and in a village in
Jiangxi, and the fact that poverty is beyond the imagination of someone
growing up in China’s most affluent metropolis. There is also gender
dimension. Men are expected to be the main provider for the family:
young urban women, especially those growing up in big cities like
Shanghai, are often reminded by families and friends that only a man who
can afford to buy an apartment in the city is worthy of their consideration
as a marriage partner.
Even more importantly, this post is only one of the many stories that
circulate on the internet during the Chinese New Year holiday around the
theme of “returning to the rural home” (fanxiang). And this is why the
authenticity of the post matters less if we treat it as a trope that captures
the sentiment of society, a set of discourses articulating certain power
dynamics. To study discourse is not just to look at its “expressive value or
formal transformations,” but also to examine its “modes of existence.”
“The modes of circulation, valorisation, attribution, and appropriation of
discourse vary with each culture and are modified within each” (Foucault,
1991, p. 117). China is a country with a rural population of 600 million.
The younger generation moves to the city for study and for work and
some will acquire urban residential status. Many only visit their family in
the countryside once a year at the Spring Festival. The general tone of the
fanxiang writings is pessimistic. The urban dwellers who are moving fur-
ther and further apart from rural life now look back at their home towns
with a mixture of sadness about the ongoing poverty and hardship,3
resentment of backwardness and moral corruption,4 nostalgia for the
idyllic old times, and powerlessness in relation to change.5 What lies

behind these narratives is confusion and doubts about China’s develop-
ment model, and lamentation over the human cost as well as the environ-
mental cost, of economic growth. Noteworthy, however, is that these
accounts are all provided by the urban middle class from their own point
of view. The subaltern—the rural population—does not have a voice, let
alone does it demonstrate any signs of agency in these pitiful accounts.
That members of the rural population cannot speak for themselves is both
a symptom of their marginalized position in the socioeconomic hierarchy
and a major obstacle to the improvement of their lives. The fanxiang writ-
ings epitomize what Sun (2013, p. 27) calls “the culture of inequality and
the inequality of culture”.
Mediation as a Dialectic Process

Building upon the work of Thompson (1995) and Martin-Barbero
(1993), Silverstone (2005) calls media scholars’ attention to the “funda-
mentally dialectic notion” of mediation, elaborating that
[M]ediation requires us to understand how processes of communication

change the social and cultural environments that support them as well as the
relationships that participants, both individual and institutional, have to that
environment and to each other. At the same time it requires a consideration
of the social as in turn a mediator: institutions and technologies as well as
the meanings that are delivered by them are mediated in the social processes
of reception and consumption. (p. 189)
Silverstone highlights power as the key dimension in studying media-

tion, in terms both of media power, which is exercised at the conjunction
of political, economic, and symbolic power, and of other sources of power
that interact with the media. Quoting Thompson, he suggests thinking of
power as “the differential capacity to mobilize meaning” (p. 191) that can
only be studied in particular sociohistorical contexts. I outline below the
implications this discussion has for studying mediated politics in China.
First, the institutional arrangement of communication in China, includ-
ing issues related to communication infrastructure or media content
regulation, is both embedded in and reshaping the political–economic and
social contentions in the specific Chinese context. As much as I am aware
of the significance of the Chinese state, the conceptualization of politics in
this book goes beyond formal, institutional politics to include political
contestations at the informal and micro levels. In addition to a broader
understanding of media politics, I base my analysis on the theoretical
premise that the relationship between media and politics is mutually con-
stitutive rather than instrumental or reflective of the other. That is to say,
the media do not simply reflect or act as the tool of real-life political strug-
gles: they are part of those struggles. It is through the process of engaging
with the media that social groups formulate their causes and identities.
Correspondingly, the arrangement of the media is constantly in flux, con-
tingent upon the social and political context.
Second, mediation takes place at the symbolic level, in terms of who
gets to participate in mediated communication, how they represent
themselves or are being represented, and how such participation and
16 B. MENG
representation feeds back into inclusions or exclusions in the lifeworld.

The much-discussed topic of cyber nationalism (Wu, 2007; Zhou, 2006),
for example, invites our reflection not only on the historical, social and
cultural contexts that contribute to the emergence of such phenomena,
but also on how discourses of nationalism are mediated by specific fea-
tures of the internet and thus become either amplified or polarized (see
more discussion about this in Chapter 5). The voices that are silenced in
this vociferous conversation are just as important as those that are
accentuated.
In addition to the political logic that often receives most attention in
both popular commentary and academic literature on communication in
China, more consideration should be given to the commercial/capital
logic and the logic of communication technologies. Most media outlets in
China, whether private or nominally public, are no longer Party organs.
They are making efforts to survive in an increasingly competitive market,
which on the one hand promotes plurality and on the other creates new
strata of dominance and exclusion. The contradictions and contestations
of the changing media scene are manifest not only at the institutional
level, through the regulation and arrangement of media production, but
also in the negotiated everyday practice of media professionals, in the
informational and entertainment content that mediates almost every
aspect of social life, and in the ways in which different social groups use the
media for their own causes.
New communication technologies have not just opened up more space
for interaction, but also contributed to the formation of new discursive
modes and communicative practices. That is to say, news websites, online
forums, chat rooms and blogs do not simply extend offline communication
into the virtual world, but may transform the ways in which conversations
are conducted. For example, the motivation and level of commitment of
those who take part in making online spoofs or in peer-to-peer information
production may vary, and they do not necessarily share a preconceived or
coherent agenda. But it is during the communication processes mediated by
the internet that they may develop new ways of relating to one another and
a new orientation towards the society they are living in. On the other hand,
attempts to control the new means of communication come from various
sources of power and are constantly negotiated through technological fea-
tures of those media. For example, the decentralized structure of the inter-
net has prompted the evolution of a decentralized regulatory model that
combines self-censorship, market-based differentiation, and government
policy (Zhao, 2008). Any research attempting to investigate the enabling or

empowering potential of new communication technologies would have to
take into consideration the environment that mediates those potentials.
Structure of the Book
Building on the historical awareness and the aforementioned theoretical
premises, this book examines the consensus and contestations with regard
to the politics of contemporary Chinese media. The empirical materials
used here are based on documentary analysis, in-depth interviews,
textual/discourse analysis and online ethnography. Each chapter addresses
a different aspect of media politics, namely the state’s managing of politi-
cal communication, the changing ethos of news media, the cultural poli-
tics of entertainment media and the internet-mediated politics of everyday
life. I start every chapter with a theoretical contention, followed by an
overview of the key literature, with a particular focus on the historical
trajectory as well as the institutional context of the type of communicative
activities under discussion. Each chapter contains case studies based on
both primary and secondary data and finishes with concluding remarks.
Chapter 2 looks at how the Chinese state manages political communi-
cation internally and externally in the postsocialist era. After a historicized
explication of the ideological spectrum in contemporary China, I draw on
Wang Hui’s notion of “depoliticized politics” to look at how the CCP is
trying to circumvent some of the fundamental ideological contradictions
with a pragmatic and often technocratic approach. With examples from
political communication targeting both domestic and international audi-
ence, I substantiate the argument with empirical analysis.
Chapter 3 begins with a critique of the orthodox liberal perspective that
is often used to examine news media in China. I then examine the trajec-
tory of news media commercialization, conglomeration and convergence
in China, with a focus on how the Party-state is constantly trying to incor-
porate and contain the power of capital to sustain its hegemonic control.
I draw on in-depth interviews with veteran journalists and senior editors
to explicate how the political economy of Chinese news industry condi-
tions the daily work experience as well as the professional identity of media
workers. Moving beyond the conventional dichotomy of state censorship
vs. repressed media, I try to provide a more complex picture by bringing
into discussion the strategic positioning of media outlets themselves, the
18 B. MENG
changing journalistic ethos and the new power dynamics of a converged

media environment.
Chapter 4 focuses on the cultural politics of entertainment media in
China. I try to bring together institutional-level analysis and attention to
discourses and meaning in two steps. First, I map out the political econ-
omy of both film and television industries, so as to explain the structural
conditions that give rise to or suppress certain types of entertainment
media content. Second, in the close reading of a few exemplary film and
television texts, I situate the tensions and contradictions emerged from
rhetorical devices of storytelling in the broader context of political, eco-
nomic and social change in China. I argue that the socialist nostalgia in the
film The Piano in a Factory and the neoliberal mentality imbibed in reality
TV are two sides of the same coin that constitute the ideologies of con-
temporary China.
Chapter 5 starts off by synthesizing and critiquing the status quo of
research about Chinese Internet. I present three case studies on the
internet-mediated politics of everyday life to challenge and to complicate
the dominant analytical framework. The Facebook Expedition of Little
Pinkos is a form of online activism, but it does not fit the common imagi-
nary about contentious politics on the Chinese Internet. The gendered
consumerism discourse around “Spendthrift Chicks” and the case of
WeChat parenting accounts fall out of the conventional remit of online
politics. But they illustrate the collusion between the state and the market
in configuring identity, desire and aspiration, all of which are key dimen-
sions of political subjectivity. Overall, the three cases unsettle a series of
entrenched binary thinking, such as state vs. market, state vs. society, cen-
sorship vs. freedom, centralized control vs. dispersed network, delibera-
tion vs. emotion. The three cases also illustrate the dialectic process of
mediation, in the sense of media discourse being embedded in social and
political context while also shaping subjectivity and practices.
In the concluding chapter, I revisit the contemporary relevance of

China’s socialist history by comparing speeches made by Mao Zedong and
Xi Jinping on culture, ideology and the role of media workers.
Counterposing Xi’s talks against their historical counterparts can help to
reveal the inconsistency and contradictions in current “ideology work,” as
well as the challenges that the CCP faces in re-establishing hegemony. The
ideological struggles examined in my empirical chapters seem to confirm
Stuart Hall’s view of crises as not leading to any preordained result. But
the memory of socialism, be it nostalgic or disillusioned, shapes the

Chinese people’s assessment of the status quo as well as their imagining of
the future.
Notes
1. Deng came up with this famous saying to convey a highly pragmatic approach:
black cat or white cat—as long as it catches the mouse it is a good cat.
2. Mao identified these as the distinctions between the rural and the urban,
industry and agriculture, and physical and mental labor.
3. A portrait of the countryside from the perspective of a daughter-in-law (一
个农村儿媳眼中的乡村图景) (February 4, 2016) Retrieved from http://
culture.china.com/11170626/20160204/21450058_all.html
4. Life in rural Jiangxi: A hometown like this, I don’t miss it at all (江西农村实
景:这样的家乡,我是丝毫不眷恋的) (February 27, 2016) Retrieved from
https://read01.com/RJAmjk.html
5. If the countryside is sinking, every one of us who has left is complicit (如果
家乡沦陷,每个在外的人都是帮凶) (February 17, 2016) Retrieved from
http://epaper.bjnews.com.cn/html/2016-02/17/content_623001.
htm?div=0
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(pp. 175–195). London: Routledge.
Zhao, Y. (2011). Sustaining the contesting revolutionary legacies in media and
ideology. In S. Heilmann & E. J. Perry (Eds.), Mao’s invisible hand: The politi-
cal foundations of adaptive governance in China (pp. 201–236). Cambridge,
MA: Havard University Press.
Zhao, Y., & Schiller, D. (2001). Dances with wolves? China’s integration into
digital capitalism. Info, 3(2), 137–151.
Zhou, H. (2016, February 25). How come a fabricated Chinese New Year family
meal got the most attention during the Year of Monkey Spring Festival? Initium
Media Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://theinitium.com/
article/20160225-mainland-shanghai-jiangxi/
Zhou, Y. (2006). Historicizing online politics: Telegraphy, the Internet and political
participation in China. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
CHAPTER 2
The Chinese State: Moving Left? Moving

Right? or Depoliticized?
Historicized Understanding of Left and Right

One of the most common perspectives, adopted by pundits and academics
alike, from which to examine the politics of Chinese media, is that of the
antithetical relationship between the authoritarian state and market-
oriented media. Whether the focus is on conventional news outlets or on
digital platforms, there is an entrenched assumption that the state embod-
ies the conservative and the repressive, while the media, or the new tech-
nologies in general, represent the liberal and the liberating. This is the
communication scholars’ version of what Heilmann and Perry (2011,
p. 4) have identified as political scientists’ tendency to reduce politics in
China “to an unremitting interplay of repression and resistance.” In the
Western liberal democratic context, conservative would be considered
right-wing on the political spectrum while liberal is often used inter-
changeably with left-wing. When it comes to China, however, it seems to
be the other way around: the Anti-Rightist campaign in Mao’s China tar-
geted liberal intellectuals who were critical of the CCP and the govern-
ment. Nowadays, the New York Times, considered by many as the beacon
of liberal news media, often refers to those in China who object to free-
market policies as “old guard leftists” (e.g., Buckley & Jacobs, 2015).
Yet simply reversing the labels of “Right” or “Left” would not be suf-
ficient, as the reality is far more complicated. Since the economic reform
started in the 1980s, generations of CCP leaders have cautioned against
the danger of leftism. When Deng Xiaoping made his Southern Tour in

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5_2
26 B. MENG
1992, which is widely considered a milestone event that set the political
agenda of the CCP after the 1989 Student Movement, he made a speech
that brushed aside the conservatives’ concern about “peaceful revolution”
in light of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and called for more economic
openness. In his speech formally proposing the notion of a “socialist mar-
ket economy,” Deng instructed that practice should take precedence over
ideological debates. In an unprecedented manner, he emphasized that the
party should “guard against the Right, but guard primarily against the
Left,” which meant that he saw leftism as posing the more imminent dan-
ger (Chan, 1993, p. 25).
Little less than a decade later, in 2001, soon after Jiang Zemin autho-
rized, in his July 1 speech, the admission of private business owners into
the CCP, two letters from prominent older Party figures opposing the
incorporation of capitalists into the Party began to circulate privately
(Monthly Review, 2002). Later, these same letters appeared in Pursuit of
Truth and Midstream, two well-established leftist magazines that often
serve as platforms for policy debate. The “old leftists” not only criticized
Jiang for abandonment of class analysis and logical inconsistency, but also
for “violation of basic party principle and democratic procedure by unilat-
erally proclaiming a position on such an important issue without discus-
sion or approval by a party congress” (Y. Zhao, 2008, p. 54). The direct
confrontation between the central leadership and the “old leftists” led to
the closure of the two magazines. Even the South China Morning Post, the
Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper hardly famous for being
on the political Left, reported that “President Jiang Zemin has ordered
the anti-reform leftist forces to be ‘exterminated at the budding stage’”
(cited in Zhao, 2008, p. 55).
Fast-forward another 10 years: in March 2012, at the end of the Hu
Jintao era, just before Xi Jinping took over as President and General Party
Secretary, Premier Wen Jiabao sounded a message of warning against the
“possible repeat of the historical tragedy of the Cultural Revolution” when
answering a question about Chong Qing at the closing press conference of
the 18th Party Congress. One month before that, the Chong Qing Police
Chief had fled to the US Consulate in Chengdu to seek assistance, alleg-
edly after falling out with Bo Xilai, then Chong Qing Party Secretary.
Wang was Bo’s right-hand man in his famed campaign against organized
crime, and was even featured in a television drama as a “gangbuster hero.”
The agenda that Bo had been carrying out in Chong Qing was perceived
by many, either approvingly or critically, as an attempt to renew the Maoist
THE CHINESE STATE: MOVING LEFT? MOVING RIGHT? OR DEPOLITICIZED? 27
legacy. On the ideological front, Bo tried to revive revolutionary history

and “Red culture”; on the social front, he initiated policies orientated
towards social welfare and “common prosperity” (Meng, 2016; Zhao,
2012). These were controversial moves and it was widely anticipated that
Bo’s political fate would be determined by the central leadership at the
18th Party Congress. The Wang Lijun incident only expedited the circula-
tion of even more rumors and speculations (Wang, 2012). Given this pre-
text, Wen’s seemingly banal statement carries a strong message for anyone
who understands Chinese history and the Party’s verdict on the Cultural
Revolution. It designates what happened in Chongqing as a forbidden
subject, just like the Cultural Revolution itself, “not available for public
debate or historical analysis and fit only for political condemnation”
(Wang, 2012, p. 14). The very next day, March 15, 2012, the Xinhua
News Agency reported that Bo Xilai had been removed as Chongqing
Party Secretary.
By 2017, almost five years after Xi Jinping assumed power, Western
commentators’ assessment of Xi’s leadership is hardly positive. The Atlantic
ran an article in December 2016 by the long-term China observer James
Fallows (Fallows, 2016) entitled “China’s Great Leap Backward.” The
article quoted from a wide range of sources to identify five areas where
things had become more controlled: increased censorship of communica-
tion, repression of civil society, extraterritoriality (China is trying to extend
control over its borders), failed political reform and surging “anti-
foreignism.” Fallows quoted the Berkeley-based China scholar Orville
Schell, who had said that China was regressing “closer to the Maoist root”
and urged the US to reconsider its policy towards China. Yet on January
17, three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, who had been
criticizing globalization and vowing to “make America great again” by
upholding the principle of “America First,” Chinese President Xi Jinping
delivered a strong speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos defend-
ing what he called “economic globalization” and sounded a warning
against trade wars. The international media certainly would not miss the
symbolism of the CCP leader defending the liberal trade order at the most
important annual gathering of global capitalism, at a time when political
leaders in the US and Europe were questioning the value of globalization
(Al Jazeera, 2017; Domonoske, 2017; Elliott & Wearden, 2017; Momani,
2017; Reuters, 2017). While the irony of this may strike some, it was only
the natural follow-up to the ongoing struggle of the CCP central l eadership
against leftists within the party and in pursuit of economic liberalization.
28 B. MENG
These episodes, which were by no means exceptional, seem to confirm

what political scientists have observed: that China does not fit pre-existing
models of political economy and indeed defies familiar expectations in the
study of comparative politics (Tsai, 2007, p. 6). This is why labels like
“Left,” “Right,” “liberal” and “conservative” can be misleading and need
to be understood in their historical context and in relation to political
contestation at multiple levels. Post-Mao China witnessed the major shift
in the Party’s priorities from mass-scale class struggle to “socialist mod-
ernization.” The Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee signposted
the start of a new era that would make a decisive break with “those ideo-
logical and political lines of Mao that culminated in the Cultural
Revolution” (Tsou, 1986, p. 219). The Plenum urged the Party “to inte-
grate the universal principles of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought
with the concrete practice of socialist modernization and develop it under
new historical conditions.” Disagreements were rife with regard to how
exactly to integrate principles with practice and what “socialist moderniza-
tion” implies. Deng Xiaoping’s “cat theory” and his call to put aside the
ideological debate was an ingenious move to circumvent a huge array of
discrepancies and to project a unified image of the Party. Deng’s highly
pragmatic approach set the tone for later CCP leaders, who have relied
heavily on the impressive figures for economic growth as a major source of
legitimacy (Pei, 2006, pp. 19–21), albeit not the only one. Yet history
bites back, not only through the “old guard leftists” who strive to retain
the socialist legacy, but also through those to the right of the regime who
want to revisit revolutionary history with a critical eye.
Contestation of Historical Accounts

YanHuang ChunQiu (hereafter YHCQ; the title can be translated as
China through the Ages) is one publication for the dissenting voice among
the Party elites. This is a monthly magazine that focuses on the modern
history of China, especially that of the CCP. In April 2015, YHCQ
received a letter from the State Administration of Press and Publication
(SAPP) listing 37 articles recently published in the magazine as “violating
the rules” (weigui). In his open letter of resignation, Deputy Editor Yang
Jisheng1 defied the accusations of the state regulator, arguing that many of
the articles identified in SAPP’s “letter of warning” were actually consis-
tent with the Party line. He further defended YHCQ’s “political correct-
ness” by referring to the principle of “eight untouchable topics” that the
magazine had been following over the years. These topics included: the
1989 Student Movement; separation of executive, legislative and judicial
powers; state control of the military (instead of party control); Falun
Gong; the current leadership and their families; religion and ethnic issues;
multiparty democracy, and foreign policy.2 This is a telling list, revealing
not only the survival strategy of a seemingly innocuous magazine, but also
showing the breadth of the Party’s hegemonic control over history and
ideology.
Although the international media that reported on this incident all
referred to YHCQ as a liberal outlet, the magazine’s roots were in the
Party establishment. The founding Editor-in-Chief, Du Daozheng, is a
senior Party member whose credentials include Chief Editor at the state-
run Xinhua News Agency, Editor-in-Chief at one of the most important
Party-organ newspapers, Guangming Daily, and Minister of General
Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) in the late 1980s. Having
been in charge of both state media outlets and the main regulatory body
of the Chinese press, Du is not one of those stereotypical liberal journalists
who criticize the system from outside. In fact, YHCQ had from the very
beginning the support of high-ranking Party officials including Xiao Ke, a
general in the People’s Liberation Army, and no less than Xi Jinping’s own
father, Xi Zhongxun, who once praised the magazine for “doing a good
job.”
On the other hand, Du does have close ties with the reformist wing of
the Party, among whose most prominent figures is former Premier
(1980–1987) and Party General Secretary (1987–1989) Zhao Ziyang.
Advocating the privatization of state enterprises and the separation of
Party and state, Zhao had always been considered a more liberal-leaning
top party leader. His disagreement with Deng Xiaoping over the handling
of the 1989 Student Movement3 led to his political downfall and subse-
quent house arrest. For dissidents and liberal elites, this abrupt change of
fortune turned Zhao into something close to an icon representing the
missed opportunity for top-down political reform. Du was the Minister of
GAPP under Zhao’s Party leadership and the two remained close during
Zhao’s 16-year house arrest. In 2010, five years after Zhao’s death, Du
published in Taiwan and Hong Kong a book entitled What Else Has Zhao
Ziyang Said?, based on his conversations with Zhao. YHCQ’s political
connection with Party elites does not stop here. Deputy Director Hu
Dehua is the son of Hu Yaobang, another relatively open-minded Party
leader who enjoyed great popularity among intellectuals. While Zhao
30 B. MENG
Ziyang’s ouster resulted from the 1989 student movement, it was Hu

Yaobang’s death that triggered the initial demonstrations. Hu was Party
Secretary during the student protests of 1986–1987 and was dismissed
from his position for not controlling the situation more forcefully.
Although, politically, Hu was less of a reformist than Zhao and did not
support many of the students’ demands at that time, his removal from the
top leadership position made him a martyr. When Hu Yaobang died on
April 15, 1989, this “provided the crucial impetus for launching the dem-
ocratic protest movement” (Calhoun, 1997, p. 36). Students took to the
streets to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang; more importantly they were
using this opportunity to voice their disapproval of the failure of CCP
hard-liners to listen to intellectuals.
The fact that YHCQ has unusual connections with two former General
Secretaries of the CCP indicates that the temporary closure of the maga-
zine in July 2015 was less a confrontation between the Party-state and
liberal intellectuals than a conflict between different Party-elite factions.
The ideological struggle, however, is not restricted to “princelings” and
Party officials. Two other incidents illustrate how contentious mediated
politics in China is, and why the simple dichotomy of repressive state vs.
liberal media is not the most productive analytical approach for making
sense of conflicts that are multifaceted. The Five Heroes of the Langya
Mountain (狼牙山五壮士) is one of the most famous episodes from the
anti-Japanese war, as taught to generations of Chinese youngsters. The
textbook version tells the story of a small group of Chinese soldiers divert-
ing the Japanese army to the main peak of Langya Mountain so as to leave
enough time for the main troops and civilians to retreat. Five of the sol-
diers fought until the very end and jumped off the cliff when they ran out
of ammunition. Three of them died and two were severely injured. In
2013, Managing Editor Hong Zhenkuai published two pieces in YHCQ
questioning some of the details of the official account. Hong used archival
research to examine the discrepancy between different accounts and dis-
puted a few details such as the exact location where the soldiers jumped,
whether the two survivors were actually trying to escape, and whether the
group had stolen radishes from civilians when passing through their fields,
thus appearing less heroic. The families of the two survivors accused Hong
Zhenkuai of “historical nihilism” and sued him for libel. The Intermediate
People’s Court of Beijing ruled in 2016 that Hong should apologize pub-
licly on the YHCQ website and via the mass media. Hong told a reporter
from the New York Times that he “would never do that because this is
basic academic freedom and I shall keep my integrity as an intellectual”

(K. Zhao, 2016). In the meantime, while the lawsuit against Hong
Zhenkuai was ongoing, a leftist media commentator, Guo Songmin,
posted a message on his Weibo account in response to the articles by
Hong, saying that the authorities “definitely should fight against historical
nihilism, it would be a joke to simply leave this son of a bitch alone.”
Interestingly enough, Hong then sued Guo for libel, but lost the case.
The court ruled that Guo’s comment was fair criticism. Unsurprisingly,
this part of the story was not picked up by the international media.
Far from witnessing either the end of ideology or the end of history, we
are seeing intense contestation of history among political elites, intellectu-
als and ordinary people. These ideological conflicts manifest through
competing accounts of historical events, polarized opinions of historical
figures and varied assessment of historical periods. One topic that epito-
mizes the clash of different views across the political spectrum is undoubt-
edly Mao Zedong. On December 26, 2016, the 123rd anniversary of
Mao’s birth, a university professor from Shangdong province named Deng
Xiangchao posted several messages on his Weibo account ridiculing Mao.
One of the messages said: “If Mao had died in 1945,4 China would have
seen 600,000 fewer killed in war. Had he died in 1958,5 30 million fewer
would have starved to death. Had he died in 1966,6 20 million people
would have been spared from class struggle. It was not until 1976,7 when
he finally died that we started having enough to eat. The only correct
thing he did was to die.” This post immediately provoked strong reaction
from Chinese netizens. Not only did many people voice their criticism
online, prompting Deng to close his Weibo account the next day, but
some also organized a protest on the university campus where Deng
teaches, holding up banners with slogans like “whoever is against Mao is
the enemy of the people” and “Deng Xiangchang should not get away
with insulting Chairman Mao.”8 The protestors demanded that the uni-
versity penalize Deng for his comments about Mao. Soon afterwards, the
government of Shandong Province dismissed Deng from his position as a
counsellor of the provincial government and he was also removed from
membership of the Standing Committee of Shandong Provincial
Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
Mao loyalists applauded the sanction while liberal intellectuals came to
Deng’s defense, citing citizens’ right to freedom of speech (Liu, 2017).
To be sure, this was not the first time that bitter confrontation had bro-
ken out between populist supporters of Mao and those who considered
32 B. MENG
him the ultimate symbol of communist tyranny, often with a reluctant

government caught between and trying to contain the conflict without
necessarily taking sides. In 2010, a Beijing high-school history teacher,
Yuan Tengfei, sparked controversy with his fiery comments mocking Mao
in his history lessons. Yuan listed Mao Zedong alongside Adolf Hitler and
Josef Stalin as one of the world’s “fascist dictators.” He compared the
memorial hall in the center of Tiananmen Square containing Mao’s
embalmed corpse to the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan where convicted war
criminals are among those commemorated (Hille, 2010). Yuan’s sensa-
tionalist rhetoric not only earned him instant celebrity online, but also
turned his books into bestsellers. CCTV invited him to be a speaker on
Lecture Room, a popular educational series that focuses on Chinese his-
tory and Chinese culture. Meanwhile, leftist websites such as Utopia
(wuyou zhixiang, http://www.wyzxwk.com/) compiled a collection of
more than 800 articles published within one year and contesting a wide
range of assertions made and historical accounts given by Yuan in his
lectures. Yuan’s critics reprimanded the Beijing Municipal Commission of
Education, the government body that oversees public education in the
capital, for failing to discipline him for the “harmful messages” conveyed
to young students. The unequivocal condemnation by contributors to left-
ist websites was in contrast with the ambivalent stand of Party and govern-
ment. This seemingly counterintuitive discrepancy needs to be understood
in relation to a series of profound contradictions that the CCP is trying to
navigate, which is the focus of the next section.
Depoliticized Politics and the Resurgence

of Ideological Struggle
A key difference that sets post-Mao China apart from Mao’s China is the
latter’s “trademark policy style that favored continual experimentation
and transformation (or ‘permanent revolution’) over regime consolida-
tion” (Heilmann & Perry, 2011, p. 7). From the 1978 Third Plenum’s
declaration that “the large-scale turbulent class struggles of a mass charac-
ter have in the main come to an end” (cited in Tsou, 1986, p. 219) to
Deng Xiaoping’s reiterations both before and after the 1989 student
movement that “stability is paramount” (稳定压倒一切) and the Hu
Jintao leadership’s focus on upholding social stability via “social manage-
ment”9 (Lee & Zhang, 2013; Pieke, 2012), the top priority of the CCP
has shifted from mass mobilization in the revolutionary era to staying in

power with sufficient legitimacy.
Wang (2009, pp. 3–18) uses the term “depoliticized politics” to sum
up his argument that “the party is no longer an organization with specific
political values, but a mechanism of power” (p. 6). He argues that in con-
temporary China the space for political debate has largely been eliminated,
as the “line struggles” that used to function as a corrective mechanism for
the party to recognize and repair its errors have degenerated into mere
power-play between different factions. He points to three key factors as
underpinning the current stage of China’s depoliticization:
In the marketization process, the boundary between the political elite and
the owners of capital grows gradually more indistinct. The political party is
thus changing its class basis.
Under conditions of globalization, some of the economic functions of
the nation-state are ceded to supranational market organizations (such as
the WTO), so that a globalized, depoliticized legal order is consolidated.
As both market and state are gradually neutralized or depoliticized, divi-
sions over questions of development become technical disputes about
market-adjustment mechanism. Political divisions between labor and capi-
tal, left and right, are made to disappear. (p. 13)
Thornton (2011) notes that the replacement of Mao’s “mass line” with
public opinion surveys is one such example of a depoliticized governing
technique. Mao defined the “mass line” as leading “from the people, to
the people,” which ensured the alignment of masses, party members, cad-
res and Party as the revolutionary vanguard. Scholars debate whether the
mass line constitutes a form of participatory democracy or whether it was
only used as a form of top-down control. But many do recognize that the
term “mass” in this context connotes a largely latent form of political power
and expression, and that it has a strong activist component. Further, the
Maoist state institutionalized a wide range of practices based on the mass
line principle to encourage communication between cadres and masses.
Thornton (2011) argues that the Mao-era model of mobilizing popular
opinion put “emphasis on the processes of creating collective economic
interests and class consciousness,” while the modern-day survey methods
favored by the post-Mao leadership “recast the process of public opinion
formation as a highly constrained type of depoliticized choice-making on
the part of respondents selecting from a limited list of pre-screened
34 B. MENG
options” (p. 241). Hence, despite inheriting a good part of the Mao-era

governing practices and policy styles, the current leadership has adopted a
depoliticized “social-engineering” approach in which public opinion polls
serve to defuse awareness of and anger towards rising social inequalities.
Although “depoliticized politics” does capture some of the crucial
changes to post-Mao governance, especially the changing class base of the
CCP and the increasingly technocratic orientation of policy-making, com-
plete depoliticization is, as far as the Party itself is concerned, neither desir-
able nor possible, given how stratified and contentious Chinese society has
become.
Despite Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that “development is the only hard
truth” (发展才是硬道理), which was an ingenious move to gloss over the
ideological contradiction of a communist party pursuing capitalist devel-
opment, each new generation of leadership “continues to derive at least
part of its political and ideological legitimacy from its revolutionary hege-
mony and some kind of discourse on socialism” (Zhao, 2011, p. 205).
Zhao examines the slogans proposed by the Jiang Zemin and the Hu
Jintao leaderships, from the “three represents” (三个代表) thesis to the
“scientific concept of development” (科学发展观) and “constructing a
harmonious socialist society” (建设社会主义和谐社会). She contends
that, instead of dismissing these doctrines completely as empty expres-
sions, they should be understood as part of continuous efforts by the CCP
to articulate and re-articulate its socialist pretensions. Viewed in the con-
text of this tradition, Xi Jinping’s assertion that the Party’s rule during
“the 30 years before the Reform and Opening Up is inseparable from the
30 years afterwards,” his call for the “great rejuvenation of the nation,”
and his demand that the media unite to amass “positive energy,” all of
which pronouncements made China observers gasp at the apparent extent
of Xi’s Maoist revival, are only the latest attempts to rearticulate revolu-
tionary hegemony.
Meanwhile, there exist profound tensions between a communist party
carrying out capitalist development, the growing inequalities resulted
from the building of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and the
increasingly disenfranchised working-class and rural population that nom-
inally form the class base of the CCP. This has given rise to both a Maoist
populism nostalgic for the country’s egalitarian socialist past and a liberal
elitism that sees capitalist liberal democracy as the only way forward for
China. For the central leadership, both ends of the ideological spectrum
need to be constantly coopted, contained, and if necessary repressed. The
reformists within the party establishment are clearly a driving force behind,
as well as the major beneficiaries of, marketization and globalization.
Economic reform has created huge opportunities for these party elites to
convert their political capital into business opportunities and material
wealth (Sparks, 2010). In addition to attempts at steering policy, the
reformists form a strategic alliance with intellectuals, and increasingly with
media elites, to propagate pro-market and pro-economic liberalization
discourses. Certain media outlets, such as YHCQ and the financial news
magazine Caixin, act as key platforms for this political group and in return
are being allowed more leeway in their operation. But such an unspoken
alliance does not guarantee their exemption from political risks. Depending
on the priority of the central leadership and the power negotiation between
different cliques of the ruling elites, there are occasional crackdowns, just
as happened to YHCQ from 2015 to 2016.
The populist Left is treated by the regime with equal, if not greater,
wariness and suspicion. The Maoist discourse on nationalism, China’s
antifeudalism and anti-imperialism revolution led by the CCP, and the
Party as the only rightful leader of Chinese socialism are crucial sources
from which the regime derives its legitimacy. On the other hand, the left-
ists’ invocations of Maoism and socialism become potent discursive tools
to formulate criticism of the CCP’s betrayal of the socialist promise and its
working-class base. Further, from the late 1970s and throughout the
1980s, the Party went through the difficult process of demystifying Mao,
a “thorough negation” of the Cultural Revolution10 (Wang, 2009,
pp. 4–5) and the reinterpretation of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong
thought (for more detailed discussion, see Tsou, 1986, pp. 144–188), all
of which paved the way for economic reform. Then in 1992, recovering
from a student democracy movement that posed one of the severest chal-
lenges to the regime to date, Deng Xiaoping tried to close down the ideo-
logical debate on Mao and the Cultural Revolution by emphasizing that
“development is the only hard truth.” In this regard, the Maoists’ con-
stant reminder of the Party’s political predicament is not something that
the leadership welcomes.
The case that best illustrates the central leadership’s ambivalent attitude
towards Maoist populism is the highly mediatized downfall of Bo Xilai,
mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 1. Elsewhere I have examined
(Meng, 2016) how Party-organ news media, mainstream commercial
media and social media all contributed to sustaining the most spectacular
political scandal in the recent history of the CCP. Particularly noteworthy,
36 B. MENG
leading up to the trial of Bo Xilai, was the temporary shutdown of the

Maoist website Utopia in conjunction with the sudden unblocking of
overseas websites that had always been deemed “hostile” to China such as
Boxun News and the Falun Gong site Epoch Times. I have argued that the
conflict between Bo and the central leadership was not only a political
struggle over which faction would have a larger share of power. It was also
an ideological struggle that laid bare the contradictions between the
Party’s socialist promises and capitalist policies. By invoking China’s
socialist legacy in order to articulate a political agenda prioritizing redistri-
bution and shared prosperity, Bo Xilai trespassed on two forbidden zones.
One was the central leadership’s monopoly over the appropriation and
reinterpretation of revolutionary history. The other was the Party’s ongo-
ing effort to push aside socialist discourse with non-ideological promises
of things like a “harmonious society” and a “Chinese dream.”
Despite Deng Xiaoping’s call for an end to the ideological debate on
“whether the name is capitalism or socialism” (姓资还是姓社), “line
struggle” (路线斗争) occurs at grassroots level, among intellectuals and
between different factions of political elites. Not only are historical
accounts of the Party and the revolution heavily contested, there are also
competing visions of the future. Those on the Left, including but not
limited to the Maoists, are questioning many capitalist development pol-
icies, while those on the Right, including both reformists within the
Party and liberal elites outside the political establishment, believe that
the problem lies in the slow pace of marketization and liberalization. The
central leadership is certainly wary of discussions of Western-style liberal
democracy, multiparty systems or constitutionalism, as seen in Xi
Jinping’s warning against “universal values” in his speech addressing
Party School members of the CCP (Xi, 2016). The leftist discourse, on
the other hand, is countered by greater efforts to sustain the hegemony
of developmentalism.
Building Soft Power: The Depoliticized Style?

The “depoliticized politics” that the CCP is pursuing not only results in
contradictions and discrepancies in the domestic media sphere, but also
contributes to the challenges that the Party-state is facing in its attempts
to promote China’s soft power overseas.
Coined by American political scientist Joseph Nye in the late 1980s
when advising the US government on its foreign policy in the post-Cold
War era, “soft power” refers to the ability of a state to achieve the outcome
it prefers in world politics in a non-coercive, cooptive manner. The term
was soon picked up by Chinese scholars after the publication of Nye’s
1990 book Bound to Lead, then entered official discourse at the turn of
the millennium, since it seems to offer “a ready solution to ease the anxiet-
ies around the world about China’s rise” (S. Zhao, 2009, p. 248). On the
surface, the connotations of soft power seem to be compatible with the
traditional Chinese warcraft that aims to “defeat the enemy without com-
bat” (不战而屈人之兵), as well as with the contemporary leadership’s
emphasis on a “peaceful rise” with no intention of aggression. Considering
the geopolitical and historical context within which Nye proposed the
concept, however, there are at least two thorny issues for the Chinese gov-
ernment in adopting soft power as part of their strategic thinking.
First, Nye has made it clear since his initial formulation (Nye, 1990,
2009) that he is speaking from the US point of view. The opening sen-
tence of his 1990 article in Foreign Policy reads: “The Cold War is over and
Americans are trying to understand their place in a world without a defin-
ing Soviet threat” (p. 153). In other words, he is offering suggestions to
the world’s only remaining superpower, a country that benefited greatly
from the Second World War, has military alliances with Japan and Western
Europe and wields significant hard power in other parts of the world, on
how to better sustain its position in a world of growing interdependence.
Facing the critique of other international relations scholars, Nye later
admitted that he had overstated the intangibility of resources, and that
hard- and soft-power resources were interchangeable (Nye, 2010). The
soft power of the US is contingent upon its hard power and has been
solidified in the specific geopolitical context since the Second World War.
To say that US security hinges as much on winning hearts and minds as it
does on winning wars is certainly very different from saying that an emerg-
ing power like China could emulate the American trajectory of
ascendance.
Second, Nye was proposing the notion of soft power at a moment when
the Soviet Bloc was disintegrating and capitalist liberal democracy was
looking to declare victory around the globe. It was around the same time
that Fukuyama pronounced the end of history and the end of ideology.
The Soviet Bloc was more than a threat to US security in the military
sense: it was competing with the US in offering a different way of organiz-
ing the economic and political life of millions. Nye himself admitted that,
in the early postwar period, “the Soviet Union profited greatly from such
38 B. MENG
soft resources as communist ideology, the myth of inevitability, and trans-

national communist institutions” (p. 167). Now, with the collapse of the
USSR, the conversion of the Eastern Bloc and the myth of inevitability,
transnational institutions are firmly on the side of the capitalist camp led
by the US. Yet when Chinese political elites started talking about soft
power in earnest this was, at least initially, a defense mechanism to alleviate
the widespread worry and suspicion provoked by China’s rise. To a large
extent, China is trying to produce and disseminate counterhegemonic
narratives about itself while relying on a hegemonic framework.
The CCP’s strategy of transplanting “soft power” to the Chinese con-
text is partly to be viewed in conjunction with depoliticization. It is worth
mentioning that Maoist China always made an effort with overseas public-
ity, so called “external propaganda” (外宣), although this was limited to
the socialist camp and other developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin
America. The main vehicles during that period were branches of the
Xinhua News Agency in these countries, along with publications such as
People’s China and China Construction, and China Radio International
(CRI). TV stations during that time also exchanged news documentaries
with communist TV stations in other countries, with the content ostensi-
bly having a strong political and ideological orientation. As Zhao (2013)
reminds us, the Cold War period witnessed the spread of Maoism “as a
revolutionary ideology and a ‘third world’ socialist alternative to both
Western capitalist modernity and Soviet bureaucratic socialism” (p. 20). In
contrast, post-Mao expansion of China’s soft power takes a technocratic
approach that circumvents ideology with an emphasis on economic devel-
opment, an instrumentalist view of “communication capacity,” and an
essentialist, apolitical understanding of Chinese culture.
The establishment of Confucius Institutes in overseas universities and
the Chinese state media’s “going global” initiatives started in the early
2000s, after the 16th Congress of the CCP under the leadership of Jiang
Zemin proposed the notion of a “peaceful rise.” But it was not until the
17th Party Congress in 2007 that Hu Jintao specifically stated in his report
that “we must enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country to
better guarantee the people’s basic cultural rights and interests.”11 Soon
afterwards, senior Party officials in charge of media and culture began to
reformulate the key components of soft power in their elaboration of the
Party’s new priorities. Wang Guoqing, former Vice-Minister in the
Information Office of the State Council, has not only replaced the notion
of “political values,” which Nye sometimes uses interchangeably with
ideology, with that of economic power, but also underscored the impor-
tance of this by listing it as the first attribute of soft power: “Soft power
refers to a nation gaining influence through its economic power, attractive
culture and diplomacy” (cited in X. Zhang, 2016, p. 4). Kurlantzick notes
that, for the Chinese, soft power includes economic levers such as aid and
investment, which conventionally would be considered part of hard power
(Kurlantzick, 2007). This choice is hardly surprising given that China is
always on the defensive when faced with criticism from the West on issues
related to human rights and political freedom. The Chinese economy, on
the other hand, has been growing since 1978 at a rate that is envied by
most developed countries. After the 2008 financial crisis, some Chinese
joked that “it used to be the case that only socialism could save China;
now it looks like only China can save capitalism.”
The importance of “communication capacity” was articulated by the for-
mer CCP propaganda chief Li Changchun in 2008, at the celebration of the
50th anniversary of the establishment of Central China Television (CCTV).
Li stated that “in the modern age, whichever nation’s communication meth-
ods are most advanced, whichever nation’s communication capacity is stron-
gest … has the most power to influence the world” (cited in Farah & Mosher,
2010, p. 7). Sun (2010, pp. 54–55) also cites the following paragraphs from
the same speech in her analysis of China’s soft power strategies:
We must go “global,” strengthening our foreign language channels, expand-

ing our partnership with foreign television organizations, vigorously push-
ing for the international transmission of our television programs, so that our
images and voice can reach thousands of homes in all parts of the world.
As Sun points out, Li’s statement conveys a vision of expansion on the

new electronic frontier of cultural influence. In order to achieve this influ-
ence, Li highlights the timely dissemination of a credible message, under-
standing foreign audiences and making effective use of modern
communication technologies:
In reporting important events inside and outside China, we must aim to be

timely, open, and transparent. We want to adopt a pro-active approach, try-
ing to be the first to get our voice out and communicating our own perspec-
tives. We must work hard to enhance the authoritativeness and impact of
our mainstream media. We must conduct in-depth studies of foreign audi-
ences’ mindsets and viewing habits, be attentive to the international needs
for Chinese news and information, and understand foreign audiences’
40 B. MENG
ways of thinking. Taking advantage of modern communication technologies

and techniques, we must adopt a style and language which is acceptable and
intelligible to foreign audiences. (cited in Sun, 2010, p. 55).
Judging from this statement, I agree with Sun (2010) that the Chinese
government’s multibillion-dollar soft power campaigns are premised on a
transmission view of communication that fails to take into consideration
the symbolic dimension of communication. The main concern has been
“with a process by which messages are transmitted and distributed in space
for the control of people at a distance” (p. 57).
The failure to recognize the symbolic dimension of communication
activities is closely associated with an essentialist, apolitical understanding
of culture. From the rolling out of Confucius Institutes since 2004 to the
2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and the screening of a nation-
branding commercial in Times Square concurrently with Hu Jintao’s visit
to the US in 2011, Chinese culture is delivered in well-polished packages
free from conflicts and contradictions. But the audiences are active and
participatory and bring preformed ideas, as in any communication pro-
cess, which means that the best intentions of the content producers are
not always successful. The spectacular Olympics opening ceremony was
tarnished by the widely reported pre-recorded footage of fireworks and
the “lip-syncing incident,”12 both of which were interpreted by interna-
tional media as indications of how “image-obsessed” China was in its
efforts to create a perfect Summer Olympics (NBC, 2008). The Confucius
Institute has suffered major setbacks since 2013, when the American
Association of University Professors called for agreements between
Confucius Institutes and nearly 100 US universities to be either cancelled
or renegotiated to better reflect Western values (Foster, 2014). The
University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University subsequently
closed their branches of the Confucius Institute, citing concerns about
impingement on academic freedoms. Even though the CCP has done
away with the component of political values in Nye’s original conceptual-
ization of soft power, whatever message they send to the overseas audience
this will never be interpreted in a “depoliticized” manner.
Rebranding the National Image

The 2008 Beijing Olympics were a watershed moment that really brought
home to the Chinese government the discrepancy between the nation’s
self-perception and its international image. On August 7, 2007, exactly
one year before the Olympics, 10,000 carefully selected spectators gath-
ered in Tiananmen Square to witness the unveiling of a special clock that
would display the countdown to the start of the Games. On that same day,
a group of dissidents sought global media notoriety by unfurling on the
Great Wall a large banner emblazoned with the words “One World, One
Dream, Free Tibet” (Spiegel Online, 2007). Also in that week, Reporters
Without Borders staged a demonstration with participants wearing T-shirts
that depicted the Olympic rings transmogrified into handcuffs. Other
international organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists took the opportunity as
well to subvert the celebration of the countdown with critical reports on
China’s human rights issues. This kind of clash between the official mes-
sage and a wide range of unofficial narratives set the tone for the media
scene leading up to and during the Beijing Olympics.
The Olympics torch relay, for example, was one of those turbulent
media events that exceeded official attempts at control. The Chinese gov-
ernment was hoping that the torch relay would be a proud prologue to the
country’s biggest coming-out party, which was to offer “Chinese citizens
new purchase on a sense of national greatness and collective destiny”
(Polumbaum, 2003, p. 72). Yet, in London and in Paris, the highly sym-
bolic “rite of passage” was disrupted by protestors supporting Tibet inde-
pendence or critical of China’s human rights record in general (Burns,
2008). Overseas Chinese students took it upon themselves to defend the
image of China and to “oppose media injustice” (Xinhua Online, 2008).
A former Tsinghua University student set up Anti-CNN.com13 to post
detailed dissections of Western media reports on China. The site pointed
out the many factual errors of reporting made by prominent and reputable
Western media organizations including CNN, The Washington Post,
The Times, the BBC, Germany’s NTV, RTL and Der Spiegel and Radio
France Internationale. While the government mainly focused on the
Olympics Games as a celebration of achievements (see Dayan and Katz’s
(1992) typology of media events), the Beijing Olympics seems to have
triggered particularly sharp contestation over media representation of the
“real China” (Latham, 2009). The competing narratives provided by
international and domestic media certainly intensified both Chinese gov-
ernment’s and Chinese people’s awareness of Western media bias. If, as
the former propaganda chief Li Changchun emphasized, communication
capacity is the key to projecting a strong “Chinese voice” on the global
stage, it is understandable that by early 2009 the central government was
ready to significantly increase investment14 in the overseas expansion of its
42 B. MENG
main media organizations, including the People’s Daily, CCTV and Xinhua,
in a major drive to improve the country’s image internationally.
The global expansion of Chinese state media is first and foremost a mat-
ter of increasing physical capacity by setting up more bureaux, adding
more channels and strengthening presence on social media platforms.
Since 2009, Xinhua has increased its overseas bureaux from just over 100
to 180, with seven regional offices located in New York (North America),
Mexico City (Latin America), Moscow (Eurasia), Brussels (Europe), Cairo
(Middle East), Nairobi (Africa) and Hong Kong (Asia-Pacific). To put the
number into perspective, Associated Press, with 280, has the highest num-
ber of bureaux around the globe, followed by Reuters and Agence France-
Presse, which both have 200. Xinhua is now among the top agencies in
terms of global reach, publishing news text, photographs and audio/video
programs around the clock in eight languages (Chinese, English, French,
Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian). CCTV now has over
70 foreign bureaux, broadcasting to 171 countries and regions in six UN
official languages. China Radio International (CRI), the world’s second-
largest radio station after the BBC, broadcasts in 64 languages from 32
foreign bureaux, reaching 90 radio stations worldwide. In April 2009, the
People’s Daily Press Group launched an English version of Global Times,
and in February 2013 a US edition was added to the portfolio. While the
Chinese-language version of Global Times focuses heavily on international
events and is famous for its nationalistic stance, the English version reports
more on Chinese domestic news catering to expats within China.
Although Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all blocked in China, the
state media see these platforms as a crucial part of their global expansion.
In January 2015, the Xinhua News Agency relaunched its global social
media platforms after adopting the unified name “New China,” a literal
translation of Xinhua. By February 2017, it had accumulated 17 million
followers on Facebook, 7.9 million on Twitter and 85,000 subscribers to
its YouTube channels. On August 1, 2015, Xinhua also launched Spanish-
language accounts on these three social media platforms. Meanwhile,
China Daily, CCTV News, People’s Daily and the English-language ver-
sion of Global Times are all active players on English-language social media.
Their hourly updated content features not only Chinese stories, but also
increasingly global news that appeals to a broader range of social media
users.
At the start of 2017, CCTV launched the China Global Television
Network (CGTV) as the most recent major initiative to extend “soft
power.” The new multilingual media cluster will have six TV channels, a
video newsletter agency and a new media agency. In a congratulatory let-
ter from Xi Jinping, the Chinese President urged CGTV to “tell China’s
story well, spread China’s voice well, let the world know a three-
dimensional, colourful China, and showcase China’s role as a builder of
world peace” (Osborne, 2016). Two senior editors from the People’s Daily
group15 have mentioned that CGTV was trying to emulate the Russia
Today (RT) channel, both saying that the top Chinese leadership “would
love for CGTV to have the kind of presence that RT does.” What is inter-
esting here is not only that RT is not necessarily perceived in a positive
light by Western journalists, but also that neither of these editors is confi-
dent about the prospect of CGTV achieving the status as RT. They cite
two major obstacles. One is that CGTV is much more stringently regu-
lated than RT, which according to one of the editors who has visited its
headquarters “operates with greater autonomy in a much more profes-
sional manner.” The other difficulty, they believe, is that for the interna-
tional community the perceived distance between CGTV and the Chinese
government is much shorter than that between RT and the Russian gov-
ernment. In other words, although RT is often criticized for being Putin’s
propaganda machine, for example during the 2014 Ukrainian conflict
(Zinets & Prentice, 2014), senior editors of Chinese state media are
concerned that CGTV will be viewed as an even more undisguised mouth-
piece for the CCP.
Such concerns are behind China’s exploration of a wider range of activ-
ities aimed at changing international discourse as well as at the direct
expansion of state media. Sun (2014, pp. 1901–1902) uses two examples
from Australia to illustrate how Chinese state media attempt simultane-
ously to circumvent both local regulation and hostile attitudes by develop-
ing business collaboration, namely the reciprocal programming agreement
between CCTV and cable and the satellite news channel Sky News
Australia, and the partnership between Global CAMG Media, a Melbourne-
based organization owned by Australian citizen Tommy Jiang, and China
Radio International. Madrid-Morales and Wasserman (2017) look at
Chinese initiatives in South Africa, including content production and dis-
tribution, infrastructure development, direct investment in local media
and the training of journalists. At a time when many news organizations
around the world are trying to cut costs due to financial difficulties, the
Chinese government’s generous support of the overseas expansion of state
media has only raised even greater alarm. For example, during the 18th
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Party Congress in November 2012, when Andrea Yu, a young woman of

Caucasian appearance self-identified as an Australian reporter, was called
more than once to ask “softball” questions at the press conferences, she
became the darling of the state media. She appeared in the People’s Daily
and on CCTV as the face of foreign correspondents who say favorable
things about China. Nonetheless, there was a strong backlash against
Andrea Yu when the foreign correspondents’ community in China found
out that she worked for Global CAMG, which started partnering with
CRI in 2007. As Sun (2014) points out, the Western media reacted with
unusual fury to a couple of innocuous questions asked by an inexperienced
journalist at official Chinese press conferences. Beneath this strength of
feeling is probably an “indeterminate sense of anxiety and fear regarding
the purity and cohesiveness of the foreign correspondent cohort”
(p. 1897). Similarly, media professionals in South Africa have so far been
responding to the Chinese presence on their media scene with notable
reservations, suspicion, if not downright rejection (Madrid-Morales &
Wasserman, 2017).
China’s media-related efforts to strengthen soft power go far beyond
journalism. In 2011, Xinhua signed a “long-term lease” on a giant, 60-by-
40-foot LED sign on New York’s Times Square. The logo of China’s state
news agency started beaming out alongside Prudential, Coca-Cola,
Samsung and Hyundai, and the screen has since been used to show videos
promoting the national image (Elliott, 2011). Earlier that same year, a
60-second video featuring many Chinese celebrities had already been
played thousands of times on six oversized screens in Times Square to
coincide with President Hu Jintao’s visit to the US. In addition, Chinese
state media are enlisting foreign PR firms and consultancy companies in
support of their charm offensive (Wong, 2016b). Li Changchun’s speech,
quoted earlier, emphasizes the urgency of adopting “a style and language
which is acceptable and intelligible to foreign audiences.” Who can better
advise on this than foreigners themselves? One style the propagandists
seem to favor is the short animated video. In 2015, a music video about
the CCP’s 13th Five Year Plan went viral on the Internet. This colorful
video features chirpy cartoon characters singing a catchy tune about the
shisanwu (13th Five Year Plan). The lyrics try to explain to foreigners in a
humorous manner what the plan is about and how it is drawn up (Horton,
2015). The light-hearted style of the music video ostensibly subverts the
stereotypical image of Chinese propaganda, but little beyond the format is
innovative. The video was produced by the Fuxing Road Studio, which,
according to the Wall Street Journal, is under the editorial control of the
CCP’s International Department while also outsourcing some produc-
tions to foreign media firms (Wong, 2016a). No one knows for sure
whether the studio is actually located on Fuxing Road in Beijing or
whether the name (fuxing means rejuvenation in Chinese) is a nod to Xi
Jinping’s call for “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
Looking at these state initiatives to strengthen soft power, it is not too
hard to detect an instrumentalist understanding of communication and a
static and conflict-free notion of culture, as well as a technocratic approach
to politics, all of which translate to the symbolic level in one way or
another. In the next section I shift the focus from capacity-building to
storytelling, by analyzing in detail two videos intended to promote China’s
national image (国家形象宣传片). The arrangement of symbols emerges
from an institutional context: “it will be superficial to try to analyse politi-
cal discourses or ideologies by focusing on the utterance as such, without
reference to the constitution of the political field and the relation between
this field and the broader space of social positions and processes”
(Thompson, 1991, p. 28).
A Harmonious Society with a Truncated History

and a Depoliticized Culture
In 2011 the Chinese State Council Information Office commissioned a

group of young filmmakers to produce two promotional videos, a short
one to be shown in public overseas and on foreign media and a longer one
to be shown in Chinese embassies around the world and on diplomatic
occasions. The shorter, 60-second version was the one displayed in Times
Square, as previously mentioned, with more than 50 prominent Chinese
personalities shown in 13 different groups to represent the achievements
of the nation. There is no voiceover, only visual taglines introducing each
group and the names of the individuals. While the background music is
upbeat, the whole video is presented like a static slideshow with little
dynamic. The 13 categories exemplified are: stunning Chinese beauty,
inspiring Chinese bravery, award-winning Chinese talent, enchanting
Chinese art, leading-edge Chinese agriculture, influential Chinese wealth,
extraordinary Chinese people, thrilling Chinese athletes, thought-
provoking Chinese scholarship, aesthetically pleasing Chinese design,
trend-setting Chinese supermodels, captivating Chinese dialogue, and
46 B. MENG
Chinese space travel. Putting aside the issue that many Western commen-
tators immediately picked up on, namely that many of the personalities are
not recognizable to a non-Chinese audience, several aspects of the mes-
sage itself are worth pondering on.
For a country that has been through socialist revolution and is still led
by a communist party, this publicity video is strikingly individualistic in
tone. The achievements in economy, science, space technology, sports, art
and entertainment are all depicted as achievements by individuals like the
celebrities depicted here. There is no indication of how collective efforts
during the period of socialist China laid the foundations, in industrializa-
tion, education, public health, science and technology, for many of these
achievements. The irony here is that the only Nobel Prize in science that
China has received so far, an honor that is considered by many as the ulti-
mate testimony of the nation’s progress on the scientific front, was awarded
in 2015 to Tu Youyou for the discovery of the drug artemisinin—a discov-
ery made during the Cultural Revolution. Although the Nobel Prize does
not necessarily recognize teamwork, Tu’s discovery, which saved millions
from malaria, was very much a collective effort, considering the way in
which scientific research was organized in Maoist China.
What goes hand in hand with this individualistic representation is a
strong elitist tendency. All the celebrities in the video are standing or sit-
ting alone or in a group, having no interaction with anyone. Each frame is
like an individual or group portrait, reminiscent of those classic oil paint-
ings portraying aristocrats and their family members. They convey a very
different message from that of socialist art foregrounding the power and
virtue of common people.
This obliviousness to the country’s socialist past is even more manifest
in the longer, 17-minute version of the video. After the opening shots of
Chinese landscapes and everyday life, the voiceover starts with a few ques-
tions about how Chinese people view themselves, how they relate to his-
tory and tradition, whether the culture is characterized by conflict or
coming together, and how Chinese think about the future. These are the
themes that run through the rest of the film, which consists of eight sec-
tions, namely “opening the door with confidence,” “growth with sustain-
ability,” “development with sharing,” “multiculturalism with shared
prosperity,” “freedom with responsibility,” “expanding democracy with
stable authority,” “economic differences with mutual respect,” and “pros-
perity with prudence.” The main narrative, tellingly but unsurprisingly,
begins in 1979, the year that marked the beginning of Reform and
Opening Up. The film goes on to talk about the fast pace of economic
growth and social change. China’s development in recent decades is attrib-
uted solely to the policies of the post-Mao era. Socialist history is relegated
to the backwater contemporary China has sought to leave. While in 1949
the famous leftist writer Hu Feng came up with the much-acclaimed title
“Time Starts” for his poem celebrating the founding of the People’s
Republic of China, for those eager to shed the burden of 30 years of build-
ing socialism time only starts in 1979. Yet plenty of historians would argue
not only that the CCP’s legitimacy still rests on the legacy of socialist revo-
lution, but that the economic development that China has achieved in the
last four decades would not have been possible either without the socialist
project of modernization (see, e.g., Heilman & Perry, 2011; Lin, 2006;
Tsou, 1986).
Unlike the 60-second version, the 17-minute publicity video does
touch on a range of important issues, including environmental protection
and sustainable development, the income gap and rural/urban division,
multiethnicity and cultural diversity, and even freedom of information and
political rights. Each one of these polemic issues is neutralized through a
host of depoliticizing discursive strategies. For example, after showing
glitzy images of urban prosperity and a voiceover highlighting impressive
growth in all aspects of Chinese society, the increasing gap between rich
and poor is then presented as a by-product of development. To shy away
from any connotation of class conflict, the producers carefully chose the
term “economic difference,” avoiding any mention of inequality. Without
showing any image of poverty, and as if avoiding any potential accusation
of Maoist egalitarianism, the video quickly cuts to some of the richest
people in China today, including Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu; Jack Ma,
CEO of Alibaba, and Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing. The voiceover
describes them all in terms of a rags-to-riches story and the persistent pur-
suit of a “dream” that led to their success. Extraordinarily, the message at
the end of this section is that people should show mutual respect despite
“economic difference,” as if inequality was something to be celebrated
just like multiculturalism.
On the issue of culture, ethnic minorities are included in the film to
help illustrate the point about cultural diversity, but are shown with very
limited agency. Unlike all the other figures who speak in front of the cam-
era and offer some comments about Chinese society, members of ethnic
minorities are only shown wearing traditional costumes and saying their
names and which ethnic group they belong to, as if putting a label on an
48 B. MENG
artefact for display. Aside from vague statements about minority groups
being able to share in prosperity while preserving their own culture, the
only concrete policy mentioned in the film is that ethnic minorities are
allowed to have more children so that they can pass on their heritage! The
patronizing ethnocentrism is further illuminated by the concluding
remark, that “all these are unified by a clear national identity.”
Politics is left until the end. The section on “freedom with responsibil-
ity” acknowledges the vast number of internet users in China and their
growing awareness of the power such connectivity has brought them. The
focus then shifts to individual responsibility and personal virtues. With
images of people offering help and demonstrating kindness to one another,
the voiceover states that it is generosity, love and perseverance that keep
Chinese society moving forward. Allegiance to the nation and optimism
towards the future are said to be now motivating individuals to take
responsibility. The discourse of personal responsibility and mutual care
masks the significant shift in the class basis of the regime. The working
class, who are represented here by children of migrant workers and con-
struction workers, is portrayed as the beneficiary of state welfare and the
goodwill of the urban middle class. Long gone are the days when workers
and farmers, at least nominally, were hailed as the country’s ruling class.
Instead, they are now the marginalized and underprivileged social group
(弱势群体) in need of compassion and charity. A discussion of political
governance follows, with no mention of the CCP. Instead, village elec-
tions in rural areas are referred to as a “democratic experiment from the
bottom-up” and the National People’s Congress is said to be the demo-
cratically elected decision-making body with the highest level of power.
Much effort is focused on conveying the message that the Party does not
ride above the state and that effective governance and regime stability take
priority over the political goals of the Party. This is why Wang Hui (2009)
draws a distinction between Party-state and state-Party. Wang argues that
transformation from the former to the latter happens when a party,
through the process of exercising power, becomes subject to the state
order and no longer conforms to its past political goals. In other words,
the Party has changed into “a depoliticized apparatus, a bureaucratic
machine, and no longer functioned as a stimulant for ideas and practice”
(p. 9). Under these circumstances, Wang contends, even control of the
media is not primarily ideological, but rather based on the need to pre-
serve stability (p. 14).
The Chinese government is putting huge resources into the promotion

of “soft power.” Just like any other effort of mass persuasion, such as
advertising or public relations campaigns, it will be difficult to measure the
“effect.” Of course, as Nye’s critics have pointed out, soft power is never
separable from hard power. As China develops, its soft power has grown
and will continue to grow, not to mention that the Chinese government
has already expanded Nye’s initial conceptualization to include economic
power. My analytical focus here, however, is not so much on the tangible
“impact” of those soft-power initiatives, but on the impasse that the
Chinese state is facing in political communication, both internally and
externally. If China’s development is conceptualized only in terms of full
integration into global capitalism, domestically the tension between grow-
ing inequality and injustice on the one hand and on the other hand a com-
munist party that still endorses socialism will only escalate. Internationally,
even as Western liberal democracies are currently undergoing deep crisis,
China will not be able to offer a counterhegemonic discourse with only the
backup of impressive GDP figures. As sociologist and playwright Huang
Jisu has wryly put it, “a world view without the slightest shred of idealism
is likely to turn China’s rise into a drunk drive by the nouveau riche.”
In this chapter I have examined how the Chinese state manages politi-
cal communication internally and externally in the postsocialist era. I start
with a historicized explication of the ideological spectrum in contempo-
rary China, aiming to unsettle the simplistic dichotomy and to re-
contextualize the meaning of “Left” and “Right.” I then draw on Wang
Hui’s notion of “depoliticized politics” to look at how the CCP is trying
to circumvent some of these fundamental ideological contradictions
through a pragmatic and often technocratic approach. Internally, contes-
tation of the country’s revolutionary history reveals the ideological cleav-
age at both elite and grass root levels. The central leadership is treading
carefully between liberal elites, who have been benefiting from the reform
and want to push for further marketization and liberalization despite
increasing social inequality, and the “old-guard leftists” who are highly
critical of the current political and economic agenda. The latter group has
a diming yet persistent voice, and the central leadership’s need to derive
legitimacy from the CCP’s revolutionary past also means they need to find
a way to articulate socialist promises with capitalist policies, no matter how
awkward the articulation will be. Internationally, China has launched the
50 B. MENG
“charm offense” with a focus on building communication capacity across

the globe. In the ideologically charged field of international communica-
tion, however, China’s attempt to defuse ideological conflicts with prag-
matism has only achieved limited success, and sometimes has even
backfired, as in the case of Confucius Institute.
Notes
1. Yang is a veteran journalist of the Xinhua News Agency who, after his
retirement, published a controversial historical account of the 1959–1961
Great Famine in China. Entitled Tombstone, the book is widely acclaimed
outside China for offering courageous criticism of the Great Leap Forward
that led to the famine. Yet many historians have also contested the book’s
report of the death toll in the famine, a figure of great political significance,
saying that Yang hyped the number to make his point.
2. See Yang Jisheng, “my two open letters.” 16/07/2015. Retrieved from
http://www.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2015/07/201507160051.
shtml
3. Zhao refused to order the military to crush the student demonstration. For
more details of Zhao’s position during the 1989 student movement, see
Calhoun (1997).
4. Start of the civil war between the CCP and the Kuomintang-led
government.
5. Start of the Great Famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward.
6. Start of the Cultural Revolution.
7. End of the Cultural Revolution.
8. See analysis of public opinion on Deng Xiangchao’s insulting of Mao
(邓相超辱毛事件的舆情及分析). 03/02/2017. Retrieved from http://
www.wyzxwk.com/Article/yulun/2017/02/376449.html
9. This term was first enunciated during the Jiang Zemin era and became one
of the eight key targets in the 12th five-year plan published in March 2011.
For more details see Pieke (2012) and Lee & Zhang (2013).
10. The Sixth Plenum of the Central Committee on June 27, 1981, released a
document that specifically repudiated the “theory of continued revolution
under the dictatorship of the proletariat” that was one of Mao’s principal
theses justifying the Cultural Revolution.
11. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-10/15/content_6883748.htm
12. The nine-year-old girl, Lin Maoke, who performed the Ode to the
Motherland turned out to be syncing the voice of another girl, Yang Peiyi,
who was considered a better singer but not pretty enough.
13. The site has now changed its domain name to www.m4.cn and is now
called April Media (四月网).
14. It was first reported by the South China Morning Post that the Chinese
government was to allocate 45 billion RMB for this purpose. But SCMP
cited no sources and there was no other report, either in English or in
Chinese, to corroborate this, even though the number was later widely
cited by other international media outlets to make a point about the
aggressiveness of the Chinese media’s “going out” campaign.
15. Based on face-to-face interviews. Both are senior figures who have worked
in state media for many years and both asked not to be named.
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CHAPTER 3
Looking beyond the Liberal Lens: News

Media as Contested Discursive Space
If there is one perspective that dominates academic inquiry into journalism,

it is that of liberalism. For societies that are considered liberal democratic,
the presumption is that there will be freedom of the press if the news media
are free from state suppression. A free press sustains democracy by inform-
ing the citizenry and ensuring the basic human right to freedom of expres-
sion. There are certainly variations across Western liberal societies, which
Hallin and Mancini (2004) have compared and contrasted in their book
Comparing Media Systems, aiming specifically to demystify the unitary
notion of a “Western media model” (Hallin & Mancini, 2012, p. 1). For
authoritarian countries such as Russia or China, or “transitional democra-
cies” such as Hungary or Poland (Voltmer, 2013), the liberal media model
is often used as a yardstick to measure how far those countries are from the
ideal state of media freedom (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, pp. 7–13; Meng &
Rantanen, 2015). Written at the high point of the Cold War, the hugely
influential Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Peterson & Schramm, 1956) is
one such example of defining different models of the press with the vocabu-
lary generated from a single model, classical liberalism (Nerone, 1995,
p. 21). It is classical liberalism that divides the political world into individu-
als versus the state. “By contrast, premodern notions of community or pol-
ity deny the salience of the individual versus society opposition. Likewise,
Marxism and postmodernist notions of the state and subjectivity are at odds
with liberal notions of individuality” (pp. 21–22). Nerone and colleagues
point out that Four Theories was heavily influenced by the Cold War agenda,
especially in its “efficient and unfair” treatment of Marxism. Hallin and

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5_3
58 B. MENG
Mancini (2004) are even more critical, comparing Four Theories to a “hor-
ror-movie zombie” that has stalked the landscape of media studies “for
decades beyond its natural lifetime,” and calling for scholars to “give it a
decent burial and move on” (p. 10). Regardless, the ethnocentrism and
normative liberalism persist, not due to intellectual inertia, but because of
the power structure underpinning the production of knowledge.
One of the fundamental problems with Four Theories has been the con-
founding of history with theory (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Nerone, 1995).
The book was written in the 1950s, at a time when the dominance of
industrial capitalism in the United States fostered “an ideological climate
that works to sustain the general interest of capital and ‘the free market’ as
an economic system” (Guback, 1995, p. 9). Internationally, the United
States was competing with the Soviet Union on the military, economic
and ideological fronts by actively exporting capitalist liberal democracy to
Third World countries, although, during the Cold War, when the anti-
Communist agenda clashed with the agenda of democratization,
Washington would frequently support right-wing dictatorships in Asia and
Latin America (Lee, 2001, pp. 9–11). Viewed from this perspective, Four
Theories is a deeply ahistorical text not just because the authors omit the
historical context of the book itself, which admittedly is not a prerequisite
for intellectual validity, but because they attempt to generalize historically
specific press models as theories. Siebert, Peterson and Schramm took the
Western worldview of liberalism, an ideology evolved through a particular
economic and geopolitical context, and presented it as a timeless structure
of ideas.
The lack of historicity in media and communication research goes much
deeper and broader than the limitations of Four Theories, which I am using
here, perhaps a little unfairly, as a quintessential example of analyzing non-
Western media from an ahistorical, Euro-centric perspective. As Willems
(2014) puts it in tracing the genealogy of knowledge production about
media and communication in Africa, liberal-democratic theory has become
so hegemonic that, to a large extent, the historicity and diversity of a vast
continent is erased in order to generate raw data testifying to Eurocentric
normative theories. The parallel between colonization of land and coloni-
zation of the mind is hard to miss here. Chakrabarty’s project of “provin-
cializing Europe” helps to reflect on the tensions in using Western-based
theoretical categories to analyze non-Western media. As Chakrabarty
(2000, pp. 42–43) argues, such a project does not call for a “simplistic,
out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science,
LOOKING BEYOND THE LIBERAL LENS: NEWS MEDIA AS CONTESTED… 59
reason, grand narratives, totalizing explanations, so on.” Rather, it fore-

grounds historical struggles:
These struggles include coercion (both on behalf of and against moder-

nity) – physical, institutional, and symbolic violence, often dispensed with
dreamy-eyed idealism – and this violence plays a decisive role in the estab-
lishment of meaning, in the creation of truth regimes, in deciding, as it
were, whose and which “universal” wins … The project of provincializing
Europe therefore cannot be a project of cultural relativism. It cannot origi-
nate from the stance that the reason/science/universals that help define
Europe as the modern are simply “cultural-specific” and therefore only
belong to European cultures … The project of provincializing Europe has
to include certain additional moves: first, the recognition that Europe’s
acquisition of the adjective “modern” for itself is an integral part of the story
of European imperialism within global history; and second, the understand-
ing that this equating of a certain version of Europe with “modernity” is not
the work of Europeans alone; third-world nationalisms, as modernizing ide-
ologies par excellence, have been equal partners in the process.
The Chinese revolution and the subsequent project of building “social-

ism with Chinese characteristics” have been a long process of historical
struggles fraught with conflicts and contradictions. Yet, from the very
beginning, Chinese socialism was a project “that has sought to develop by
its own unique means into its own unique type, always conscious of the
other possibilities it has refused to emulate: that is, Soviet-style bureau-
cratic socialism (and now Russian postcommunism) as well as diverse
forms of peripheral capitalism” (Lin, 2006, p. 1). In other words, the
socialist revolution in China was an attempt to pursue an alternative
approach to modernization distinct from either European or colonial
modernity. Media and communication, particularly the news media, have
always been an integral part of the ideological apparatus of the CCP. Hence,
to evaluate the development of the news media in China, either in terms
of analyzing in detail what and why they are, or in terms of measuring
them against a normative ideal of how they should be, the Habermasian
framework of the public sphere may not be the most productive one.
Instead, the understanding and critique of Chinese journalism need to be
firmly rooted in the trajectory of Chinese socialism, including the transfor-
mation of and diversion from its initial aspirations and ideals.
Hallin and Mancini (2004) propose four major dimensions on the basis
of which media systems in Western Europe and North America can be
60 B. MENG
compared: (1) the development of media markets, with particular empha-

sis on the strong or weak development of a mass-circulation press; (2)
political parallelism: that is, the degree and nature of the links between the
media and political parties or, more broadly, the extent to which the media
system reflects the major political divisions in society; (3) the development
of journalistic professionalism, and (4) the degree and nature of state
intervention in the media system (p. 21). Political parallelism in the nar-
row sense is clearly not applicable to China, where there is only one ruling
party. But with Chinese society becoming more stratified and media insti-
tutions increasingly adopting a pro-market ideology, an alliance between
factions of party elites, news media and the urban middle class has emerged.
In addition to the multiparty system, there are two other assumptions of
this framework that are derived from political systems in Western Europe
and North America. One is the separation of media market and state, and
the other is the relatively high level of autonomy of the journalistic field,
and both are crucial to liberal journalism. However, when the Chinese
press system was conceived, following the communist revolution, the key
dimensions were very different.
From Mass Line to Party Principle

For the Chinese Communist Party, journalism is an integral part of apoliti-
cal communication premised on the principle of a “mass line.” According
to Mao’s own formulation (1967, p. 120), the notion of the mass line was
an ideological conviction as well as a working method:
In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily
“from the masses, to the masses.” This means: take the ideas of the masses
(scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study
turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses
and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as
their own, hold fast to them and translate them into actions … and so on,
over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more cor-
rect, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of
knowledge.
The Party needs to stay close to the people so as to collect their opin-
ions, concerns and aspirations for the making of policies that will serve
their interest. But the masses can only feed raw materials into the Party’s
policy-making, since they do not always have an understanding of the big

picture and can be short-sighted. It is Party members and cadres who are
supposed to be the vanguard of the proletariat and need on the one hand
to harness people’s voices and on the other hand to educate the masses
about Party policies. Hence the mass line is meant to be a two-way process
that both produces collective knowledge and raises consciousness through
words, speeches, “telling bitterness” (suku) and various other forms of
communication (Lin, 2006, p. 143).
Journalism is one of the key communication channels through which
the Party sustains the mass line. In a speech made in 1948 to the editorial
team of Jinsui Daily, a Party newspaper established during the anti-
Japanese war, Mao defined the function of journalism in this way:
The role and power of newspapers consists in their ability to bring the Party
program, the Party line, the Party’s general and specific policies, its tasks and
methods of work before the people in the quickest and most extensive way.
Your job is to educate the people, to let them know their own interests, their
own tasks and the Party’s general and specific policies. (Mao, 1948)
Scholars note the strongly paternalistic tone here: journalists are to per-
suade people of the correctness of party policies (Howard, 1988; Zhao,
1998). Although in a Western liberal context propaganda has pejorative
connotations of brainwashing, Timothy Cheek has argued that in the
Chinese context “propaganda is nothing more than the attempt to trans-
mit social and political values in the hope of affecting people’s thinking,
emotions, and thereby behavior” (Cheek, 1989, p. 52). From the liberal
perspective, the press is the “fourth estate” that holds power accountable,
although the political economy that shapes the operation of the press is
often left unquestioned. In this scenario, audiences are made up of rational
individuals capable of telling truth from false information acquired
through a marketplace of ideas. For the communist parties that led the
Soviet and Chinese revolutions, the conceptualizations of journalism,
journalists and news audiences are all very different.
On the eve of the October Revolution, Lenin wrote about the role of
the press in enabling democratic governance by the Bolsheviks. In a char-
acteristically polemic piece entitled “How to Guarantee the Success of the
Constituent Assembly,” Lenin argues for the Soviet state’s monopoly over
the press, pointing out the inherent class nature of the ownership and
control of newspapers. He maintains that
62 B. MENG
because the publication of a newspaper is a big and profitable capitalist

undertaking in which the rich invest millions upon millions of roubles,
“freedom of the press” in bourgeois society means freedom for the rich
systematically, unremittingly, daily, in millions of copies, to deceive, corrupt
and fool the exploited and oppressed mass of the people, the poor. (Lenin,
1977)
Newspapers “yield tremendous income … to their capitalist publishers”

through private advertisements, and are able to distribute to “the most
oppressed and ignorant class” on a large scale and at that time almost
without cost. The content these newspapers publish serves the class inter-
est of their owners. Hence, for Lenin, state control of newspapers is not an
infringement but an extension of the freedom of the press to ensure that
“all opinions of all citizens may be freely published.”
Here Lenin gives great importance to the workers’ state wrestling con-
trol of the press from capitalists. Mao certainly inherited Lenin’s idea of
the Party newspaper as propagandist, agitator and organizer for the Party.
Yet he also puts emphasis on how intellectuals in general should find ways
to integrate themselves with the working class. In his speeches addressing
“news workers” (新闻工作者), both before and after the CCP took power,
Mao talked at length about why and how journalists should make efforts
to learn from the masses. For example, in the 1948 speech mentioned
earlier, he criticized journalists for often being naïve about the real world:
in order for people to educate the masses, you have got to first learn from
them … journalists need to study the materials reported from the grass-
roots, enrich your knowledge, make yourselves more experienced. Only
then, can you do your job well and be able to accomplish the mission of
educating the people. (Mao, 1948)
In his 1957 speech at the National Conference on Propaganda Work,

Mao stressed that, being educators and teachers, intellectuals “have the
duty to be educated first.” He insisted that to serve the masses of peasants
and workers, intellectuals needed to “first and foremost, know them and
be familiar with their life, work and ideas.” It is only when, in addition to
reading books, intellectuals have gained some understanding of Marxism
“through close contact with the masses of workers and peasants and
through their own practical work,” that they can speak the same language
as the Party, “not only the common language of patriotism and of the
socialist system, but probably even that of the communist world outlook”
(Mao, 1957). In this regard, Mao went beyond Lenin’s more instrumen-
talist view of the press to conceptualize it as an organic component of the
mass line. While Lenin was preoccupied with the Bolsheviks seizing power,
Mao’s mass line was meant for both revolutionary mobilization and dem-
ocratic governance.
As a result of the Party assigning the propaganda task to journalism, in
typical Party journalism news is “usually not about breaking events but
about trends, tendencies, and achievements over time,” and is “conclusive
and comprehensive” (Zhao, 1998, p. 27). From a liberal point of view,
such characteristics indicate the failure of journalists to hold power
accountable. From the Maoist perspective, however, if news in general is
conclusive and comprehensive this can be attributed to the recursive learn-
ing process that has already taken place for journalists before they file their
reports. The mass line, if rigorously implemented, can be an effective
mechanism to “encourage popular participation and deliberation for artic-
ulating and aggregating interests and preferences” (Lin, 2006, p.147).
Indeed, some do regard it as a distinctive form of popular democracy that
led to the CCP’s success in revolutionary mobilization (Goodman, 2000;
Selden, 1993). The presumption here is that, for the mass line to be effec-
tive, there is no separation between the interests of the Party elites and
those of ordinary people. Neither should there be factions within the
Party elites, nor differentiated class interests among the people.
Notably, in the post-Mao era, whenever the CCP articulates its justifica-
tion for the Party’s domination of the press, it is not the mass line, but
“Party principle” (党性原则) that is reiterated as the core concept. A typical
journalism textbook describes this as comprising three basic components:
the news media must accept the Party’s guiding ideology as their own; they
must propagate the Party’s programs, policies, and directives; and they
must accept the Party’s leadership and stick to its organizational principles
and press policies (Zhao, 1998, p. 19). The line of reasoning goes that the
Communist Party is the vanguard of the proletariat and can look out for the
best interest of the people better than the masses themselves. Journalists
will best perform their duty of serving the people by following the guid-
ance of the Party. When the CCP turned from a revolutionary party
that focused on agitation and mobilization into a ruling party that priori-
tized regulation and control, Party elites who are supposed to be the
vanguard of the working class turned into bureaucrats, and the power
of the people became overwhelmed by the power of the state (Lin, 2006,
pp. 143–148). As much as Mao was wary of Soviet statism from the
64 B. MENG
beginning and was trying to combat bureaucratic socialism with an anti-

elitist revolutionary voluntarism, which was also why he initiated the
Cultural Revolution, he was not able to stop the CCP from turning into a
highly bureaucratized state apparatus—the transformation from Party-state
to state-Party, as discussed in the previous chapter.
The Party principle of journalism is implemented through a pervasive
mechanism that includes directives from the Party and administrative
orders from the government, organizational and personnel control, moni-
toring of journalistic practices and censoring of content. These top-down
measures are not counterbalanced by any institutionalized channels
enabling feedback from the bottom up, which leads to serious issues with
the accountability of both the Party and the press. Since the Party’s policy-
making is highly centralized and opaque, news media only convey final
decisions instead of communicating the policy-making process to lower-
level cadres and ordinary people, let alone reporting on any debates
around important policy issues. Moreover, as Howard points out, the
homogenizing notions of “mass” and “people” are hugely problematic,
since they “sabotage prospects for building a socialist society on a founda-
tion of pluralist solidarity and diverse democratic forums for the articula-
tion of differing needs and negotiation of agreements (plans and policies)
for the utilization of productive resources” (Howard, 1988, p. 15). If
these serious limitations were already hindering journalism in socialist
China in fulfilling its political and social responsibilities, they are only
exacerbated in the post-Mao era. In the next section, I provide an over-
view of the political economy of Chinese journalism, including a trajectory
of press reform, in order to illustrate the power dynamics that shape news
production in China.
Commercialization, Conglomeration
and Convergence
To understand how news media in China are moving further and further
away from the initial value orientation of “serving the people” and from
being a key link in the “mass line,” we need to examine the roles played
both by the state and by capital, as well as the media logic that news orga-
nizations follow. Staying true to Deng Xiaoping’s mantra of “crossing the
river by feeling the stones,” the Party-state’s policies and practices in regu-
lating news media have been evolving since the start of the economic
reform. The two decades right after the Cultural Revolution saw the rapid
rolling-out of media commercialization and marketization. Starting from

the mid-1990s, there were a series of state-mandated conglomerations
that gave rise to large newspaper groups at both central and provincial
levels. Since the late 2000s, having realized both the social impact and the
economic significance of digital networks, the Chinese government has
mobilized press groups towards media convergence so as to occupy the
new “ideological battleground” (Tiezzi, 2015) of digital media.
This periodization of the Chinese press, moving from commercializa-
tion to conglomeration to convergence, just like most other segmenta-
tions of historical trajectories, is adopted here for analytical purposes and
by no means clear-cut. Naturally, convergence is premised upon, rather
than a departure from, the first two stages. Also, as Dallas Smythe remarked
during his visit to China in the late 1970s, in response to Chinese officials’
explanation that the state media were only allowing limited advertising at
that time, “one cannot be a little bit pregnant” (Zhao, 2007). Once media
marketization started, even though it was initiated by the Chinese state as
a top-down process and has been heavily regulated, the power of capital
was bound to increase. Tensions and friction between political logic and
commercial logic are bound to occur. Another vector of power that is
often neglected in the conventional state-centric approach to communica-
tion in China is what I would call media logic, which includes the opera-
tional rationale of media institutions, the features of communication
networks and the general orientation of media professionals. For the sake
of clarity, I discuss the political economy of the Chinese press system and
media logic separately. In reality, they are often entangled. The choice of
analytical focus is itself often a political one, as such a decision implies the
target of criticism: was the authoritarian state the only entity to be blamed
for news media’s failure in fulfilling social responsibilities, or are there
other factors at play?
Like economic reform in many other sectors, media restructuring in
China started from decentralization, which successfully fostered economic
growth even without political reform. Pei (2006, pp. 144–147) points out
that a salient feature of China’s economic reform is the decentralization of
property rights from national authorities to provincial/local authorities.
Decentralization has also significantly reshaped power distribution and
political relations within the Party-state system. Political scientists observe
that bargaining between and among national and subnational leaders, via
both old and non-traditional institutions, has led to a rehabilitation of
economic and political localism or regionalism (Lin, 2006; Pei, 2006;
66 B. MENG
Shirk, 1994). Compared with the central dominance of the past, provin-
cial and lower-level governments now have much greater opportunity to
defend and expand their local interests, “to the extent that political homo-
geneity seems to have broken at the seam of the policy-making process”(Wu,
2000, p. 47). In a parallel manner, as regional authorities have sought to
express their views and interests, at least in their own localities, news pro-
duction and distribution have been substantially decentralized. When the
economic reform started in 1979, there were 69 newspapers published in
China, 17 of which (24.6 percent of the total) were published in Beijing.
All the others were published in provincial capitals. By 1996, just before
the state-mandated consolidation started, there were a total of 2163 news-
papers published, with 206 (9.5 percent of the total) of these published at
the central level. In the affluent coastal provinces, where localism is much
stronger due to higher levels of economic development and local interests,
the number of newspapers was high (Wu, 2000, p. 49). For example,
Guangdong Province had 62, Jiangsu had 58, and Shandong had 53. Not
only had every city established its own newspapers in the 1980s, but some
county governments in rural areas has also entered the field of media
enterprise by first running a newspaper. County newspapers increased in
number from 79 in the early 1980s to 150 by the late 1990s. In addition
to the vertical decentralization from national center to localities, the num-
ber of newspapers run by various ministries and bureaux of central govern-
ment increased, together with newspapers sponsored by semi-governmental
and social organizations, from 22 in 1982 to 1189 in 1996.
The proliferation of newspapers was fueled by the dual forces of decen-
tralization and commercialization. As soon as the economic reform started,
the state realized that it was no longer financially feasible to subsidize all
media outlets as it used to. Subsidies were gradually cut and newspapers
were encouraged to pursue commercialized financing. Newspapers now
needed to cover their own production costs, establish a distribution net-
work and start to vie for attention on a competitive news market. In the
meantime, advertising was becoming the fastest growing industry in
China, with an annual growth rate of 41 percent from 1981 to 1992. The
rate of growth further accelerated after 1992, which was the year that
Deng Xiaoping gave his famous speech during his Southern Tour calling
for deeper economic reform and even bolder steps of marketization. The
news media’s advertising income grew dramatically. In just one year, from
1992 to 1993, the revenue of the highest-earning news organizations
doubled (Zhao, 1998, p. 55). That dependence on advertising will have a
profound and multifaceted impact on the production of news is well

explained by those who study the political economy of communication
(Baker, 2014; Curran & Seaton, 2003; Hackett & Zhao, 1997; Jhally,
1989; Mattelart, 2005; Zhao, 1998). Indeed, this was exactly why Lenin
argued for a state-controlled press, since an advertising-supported news
industry would only serve the interests of the capitalist class. However, the
CCP’s strategy in handling a dramatically altered media landscape was not
to limit the influence of commercial forces, but to turn Party newspapers
into a profitable “publicity Inc.” (Lee, He, & Huang, 2006).
By the late 1990s, decentralization and commercialization had led to a
fragmented, bureaucratized, overextended press system that was lacking in
economy of scale. Papers run by government bureaucracies and non-Party
organizations were undermining the circulation and advertising base of
central and Party-organ newspapers (Zhao, 2000, p. 14). The imminent
WTO accession exacerbated anxiety over the financial viability of domestic
media, which were widely perceived at that time as unable to compete with
global media conglomerates. Even Ding Guangen, then Minister in the
Propaganda Ministry of the Communist Party Central Committee, had
forewarned the protected Chinese media that the good old days would
soon be over. Under these circumstances, the Party-state took the initiative
in organizing domestic media conglomerates that are “bigger and stron-
ger” so as to pre-empt the anticipated foreign competition (Lee et al.,
2006). In 1996, the Party announced a three-year media market rational-
ization campaign to “achieve optimal integration of propaganda effective-
ness and economic efficiency” (Zhao, 2000, p.14). A series of mergers was
fostered by means of administrative orders, often between lucrative and
popular tabloids and Party-controlled papers. The b ureaucratic press was
to be consolidated, the number of professional papers to be reduced, and
no more licenses would be issued for these categories.
While critical scholars in the West, especially in the United States, where
concentration of media ownership is an acute issue, have developed a
scathing criticism of the detrimental impact that media conglomeration
has on democracy and on cultural diversity (Bagdikian, 2004; Baker,
2001, 2006; Birkinbine, Gomez, & Wasko, 2016; Herman & McChesney,
2001; McChesney, 2004, 2015), the CCP found press conglomerates to
be the perfect recipe for regaining control, both economically and politi-
cally. By the end of the restructuring campaign, China had set up seven
national and regional press groups. In 2000, nine more groups were
approved by the State Administration of Press and Publication. These
68 B. MENG
press groups are financially independent and are expected to take advan-
tages of economies of scale, but are not registered with the government’s
industry and trade bureau as independent businesses. Instead, they are
affiliated with the Party’s propaganda departments at the national or pro-
vincial levels, with their publishers or editors-in-chief appointed by and
accountable to the relevant Party committee. Just as the capitalist state in
nineteenth-century Britain consciously mobilized market forces to curb
the underground, radical working-class press (Curran, 1978), the domi-
nance of these press groups in their respective news markets, especially at
the provincial level, has effectively crowded out any small newspapers that
were unprofitable or unruly. Within each press group, the highly profitable
tabloids and metropolitan newspapers can now cross-subsidize the much
less popular Party organs, which continue to act as the major mouthpieces
of the Party and to be subject to more stringent control over content pro-
duction. To be sure, even for those commercially successful subsidiaries
that have mass appeal, it is not an option to challenge the Party line, and
neither do they have incentives to do so. After all, press conglomerates’
economic interests are subordinated to their ideological mission: “only by
serving the party-state’s political interests would they be granted eco-
nomic privileges (ranging from tax breaks and resource allocation and uti-
lization, to political and monetary rewards)” (Lee et al., 2006, p. 586). As
Stockmann (2012) argues, with the support of a wide range of empirical
materials, market-based media in China promote regime stability rather
than challenging authoritarianism: as long as the media profit enormously
from a protected and distorted market, they have no reason to make the
risky move of challenging the supremacy of the Party-state.
If “press group” (报业集团) was the keyword for the Chinese media
industry in the 1990s, by the late 2000s “media convergence” (媒介融
合) was the new catchphrase that seemed to point the way forward. In
2007, when I was talking to a veteran journalist friend of mine who had
been working for a decade for the Nanfang Media Group, she asked
whether I knew anything about media convergence, as “it is the talk of
the town.” I offered her a brief account from a critical media scholar’s
perspective, mentioning both the empowering potential of converged
media platforms for average users and concerns about the growing power
of corporate media. She was surprised: “that’s not how we talk about it
here at all! Policy-makers, academics, and media professionals are all dis-
cussing how to better achieve media convergence!” Her reaction sums up
well the highly homogenous nature of public discourse concerning media
convergence in China, which has been all about following the commercial
and technological logic of convergence to build “bigger and stronger”
media conglomerates. Generally speaking, the state’s push for media con-
vergence follows the same rationale as the top-down initiative to form
press groups, but with an even stronger impetus towards the corporatiza-
tion of formerly public media institutions (Hong, 2017, pp. 101–112).
That is to say, on the one hand the government would like state-owned
or state-controlled media to remain commercially viable and competitive
in a converged environment. As the country tries to “upgrade” its eco-
nomic model from “made in China” to “created in China,” media and
communication has become an increasingly important sector for sustain-
ing growth. The State Council published a report in 2011 that sounded
a warning message: “For a long time, state-owned cultural institutions
were not transformed into corporations, staying outside of the market
economy and thus lacking competitiveness and energy. This situation has
caused huge waste of state-owned cultural assets, which are facing market
marginalization. Meanwhile, all sorts of non-state enterprises sprang up,
dominating distribution channels and consumption platforms”
(Xinhuanet, 2012). On the other hand, it makes good political sense to
have a handful of party-controlled press groups providing news content
across a wide range of media platforms. Indeed, until now, internet com-
panies have not been licensed to carry out original news reporting on
current affairs, even though major players such as Sina, Tencent and
Netease are increasingly playing “edge ball” (擦边球) by doing their own
reporting on entertainment and non-sensitive social news. The central
Party-organ People’s Daily established the People’s Daily Online as early as
in 1997, followed by a mobile version in 2007 and People’s Video in
2011, targeting smartphone users. The Liberation Daily Press Group,
based in Shanghai, carried out various internet-related strategies in 2006
and was endorsed by GAPP as a pioneer of “Chinese digital press innova-
tion projects.” Others, such as the Shen Zhen Press Group, the Hang Zhou
Daily Press Group and the Nanfang Media Group, all of which are
located in the affluent east coast metropolises, are being restructured as
“all-media information providers” (全媒体).
The CCP has taken a highly pragmatic and instrumental approach
towards reform of the press system. Party-organ newspapers have been
encouraged to explore various means of converting their political pres-
tige into commercial opportunities. These are the “parent” newspapers
in press groups, toeing the Party line most closely while allowing the
70 B. MENG
“offspring” newspapers to pursue market-oriented news-production

strategies (Lu, 2003). Although the initial stage of commercialization
gave rise to a decentralized press system, the series of rationalizations car-
ried out in the late 1990s made sure the Party retained control over com-
munication resources, which became even more concentrated with the
unfolding of media convergence. This is why some call Chinese media
conglomerates “a hallmark of China’s bureaucratic authoritarian state
capitalism at work” (Lee et al., 2006, p. 586). The restructuring process
has been justified and guided by the two-pronged rationale of Party prin-
ciple and market logic, while almost completely circumventing any seri-
ous discussion of the public service obligations of media institutions. The
marriage between political loyalty and the pursuit of profit has in practice
aggravated the unequal distribution of communication resources between
urban and rural, rich and poor. The most successful press groups, in
terms of resources, revenue and market reach, are all concentrated in the
coastal area. The most profitable operations within each press group are
metropolitan papers targeting the urban middle class. Zhao contends
that the media system assumes a double role in the processes of class for-
mation in contemporary China: “it affects class structure not only as an
increasingly central vector of production and economic exchange—most
importantly in its growing role as a significant sector of economic pro-
duction and in its role as an advertising vehicle for the entire economy—
but also as the means of social organization and sites of identity formation”
(Zhao, 2010, pp. 257–258). The goal of the Party-state in managing a
stratified press system is no longer to ensure totalitarian control as part of
the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead, the core principle is to main-
tain the hegemony of the CCP through a sophisticated bureaucratic sys-
tem. Below, I highlight a few high-profile cases to illustrate the negotiation
between state, market-oriented newspapers and the interest groups these
papers represent.
A Liberal Newspaper’s Dream of Constitutionalism

At the start of 2013, the Southern Weekly (SW), which is part of the
Nanfang Media Group (NMG) and famous for its liberal stance and its
investigative reporting, once again became a hot topic on Chinese social
media and showed up in international news headlines. In the paper’s
New Year editorial, there were a number of glaring errors, including
incorrectly written words, historical inaccuracies and incoherent sen-

tences. This was quickly attributed to mistakes made by the censors in
their hasty change of the original content. On January 3, some SW staff
members took to Sina Weibo to protest against Tuo Zhen, the propa-
ganda chief of the Guangdong Province Party Committee that oversees
NMG, for his alteration of the editorial. In the meantime, the original
editorial, drafted by Dai Zhiyong, entitled China Dream, Constitutionalism
Dream, appeared on several major online forums. The title had been
changed to We Have Never Been So Close to Our Dream in the version
published in the paper, downplaying the emphasis on constitutional
rights. The incident quickly gained high visibility, with international
media picking up the story (BBC News, 2013a; Richburg, 2013), SW
staff members posting more insiders’ accounts online, and the Global
Times, which is part of the People’s Daily Group, publishing an editorial
calling for “calm deliberation.”
It soon emerged that Tuo Zhen had in fact been away on a business trip
during the week concerned and had not himself intervened in this particu-
lar case. The provincial propaganda department had had exchanges back
and forth with the paper’s editors about the content and wording of the
editorial and it was the Deputy Editor who had made those errors when
carrying out some last-minute changes after the New Year’s edition had
already been signed off by the senior editor in charge. The mounting pro-
test, however, was still targeted at Tuo Zhen, whose alleged instruction to
alter the editorial was criticized in an open letter signed by 50 former edi-
tors and reporters of Southern Weekly as “an act of crossing boundaries; a
domineering act; an act of ignorance; an unnecessary move (越界之举、
擅权之举、愚昧之举、多此一举)” (W. Li, 2015). The letter demanded
that Tuo take the blame and resign. Later, at an enlarged meeting of the
editorial board, Chief Editor Huang Can took responsibility, but asked
the administrator of SW’s official Weibo account to hand over the pass-
word so that the senior editorial team could communicate with the public
via Weibo directly. At 9:18 pm on January 6, Wu Wei, the Director of SW’s
news department, posted a statement on Sina Weibo which was censored
and removed shortly after:
I have handed in the password of Sina Weibo account @SouthernWeekly to

Mao Zhe, General Manager of Southern Weekly’s New Media business. I
will not be responsible for the following statement and any future content
posted by that account.
72 B. MENG
Two minutes later (at 9:20 pm), a “clarification” statement was posted
on SW’s official Weibo account:
To our readers: the New Year Message we published in the January 3 New
Year special was written by our Editor in accordance with the topic Chasing
Dreams; the preface on the front page was written by one of our directors.
The rumors on the internet are untrue. We apologize to you for the mis-
takes we made due to our negligence in the haste.
Soon after, at 9:30 pm, @SouthernWeeklyEditorialDepartment2013

posted:
On the night of January 5, Southern Weekly called an emergency enlarged

meeting for members of the editorial board. We are planning to constitute
an investigation team on the New Year special issue immediately, complete
the incident report and submit it to the highest authority. However, at
about the same time, the related authority pressured Southern Weekly to
release a falsified statement through our official Weibo account, trying to
shift the blame to the editors who were not even present. (We) call for fac-
tualism; stop all the interruptions until the final report gets released. Let the
truth write the history.
This message was soon deleted by Sina as well. The next day, a few
dozen protestors brought flowers to the SW office building in Guangzhou
and held up banners demanding press freedom.
The pretext for this highly publicized confrontation, according to some
of the SW journalists I spoke with, was that Tuo Zhen had been intervening
aggressively in news production at SW ever since he took over as the pro-
vincial propaganda chief.
He started waving a big stick as soon as he arrived in Guangdong. Do you

know how he edits your reports? He doesn’t write in the margin as most
other officials do. He would do it on the computer and send back the revised
article—there wasn’t even a trace! Or he would call you on the phone and
tell you exactly what were the changes that needed to be made. Fine, if you
want to make changes, tell us in advance. Well, he would read the draft edi-
tion on the phone before he goes to bed, around midnight. Yes, he could
access our internal editing system via his phone. Sometimes even if the
reports were already approved by the central officials, he would give us a call
and say no, you couldn’t publish like that. (SW02, January 3, 2017)1
The worst case was in July 2012. Remember the big thunderstorm in Beijing
that caused a huge flood? Dozens of people drowned, remember? We were
going to do a special issue called “departed.” Nothing sensational, just to
list their name, age, occupation, what others said about them in that after-
noon when they died. The propaganda department wouldn’t let us do it. We
initially had a list of 20 people, they crossed out most and only left five
names of those who died from helping others, such as the village Party sec-
retary or neighborhood cadres. We said, OK, if you do this let us at least add
five ordinary people. They said no. And they changed the title from
“departed” to “heroes.” This is one of the most extreme cases. But basically
the whole year went like that. How could we run the paper any more?”
(SW03, January 3, 2017)
Even though the journalists I spoke with acknowledged that Tuo Zhen
was not the one who made changes to the New Year’s editorial, they
insisted that “there were reasons that we reacted like that.” To understand
the significance of this incident, however, we need to take into consider-
ation an even broader context. SW is a newspaper that had benefited
greatly from the political decentralization and economic liberalization of
the reform era. Founded in 1984, it was one of the success stories in the
first wave of media commercialization, when Party organs started
publishing market-oriented weekend supplements to generate more reve-
nue. Zhao (2012) provides a detailed account of how SW transformed
itself from a light-hearted weekend paper to the “de facto organ of post-
1989 liberal intellectual publicity” (p. 106). If, as Zhang (1998, p. 134)
contends, the intellectual and moral authority of Chinese intellectuals in
the 1980s had three sources, namely “their semi-autonomy from the state;
their simultaneous deep loyalty and commitment to the project of the
reforms; and their access to, and incorporation within, the cultural-
discursive institutions of the capitalist global system,” the state’s cracking
down on the 1989 democracy movement made the union of these three
elements impossible. By the late 1990s, with China’s WTO accession
looming on the horizon, nationwide privatization of formerly state-owned
enterprises taking a toll on the working class, growing economic and social
inequality, a disintegrating socialist welfare system, and rural China in
deep crisis, Chinese intellectuals started to engage in intense debate about
the country’s modernization trajectory. It is beyond the scope of this
chapter to provide an in-depth treatment of this fascinating topic in intel-
lectual history (for more details, see Cheek, 2016; Chen, 2004; Dirlik,
74 B. MENG
2012; H. Li, 2015; Rofel, 2012; Xu, 2003). The “liberal” perspective and
the “new Left” perspective diverge in their assessment of socialist history,
their perception of Chinese reality and their vision for future develop-
ment. To sum up broadly the key points of contention, liberal intellectu-
als, in their embrace of liberal capitalist democracy, reject China’s
revolutionary legacies and endorse the “universal values” of free market,
private property, and human rights as “the end of history.” The “new
Left” on the other hand, is highly critical of capitalist globalization as well
as of the inherently capitalist nature of Western liberal democracy. They
refuse to bury China’s revolutionary past as they consider it not only a
significant historical praxis that shaped the present, but also a source of
inspiration for a radical democratic socialist vision based on a critique and
transcendence of capitalist modernity (Zhang, 1998). SW firmly aligned
itself with the former camp by providing a key platform for liberal intel-
lectuals to reach a wider audience.
An incident that took place in 2010 indicates the lengths that SW would
go to in order to delegitimize the views of its ideological opponents. One
of the most prominent “new Left” scholars to emerge from the aforemen-
tioned debate is Wang Hui, the former editor of the much-acclaimed Du
Shu magazine. Wang was trained as a literary scholar, but later focused on
researching the intellectual history of modern China. During the early
2000s, Wang had public debates with some of the leading liberal intellec-
tuals, including Qin Hui, Xu Youyu and Zhu Xueqin, about a wide range
of issues such as the evaluation of the socialist legacy, the power and
responsibility of the state, economic and social policies for rural China,
issues with building democratic institutions, etc. Wang was critical of what
he saw as the liberals’ blind faith in the capitalist market economy and
their wholesale embrace of “universal values” at the expense of critical
reflection on Chinese history. All of Wang’s liberal interlocutors are fre-
quent contributors to SW and have accused Du Shu of being “too leftist,”
even though a profile of Wang Hui in the New York Times acknowledges
that Du Shu “publishes writing from across the ideological
spectrum”(Mishra, 2006). In March 2010, Wang Binbin, one of the lib-
eral columnists on SW, accused Wang Hui of plagiarism in his 1988
dissertation-based book Against Despair (fankang juewang). This contro-
versy over academic integrity was dramatized into a media spectacle by the
coordinated efforts of media and liberal intellectuals. Wang Binbin’s arti-
cle was first published in the academic journal Literature and Art Research
(wenyi yanjiu), which has only a small circulation, then in the March 25
issue of SW to ensure a wider readership and sensational effect. SW added

an editorial commentary on the article that “not only presumes Wang Hui
guilty, but also claims the necessity of outside intervention to overcome
the failure of academic self-discipline” (Zhao, 2012, p. 112). Given Wang
Hui’s intellectual status both within and outside China, Wang Binbin’s
accusation stirred up extensive debate on the Chinese internet that lasted
for months (Custer, 2010). Forensic examinations of Wang Hui’s book
were conducted by both academics and ordinary internet users seeking to
either support or refute the charge. In July, the international academic
community published an open letter in defense of Wang Hui. The letter,
signed by many prominent Western scholars such as Tani Barlow, Arif
Dirlik, Gayatri C. Spivak and Frederic Jameson, some of whom are transla-
tors of Wang Hui’s works, frames the plagiarism charge as an “attack from
the popular media in China” (Lam, 2010).
Academic integrity is an important and legitimate issue. But the ways in
which Wang Binbin mobilized “symbolic violence and a prosecution-style
presentation” of what many consider a thin case against Wang Hui (Zhao,
2012, p. 113) and SW’s persistent bias in presenting the case raise doubts
about the possible political motivation behind this intellectual witch-hunt.
In 2014, Wang Binbin published an anthology entitled Much Ado about
Something (有事生非). This is a collection of essays critiquing the work of
three scholars, Wang Hui, Cai Xiang and Lydia He Liu, all of whom are
considered to be on the political Left. Interestingly enough, Wang Binbin’s
critique of their academic writing focuses almost entirely on writing style,
citation format and grammatical problems, with very little engagement
with the substance of their arguments. As discussed in Chapter 2, we need
to develop a well-historicized understanding of terms like “Left,” “Right,”
“liberal” and “conservative” in the Chinese context. As society becomes
more stratified and the consensus among both intellectual and political
elites crumbles, we need to interrogate, rather than take for granted, the
mass media’s frequent claims to represent the voice of “the people.” Such
claims can often be a discursive strategy for legitimizing the interests of a
particular social class while marginalizing dissenting views (see Meng,
2016). Both liberal and new Left intellectuals are critical of aspects of the
Party-state, ostensibly for different reasons, but they have also found sym-
pathetic ears and even supporters among factions of the party elites. The
liberals are in favor of China’s integration into global capitalism, but
believe it is liberal democracy rather than an authoritarian communist
party that can act as the best guardian of a “free market” economy. The
76 B. MENG
“new Left” hopes to revitalize the socialist legacy and hold the CCP
accountable to its initial promise of building people’s democracy. Based on
this understanding, the accounts provided by SW journalists not only sug-
gest the tension between the paper and the current propaganda chief, but
inadvertently reveal some of the conditions that enabled SW to grow.
Given the power that the provincial propaganda department has over the
press group, it is no coincidence that SW started out in Guangdong, the
province where China’s very first Special Economic Zone is located, and
was able to “scale up” to become a newspaper with national influence
(Zhao & Xing, 2012). The fact that, compared to media outlets based in
Beijing and Shanghai, the Nanfang Media Group is further away from the
political center, means that the local political climate may play a more
direct role in either opening up or closing down the space for a publication
like SW.
In this section, I have tried to unravel the dichotomy of authoritarian
state vs. liberal media by exploring the details of a seemingly straightfor-
ward censorship case. Current SW journalists seem demoralized as a result
of the recent round of repression coming directly from the provincial pro-
paganda department, as well as the intensified self-censorship of the
Editor-in-Chief who had been parachuted in. One lamented: “do you
even hear the voice of SW these days? We used to be in the first tier.
Whenever something happens, we want to be there. But now? Nobody
even cares.” (SW01, January 3, 2017). But some are hopeful about the
new propaganda chief, Shen Haixiong. This change in personnel was
interpreted by many as a sign of the central government’s dissatisfaction
with Tuo Zhen’s record of disciplining the media in Guangdong:
Tuo Zhen is all about heavy-handed repression, but Shen is different,

smarter. He wants us to be proactive in cleaning up our reputation. We need
to earn back the trust [of the central government]. He would assign us
themes that no other media had dealt with, but make sure it’s politically
safe. Well, actually, sometimes he would even disclose official decisions that
were not yet made public. We put it online, maybe we had to take it off in
half an hour. But hey, at least we got the story out there first. (SW04,
January 4, 2017)
This clearly shows how much of the operation of provincial media is

contingent upon the regulatory environment at the local level. It also
suggests that, as bureaucrats, propaganda officials make their political
calculation based on different rationales. Some take the repressive

approach while others try to actively occupy the ideological battleground,
but all are oriented towards upward accountability—they want to be rec-
ognized by the higher level officials as capable and effective.
Capital, Technology and the Changing Ethos
Journalism for Sale: The Cases of New Express and 21 Century

Business Herald
In addition to political dynamics, the power of capital, aided by the logic
of digital technologies is playing an equally significant role in reconfigur-
ing the landscape of news production. In October 2013, a journalist
named Chen Yongzhou from New Express, a Guangzhou base tabloid, was
arrested on “suspicion of damaging the business reputation” of a major
construction machinery company, Zoomlion (Hearst, 2013). Between
September 2012 and June 2013, Chen filed a total of 14 reports about
Zoomlion, in which he alleged that the company had exaggerated its prof-
its, overspent on advertising in “distorted marketing campaigns” and was
involved in financial fraud. Subsequently, Zoomlion’s shares plummeted
on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. The company
proclaimed that neither Chen nor anyone else from New Express had ever
conducted any interviews with them, and that the reports were full of false
information. What was highly unusual was not only the sudden arrest, but
also that it was carried out by the police from the neighboring Hunan
province, where both Zoomlion and its competitor, Sany, are located. The
two companies have engaged in bitter competition for years, with each
finding its own ways to leverage political and media resources to its own
advantage (He, 2013). Shortly after Chen’s arrest, New Express published
prominent front-page appeals on two consecutive days calling for his
release and enacting the familiar script of a courageous news outlet defying
the power of the state. Later Chen made a public confession on CCTV,
admitting that he had taken a bribe to run a smear campaign against
Zoomlion and that most of the material in the reports had been provided
by a third party. Although Chen did not specify the source, those who had
been following the rivalry between Zoomlion and Sany believed it was the
latter that supplied the misinformation in order to sabotage its competitor
(He, 2013). New Express recanted its defense of Chen, who was found
guilty in October 2014 of taking a bribe and damaging Zoomlion’s
78 B. MENG
business reputation. The focus of international media and of opinion lead-

ers on Weibo was on the legality of the public confession and this did raise
valid concerns about due process (BBC News, 2013b; Bloomberg, 2013;
Hearst, 2013; Reuters, 2013). However, the main story is one of media
corruption—how news organizations and media professionals are convert-
ing their symbolic resources into material gains.
While the Chen Yongzhou case exposes how business interests are cor-
rupting journalists, the 21 Century Business Herald (21 Century) scandal
that emerged a year later illuminates how journalists are seeking revenue
essentially through blackmailing commercial companies. 21 Century is
part of the Nanfang Media Group and is one of the most influential busi-
ness papers in China. In September 2014, police started investigating
alleged extortion by 21 Century’s online version, following leads provided
by whistleblowers, many of whom were from businesses that at some point
had had to pay the newspaper a “protection fee” (Yuan, 2014). It soon
transpired that for years 21 Century Online had been taking advantage of
its influence in the business world to regularly extort from companies,
especially those about to launch an IPO on the stock exchange. It is com-
mon practice for the newspaper to tell a company that journalists are in
possession of evidence of wrongdoing. If the company wants to shield its
reputation from severe damage, it can either pay the journalist upfront or
agree to spend large amounts on the website or in the paper. During a
period of five years, 21 Century raked in billions of RMB through this type
of “revenue source.” What is even more extraordinary is that when I men-
tioned this case to many journalists I interviewed they seemed completely
unperturbed by this illegal practice. One former Nanfang Media Group
employee emphasized the often unethical operation of businesses:
We just tell ourselves that none of them are good guys. These companies,
you know, they all do bad things in way one or another. It’s not like we are
being unfair to them, right? We are acting on behalf of the public to teach
them a lesson. (SM01,2 January 2, 2017)
A journalist currently working for another news outlet in Shanghai

defended the extortion as contributing to collective welfare: “Come on,
this is an open secret in the world of financial journalism. I feel bad for
Shen Hao, actually [Shen is the publisher and Editor-in-Chief of 21
Century, who was later convicted of extortion and embezzlement]. After
all, when he charged fees from those companies, he wasn’t doing it for
himself. He was looking after everyone working for the paper!” (CBN03,3
December 20, 2016).
Reallocation of Journalistic Resources

The power of capital does not stop with compelling a direct exchange
between those who have money and those who are in possession of sym-
bolic capital. The general shift of capital flow from traditional media to
internet companies significantly reconfigured the distribution of commu-
nication resources and reshaped the journalistic ethos. In January 2017,
the Beijing Times and the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post (OMP),
two of the once top-performing metropolitan papers in China, ceased
publication on the same day. This coincidence is highly indicative of the
financial difficulties that traditional news outlets are now facing, in China
as well as in many other parts of the world. The changing fate of OMP is
particularly telling, as the majority of the staff are now working for The
Paper (thepaper.cn), a news website backed by Shanghai United Media,
which was also the parent company of OMP. The state-owned Shanghai
United Media was established in 2013 through the merger of the city’s
two largest newspaper groups, Liberation Daily Press Group and Wenhui–
Xinmin United Press Group, in order to accelerate media reform and capi-
talize on the fast growth of internet media. In July 2014, thepaper.cn was
launched with an opening editorial that went viral, written by its CEO Qiu
Bing, who had been Editor-in-Chief of OMP. The editorial was full of
nostalgia for bygone “times of idealism,” but also adamant about embrac-
ing “the era of the internet” (互联网时代). The core journalistic team
moved with Qiu from OMP to The Paper, whose name in Chinese means
“surging waves” (peng pai). Within a short span of two years, thepaper.cn
established its reputation through rigorous current affairs reporting and
intelligent commentary pieces, catering particularly for a young urban
generation of smartphone users (Speelman, 2015). By the end of 2016,
the number of active daily users of The Paper’s mobile phone app had
reached five million. Furthermore, just as OMP announced its final issue,
The Paper successfully raised RMB 610 million (US$ 88 million) from six
Shanghai-based state-owned enterprises. It is clear that The Paper is the
flagship project of the new-media strategy now being pursued by the
Shanghai Municipal Government and the Propaganda Department of the
Shanghai Party Committee. Just as the Nanfang Media Group benefited
greatly from the strong economic growth of Guangdong province, the
80 B. MENG
level of investment that The Paper now receives would be unimaginable in

any less affluent region. The ability of news outlets to make the “digital
turn” is contingent upon the resources they are able to deploy.
But the state sector is a latecomer to the new game of delivering news
content on converged digital platforms. The Shanghai government’s new
media strategy is to a large extent a reactive one, attempting to reclaim the
discursive and ideological space already being eroded by technology-savvy
private companies. The two names I heard most frequently during my
field work in 2016, when asking journalists about the major game-changers
in their field, were Jinri Toutiao (the name means “today’s headline”) and
Alibaba, neither of which would identify themselves as media companies.
Like Apple News or Google News, Jinri is a news aggregator that relies on
algorithm to deliver an individualized newsfeed via a smartphone app.
Since its start-up in 2012, the company has experienced exponential
growth of its advertising revenue, which reached RMB 6 billion (US$ 870
million) by the end of 2016. At a time when other major news portals such
as Sina, Tencent, Sohu and Ifeng were still using human editors to o rganize
and rank news content, Jinri was a pioneer in algorithm-based content
delivery. Its founder and CEO Zhang Yiming carefully distances Jinri from
the news media, emphasizing instead that it is a technology company that
“does not produce content or opinions” (Song, 2016). However, the
business strategy that has earned Jinri top revenues has provoked wide
criticism, mainly for two reasons. First, there is great uncertainty with
regard to the applicability and enforcement of copyright law in this new
territory. Several lawsuits have been filed in the United States by tradi-
tional news organizations against aggregators. For example Agency
France-Presse sued Google when the latter first launched a news aggrega-
tor in 2002, while three years later Associated Press sued All Headline
News for unauthorized use of its content (Isbell, 2010). Both cases were
settled by means of a licensing deal. Although Jinri has recently start to
pay for the authorized use of content from major news organizations,
many journalists are bitter about how the company expanded its market
share through free-riding on the production of traditional media.
Yes they are now paying us to use our content, but only after they have got
rich and powerful (财大气粗). They are in a much better position to bargain
now. The company started by stealing from us, and they are really eating
into traditional news organizations’ advertising revenue. You see, if the thief
loots from everyone, he’ll end up having no one left to steal from any more.
Jinri has popularized this business model and others are following suit,
including major news portals like Tencent and Ifeng. I think the ecology of
news production and consumption has been degraded as a result. (Paper 01,
December 19, 2016)
The second major aspect of what many journalists consider to be a

degenerating news ecology is how algorithm-based content delivery is
resulting in a “race to the bottom” at worst and an “echo chamber” at
best. Jinri launched with the slogan: “headlines are what you care about” (
你关心的才是头条). The company collects data about user preference and
demographic features through the digital trace people leave behind in a
plethora of online activities. Just like other news-feed services, its selling
point is giving users what they want. But many have noticed that Jinri pri-
oritizes sensational stories that cater to the lowest common denominator.
Not only does the mobile app often uses images of scantily dressed women
as clickbait, the actual content it delivers is predominantly tabloid-style and
lacks basic professional judgment. One journalist told me he had installed
the app a few times on his phone, but always ended up deleting it:
I simply couldn’t stand it. It’s full of provocative photos of beautiful women,
all kinds of vulgar content, very lowbrow human-interest stories. For me,
that doesn’t qualify as news. The more they cater to the lowest common
denominator, the higher their advertising revenue. I heard their revenue
tripled again this year. (Paper 02, December 19, 2016)
Another was suspicious of the company’s claim that the entire configu-
ration is left to the “objective calculation” of algorithm:
I tried to use it, as I was curious about how it works. But it didn’t cater to
my interests and needs at all. Sometimes I was tricked by the title and only
realized the content was not what I wanted at all after clicking through. But
the app would only count the clicks, right? Not how you actually think of
the article. Even if I only clicked on titles that look like hard news, the app
would keep feeding me those tasteless stories. If I weren’t a journalist who
sometimes tried to look for news leads on Jinri Toutiao, I wouldn’t use their
app at all. (CBN02, December 20, 2016)
An Eroding Workforce and a Changing Ethos

While companies like Jinri Toutian are eroding the revenue base of tradi-
tional news organizations and reshaping the consumption pattern of news
readers, internet giants such as Alibaba are luring elite journalists with
82 B. MENG
much higher salaries and a discourse equating digital with future. To be

sure, journalism has never been a highly paid career. Journalists derive job
satisfaction from non-material rewards such as flexible working hours, a
high level of autonomy, social status and prestige, and a sense of social
responsibility. As the political and economic climate for the operation of
news industry changes, journalists’ calculation of their career prospect
shifts. Among the eight former journalists I interviewed, three mentioned
insufficient autonomy as a major disincentive to continuing a journalistic
career. What is noteworthy is that this does not necessarily reflect tight-
ened political control of news production—the control has always been
there, but often has to do with journalists’ professional stage. As journal-
ists move up the career ladder, they gain visibility among their readers and
take on tasks of greater social and political significance. As a result, they
encounter more frequently various forces, both political and commercial,
attempting to intervene in the process of news production. Such interven-
tion is far more complicated than simple suppression. In fact, in today’s
highly mediated society, various stakeholders are spending a great deal of
effort trying to shape the news narrative to their own advantage. For
example, a senior journalist who used to be in charge of legal reporting at
The Paper recounted to me the following reason for his move to an online
video start-up:
We did lots of preparation before The Paper went live in July 2014. I had a
list of more than a dozen legal cases involving unjust and wrong charges. We
did all the research and were going to release one story every few days dur-
ing the launch period so as to maximize the impact. But the impact came
even quicker than we expected. The first couple of reports were noticed by
senior ministers at the Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s
Procuratorate. They asked lower-level courts that dealt with the cases to
open the dossier immediately and start an investigation. From then on,
courts and prosecutors at provincial levels all started paying close attention
to our column. I got more and more phone calls from these people every
day, either trying to push their side of the story or to ask me to take certain
reports down. I was fed up. I don’t want to spend one-third of my work day
dealing with these kinds of requests. It’s ridiculous. (Paper 03, December
19, 2016)
On the other hand, more than half of the former journalists referred to
salary as the main reason for making a career change. Interestingly, while
the perceived lack of autonomy has to do with one’s position on the career
ladder, the perceived low level of material compensation has to do with life
stage. A former financial journalist summed it up succinctly:
You see, it is OK to earn 8,000 Yuan per month when you are in your late
20s or early 30s. But if you are still earning that amount by the time you hit
40, you are a bit of a loser. Especially for us financial journalists. We know
full well how much people in the financial sector earn. (Formerly CBN04,
December 21, 2016)
Another former award-winning environmental journalist who had

recently moved to the public relations department of Ant Financial
Services, an affiliated company of the Alibaba Group, was equally candid:
“I changed my career for financial reasons. I wanted to give my family a
basic level of security. To earn some money while my skills are still valued.”
(Formerly CX01,4 January 5, 2017).
This group of highly experienced elite journalists reconsidering their
career path is exactly the talent pool that internet companies like Alibaba
are aggressively tapping into. While talking to a current editor at Beijing
News, one of the few metropolitan newspapers that are still thriving, he
recounted to me at least half a dozen former colleagues who had moved
to the public relations departments of Alibaba or its affiliated companies.
Another senior editor on the same newspaper described to me how the
migration of elite journalists to internet companies, either to work as
online content producers or as public relations managers, had already cre-
ated a shortage in the workforce
We had a new hire last year. She did a good piece of investigative reporting.
Then she told the boss she was going to move to an online magazine to
specialize in non-fiction writing. You know what our editor did? He imme-
diately started her salary on Band 5 and set up a new column of non-fiction
for her! Can you imagine? We all started on Band 1 when we first joined. I
mean, yes, she writes well. But she is not that experienced. This is all because
too many people had left. We don’t have enough people who can write long
pieces. Look at this one I’m editing now. It’s rubbish! (BN01,5 January 5,
2017)
For journalists, especially those who used to do investigative reporting,

the transition is not without a struggle. A senior editor at China Business
Network (CBN) explained to me why he came back to journalism after a
two-year stint at a start-up:
84 B. MENG
More or less I consider myself an intellectual. I think most Chinese journal-

ists do. We value a flexible work schedule and autonomy very much. You
don’t fully realize that until you start working for a private company. The
monitoring at KPI, I couldn’t stand it. Plus people have respect for journal-
ists. If I were doing an investigative report and called a county-level Party
official, he would treat me well. At least he wouldn’t want to offend me.
But, my god, in a company your supervisor could shout in your face if he is
not happy with your performance. I saw that once with a colleague. What
humiliation. I can’t take it. (CBN03, December 20, 2016)
The environmental journalist currently working in public relations is

acutely aware of the conflicts between the general orientations of his for-
mer and current career:
It used to be my mission to uncover unethical business practices. I took

pride in doing that. I thought I was contributing to the public good. But
now I am on the other side of the table. I help Ant to manipulate the media.
I feed them PR spins. I know how to do this well because I used to be a
journalist. Sometimes I look at those young reporters and think they are so
lazy and unprofessional! They would just use whatever press release we pro-
vide without doing any work. No, I don’t like doing this job. But when I
first joined Ant I was in charge of digging up the dirty deeds of our competi-
tors. That was even worse! Now I am dealing with central state media, mak-
ing sure they don’t have negative reports on us. I don’t know, maybe I will
go back to journalism after all. (Formerly CX01, January 5, 2017)
Not everyone has great difficulty making the necessary adjustment. GS

is the Deputy Director of the Tencent News Centre. He provided me with
an upbeat and confident account of the development of the Tencent news
service. Although GS studied journalism at university, he quickly pointed
out that “since my first job was with Sohu, I don’t have much of the tra-
ditional media gene. I tend to think in terms of online operation.” (GS,
Jan. 9, 2017). Indeed, the expansion trajectory of Tencent News that GS
proudly presented centers around such keywords as user base, user experi-
ence, user participation, visualization, mobile phone apps. Since online
news platforms in China are all operating in a grey area without having the
same kind of journalistic accreditation as traditional news outlets, compa-
nies such as Tencent are particularly cautious in avoiding potentially sensi-
tive topics. They calculate the political risk when doing limited amount of
current affairs reporting. Most of their news content focuses on financial
news, sports and entertainment. By positioning themselves as internet

companies, Tencent and Alibaba not only circumvent some of the more
restrictive regulation of the news media (although, to be sure, regulators
are also adapting to the converged media environment), they also shed
part of the burden of journalistic responsibility. One clear difference
between GS and all the other former and current journalists/editors I
interviewed is that the he was introducing me to a new business model,
while others were reflecting on the changing landscape of the journalistic
profession.
In this chapter, I started with a critique of the orthodox liberal perspec-

tive that is often used to examine the news media in China. I proposed
that, instead of measuring Chinese journalism against the yardstick of lib-
eral democracy, we should go back to the Maoist conception of the press
as a crucial link in the implementation of the “mass line.” I then examined
the trajectory of news-media commercialization, conglomeration and
convergence in China, with a focus on how the Party-state is constantly
trying to incorporate and contain the power of capital in order to sustain
its hegemonic control. The dual forces of state bureaucracy and commer-
cial market are pulling the news media further and further away from the
initial conceptualization of the communication channel for the mass line.
Lastly, I have drawn on in-depth interviews with veteran journalists and
senior editors to explicate how the political economy of the Chinese news
industry conditions the daily work experience as well as the professional
identity of media workers. Moving beyond the conventional dichotomy of
state censorship vs. repressed media, I have tried to depict a more complex
picture by bringing into the discussion the strategic positioning of media
outlets themselves, the changing journalistic ethos and the new power
dynamics of a converged media environment.
Notes
1. The interviews cited in this chapter were conducted during my fieldwork
from December 16, 2016 to January 10, 2017. I assign a code to each inter-
viewee based on the news outlet they work/have worked for and the
sequence of the interview. For example SW02 here refers to the second
person who works for Southern Weekly that I interviewed.
2. SM stands for Southern Metropolis, a metropolitan newspaper under Nanfang
Media Group.
86 B. MENG
3. CBN refers to China Business Network, a Shanghai-based financial media

group.
4. CX refers to China’s flagship financial news magazine Caixin, which is
under the editorial leadership of Hu Shuli.
5. BN refers to Beijing News (新京报), one of the most successful metropoli-
tan newspapers in China.
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CHAPTER 4
The Cultural Politics of

the Entertainment Media
A Broader Understanding of Politics and Ideology

Although the cultural politics of the entertainment media is a well-
researched subfield in communication studies (See, e.g., Berlant, 2011;
Cammaerts, 2007; Duggan, 2012; Gray, 2006; Harold, 2004; Jin, 2006;
Jones, 2006; Kellner, 2002; van Zoonen, 2005; Willems & Mano, 2016),
when it comes to researching media and communication in China, it is
political communication and journalism that enjoy the highest priority,
almost by default. Aside from a few exceptions (Bai, 2015; Sun, 2009a,
2014; Yu, 2009), not nearly enough attention has been paid by media
scholars to the articulation, circulation and reproduction of shared mean-
ings through entertainment media content. There are several reasons for
this. First, assuming the omnipotence of the authoritarian state in all
aspects of social life, researchers tend to take a rather narrow and rigid
view of ideology that equates it with coercive state control. It is narrow
because such a view often exaggerates the state’s monopoly over symbols
and meanings and ignores what Gramsci would call the educative and
regulative measures of the state in mobilizing consent (Hall, 2016,
pp. 163–164). It also neglects other discursive sources not directly spon-
sored by the state, such as market and media professionals. It is a rigid
understanding of ideology, presupposing that once the “false conscious-
ness” imposed by the state apparatus is dispersed people will be able to see
“true” conditions and “real” life. Yet, as Hall (2016) points out, “when
we contrast ideology to experience, or illusion to authentic truth, we are

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5_4
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failing to recognise that there is no way of experiencing the ‘real relations’

of a particular society outside of its cultural and ideological categories”
(p. 139). Second, a rather monolithic conceptualization of contemporary
Chinese society undergirds the notion that contestation over discourse
and meaning only takes place between the state and society. In reality, as
China becomes well integrated into global capitalism and moves from a
largely egalitarian society to a country with a high Gini coefficient, lived
experience, and the ways in which people interpret such experience, is
becoming increasingly stratified along the intersecting dimensions of
social–economic inequality. Third, privileging informational over enter-
tainment content betrays the conventional liberal view of politics and sub-
jectivity, that is, the Habermasian idea that politics is about individuals
transcending narrow concerns with private matters and engaging in ratio-
nal deliberation over issues that concern public life. Although the idea of
the public sphere has been widely critiqued in Western contexts by femi-
nist and poststructuralist scholars, who highlight the situatedness (rather
than universality) of subjectivity, the fluid boundary between public and
private matters, and the importance of narratives and emotions in politics,
the liberal framework remains the most entrenched one used by research-
ers to interpret mediated politics in non-Western societies.
In order to develop a historically informed reading that is simultane-
ously attentive to the contemporary context, in this chapter I mainly draw
upon the analytical approach of British Cultural Studies, as delineated by
Stuart Hall, to examine how different ideologies—systems of meaning
that enable people to make their lived experience intelligible—are shaped,
circulated and sustained in film and television content. Hall is alert to both
the economic reductionism and the class reductionism that a Marxist anal-
ysis of culture is often accused of. He incorporates Althusser’s discussion
of “over-determination” and of ideology as “systems of representation” in
order to emphasize that “there is ‘no necessary correspondence’ between
the conditions of a social relation or practice and the number of different
ways it can be represented” (Hall, 2016, p. 138). Hall (2016) further
refers to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony in order to explain that the basic
structure of productive forces within a given society only sets “the funda-
mental limits and conditions” for social formations at other levels, rather
than determining them (pp. 159–161). Yet Hall is equally, if not more,
critical of cultural analysis that is completely detached from any serious
consideration of the base, which, according to Marx, articulates both social
relations and productive forces. In his last interview, with Sut Jhally in
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA 93
2012, Hall reiterated his disapproval of the type of cultural studies that “in
its attempt to move away from economic reductionism … sort of forgot
that there was an economy at all” (Jhally, 2016, p. 337). The conjunctural
analysis that Hall advocates, which is best illustrated by his co-authored
book Policing the Crisis, requires sufficient attention to the mutual consti-
tution of economic, cultural and political formations.
Aiming for such a multifaceted inquiry, I first map out the structural
conditions of entertainment media production in China, with attention to
the political economy of the media industries as well as the role of state
regulation in setting the boundaries of audiovisual storytelling. I then
choose a cinematic text and a particularly popular television genre for
more in-depth examination. Instead of focusing on aesthetic style and sto-
rytelling techniques, however, my reading of these texts is “symptomatic”
rather than appreciative. I am interested in how social inequality and injus-
tice, as experienced by disenfranchised groups, are conveyed through
images, discourses and narratives. But, just like any other cultural studies
project, this is as much about grievance and suffering as it is about resis-
tance and struggle. After all, culture is not just the system of meaning that
enables people to make sense of their lived experience, it also provides the
vocabulary for people to imagine an alternative future. For example, I
offer a close reading of an artistically acclaimed but commercially unsuc-
cessful movie about laid-off workers in the Chinese rustbelt. I focus par-
ticularly on the cultural resources that these workers draw upon in order
to reconcile the discrepancy between the regime’s past promises to and
current betrayal of the working class. I also look at how hugely popular
reality TV shows contribute to the construction of subjectivity for the
young urban generation.
The Political Economy of the Chinese Film Industry

Two decades ago, on the eve of China’s accession to the WTO, filmmakers
and industry observers agonized about “the wolves at the door,” in antici-
pation of Hollywood’s more aggressive expansion on the Chinese film
market (Zhao & Schiller, 2001). By 2011, Yin Hong, a prominent film
scholar at Tsinghua University, was proclaiming that the Chinese film
industry was now “dancing with wolves” after a successful round of
restructuring and marketization (Ma, 2011). There does seem to be an
upbeat story to tell, if one only looks at figures on the commercial side,
about an industry getting out of deep crisis to embark on trajectory of
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flourishing. Starting from 1995, China agreed to import up to ten first-

run Hollywood movies every year on a revenue-sharing basis, as part of
the effort to show goodwill in opening up the domestic media market in
preparation for WTO membership. Although the first imported “big pic-
ture” (大片), The Fugitive, garnered a meagre 1.4 million RMB in box-
office revenue, it represented a watershed moment in the overhaul of a
Chinese film industry that has been emulating the Hollywood model of
production, distribution and exhibition since. Thanks to imports, total
box-office revenue in 1995 achieved a 15 percent increase compared with
1994. More importantly, the Hollywood blockbusters restored the
theatre-going habit of the Chinese audience, turning 1995 into “the year
of cinema” (Zhu & Nakajima, 2010, p. 29). In that same year, 70 domes-
tic Chinese films were axed from distribution to cinemas on the basis of
profitability considerations (Dai, 1999, p. 21).
One of the key features of the Hollywood model is the vertically inte-
grated studio system that is able to exert control over different stages of
the whole process, from preproduction to production, from marketing to
exhibition. As the domestic film industry marveled at the box-office suc-
cess of movies like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan,1 policy-makers in
China decided that Hollywood represented a more “advanced” industrial
model that was worth imitating. As with the formation of press groups
discussed in the previous chapter, it was the state that set up the formida-
ble media conglomerate China Film Group Corporation (CFGC) in the
late 1990s. The film and television production units of CFGC include the
Beijing Film Studio, the China Youth Film Studio, the China Film
Co-Production Corporation, the China Film Equipment Corporation, the
Movie Channel Production Centre, the Beijing Film & Video Laboratory,
the Huayun Film & TV Compact Disc Co. Ltd., China Film Animation,
and others. In addition to audio-visual production, CFGC is involved in a
wide variety of businesses including film distribution and exhibition, film
import and export, cinema circuit management, digital cinema construc-
tion, print developing and processing, film equipment management, ancil-
lary products, advertising, property management, as well as real estate.
CFGC enjoys a monopoly on distributing imported movies and takes
about one-third of the market share in film distribution (Ent Group,
2015). Ever since the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television relaxed its
production licensing policy and allowed investors outside the film industry
to co-produce with state-run studios in 1995, there have been a series of
favorable policies encouraging investment in and financing of the cultural
industries. Besides the default dominance of CFGC, a few private compa-

nies emerged in the following decades to become major players in the film
industry, including Huayi Brothers, Wanda Media and Bona Films, all of
which are multimedia conglomerates. The three Chinese internet giants,
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (collectively known as BAT) have also been
expanding aggressively in the entertainment sector, setting up companies
or business divisions such as Iqiyi Film, Baidu Film, Alifilm and Tencent
Film.
Beyond the institutional-level restructuring, Hollywood imports culti-
vated the so-called “big-picture mentality” (大片意识) among both audi-
ences and film practitioners in China. Domestic production companies
increased their budgets significantly in order to rival Hollywood. Western-
style distribution was introduced, dividing profits as well as losses between
producer, distributor, and exhibitor. Under this system, the producer is
forced to confront the market directly, while the distributor and the exhib-
itor must make every effort to promote the film. Accordingly, moviegoers
now expect big stars, visual spectacle, slick production and an all-
encompassing marketing campaign as indicators of a quality movie. By
2004, domestic film receipts exceeded foreign film receipts for the first
time since 1994, despite the doubling of the number of foreign films
allowed into China as required by the WTO agreement. This trend of
expansion has continued until the present, with domestic films accounting
for 55 percent of total box-office revenue in 2014 (Ent Group, 2015).
The tide seems to have turned. Hollywood is now on the one hand
relying on co-production with Chinese film companies to capture the
hugely profitable movie market, while on the other hand becoming con-
cerned about the acquisition of their business operations by Chinese inves-
tors. When Wang Jianlin, the founder and CEO of China’s Wanda Group
made a $1 billion bid for Dick Clark Productions, the producer of the
Golden Globe Awards, this caused quite a stir (Belloni, 2016; Brzeski,
2016a; Faughnder & Pierson, 2016). After all, this was after Wanda had
already acquired the theatre chain AMC Entertainment at a cost of $2.6
billion in 2012 and closed a $3.5 billion deal early in 2016 for Legendary
Entertainment. Although there was almost a collective sigh of relief from
the US side when the Dick Clark deal was called off by the Chinese regula-
tors (Faughnder & Pierson, 2017), the Chinese film industry is already
well integrated into global Hollywood. For example, after a string of box-
office failures, laying off 20 percent of its workforce and closing down a
studio in Northern California in 2015, Dream Works Animation launched
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a $330 million joint venture, Oriental Dream Works, with several Chinese
partners. The first movie that Oriental Dream Works co-produced was
Kung Fu Panda 3, a successful franchise that the studio hoped would be
an even bigger hit in China than anywhere else (Faughnder, Kelley,
Kaufman, & Hill, 2016). Not only did American and Chinese filmmakers
collaborate to make sure the representation of elements of Chinese culture
was accurate, the characters in Kung Fu Panda 3 were animated twice in
order to match the nuance of English and Chinese language in the two
versions intended for overseas and Chinese audiences respectively. Having
a local partner also helped the studio to secure the highly advantageous
release window during the 2016 Chinese New Year. Dream Works’ calcu-
lation paid off. By the end of the first week of release, Kung Fu Panda 3
had already pulled in $149 million in China, compared to the North
American box-office revenue of $128.5 million, surpassing the previous
record holder, Monkey King: Hero is Back, to become the most successful
animated film in the Chinese box-office (Brzeski, 2016b).
All these figures seem to point to the commercial viability of the Chinese
film industry, and business consultants are indeed making a positive assess-
ment and optimistic projection about the growth of this sector
(Barraclough, 2016; Deloitte, 2016; Ent Group, 2015; ITA, 2016;
Wharton, 2016). The overall orientation of film production in China has
been transformed. From the early 1950s to the early 1980s, under the
planned economy, the film industry consisted of a Soviet-style national-
ized studio system under which the films produced were dictated by the
central government’s political agenda. Production resources, film licens-
ing, film distribution and exhibition, and film import/export were all
planned annually in accordance with the Party’s propaganda targets.
During this period, “film functioned to disseminate communist ideology
and bolster the Party’s leadership” (Zhu & Nakajima, 2010, p. 23). Three
decades later, the Chinese film industry has become thoroughly commer-
cialized. As in Hollywood, “the primary driving force and guiding princi-
ple for the industry is profit, and capital is used in different ways to achieve
that goal” (Wasko, 2011, p. 322).
As critical communication scholars have long argued from a political
economy perspective, producing films as a commodity has profound
implications for the kind of films that are produced (and not produced),
how the story is told, who makes them and how they are viewed (Bettig
& Hall, 2003; Miller, Govil, McMurria, Wang, & Maxwell, 2005;
Wasko, 2003, 2011). The average film production budget has increased
significantly since the 1990s. Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, two direc-
tors who represent “Fifth Generation filmmakers” in China, both earned
their fame at international film festivals with low-budget productions
such as Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum. They are now powerful brands
that can easily attract huge investment to make Hollywood-style block-
busters. Zhang Yimou’s most recent movie, The Great Wall, featuring
Matt Damon, has a budget of $150 million and boasts of being the most
expensive movie ever made in China. Among the ten most expensive
non-English-language films ever produced, five are Chinese (Wikipedia,
2017). As the financial stakes get higher, the types of stories getting told
are becoming more similar. The most recent list of the Top Ten highest-
grossing movies on the Chinese market includes four Hollywood pro-
ductions, including Fast and Furious 7, Fast and Furious 8, Transformers:
Age of Extinction and Zootopia, and six Chinese films, all of which are
fantasy films that rely heavily on the appeal of exotic storylines and visual
spectacle.
Even the “main melody films” (zhuxuanlv dianying) that enjoy strong
state support and carry explicit political messages are now incorporating
ingredients of commercial success. Han Sanping, the CEO of the biggest
film group in China, the state-owned China Film Group, has openly noted
“the need to make mainstream ideology mix well with commercial means”
(Rosen, 2012, p. 198). Han himself produced the highly successful The
Founding of a Republic (Founding) (建国大业) in 2009 to commemorate
the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China,
garnering over RMB 400 million at the box office. The film’s impressive
ensemble of 177 famous stars is largely a testament to the power of Han
Sanping, arguably the most powerful individual in the Chinese film indus-
try. In fact, interviews and survey data suggest that the primary attraction
for Founding’s audience was the appearance of these celebrities, “leading
to the amusing game of trying to discern which star was hiding under the
make-up of a late 1940s historical figure” (Rosen, 2012, p. 198). Such
unexpected popularity led to a sequence of “main melody blockbusters.”
To celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese
Communist Party, Han Sanping again teamed up with director Huang
Jianxin to produce The Beginning of the Great Revival (建党伟业）.
Although some aspects of the historical account in the movie were
contested or even criticized, the box office revenue was on par with
Founding’s due to a cast of A-list Chinese stars such as Andy Lau and
Chow Yun Fat. Yet a third movie of a similar type called The Founding of
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an Army has been scheduled for release in July 2017 on the eve of the
90th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army. Just like the Fast and
Furious franchise, which has now churned out eight sequels to maximize
profit, Han Sanping is hoping that he has unlocked a formula that com-
bines mainstream ideology with commercial success.
This overview of the Chinese film industry reveals several important
trends. First, the resources for film production and distribution, including
capital, creative talent, marketing support, access to exhibition channels
and so on, have been redistributed from state-owned studios to private
companies. This does not necessarily mean that the resources are less con-
centrated, only that state control over the industry has been significantly
undermined by a handful of media conglomerates. Second, as the com-
mercialization and marketization of the industry develops at a fast pace,
capital from non-media sectors increasingly flows into film production,
which is favored by many investors for its good growth potential. For
example, Wang Jianlin, the CEO of the aforementioned Wanda Group,
started his business empire in the real-estate sector. The three dominant
nternet companies are all investing heavily in entertainment media, includ-
ing movie production. This in turn exacerbates the whole sector’s orienta-
tion toward the bottom line. What investors are most interested in is
whether they will be able to recoup their investment. Hence, it is not
surprising that urban comedy, fantasy and action movies are the genres
that one encounters most often in any metropolitan cinema chain. Third,
the Chinese film industry has become thoroughly globalized. Hollywood
is relying more and more on the Chinese market, to the extent that studios
are willing to alter movie plots to appeal to the Chinese audience, accom-
modate Chinese brands in product placement, and even compromise with
Chinese censors (Berman, 2016; Daly, 2016; Langfitt, 2015; Robinson,
2016; Swanson, 2015, 2016). Even more importantly, capital is flowing in
both directions, with Chinese investors like Wang Jianlin taking an interest
in the lucrative global operation of Hollywood.
When Western commentators express their concerns over the “pander-
ing express,” a pun that American talk-show host Stephen Colbert used to
criticize Hollywood’s “sucking up to China” (Swanson, 2015), there are
two implicit assumptions. One is that Hollywood movies represent univer-
sal liberal values that should not be compromised by censors in any
authoritarian country. The other is that profit-driven commercial logic has
not been in conflict with the artistic integrity of filmmakers and should not
start to be now. Observing from the vantage point of the Chinese film
industry, I would turn the questions around by asking how the dominance
of the Hollywood model is affecting the stories being told, the perspec-
tives being represented and the voices being heard on Chinese film screens.
In the next section, I present the case of The Piano in a Factory, a criti-
cally acclaimed movie that suffered box office failure, to illustrate the kind
of politically significant story that could be and needs to be told on cinema
screens.
The Piano in a Factory: A Tribute

to Socialist Workers
The Piano in a Factory (Piano) is a 2011 movie directed by Zhang Meng.

It was a low-budget production that cost only RMB 6 Million (USD
$800,000), yet the director had great difficulty in securing investment.
Zhang Meng recalls that, even though the script was highly acclaimed at a
meetings with potential investors at the 2009 Shanghai Film Festival, he
was only able to get RMB 1 million in initial funding by the time shooting
started (Zhang, 2011). Wang Qianyuan, the actor who plays the protago-
nist, Chen Guilin, and Qin Hailu, who plays Chen’s girlfriend, Shuxian,
both ended up not taking any salary from making Piano. Qin even con-
tributed some of her own money to completing post-production. The
movie garnered many award nominations at international film festivals and
Wang Qianyuan won the Best Actor award at the Tokyo International
Film Festival. But this artistic achievement did not translate into box-
office success. Given the shoestring budget, the production team were
only able to run a limited marketing campaign through social media. In
June 2011, as the scheduled general release date for Piano approached,
the distributors changed the date several times since they were weighing
this small-budget production against several potential box office hits,
including Dragon (Wu Xia), a martial arts movie directed by veteran Hong
Kong director Peter Chan, Transformer 3 and Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows. Shortly before release, the distributor asked Zhang Meng
whether he could change the film’s title to Crazy Piano, since The Piano
in a Factory sounded too much like a “niche art movie.” Zhang declined
the request. The film did not remain in cinemas for long, for obvious rea-
sons, and eventually had box-office receipts of RMB 5.5 million, barely
covering the cost of production. To a great extent, the fate of Piano was
predetermined. More than two decades ago, Prindle (1993) pointed out
100 B. MENG
in his book on the political economy of Hollywood that independent

movies tend to get a very short release window, given the vast number of
movies competing to make it to the cinema. This means that anything that
runs against conventional viewing expectations will not have a “breathing
period” to gradually attract a larger audience. Often, independents accuse
the major studios that control distribution channels of being “too lacking
in vision to recognize the merit in their films or having distributed them,
of marketing them incompetently so that they do not make money”
(Prindle, 1993, p. 17).
At the institutional level, this is a familiar story of the typical predica-
ment of independent filmmakers in a hyper-commercialized film ecology.
Moreover, at the textual and discursive level, Piano is about the life of a
group of people who are hardly visible in the mainstream entertainment
media. Chen Guilin is a laid-off factory worker who has just divorced and
is trying hard to retain custody of his daughter, Xiaoyuan. Taking after her
father, Xiao Yuan is very keen on music and says she wants to live with
whichever parent can buy her a piano. Having lost his regular job and only
making odd money with a small band that performs at weddings and
funerals, Guilin cannot afford a piano. He assembles a team of fellow laid-
off workers and starts to make a piano from scratch in the deserted steel
factory where they used to work. The film ends on an ambiguous note, as
Xiaoyuan is taken by her mother to see the finished piano and plays a
simple tune for Guilin and his friends amidst the factory ruins. Many com-
mentators seem to agree that, judging from the dialogue and the atmo-
sphere of the last scene, the daughter will live with her mother despite her
father’s attempt to keep her.
The story is set in an industrial city of northeast China in the 1990s,
when the Chinese government was carrying out major restructuring of
State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and laid off millions of factory workers.
The three provinces in the northeast (dongbei), Heilongjiang, Liaoning
and Jilin, were the heavy industry base of Maoist China and were hit par-
ticularly hard. The efforts to reform the SOEs started shortly after the
Cultural Revolution and accelerated in 1993 under the leadership of
Premier Zhu Rongji. The restructuring led to some bankruptcies, public
offerings of shares, employee buyouts, development of leasing arrange-
ments, and the establishment of joint ventures with foreign investors. As
a result, SOEs were replaced by shareholding companies, private enter-
prises and limited liability companies (Zeng & Tsai, 2011). Between
1998 and 2002, employment in the state sector fell by nearly one-third,
and the reemployment rate was no more than 15 to 20 percent out of a

total of 26.8 million job losses (Lin, 2006, p. 84). At the state level,
policy discourse centered around efficiency, rationalization and growth in
order to justify the privatization of state assets. The massive layoff of SOE
workers was referred to euphemistically as “stepping off duty” (下岗).
Workers received a modest, one-off severance payment to “buy off the
length of service” (买断工龄 ), then receiving a “minimum livelihood
guarantee” (低保) every month. In reality, many former SOEs failed to
make the promised severance payment and the basic social security, rang-
ing from a few hundred to a couple of thousand RMB every month, was
not nearly enough to cover the cost of living, which led to numerous
protests and demonstrations organized by former SOE workers in the
1990s (Lee, 2007).
Such is the broad socioeconomic background to Chen Guilin’s per-
sonal struggle to retain custody of his daughter after an acrimonious
divorce. The film opens with Guilin standing beside his soon-to-be-ex-
wife, Xiaoju, in front of a dilapidated warehouse missing half its roof.
Guilin tells Xiaoju that she can take any valuable items from the house
after the divorce. Xiaoju taunts him: “do you think I am a junk collector?
I don’t want anything, but I am taking Xiaoyuan.” Guilin is surprised, but
Xiaoju insists, “my daughter can’t be happy with you.” Guilin asks her to
“stop playing the happiness card” and says Xiaoyuan is very happy living
with him. The title of the film then comes up, before the camera cuts to
the next scene of somewhat black humor. We now see Guilin conducting
a six-person band playing a Russian folk song in the middle of a field. It is
raining and everyone is wearing shabby plastic rain capes made of black
garbage bags. Shuxian sings the lyrics of “Troika,” which is a melancholic
song about a coachman driving along the snow-covered Volga River and
lamenting his poor and miserable life. The performance is interrupted by
a young man’s voice from outside the frame, protesting that the melody is
too painful. Guilin explains that “this is what Russians often play at their
funerals.” But the young man demands that the music be changed, as “the
old folk will trudge too slowly to this tune.” Only then does the audience
realize that the band has been hired to play at someone’s funeral.
This is a highly symbolic opening sequence, exuding the sentiment of
loss. In the middle of the gloomy winter of northern China, Guilin has
already lost his job, just ended his marriage, is about to lose his daughter,
and now he is being asked to play a more upbeat song for a funeral. For
millions of Chinese workers asked to “step off duty” during the economic
102 B. MENG
restructuring, this captures perfectly their pain and sorrow mixed with
disbelief and resentment. The privatization of SOEs cost more than just
jobs, signaling the collapse of a socialist way of life. Workers were hailed as
“working-class big brothers” (工人阶级老大哥) in Maoist China and were
at the top of the social hierarchy. According to orthodox Marxism, indus-
trial workers are the progressive class that represents the most advanced
mode of production. Until the 1990s, socialist factories in China were
more than a workplace and an economic unit of society. SOEs were also
social and political organizations that looked after the welfare of workers
in a comprehensive manner, offering a whole range of heavily subsidized
services such as day care, schools, canteens, health clinics, cultural centers,
sometimes even police stations and newspapers. Jia Xingjia, a writer who
grew up in the living compound of a large SOE in Harbin, reminisced in
a recent Yixi Talk2 that
When I was a child, people working in large State Owned Enterprises

enjoyed the most decent life. They were proud, even a little bit arrogant.
The arrogance came from the comparison with other occupations, such as
cadres, doctors and teachers … they thought they were the masters of
society.
Jia went on to explain that
Even now, many workers still cannot get their heads around the SOE
reform. They keep asking me, and asking themselves, why did our lives sud-
denly change in the 1990s? Why couldn’t life go on like it used to be any
more? They thought it was only a temporary difficulty that would soon pass.
No particular reason to support this kind of belief. Only that, for one thing,
the factory made them a promise—it’s a bit like an innocent girl believing in
the promise made by an old guy in the heat of love. For another, they keep
reinforcing this logic among themselves: I have to live. I cannot make a
living without the factory. The factory is responsible for my livelihood. This
is a terrible logic. (Jia, March 7, 2017)3
I quote Jia’s talk at length here because his account provides an appo-
site footnote to Piano. Zhang Meng had a similar family background to Jia
and it was the urge to “tell the story of factory workers of my father’s
generation” that compelled him to make the movie with minimal funds.
The SOE reform in the 1990s was a significant political, economic and
social event that had lasting impact on the lives of tens of millions—not
only the workers themselves but also their families. Yet so far there have
been very few films that deal with this subject, or even evoke it as the
historical background to stories taking place during that decade. Before
Piano, the only movie with a similar theme that received some recogni-
tion was a 2002 documentary film made by Wang Bing called Tiexi Qu:
West of the Tracks. Tiexi is a district of Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning
Province in the northeast. For more than 50 years, Tiexi was China’s old-
est and largest industrial base, “a fortress of the socialist planned econ-
omy” (Lü, 2005, p. 125). As market reform picked up its pace after Deng
Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour and investment was pouring into the
Pearl River Delta and Yangtze Delta areas, the northeast was still follow-
ing the state command economy, transferring out a high proportion of its
industrial output at a low price. Tiexi started to decline around this time,
just like many other industrial bases in the region. By 2002, most of the
factories in Tiexi were closed and in Liaoning Province alone 2.4 million4
were unemployed (Lee, 2007, p. 74). Wang Bing started shooting with a
DV camera in Tiexi in 1999. From the 300 hours of footage he accumu-
lated over a year and half, Wang created an epic documentary that cap-
tures “the dusk of an entire social world, together with all the hopes and
ideals that created it” (Lü, 2005, p. 127). A feeling of loss and despair
permeates the film. As Lü has put it, rather poetically, “on the vast mate-
rial ruins of Tiexi lie the wordless spiritual ruins of the working class, as
desolate as the sky after fireworks. Its memory becomes like shards of
firecrackers scattered in the snow, deepening the darkness and void” (Lü,
2005, p. 134). Although this nine-hour-long documentary is highly
praised by critics, some of whom consider it one of the best and most
important movies of the 2000s (Nayman, 2014), it is rarely seen by a
general audience due to its length and genre. This made Piano, which at
least had a short but wide theatre release and was accessible to many more
audiences, even more significant.
What also sets Piano apart from Tiexi Qu is that, in addition to lament-
ing the decline of socialism, there is a celebration of industrial workers’
creative and collective labor; in addition to sorrow, there is also pride.
Having grown up in Shenyang, Zhang Meng not only thought highly of
the documentary Tiexi Qu, but was also familiar with the historical trans-
formation of the Tiexi district. He has said in an interview: “what pains me
most is to see that, when I went back to the factories in my hometown, I
couldn’t find the workers of the previous era any more—everyone I saw
was so self-deluded and self-loathing. The spirit of the past era was gone.”
104 B. MENG
(Dai, 2011). He was nostalgic for that spirit: “I want to talk about a group
of rough guys. They are all very creative, very musical. They all work in the
factory, but you can hear their singing from far, far away.” (Dai, 2011). In
the movie, Guilin initially wants to borrow money from his friends in
order to buy a piano. But all his friends are laid-off workers struggling to
make a living as butcher, locksmith, barber, janitor, and so on. There are a
couple of comic episodes that show Guilin’s friends avoiding him because
they have no money to offer. Wang Kangmei, one of his best friends, is
even said to be hiding in the countryside. But as soon as Guilin decides to
make a piano, all his friends, who are highly skilled workers, agree to join
this seemingly crazy project. In the words of Wang Kangmei, “us folks
haven’t been working together on something for a long while.”
Once the manufacturing process starts, the camera affectionately pans
over the collaborative laboring process and lingers on each worker’s crafts-
manship, celebrating the joy and fulfilment of collective work. Guilin’s
piano-making project not only gives everyone an opportunity to “work
together on something” again, but also creates a condition of unalienated
work in the Marxist sense. Marx, in fact, used a piano-maker as an example
in Grundrisse: “the piano-maker is a productive worker, but not the pianist
… the piano-maker reproduces capital, the pianist only exchanges his
labour for revenue … labour becomes productive only by producing its
opposite” (Marx, 1993, p. 305). In contrast, the piano that Guilin and his
friends make is not to be exchanged as a commodity for the further accu-
mulation of capital, and neither does the film demarcate the separation of
workers’ physical labor and the pianist’s intellectual labor. Most of Guilin’s
friends play instruments, as they are also part of the small band that Guilin
has assembled to perform at funerals and weddings. In the movie, Guilin
twice plays Beethoven’s Für Elise, once on the cardboard piano he has
made for Xiaoyuan and once after a failed attempt to steal a piano from a
school. Some may think it is completely out of character for a Chinese fac-
tory worker to be familiar with Western classical music, but recent studies
of the cultural life of workers in large SOEs in northeast China paint a
much more colorful and nuanced picture than the commonly imagined
dull and tedious factory life. Liu (2016) points out that the two sites of
artistic production in the northeastern industrial districts, namely the pro-
fessional artistic troupes (文工团) and the everyday cultural activities in
factories, were closely interconnected. It was very common for workers to
organize artistic performances of their own, with or without professional
help. The pace of work was nothing like what we see today in sweatshops
such as Foxconn, leaving the workers more time to socialize. Wang (2016)
retrieves the important role of the Workers’ Cultural Palace (工人文化宫)
in providing both physical and symbolic space for the socialist working class
to engage in a diverse range of leisure and cultural activities, such as chess
and card games, table tennis, folk art, cinema, theatre, etc. Hence there is
nothing unusual in Guilin and his friends being so multi-talented.
At a time when the whole socialist way of life had collapsed, this group
of locksmith, carpenter, foundry worker, and lathe operator, led by a
retired engineer who studied in the Soviet Union during the 1950s, dem-
onstrates for one last time the beauty and strength of their collective labor.
It is an elegy, but also a tribute. In fact, Xiaoju tells Guilin from the outset:
“even if you could make a piano, my daughter still won’t choose you.”
But, just as Engineer Wang says of Guilin’s proposal to convert the two
deserted chimneys into some kind of artwork, “if we succeed, it will be a
glorious sight; if we fail, it will be precious historical memory.” This com-
ment is not just about the effort of retaining the chimneys as monuments
to a socialist factory, but reveals the significance of the main story. What
matters most is not the end-product, but the process of making the piano,
during which the small group of former factory workers, all of whom are
struggling to make ends meet in their daily lives, reclaim their dignity
through unalienated labor.
I have offered a contextualized reading of The Piano in a Factory from
three perspectives: (1) the political economy of the Chinese film industry,
which leaves extremely limited space for this kind of narrative and perspec-
tive; (2) the political economy of SOE reform, which constitutes the his-
torical background of the story in the film; (3) the political significance of
a seemingly unrealistic story of laid-off factory workers making a piano,
especially in relation to the socialist ideal and the subjectivity of labor. In
the next section, I turn from big screen to small screen, to examine the
relationship between reality TV as a dominant genre and the political
economy of the Chinese television industry.
The Rise of Hyper-Commercialized

Television Programming
The Chinese television industry is a unique form of state monopoly capi-
talism: “commercialized operations organized into a hierarchical structure
of administrative monopoly” (Zhao & Guo, 2009, p. 527). Control over
106 B. MENG
content rests ultimately with the Party’s propaganda department, while

operational, administrative, and regulatory control is in the hands of the
State Administration for Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT)5 and its
local counterparts. Like the news industry, the television industry in China
went through the trajectory of marketization leading to rapid growth of
advertising revenue, followed by proliferation of outlets/channels, which
then led to a new round of recentralization mandated by the state. The
implementation of the “four-tier” system in 1983 saw television stations
mushroom at the city and county levels, in addition to the existing central
and provincial stations. By 1999, in addition to cable and terrestrial chan-
nels, all provincial stations had launched at least one general-interest satel-
lite channel, so that the total number of satellite channels in the country,
including 11 CCTV channels and three education channels, reached 49,
all of which could potentially reach a national audience (Bai, 2005, p. 7).
Around the same time, the growth rate of advertising revenue dropped
from the staggering 80–90 percent throughout the 1990s to 10 percent in
early 2000. This was partly as a result of the 1996 Asian financial crisis, but
many industry insiders and policy-makers took it as a sign that the Chinese
television industry needed to be restructured and better rationalized.
After a series of policy initiatives aimed at the consolidation of the
broadcasting system, by the early 2000s county-level television stations
were no longer allowed to produce original programming and only served
as transmission stations. This effectively ended the “four-tier system.”
Broadcast conglomerates were established at both provincial and national
levels, with business interests encompassing terrestrial, cable and satellite
television, radio, film, cable networks, production and distribution of
audiovisual products, advertising, real estate, etc. The “No. 17” docu-
ment released by SARFT in 2001 further encouraged cross-regional and
cross-media expansion of these conglomerates and the restriction on
media capitalization was relaxed (Bai, 2005, p. 11).
Today, the highly commercialized Chinese television industry exhibits a
few prominent features. First, just like the uneven development that has been
part and parcel of all China’s market reform, the television landscape across
the country is marked by huge discrepancies in resources and outputs. Media
groups in affluent regions such as Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang are enjoy-
ing high ratings and an annual advertising revenue in billions, while TV sta-
tions in less-developed provinces are struggling to make their presence felt in
a highly competitive market. CCTV still has a dominant presence due to its
status as a national broadcaster and its affiliation with SARFT, which is not
entirely a neutral regulatory body. For example, some of the state regulator’s
guidelines for curbing “vulgar entertainment programming” by provincial
TV stations have been criticized as a veiled attempt to cripple CCTV’s com-
petitors (Branigan, 2011). Second, the small handful of successful media
conglomerates are becoming more globalized in their business operation, in
terms of acquiring foreign capital, content purchasing, programming
exchanges and format trading. For example, SMG, the parent company of
Dragon Television (formerly known as Shanghai Television) has had an
agreement with CNBC to exchange business news, teamed up with Time
Warner to build upscale cinemas in Chinese cities, entered into a joint-ven-
ture with Viacom to set up a co-production company, and has been success-
ful in localizing TV formats from South Korea, the United Kingdom and the
United States.
Logically, television has become a major platform for capital accumula-
tion. Although television stations are all state-owned and cannot be listed
on the stock market, they are allowed to create subsidiary companies in
collaboration with private capital. In 2004, riding on the huge success of
the singing-contest show Super Girl, Hunan TV pioneered the setting up
of the entertainment company EE-Media, which specializes in record
labels, entertainment programming and film production. Another example
is the Shanghai Media Group, which is the holding company of China
Business Network (CBN) and sold 30 percent of CBN’s stock to the
Alibaba Group in 2015 for 1.2 billion yuan ($193.5 million). Last but not
least, the highly commercialized operation of a television industry oriented
towards profit and capital accumulation has given rise to what some
researchers call an “entertainment storm” that has taken over the television
screen (Bai, 2005; Zhao, 2008, pp. 220–226). Bai (2005) points out that
prior to the late 1990s entertainment programming on television, includ-
ing artistic performance, music programs, crosstalk and evening galas, was
referred to as wenyi (literature and art), which has the socialist high-culture
connotation of uplifting people’s aesthetic sensibility. She argues that the
kind of yule (entertainment) for the sake of entertaining that we know
today is the result of media restructuring and the subsequently strength-
ened media commercialization, as “strong commercial pressure exists for
television stations to transform themselves into entertainment vendors”
(Bai, 2005, p. 4). The relentless focus on entertainment is widely perceived
as liberating and empowering for two reasons. On the one hand, compared
to wenyi (literature and art), yule (entertainment) is much closer to ordi-
nary people and everyday life, avoiding pomposity and elitism. On the
108 B. MENG
other hand, the large repertoire of light-hearted mass entertainment differs

drastically from state socialism’s didactic approach to culture, giving the
audience, who are interpellated as consumer subjects, a sense of choice and
participation. Yet participation in mediated entertainment culture is nei-
ther equal nor inclusive. As Zhao and Guo (2009) remind us, “the heavy
dependence on advertising revenues, intensive market competition, and
also the urban and affluent sociocultural composition of the television
labor force skew Chinese television heavily toward the cultural needs and
sensibilities of affluent urban consumers” (p. 535).
It is within this context that reality TV arose as arguably the dominant
genre of entertainment programming. The popularity of reality TV is a
global phenomenon that has its roots in the commercial logic of television
production. Compared with traditional scripted television drama that has
to spend a lot on above-the-line talent (writer, actor, director), the pro-
duction cost of reality TV is significantly lower. Magder (2004) compares
the production cost of different genres for the US television season
2001–2002 with the cost of a one-hour TV drama ranging from $2 million
(24) to $13 million (ER), while the cost of one episode of reality shows
ranged from $.09 million (Trading Places) to $ 1.4 million (Survivor)
(pp. 140–141). Even for the more expensive shows like Survivor, produc-
tion expenses are easily covered by multiple sponsorship deals. In fact,
from a producer’s point of view, reality TV has great potential for product
placement, merchandise tie-ins and audience participation, and is hence a
particularly cost-effective television genre. Further, once a format is estab-
lished—with a detailed “playbook” that specifies everything from the
choice of participants to the use of cameras—it becomes an international
brand that can be easily traded. Purchasing an already successful format
reduces the risk associated with developing the first iteration, leaves
enough space for localization, and effectively circumvents the quota that
many countries set for imported television content (Waisbord, 2004).
In the summer of 2005, a singing contest produced by Hunan TV
swept the Chinese television landscape. With the slogan “sing as you want,
sing out loud,” Super Girl, which was modelled on Pop Idol, attracted
more than 100,000 female contestants between the ages of four and 89
(Lynch, 2005). The audience, among which dedicated fan groups were
formed, could vote for their favorite girl via text messages (SMS).
According to a survey of 31 cities by CVSC-Sofres Media, up to 10 per-
cent of the TV audience watched the kick-off show of Super Girl in the
Guangzhou area and the primary selection in the Zhengzhou area, which
was broadcast in the daytime. The viewership of the final contest was
reported to be 400 million and the three contestants received a total of 9
million votes, making it one of the most successful shows in Chinese tele-
vision history (Yardley, 2005). Aside from the high ratings, the most cru-
cial feature differentiating Super Girl from previous talent contests on
Chinese television, such as Dream China (mengxiang zhongguo) or Lycra
My Way (laika woxing woxiu), is the fully fledged commodification of the
show. The contest was sponsored by a dairy company. Hence, the full title
of the show: “The Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girls Contest.”
The company spent RMB 14 million (US$ 1.75 million) to acquire exclu-
sive naming rights for the show. In fact, the reason why Hunan TV set up
a contest area in the city of Chengdu, located in Sichuan Province, was
because the dairy company’s sales in that area were particularly low. After
the show was broadcast, their total sales nationwide increased by 270 per-
cent (Zhou, Wang, Ma, Wang, & Du, 2005). Another major beneficiary
was telecom companies, as votes were cast via text message. Typically, vot-
ers needed to first spend RMB 1 registering to vote. Then, after receiving
a confirmation, each person could cast up to 15 votes. The three finalists
drew more than 8 million votes. A Super Girl card was issued, with the
multiple functions of credit card, Internet phone card and debit card, and
users could choose to have their favorite girl’s image printed on the card.
Wei Wenbin, Director General of the Hunan Radio and Television Bureau,
proudly claimed that Super Girl had generated a total of $50 million
income for the Group (Wei, 2007).
To a great extent, the spectacular success of Super Girl ushered in a new
chapter in Chinese television, with not only unprecedentedly comprehen-
sive commodification strategies, but also the inception of neoliberal-style
storytelling and subject-making in reality shows. Indeed, when Super Girl
was the talk of the town, what really captured the fascination of both
domestic and international commentators was not so much its business
operation, but rather its cultural politics (Meng, 2009). There are two
distinctive but interrelated themes in the popular discourse about Super
Girl. One centers on equating self-disclosure with authenticity, and the
other on exercising democratic citizenship via consumer choice.
Contestants had to gradually reveal more and more about themselves,
both on- and off-screen, in online forums and meetings with fans, in order
to convince the audience that they were being honest, truthful and sin-
cere. Paradoxically, the key selling point of these contestants as commodi-
ties is the projection of an authentic self. Li Yuchun, the winner of the
110 B. MENG
2005 contest, had the weakest voice among the final five, but she gained
the support of millions of fans because she was deemed to be the most true
to herself. This perceived authenticity increased the level of participation,
which in turn prompted celebration of the finalists as the “people’s choice”
(for more detailed discussion, see Meng, 2009). What was completely cir-
cumvented in such celebration was the power structure underpinning
audience participation in reality TV, the unequal relationship between
producer and audience, the exclusion resulting from the essentially one-
dollar-one-vote mechanism, and the actual consequences that audience
participation has for the show.
From Voice of China to Chinese Dream Show:

Sustaining Cruel Optimism in Precarious Labor
There has been extensive research linking reality TV with neoliberal gov-
ernmentality in the UK and US contexts. On the economic front, neolib-
eralism believes in “open, competitive and unregulated markets, liberated
from state intervention and the actions of social collectivities” (Theodore,
Peck, & Brenner, 2011, p. 15). Politically, neoliberalism sees the state as
antithetical to personal liberty and the free market, insisting that “the
function of the liberal state should be limited to safeguarding the condi-
tions in which profitable competition can be pursued” (Hall, 2011,
p. 707). The neoliberal ideology therefore needs to suture together a
series of discursive components—responsible individuals, free market, fair
competition, consumer choice, repressive state, sacred private and corpo-
rate interests—to make them appear as if they have always fitted together.
Reality TV seems to be a perfect platform for articulating such an ideol-
ogy, given the genre’s incessant focus on surveillance, personal improve-
ment, competition and individual success. Reality TV is “educational,” in
the sense that various subgenres are constantly offering “informal guide-
lines for living” (Ouelette & Hay, 2008, pp. 2–3). This is done in an
entertaining rather than didactic way. In makeover shows such as Queer
Eye for the Straight Guy, The Swan and What not to Wear, audiences get
tips on fashion, lifestyle and social etiquette. Sender (2006) further argues
that Queer Eye puts gay cultural expertise to work to reform heterosexual
masculinity in a way that is compatible with the neoliberal moment.
Survivor and Big Brother not only provide guidance on how to cope with
natural and man-made challenges, but also promote an extreme competi-
tiveness and self-interest in line with the neoliberal ethos (Grazian, 2010,
p. 69). Programs like The Apprentice enact shifting working cultures of
neoliberalism that emphasize “emotional commitment, entrepreneurial
adaptability, a combination of team conformity and personal ambition”
(Couldry & Littler, 2011, p. 263). In the Anglo-American context, where
the welfare state has been waning since the Reagan–Thatcher era, and at a
time “when privatization, personal responsibility and consumer choice are
promoted as the best way to govern liberal capitalist democracies”
(Ouelette & Hay, 2008, p. 2), reality TV carries out the significant ideo-
logical function of interpellating neoliberal subjects.
Given the political and historical lineage of neoliberalism, one needs to
be careful when interpreting the cultural politics of contemporary China
through the neoliberal lens. While there are many scholars who examine
the political economy and social and cultural transformations in contem-
porary China from the perspective of neoliberalism (Anagnost, 2004; Ren,
2010; Rofel, 2007; Wang, 2004; Wu, 2016; Yan, 2003), some argue that
China significantly departs from Western neoliberalism (Lo, 2012; Nonini,
2008). It is important to recognize that the question of whether neoliber-
alism can inform analysis of Chinese culture is a contested one. However,
just as there are varieties of capitalism, there are variegated forms of neo-
liberalism (Peck & Zhang, 2013; Zhang, 2013). In China, neoliberalism
is still largely an exception, as noted by Ong (2006, pp. 3–4): “general
characteristics of technologies of governing” have not yet taken hold. On
the one hand, the Chinese regime increasingly uses market-driven calcula-
tions to manage the population and administer certain spaces. The Party-
state is pushing for aggressive privatization in many areas that were once
key sites of the socialist welfare system, including housing, health care and
social security. The shift in identity of the population as consumers is dra-
matic, and inseparable from the dramatic rise of a “middle class” and in
disposable income for a large group, that has unleashed a raw consumer-
ism. Both official and popular discourses have done their share of promot-
ing the free market, privatization and responsible individuals as the drivers
of progress and future modernization. On the other hand, compared with
the United Kingdom or the United States, the Chinese state is far more
interventionist in dealing with global capital and redressing social inequal-
ity resulting from capitalist developments. Ideologically, the legacy of
patriarchal statism and socialism lingers and is often evoked by both the
Chinese Communist Party and the disenfranchised population to articu-
late the necessity of curbing the power of capital (Nonini, 2008). Thus,
Ong’s (2006) notion of neoliberalism as an exception aptly captures how,
112 B. MENG
in China’s emerging economy, “neoliberalism as technology of both gov-

erning and self-governing is usually introduced as exception to political
business as usual” (Ong & Zhang, 2008, p. 4). The discursive space of
reality TV stands out as China’s neoliberal exception, especially if we fol-
low Sun’s (2015) suggestion of studying neoliberalism as a way of life that
is fraught with power struggles over “common sense.”
Here I would like to juxtapose two reality shows, Voice of China and
Chinese Dream Show, both of which aired on Zhejiang Satellite TV and
enjoyed high ratings, in order to illustrate the pedagogical as well as the
disciplinary role played by reality TV. More specifically, these programs
use a variety of discursive strategies to incorporate the precarious labor of
participants, to reinforce the power of media institutions, and to perpetu-
ate the myth of achieving individual success by improving one’s own
“quality” (suzhi). Voice of China (Voice) is the Chinese version of the
Dutch format Voice. The final episode of the first season in 2012 achieved
a rating of 6.1 percent. The total revenue from advertising and licensing
fee was reported to be RMB 300 million (USD $45 million) (Life Weekly,
2012). By Season 4 in 2016, the 60-second commercial spot before the
Grand Finale was being sold for RMB 30 million (USD 4.5 million), on a
par with the price tag for US Super Bowl commercials. Unlike Super Girl,
contestants on Voice are not chosen from a general audition. Instead, the
production team would go talent scouting in pubs and recording studios,
often following the lead of industry insiders. After the first round of selec-
tion, only one-third of the initial talent pool would earn a spot in the
program. The contestants then needed to go through training before they
could appear on TV, mainly focusing on finding the “right” voice that
could easily impress and identifying a suitable song to fit their “personal
style.” In the actual TV show, the first step is the so-called “blind picking.”
The four judges, dubbed “dream mentors,” face the audience as contes-
tants start singing, and only turn around in the armchairs when they hear
a truly impressive voice. Two more rounds of competition ensue after each
“dream mentor” has picked their favorite singers to form a “dream team.”
On the final night, one top contestant from each “dream team” competes
to become Grand Champion, which is determined by the combined votes
of the television audience and a panel of 100 “media experts.”
The “playbook” that Can Xing, the Shanghai-based media company
that produced Voice, acquired from the Dutch copyright owner, Talpa, is
said to be several hundred pages long, specifying even the material and
style of the judge’s armchair. Such obsession with details is not purely
aesthetic. It is part of the rhetorical repertoire that sustains the aura of the
show. Couldry (2003) identifies reality TV as one of the ritual spaces
where people act out and naturalize “‘the myth of the mediated centre’:
the belief, or assumption, that there is a centre to the social world, and
that, in some sense, the media speaks ‘for’ that centre” (p. 2). In this
regard, the high specifications of the props, the judging panel consisting
of top stars, and the competitive process that leads to the glorified final
night all work together to exercise the symbolic power of a highly ritual-
ized media event. Indeed, the patterns of power articulated through media
rituals are not permanent and universal, but rather contingent and histori-
cally specific (Couldry, 2003, p. 37). I would argue that shows like Voice
reinforce what Berlant (2011) calls “cruel optimism” by successfully
incorporating the precarious labor of the contestants as well as the affec-
tive labor of audience members. It also naturalizes the myth of individual
success by articulating the lure of “the dream” and a perpetual drive
toward self-improvement. Berlant (2011) explains that
optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility

actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which
a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very
pleasure of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the
content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a
situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirm-
ing. (p. 2)
For participants in Voice, the optimism is cruel first and foremost

because it conceals the precarious condition of creative labor (Gill & Pratt,
2008; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2008; Ross, 2009). Given the show’s pro-
duction mechanism, explained above, most contestants are professional or
semi-professional musicians—music-school students, pub singers, vocal
accompanists. In other words, these are people trying to make a living in
the volatile creative industries from the lower end of the career ladder.
Even before the televised part, the production team starts mobilizing the
participation of uncompensated creative labor via a vague promise of fame
and success. For example, Liu Yating was performing in a pub in Shenzhen
when the scouting team found her. Liu was not initially interested in tak-
ing part, as she thought it would be a waste of time. The team persisted.
They asked whether she really wanted to “let this great opportunity go
and sing in this pub forever.” Liu eventually agreed to participate, but did
114 B. MENG
not make it to the final round (Sohu, 2013). Her music career has not
seemed to take off since her appearance on Voice in 2013. Contestants
contribute not only their musical talent, but also their emotions and per-
sonal stories. Li Jianzhong, the Production Manager, emphasizes the
appeal of human-interest stories. According to Li, once a contestant is
chosen, a group of “story planners” work intensively behind the scenes to
dig out all the details of each participant’s life. All the materials will be fed
to the directors in advance so that they can “trigger the right kind of emo-
tion and achieve the best results on screen” (Sohu, 2013). For instance, a
singer named Duo Liang had been working at numerous small jobs in the
Beijing music scene before taking part in Voice in 2012. Once, right before
the performance, one director noticed that Duo Liang was a bit deflated
and said to him, “you have been drifting around in Beijing for so many
years now. Stepping onto this stage might change everything, are you
ready?” Another singer, Xu Haixing, lost her father three days before the
recording of the show. The director carefully scripted the exchange at the
end of her performance, just to make sure Xu would have the opportunity
to tell the audience about her father. Ostensibly the “dream mentors”
were unaware of the plan, as the director wanted to keep the outpouring
of emotion from both judges and audience “real.”
From the creative labor of contestants to the life stories they share on-
and off-screen, from the time commitment of audience members to their
further affective labor, these are all part of the uncompensated work that
feeds into the commercial success of the Voice, which in turn garners huge
revenue from advertising and selling broadcasting rights to online plat-
forms. The contenders are especially under the spell of cruel optimism, as
many of them are lured by what Couldry calls the “myth of the mediated
centre.” The hope that the glamorous stage of the Voice will provide a
shortcut to success is a vague but powerful one, so much so that strug-
gling musicians are willing to spend weeks, if not months, of their time to
go through each round of competition.
It is part of the procedure that each of the four mentors takes turns to
ask contestants questions after their performance in the first round. This is
where research about participants’ lives is put to use in order to solicit
emotional reactions from all parties. The two most frequently asked ques-
tions are: “what made you come here?” and “what is your biggest dream?”
Two central motifs can easily be discerned from the varied personal
accounts. One is about holding on to the “dream” and the other is about
how to realize the dream. Contestants often talk about the hurdles they
have had to overcome and the difficulties they have had to endure in order
to be able to stand on this stage. But the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
makes all the effort worthwhile, and it is Voice that is offering a golden
ticket to achieving success in the highly competitive music market. The
narrative goes that as long as one does not give up on true passion and real
ambition, one will be able to succeed against the odds. The other recur-
ring and related theme is that self-improvement leads to “the good life.”
When more than one judge has offered a contender a place in his or her
“dream team,” the latter gets to choose. At this point, the mentors each
make a case for why they have the best plan to improve the individual’s
chance of winning. Often, the contestants also make the calculation on the
spot, based on the track record as well as the status of the judges in the
music industry. Berlant (2011), at the beginning of her book on cruel
optimism, asks the crucial question: “why do people stay attached to con-
ventional good-life fantasies … when the evidence of their instability, fra-
gility, and dear cost abounds?” (p. 2). If “fantasy is the means by which
people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the
world ‘add up to something’” (Berlant, 2011, p. 2), the rhetorical strate-
gies deployed by Voice are perfect examples of those “tableaux” that sus-
tain the good-life fantasy.
But fantasies are unstable and become frayed once confronted by harsh
reality. Even in the well-managed discursive space of reality TV, there are
occasional dissonances and disruptions that need to be contained. Chinese
Dream Show is another popular program that has been running on
Zhejiang TV since 2011. Its tagline is “helping ordinary people to realize
their dreams.” In each episode, participants, who are called “dreamers,”
give a performance of their choice before sharing with the audience their
wish, which ranges from material ones like covering a medical bill to non-
material ones like reconciling with estranged family members. A “Dream
Mission” of 300 people will be sitting in the studio and vote on whether
to grant the wish. Zhou Libo, a famous stand-up comedian, has joined the
show since the third season as “Dream Ambassador,” who chats with the
contestants after each performance to find out more about their lives and
dreams. Zhou also has the power to reverse the decision made by the stu-
dio audience, if he thinks a wish that is voted down by them is worthy of
reconsideration. On May 23, 2014, the charitable ambience of the pro-
gram was jarred by the appearance of a group of migrant workers from the
New Workers’ Art Troupe (NWAT).
116 B. MENG
NWAT is based in Picun, a village on the northeastern outskirts Beijing.

Due to slow development and relatively low-rent housing, Picun has
become an ideal place for migrant residency. Among the current popula-
tion of more than 20,000, only 10 percent are local residents, and the rest
are migrants working in construction, manufacturing and the service sec-
tor. Eight migrant workers from NWAT went on the Chinese Dream Show
at the invitation of the producer and their wish was to get a sound system
for the workers’ cultural center in Picun. The discordant moment came
immediately after the performance of their “Worker’s Song,” which did
not impress the audience and failed to garner the required 240 minimum
votes to fulfil their wish. In response to Zhou Libo’s question about the
typical audience for their performance, Zhao Chen, the youngest member
of the group, said that she would only sing for “good people.” Zhou Libo
probed. The 18-year-old went on to explain the hardship that many work-
ers have to endure, including not getting paid on time and not having
medical insurance to cover workplace injury. She then said, “good people
are those who look after our interest and bad people are those who exploit
us. Zhou interjected, “I think both employers and employees should be
grateful. You guys need to appreciate that the boss gave you the opportu-
nity to work and the employers should be thankful for your hard work.
Let’s not apply the term exploitation too easily to most of those good
bosses.” When he saw that the workers were clearly not in agreement with
him, Zhou commented “guys, you are a bit resentful.” At that time, the
atmosphere in the studio became tense, as the workers did not seem to be
following the usual script of embracing the cruel optimism offered by their
15 minutes of fame on TV. Probably as an attempt to break the impasse,
the director cut to the pre-recorded videos of interviews with some of the
workers’ family members—a common strategy used in shows like this to
reinforce perceived authenticity and provoke emotional response. The
working-class parents appeared simple and down-to-earth, urging their
children to be honest, to work hard and to visit home more often. As
many audience members in the studio started to wipe away tears, Yuan
Wei, one of the workers, was smiling. Zhou Libo inquired why. Yuan said
his parents actually called him after the production team arrived in his
house, as they suspected it was all a scam, “I am just wondering how you
guys shot this video,” to which Zhou replied, “you are a funny guy.” The
moment of reconciliation finally came when an assistant brought onto the
stage some steamed buns made by one of the mothers. The buns had
already gone moldy, but Zhou insisted on sharing them with everyone on
stage. The thought of their parents brought tears to the eyes of some of
the workers. Zhou then announced rather triumphantly that he would
reverse the decision of the audience and grant the workers’ wish of acquir-
ing a new sound system, with the sponsorship of some “good bosses” sit-
ting in the studio.
This episode of Chinese Dream Show is not in harmony with dozens of
others that do project the warm, fuzzy feeling of “helping ordinary people
to realize their dreams,” because the workers refused to ignore the class
conflict preventing them from having a “good life.” According to Lu Tu
(2013), a sociologist and labor activist who has been working with the
Workers’ Home6 in Picun since 2005, members of NWAT were initially
very reluctant to take part in the show, as they did not want to be subject
to the alienating gaze of an urban, middle-class audience. The second-
hand sound system the workers received after the show made them feel
even more humiliated. Unlike participants on Voice, who are hoping for a
career breakthrough propelled by media visibility, migrant workers are
acutely aware that Chinese Dream Show is not the kind of space that enables
their voice. The fact that Yuan Wei’s parents did not believe he could be
on TV reveals the exclusivity of the seemingly participatory genre. Not
only is there class-based inequality and exclusion when it comes to who
gets to participate, the terms and conditions of participation are also set
from a middle-class perspective. It is rare for hosts of reality shows to
argue with contestants, let alone calling them “resentful.” Zhou Libo
reacted strongly to Zhao Chen’s comments because wage arrears, work-
place injury and exploitation are not supposed to be mentioned on the
stage of fantasy and dreams. Most reality show participants do talk about
the hardship they endure—and this is an important component of the
“follow your heart, chase your dream” type of narrative. But in most cases
efforts toward a good life are talked about in highly individualized terms.
It is all about what individuals want and what they need to do to achieve
that goal. Or sometimes charitable entrepreneurs will come to the rescue,
as we see on Chinese Dream Show. But the word “exploitation” has strong
class connotations and signals a completely different perspective on the
conditions of one’s own life. For the bourgeoisie, migrant workers’ refusal
to let go of class conflict is threatening and hence needs to be neutralized
immediately through a discourse of gratitude and filial piety.
Anthropologists of China (Anagnost, 2004, 2008; Brownell, 2009;
Jacka, 2009; Kipnis, 2006, 2007; Sun, 2009b; Woronov, 2009) have
picked up on suzhi (quality) as a keyword for studying changing notions
118 B. MENG
of self and the changing mode of governmentality. As the country moved

from a planned economy to a market economy, “the representation of
value has undergone a reorganization in the realm of the biopolitical in
which human life becomes a new frontier of capital accumulation”
(Anagnost, 2004, p. 189). Yan (2003, p. 494) points out that “quality” is
in many respects an inadequate translation of suzhi, which “refers to the
somewhat ephemeral qualities of civility, self-discipline, and modernity.”
Anagnost (2004) also highlights how the meaning of suzhi “has been
extended from a discourse of backwardness and development to encom-
pass the minute social distinctions defining a ‘person of quality’ in prac-
tices of consumption and the incitement of a middle-class desire for social
mobility” (p. 190). In this sense, the competitive, cosmopolitan and
forward-looking contenders on Voice of China and the self-conscious,
parochial and downbeat migrant workers who feel out of place on the
stage of Chinese Dream Show, are located at the two ends of the suzhi spec-
trum. The former group has internalized the neoliberal logic of enterpris-
ing individuals and is endorsed by the televisual discourse as worth
emulating. The latter group, on the other hand, serves as a counter-
example that needs to be disciplined in front of an urban middle-class
audience.
In this chapter I have focused on the cultural politics of the entertain-

ment media in China. Bearing in mind the chronicled debate in the field
of media and communication between political economy and cultural
studies (Grossberg, 1995; Havens, Lotz, & Tinic, 2009; Jessop, 2004), I
have tried to draw, in two steps, the connection between institutional-
level analysis and attention to discourses and meaning. First, I have
mapped out the political economy of both film and television industries,
so as to explain the structural conditions that give rise to or suppress cer-
tain types of entertainment media content. Second, in the close reading of
a few exemplary film and television texts, I have situated the tensions and
contradictions emerging from rhetorical devices of storytelling in the
broader context of political, economic and social change in China, which
is what Stuart Hall would call a “conjuncture.” I argue that the socialist
nostalgia in The Piano in a Factory and the neoliberal mentality imbibed
from reality TV are two sides of the same coin that constitutes the ideolo-
gies of contemporary China. There are of course many more themes of
political significance that can be read from popular texts of the entertain-
ment media.
Notes
1. These two movies alone accounted for about one-third of total box-office
takings in Beijing and Shanghai in 1998.
2. This is similar to a Ted Talk, with speakers from arts, science and humanities
invited to give speeches on various topics. The name Yixi comes from the
Chinese saying “tingjun yixi hua, shengdu shinianshu” (listening to one
speech from you inspires me more than 10 years’ study).
3. The full script of the talk is available at http://chinadigitaltimes.net/
chinese/2017/03/
4. Even this figure is believed by many academics and ordinary citizens to be a
gross underestimate, as it was the officially registered number and did not
capture the numerous workers who were released involuntarily and
informally.
5. SARFT has now been merged with the General Administration of Press and
Publication to form the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio,
Film and Television (SAPPRFT), but the two regulatory bodies still operate
separately.
6. This is a labor NGO that has become a flagship organization for educating
and training migrant workers. The NWAT was founded by the same group
as those who set up Workers’ Home.
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CHAPTER 5
From Angry Youth to Anxious Parents:

The Mediated Politics of Everyday Life
An Expanding Field
In his book about online activism, which provides the most comprehensive
study of the Chinese internet to date, Yang (2009) draws an analogy
between television culture in the 1970s, when Raymond Williams was writ-
ing, and the internet culture as examined in academic studies at the begin-
ning of the 2000s, noting their common marginal status at these two
junctures (p. 11). Within less than a decade, however, research on digital
media and networked communication in China has gained great promi-
nence. Monographs and edited volumes have been published almost every
year since the late 2000s (Chen, 2016; Chen & Reese, 2015; Herold &
Marolt, 2011; Hong, 2017; Huang, 2014; Jiang, 2012; Lagerkvist, 2010;
Liu, 2010; Marolt & Herold, 2014; McDonald, 2016; Qiu, 2009; Scotton
& Hachten, 2010; Voci, 2010; Wallis, 2013; X. Wang, 2016; Wu, 2007; W.
Zhang, 2016; Zhang & Zheng, 2009; Zheng, 2008). Two leading jour-
nals, one in communication studies (Political Communication) and one in
area studies (China Information), published special issues on cyber-politics
in 2011 and in 2014 respectively. The Chinese Journal of Communications,
which was launched in 2008, has been publishing regularly, if not in every
single issue, research articles on networked digital media. In addition,
across a wide range of academic journals in area studies, media and com-
munication, political science, sociology and anthropology, if there is an
article about Chinese media, more likely than not it has to do with the
Chinese internet (e.g., Esarey & Xiao, 2008, 2011; Harwit, 2016; Jiang,

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5_5
128 B. MENG
2014; Jiang & Okamoto, 2014; King, Pan, & Roberts, 2013; Lei, 2011;
Leibold, 2010, 2011, 2016; MacKinnon, 2009; Meng, 2010, 2011;
Schneider, 2016; Tsui, 2007; Wallis, 2014; Weber & Lu, 2007; Yang,
2006, 2014; Yang & Jiang, 2015; Zhou, 2007, 2009).
This visible ascendance of research on networked digital communica-
tion in China can be attributed to two major reasons, one political and one
economic. Politically, the internet has been widely expected by liberals in
and outside China to be instrumental in democratization. Just as Rupert
Murdoch remarked in the early 1990s that satellite TV would undermine
authoritarian governments everywhere in the world, Bill Clinton in 2000
derided China’s fledgling attempts to control online speech as “trying to
nail Jell-O to the wall” (Clinton, 2000). By 2006, however, as Microsoft,
Google, Yahoo and Cisco had to face a US congressional hearing concern-
ing the alleged compromise on “human rights” issues that they had made
on the Chinese market (Zeller, 2006), the prospect of global technology
companies acting as democratic missionaries dimmed. In 2010, during the
collision between Google and the Chinese government that eventually led
to the company exiting China, Hilary Clinton condemned internet censor-
ship in China in her capacity as Secretary of the State in the Obama admin-
istration (Kang, 2010). While Google takes pride in its motto “Don’t be
evil” and sought positive publicity from leaving the Chinese market (where
the company never had a significant share due to the near-monopoly of the
domestic search engine Baidu), various friendly gestures towards the
Chinese government on the part of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have
been raising alarms (Abkowitz, 2017; Isaac, 2016; Parker, 2016). The
level of expectation may ebb and flow with the unfolding of reality, but
what stays constant is the hope of converting China into a capitalist liberal
democracy. The idea that pervasive and ubiquitous digital networks could
assimilate the “other” into “us” and could even lead to eventual regime
change is deep-seated. Not only constantly invoked by politicians, it also
tints the lens that many academics use to examine networked digital com-
munication in China. In the growing body of literature on online activism
in China, some works are more optimistic, citing evidence of how work-
ing-class Chinese deploy new communication technologies in innovative
ways in order to better their lives (e.g., Qiu, 2009), or cases where digital
networks have enabled new social formations (e.g., Zhang, 2016), new
genres of contention (e.g., Esarey & Xiao, 2008; Yang & Jiang, 2015), and
new possibilities of resistance (e.g., Yang, 2009). Others are less sanguine,
highlighting both the evolving mechanisms of information control (e.g.,
FROM ANGRY YOUTH TO ANXIOUS PARENTS: THE MEDIATED POLITICS… 129
King et al., 2013; MacKinnon, 2009; Tsui, 2003), and the dark side of
nationalism and ethnocentrism (e.g., Leibold, 2010, 2016).
Another factor is the significant expansion of digital networks and the
exponential growth of the information and communication industries.
The promotion and diffusion of the internet in China has always been a
state-led project, aiming to reap the economic benefit of information and
communication technologies while containing their potential political
threats (Qiu, 2004). The key indicators all seem impressive enough. By
the end of 2016, the total number of internet users reached 731 million,
with an internet penetration rate of 53.2 percent. Mobile internet users in
China reached 695 million, accounting for 95.1 percent of the total inter-
net population. Chinese rural netizens accounted for 27.4 percent of the
national total, reaching 201 million. The number of China’s listed inter-
net companies reached 91, with a total market value of more than RMB 5
trillion (US $700 billion). Among these, Tencent and Alibaba are two
representatives of China’s internet companies whose market value
accounted for 57 percent of the total, standing at over RMB 3 trillion (US
$440 billion) (CNNIC, 2017). Alibaba launched its IPO on the New York
Stock Exchange in September 2014, with much fanfare, and raised a world
record of US $21.8 billion (Barreto, 2014; Bullock & Noble, 2014;
Dealbook, 2014). Meanwhile there is Tencent, the company that operates
WeChat, an extremely popular mobile phone app that reached 889 million
active daily users worldwide by the end of 2016. For a large proportion of
urban users, WeChat goes far beyond instant messaging to serve as the
platform for conducting a wide range of daily activities from ordering
takeout to making doctors’ appointments.1 Further, Chinese Premier Li
Keqiang delineated a vision of technology-driven economic development
in his 2015 Report on the Work of the Government, when elaborating on
the notion of “Internet Plus,” a term seemingly adopted from Tencent
CEO Pony Ma. Li made a call to
develop an “Internet Plus” action plan to integrate mobile internet, cloud

computing big data, and the Internet of Things with modern manufactur-
ing, to encourage the healthy development of e-commerce, industrial
networks, and internet banking, and to get internet-based companies to
increase their presence in the international market. (Sharwood, 2015)
He went on to say, at a State Council executive meeting later that year,

that Internet Plus, combined with “Made in China 2025” and supplemented
130 B. MENG
by mass entrepreneurship and innovation, was expected to trigger a “new

industrial revolution” (K. Li, 2015). Given such a development trajectory,
it is not surprising that academic interest in studying the social conse-
quences of internet diffusion seems to be on the rise. Researchers have
explored less overtly political issues, such as the identity construction of
young internet users (Liu, 2010; Szablewicz, 2014; Yang, Tang, & Wang,
2015), internet addiction among urban youth (Huang, 2014), social
media use in rural and urban China (McDonald, 2016; Wang, 2016), and
women migrant workers’ experience with ICT (Wallis, 2013).
The Politics of the Chinese Internet

To be sure, the field of Chinese internet research has become more diversi-
fied since I called seven years ago for a move beyond the obsession with
democratization (Meng, 2010). A few propositions are worth highlight-
ing, however, in order to identify what I see as some of the limitations with
the current research agenda and to illustrate the plan of this chapter. First,
the political aspirations and the economic vision vested in digital networks
have granted internet-mediated communication a privileged position in
accessing “reality.” But this presumed access needs to be problematized.
Couldry (2003) uses the term “media ritual” to refer to “the whole range
of situations where media themselves ‘stand in’, or appear to ‘stand in’, for
something wider, something linked to the fundamental organisational
level on which we are, or imagine ourselves to be, connected as members
of a society” (p. 4). He argues that media rituals are crucial to the manage-
ment of conflict and masking of inequality, including, but not limited to,
a naturalizing of “the hierarchy of things ‘in’ the media over things which
are not ‘in’ the media” (Couldry, 2003, p. 13). I would argue that, when
it comes to the internet, what paradoxically further exacerbates this privi-
leged position is the perceived decentralized and decentralizing nature of
digital networks. That is to say, because the internet has enabled commu-
nication and mobilization in an unprecedented manner, empowered users
who previously had no voice, led to exposures that undermine institu-
tional control of information, and rendered aspects of private realms
publicly visible, it is taken even more for granted that networked digital
communication represents “the social whole” (Couldry, 2003, p. 6). This
implicit assumption is not unique to those studying communication in
China, but may well be particularly influential on their research agenda in
view of the country’s heavily controlled communication environment.
Not only is so much that was previously hidden now becoming visible, but
new forms of communicative practices have also emerged. The new visibil-
ity of what has been generally considered a discreet authoritarian society is
so beguiling that many forget to further probe the power relations that
configure such visibility.
Certainly, there has been a substantial body of research on the power of
the Chinese state in shaping the speech environment online. Here, power
tends to be narrowly conceptualized in a negative way as the ability to cen-
sor information, to suppress discussion and to preempt action. What is
equally important, however, is to conceive of power as the ability to
amplify certain voices, guide public opinion and build consensus. Since Xi
Jinping took over the leadership in 2012, the Party-state has been high-
lighting the crucial role of the internet as the “main battlefield for public
opinion struggle.” In his speech at the National Propaganda and Ideology
Work Conference in August 2013, Xi pronounced that gaining victory on
this battleground “directly relates to our country’s ideological security
and regime security.” He categorized three zones in the ideology and pub-
lic opinion arena. The red zone consists of mainstream media and positive
online forces, and needs to be consolidated and expanded. The black zone
“consists of a series of negative discourses online and in society, and also
includes all kinds of public opinion fabricated by hostile forces, this is not
the mainstream, but its influence must not be underestimated.” He called
on Party cadres to “progressively push it to change color.” Third is the
grey zone, which lies between the other two. Large-scale work, he asserted,
needs to be launched “to accelerate its transformation into a red zone and
prevent it decaying into a black zone.”2
Xi Jinping was not being overly optimistic when he declared that the
red zone is the mainstream. Exercising power in a positive way also means
not conceiving of the relationship between the state and society as the
simple antithesis that many have assumed. Information control in China is
not like a lid barely covering a pot of boiling water, where once the lid is
lifted the water will inevitably spill out. This common liberal imagined
scenario takes the ahistorical view of the regime’s legitimacy on which I
have elaborated in earlier chapters, and mistakenly sees both the Party-state
and Chinese society as monolithic. However, at the state level there are
ongoing turf wars between government ministries, especially with regard
to converged digital platforms, where the remit of regulation often becomes
blurred (Zhang, 2003; Zheng, 2008). At the Party level, factional strug-
gles among power elites also lead to inconsistent and unpredictable
132 B. MENG
policies that are sometimes meant to either contain or appease certain fac-
tions and their alliances within wider society. The most prominent case of
an ad hoc alliance between factions of power elites and segments of society
is that of the Bo Xilai scandal that unfolded between 2012 and 2013. The
discourses and narratives that emerged during this unusually mediatized
power struggle at the highest political level go far beyond a simplistic story
of the central leadership suppressing information (Meng, 2016; Zhao,
2012). Rather, rumors and “leaks” were leveraged strategically to influ-
ence public opinion (Wang, 2012).
In addition to the myth that the internet offers access to the “social
whole,” the narrow conceptualization of power, and the monolithic view of
the Party-state, there is also a lack of understanding of how stratified Chinese
society has become. Internet-mediated contention is therefore not just tak-
ing place between the state and society, but also along lines of gender, class
and political views within society. The most direct consequence of social
stratification is unequal access to the internet. A quick glance at the China
Internet Network Information Center’s (CNNIC) semi-annual report on
internet development (CNNIC, 2017) identifies a number of socio-eco-
nomic factors correlated with the digital divide, including gender, income,
location,3 and educational level. The urban-rural divide is by far the most
significant, with 72.6 percent of urban residents, in contrast to 27.4 percent
of the rural population, currently online. More importantly, as research on
digital divides has long been arguing, unequal access to the internet is on
the one hand a symptom of broader social inequality, and on the other hand
itself contributes to the a ggravation of inequality and exclusion (Livingstone
& Helsper, 2007; Mansell, 2002; Min, 2010; Stevenson, 2009; Van Dijk &
Hacker, 2003). The hierarchy is not just one of digital skills and access to
various services, but also of voice and recognition. It concerns which groups
are visible and which are not, whose views and interests are being amplified
via digital networks, and whose are relegated to oblivion. In this regard,
understanding the politics of the Chinese internet requires attention to
mediated struggles over identity, meaning and desirable lifestyles.
In the rest of this chapter, I provide three case studies that illustrate
different aspects of internet-mediated politics, concerning nationalism,
gender and class. One of these maybe considered an example of online
activism, but challenges some conventional views about contentious poli-
tics. The second focuses on the gendered consumerist discourse co-
produced by corporations and ordinary consumers, and implicitly
encouraged by the state. The third case probes the middle-class imaginary
of a “good life” through the lens of parenting advice circulating on

WeChat, the most popular social media platform.
From “Iron and Blood” to “Little Pinkos”

On January 20, 2016, a few days after Tsai Ing-wen, the pro-independence
leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, was elected the sixth President
of Taiwan, tens of thousands of Chinese netizens circumvented the Great
Firewall to flood Tsai’s Facebook page with comments opposing Taiwan’s
independence. More than 70,000 messages and emojis were posted within
24 hours (Leng, 2016). Also targeted were the Facebook pages of a hand-
ful of media outlets deemed to be pro-independence, including Sanli TV
and Apple Daily Taiwan. This so-called “Facebook Expedition” (脸书出
征) was organized by Liyi Ba, one of the largest groups on the popular
online forum Baidu Tieba run by the internet giant Baidu. Liyi Ba origi-
nated as the online fan group of Chinese footballer Li Yi, nicknamed Da
Di (Great Emperor) because of his arrogance. Often referred to as Di Ba
or simply D8 (8 is pronounced “ba” in Chinese), the group quickly grew
into a community with more than 20 million registered users engaging
with a variety of online activities going far beyond the footballer. But the
irony of Li Yi’s nickname seems to have been preserved in the communi-
ty’s characteristically irreverent, playful and self-deprecating style.
The trigger for the Taiwan “expedition” was the seemingly trivial Chou
Tzu-yu case (Li, 2016; Wang, Li, & Wu, 2016; Z. Wang, 2016). Chou is
a Taiwanese singer based in South Korea and a member of the K-pop girl
group TWICE managed by JYP Entertainment. On January 8, 2016, the
pro-China Taiwanese singer Huang An posted a message on his Weibo
account criticizing Chou for holding the “national flag” of Taiwan on
Korean television. The incident soon escalated, as Sanli TV continued to
portray Chou as a “pro-independence star” and a “Light of Taiwan,” and
mainland K-pop fans demanded a statement from Chou to clarify her
nationality and JYP’s lack of response. Several television stations and
entertainment companies in mainland China then cancelled performance
contracts with JYP, which consequently saw its stock price plummet (Li,
2016). Under huge pressure, JYP released a statement on January 14 to
confirm that Chou had “always understood and respected the one-China
principle.” On January 15, the night before election day in Taiwan, Chou
released a video of herself making a public apology, in which she pro-
claimed that she had “always felt proud about being Chinese.” Some
134 B. MENG
believe that this unexpected cross-strait scuffle was a contributing factor to

Tsai Ing-wen’s landslide win, motivating pro-independence voters who
otherwise would have stayed at home (Sui, 2016). Tsai actually mentioned
Chou Tzu-yu in her victory speech to make a point about strengthening
Taiwan as a nation.
Thus the boundary between entertainment and politics was blurred
from the very beginning and this ambivalence ran through the whole
event. Both Huang An and Sanli News offered a highly politicized reading
of an innocuous gesture by a 16-year old pop star. Agitated fans on the
mainland tried to use their consumer power to pressure the Korean com-
pany into taking a stance, which JYP eventually had to bow to. This was
certainly not the first manifestation of consumer nationalism in the Chinese
context (Li, 2008, 2009; Wang, 2006), but the consequent “expedition”
diverged, in its emphasis on communication and performativity, from the
previous script of boycotting foreign goods. The initial call for mobiliza-
tion posted on the official Weibo account of D8 stated that “this is a self-
organized cultural communication” aiming to “close the cognitive gap
between netizens from both sides” (Huang, 2016). Thousands responded
by joining QQ groups, an instant messaging service that served as an orga-
nizing base for participants. It is always difficult to make out the exact
composition of online activist groups like this, but, according to a statisti-
cal tool developed by Peking University, 83 percent of these users identi-
fied themselves as female and over 60 percent belonged to the post-1990
generation (Ruan, 2016). These demographic features, combined with
the lighthearted, non-confrontational style of many Facebook messages
centering on mundane topics of everyday life, led to commentators using
the label “Little Pinkos” to characterize the group. Little Pinko is a term
originating from Jinjiang Literary City, an online forum for users to share
their original writings. Ninety-three per cent of Jinjiang users are female
and the website used to feature large blocks of pink background color—
hence the term. Over the years, some Jinjiang users have taken a strong
nationalist position in online discussions and added to the name Little
Pinko a further connotation of patriotism.
Previously, the perceived image of Chinese cyber-nationalism has always
been a masculine, at times even a militant one. For example, one of the
earliest researchers, Hughes (2000), conjures the metaphor of a “national-
ist cyber-tiger” when referring to events like the 1998 protest against
atrocities targeting ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and the 1999 protest
against the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during
the Kosovo war. A year after the NATO protest, a Tsinghua University
student named Jiang Lei set up an online forum for military enthusiasts
called Iron and Blood (www.tiexue.net), which is a name borrowed from
Bismarck’s famous “Blood and Iron” speech calling for the unification of
German territories. The registered users of Tiexue went from a few dozen
to hundreds of thousands within its first three years (Zhou, 2005) and it
has now expanded from a military website into a prominent current affairs
forum with a strongly nationalist stance. Key opinion leaders on popular
nationalism also tend to be male. They have included another Tsinghua
student, Rao Jin, who set up an anti-CNN website during the 2008 Beijing
Olympics torch relay; Tang Jie, who produced the widely circulated video
“2008 China Stand Up” and was profiled in the New Yorker as a represen-
tative of China’s “Angry Youth” (Osnos, 2008); and the authors behind
the two highly polemical bestsellers China Can Say No (1996) and China
is Not Happy (2009). In contrast, Little Pinkos are not the kind of people
who would discuss politics on a daily basis. They prefer celebrity gossip to
hard news. They are much more likely to be part of the ACG (Anime,
Comic and Games) subculture than to frequent current-affairs forums.
Interestingly, some have pointed out the overlap between K-pop fan
groups and Little Pinkos (Wang, Li, & Wu, 2016; Yan, 2016). In-depth
interviews with an admittedly small group of participants in the Facebook
expedition reveal that, among other things, fans’ engagement with trans-
national pop idols actually reinforces their national identity. Also, fandom
activities cultivate media literacy skills, such as information-seeking,
debating with adversarial views and organizing group activities, which can
be transferred to online activism (Wang, Li & Wu, 2016). As a generation
that grew up with the transnational flow of news and entertainment con-
tent, these young people are acutely aware of the discrepancy between
their own perception of China and how the country is perceived in the
outside world. When seeking information about their idols, they encoun-
ter stories told from different perspectives. Further, the varied strategies
that transnational companies deploy in dealing with different regional
markets bring into focus the power relations that underpin the entertain-
ment industry. For example, Chinese K-pop fans complain that they are at
the bottom of the ladder, compared with Korean and Japanese fans, when
it comes to their idols’ level of engagement with the market (Wang, Li &
Wu, 2016). It is the mediated understanding of global geopolitics acquired
through fandom, rather than the indoctrination of the Chinese state, that
136 B. MENG
may be seen as a more direct source of this highly performative Facebook

Expedition.
The demographic features as well as the behavior pattern of Little Pinkos
add to the complexity of mediated popular nationalism in the Chinese con-
text, but they are not entirely new. The Little Pinkos are part of a lineage
that often becomes obscured under the hegemonic lens of liberal democ-
racy. Within the fixed image of an omnipotent authoritarian state and a
homogenous, repressed society, nationalist sentiments can be easily dis-
missed as state indoctrination that serves the regime. Based on his research
into the Tiexue (Iron and Blood) community, Zhou (2005) coined the
term “informed nationalism” to highlight the difference between the new
wave of nationalism and the Boxer Movement in the late Qing period or
the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. He cautioned against overstat-
ing the effect of a state-led patriotic campaign, since a well-educated, well-
informed public is much less susceptible to manipulation. Han’s research
(Han, 2015) on the so-called “voluntary fifty-cent army” also suggests that
the binary framework of state vs. challenger of the regime, which much
research on the Chinese Internet tends to adopt, is seriously limiting when
it comes to making sense of diverse online activities. Those hired by state
agencies to comment and manipulate popular opinion online are known as
the “fifty-cent army,” while “voluntary fifty-cent army” refers to netizens
who are critical of both the liberal elites and the Chinese government,
though on balance defenders of the regime. The following post on www.
m4.cn (四月网), which evolved from the anti-CNN website mentioned
earlier, clarifies the standpoint of this “voluntary fifty-cent army”:
We are like hedgehogs. We always stick to these five principles that annoy
and frustrate the elites. First, we stick to the Chinese principle. Everything
should be based on the core interest of China. Second, we stick to people’s
democracy. The minority should follow the majority. We don’t have blind
faith in Western-style democracy. Third, we insist on justice and equality. We
care about common people, and are alert to capital and its representatives.
Fourth, we stick to independent thinking. We don’t buy the “universal val-
ues” advocated by liberal elites. Fifth, we stick to national culture, preserve
our national virtue and will never launch vicious personal attacks.
One can see that this is not a default pro-government position and that
it leaves ample space for grassroots demands. In fact, from the military
enthusiasts on Tiexue.net (Zhou, 2005) to Han supremacists online
(Leibold, 2010, 2016), from participants in the 2005 anti-Japan protest
(Liu, 2006) to the “voluntary fifty-cent army,” the Chinese state has
always been walking a tightrope in trying to contain nationalists who seem
to be serving the interest of the regime.
Compared with their predecessors, the Little Pinkos are even more
competent in terms of media literacy and exhibit a higher level of affective
intelligence. Affective intelligence is a term borrowed by Lisbet van
Zoonen (2004, 2005) from political scientist George Marcus (2002) in
order to explain the similarities between fan communities and political
constituencies. Van Zoonen argues that “fan communities are social for-
mations that are structurally equivalent to political constituencies” (p. 43),
that fan activity and political activity make use of a similar repertoire on a
communal basis, and that, as with any civic investment, fans’ relation with
their favorite object is primarily based on emotional identification. But
emotional investment does not preclude rational deliberation. On the
contrary, Marcus’s notion of affective intelligence highlights the use of
reason triggered by emotions. Feelings of enthusiasm or anxiety “produce
the cognitive state of mind that enables the acquisition of information, the
analysis of the situation, the assessment of alternatives and development of
new routines” (van Zoonen, 2004, p. 48). As with previous incidents of
cyber-nationalism, the Facebook expedition was a reaction to external
triggers. But the participants organized themselves swiftly and set out
guidelines before taking action. The organizers set up eight QQ groups in
all, with one general group that quickly reached the upper limit of 2000
members and another “frontline” group. The six subdivisions each had a
different focus. Division One was in charge of collecting pro-independence
news, posts and photos from the Taiwan side. Division Two recruited
participants from Weibo and other social-media platforms. Division Three
worked on anti-Taiwan-independence posts, photos and emojis. Division
Four, known as the “time-difference army,” was composed of overseas
students from the Chinese mainland who could translate Chinese posts
into different languages in order to increase publicity. Division Five closely
monitored Facebook pages so as to provide instant feedback to the general
group. And finally there was Division Six, which worked in Cantonese,
presumably targeting people in Hong Kong. Before the expedition started,
the following message was widely circulated among participants:
Don’t post insulting images or photos of political leaders. Make absolutely

sure not to post any pornographic images. We should upload more photos
from the mainland, including urban construction, great food, landscape
138 B. MENG
and culture, technological progress etc. Be smart if you encounter a

dumbass—we should enlighten them, after crushing their pro-indepen-
dence views!!!! Intercultural communication is our top priority. Be sure to
remember that!
Content analysis of posts on Tsai Ing-wen’s Facebook page within 24

hours of the expedition (Z. Wang 2016) shows that the guidelines were
actually followed throughout the event. The overall mood was not con-
frontational, but rather playful and humorous. Organizers of the event
created templates in advance as ammunition that could be quickly “fired”
at opponents. The most frequently used templates featured “Eight Honors
and Eight Shames,” which is the socialist moral code propagated by the
Hu Jintao leadership; the Chinese national anthem; Ode to the Motherland,
one of the most famous patriotic songs in the mainland; and Nostalgia, a
well-known poem by the Taiwanese writer Yu Guangzhong expressing his
emotional attachment to China. Participants even made the effort of
translating some of these templates into many different languages. As a
young generation of cosmopolitan media users growing up in the ACG
culture, the participants were very skillful in creating memes with symbols
of popular culture. They added captions to the anime versions of pop
idols’ photos, made spoofs of propaganda posters, and also posted numer-
ous pictures of Chinese food as part of the discursive strategy to “win
them over” with attractions of the mainland (Guo & Yang, 2016).
Amidst this somewhat carnivalesque performance, there is serious
engagement with the opposing view. The organizers drafted a statement
in anticipation of the expedition to explain their position with regard to
the Chou Tzu-yu case. They acknowledged that, since young people in
mainland China and in Taiwan receive very different forms of education,
differences do exist:
but anyone who wants to make money on the mainland of China must
respect the nation. She can choose to stay in Taiwan, doing whatever and
saying whatever she likes, which has nothing to do with us. What’s more, as
far as we are concerned, she is just a teenager and it’s shameless of her com-
pany to have forced her to make an apology. Neither the Chinese govern-
ment nor the Chinese media forced her to do that or forced her out.
Many Taiwanese Facebook users made fun of the fact that the mainland
“warriors” had to climb over the firewall in order to defend the regime,
and asked what there was to love about a country that does not allow
freedom of information. In response, a mainland participant, @Li Yongqi,

made the following rather sophisticated argument:
To put it simply, the Party represents the collective interest of 80 million

Party members. The government represents the collective interest of all civil
servants and bureaucrats. The nation represents the collective interest of all
Chinese.
Sometimes these three entities have common interests, for example in

defending the unification of the nation, in economic development and in
improving people’s livelihood.
At other times, they have conflicting interests. A typical example is the Great
Firewall. The Party and the government built the wall so as to prevent
Chinese people from having access to rumors from the outside world.
Regardless of the credibility of those rumors, neither the Party nor the gov-
ernment would be able to dispute them. So they thought it would be easier
to simply block everything.
This is against the national interest of 1.3 billion Chinese people because,
aside from political information, there is useful economic and academic
information much needed by the people that is also blocked. Here the Party
and the government betray the interest of the nation.
The D8 Expedition is in order to defend the unification of the country and

is certainly consistent with the national interest. But circumventing the
Firewall is against the interests of the Party and the government.
However, the national interest should always by default take priority over
the interests of the Party and the government. Hence the expedition is not
only just, but should be praised.
As for you guys who keep saying “your country,” I think what you meant
was actually “your Party” or “your government” rather than “your China.”
You can step out of the collective interests of the Party and the government,
but still defend the interest of the nation.
The affective intelligence of the Little Pinkos is manifest not only in

their capacity to acquire information, create content, disseminate mes-
sages, engage in debate and mobilize support; they are also vigilant against
the state’s attempts at co-option, which again challenges the state-centric
140 B. MENG
interpretation of the event. The state censors’ first response was to control
publicity about the campaign—in fact they are extremely wary of any kind
of mass mobilization, regardless of the ideological position, be it the right-
wing, quasi-religious Falun Gong (Zhao, 2003) or labor unrest (Lee,
2007). The organizers arranged for live webcasting of the event on several
platforms. A couple of hours into the expedition, just as participants were
deeply immersed in the exciting performative communication with neti-
zens across the Taiwan Strait, they found the webcasts being shut down
one after another (H. Zhao, 2016). No matter how strong the argument
the Little Pinkos could make in distinguishing between the Party, the state
and the nation, they could not do away with the irony that a patriotic
campaign defending a key state policy was actually causing concern to the
government. As with many other cases of censorship, however, what mat-
ters most is the gesture itself rather than whether a total suppression of
information was achieved. The cancellation of the live webcast sought to
contain the impact of the event, but was not intended to eliminate the
topic from public discussion. On the following day, January 21, 2016, the
Global Times, a nationalist subsidiary of the People’s Daily Press Group,
published an editorial piece with the awkward title: “No Need to
Exaggerate the Negative Impact of the Di Ba Expedition on Cross-Strait
Relations” (Global Times, 2016). The Party organ’s endorsement is a
reluctant one, to say the least. The event was first and foremost framed as
having negative consequences, then partly redeemed by being described as
not entirely detrimental to cross-strait relations.
Other state agencies were more forthcoming. A few days later, on
January 26, the official Weibo account of the Communist Youth League
of China, which is the youth division of the CCP, published a long piece
that tried to define the Little Pinkos in a patronizing and sexist manner.
The post refers to the Facebook Expedition as a definitive moment that
made a name for the Little Pinkos on the Chinese internet. It then traces
the origin of the term to Jinjiang Literary City, before offering a portrait
of the group:
They don’t understand network security, and always post lots of photos on
their social media accounts. They don’t know much about online public
opinion either, yet they are fighters on this battleground … They don’t care
about politics and probably cannot even tell the difference between the
“Left” and the “Right,” but they are born with a sense of justice … Even
though they are subject to all kinds of slander and defamation, they remain
sweet and innocent … Little Pinkos are our sisters, our daughters and the
girl next door who we have a crush on. Let’s all protect them.
The Youth League has shifted its communication style in recent years in
order to better reach the young generation. Its Weibo account has been
experimenting with expressions and rhetoric borrowed from youth cul-
ture, with varying degrees of success. This time the attempt to co-opt the
Little Pinkos completely backfired. The message was reposted many times
and was so widely criticized that the Youth League had to delete it only a
few hours after posting (X. Wang, 2016). Many commentators, self-
identified as Little Pinkos or not, took issue with the patriarchal tone and
rejected the profiling. One of the comments says:
So, to put it in the language that common people can understand, Little
Pinkos are the girls that dirty uncles in the Youth League can put their hands
on. Apparently these girls have just grown out of adolescence, but intellec-
tually they’re still immature.
Another says:
Look: “don’t understand network security,” “don’t know much about

online public opinion” and “don’t care about politics”—all these essentially
translate into one word, “stupid.” “Born with a sense of justice” meaning
patriotic. So Little Pinkos are stupid and patriotic. Do you think if you put
stupid together with any big word such as patriotic, is that supposed to be a
compliment?
Yet another says: “translation: although you Little Pinkos are superficial
and stupid, although you don’t understand a thing about either technol-
ogy or politics, we love you for being sweet and innocent, and for acting
as our running dog.”
For some, online nationalist campaigns such as the Facebook Expedition
deserve skepticism, if not downright criticism. One reason is that emotion-
ally charged online mobs are a digression from the Habermasian model of
the public sphere, since they do not engage in rational debate (Hughes,
2000, 2006). This argument would seem to neglect both the significance
of emotion in any kind of political participation (Dahlberg, 2005; Mouffe,
1999; Young, 2002), which critics of the orthodox Habermasian public
sphere have pointed out, and the ample evidence suggesting a high level of
media literacy and deliberation (in addition to this case, see also Han, 2015;
142 B. MENG
Zhou, 2005). Concern about the negative consequences of cyber-national-

ism could also be related to the critique I made earlier in this chapter of the
way the internet is taken for granted as a privileged point of access point to
the society as a whole. As much as the internet favors emotional bonding
and rational deliberation, it is a platform for the performance of identities
(Cover, 2012; Nakamura, 2013; Vrooman, 2002). Therefore we need to
be careful in making an equivalence between what we see on the internet
and how things are in reality. After all, the internet amplifies the voices of
those who know how to work the medium.
The other common criticism of groups like the “voluntary fifty-cent
army” and the Little Pinkos concerns their conformity with official ideol-
ogy. The argument goes that, since nationalism has become a crucial source
of legitimation in post-socialist China, nationalist sentiments are often
encouraged, or even manipulated by the state. Even when cases of cyber-
nationalism are genuinely spontaneous, they will do little to push forward
a progressive social cause, since they are driven by consensus rather than
contention (Guo & Yang, 2016; Yang, 2016). It is true that nationalism
has always been an integral part of the Chinese project of socialist modern-
ization. Together with the socialist ambition for equality and justice, and
the developmental drive to overcome economic backwardness, national
pride in unity, sovereignty and autonomy is the third force that underlies
“the Chinese desire for distinction and international recognition” (Lin,
2006, p. 60). There is a dynamic balance between these three elements.
When socialist conviction becomes weaker, nationalism and developmen-
talism will grow stronger in order to sustain the legitimacy of the regime.
To label the campaign as consensus-driven, however, limits appreciation of
a multifaceted Chinese state and a stratified Chinese society, both of which
I have discussed in earlier sections of this chapter. Different state agencies
responded differently to the Facebook event, ranging from a modest effort
toward control to an aggressive attempt at co-option. “Society” also takes
different views. On Chinese social media platforms such as zhihu.com,4 the
interpretation and assessment of the expedition varied, with some people
celebrating the triumph, some ridiculing the event as completely pointless,
while others were saying that the biggest winner in this whole thing was
Facebook (https://www.zhihu.com/question/39663757). Previous
activities of the “voluntary fifty-cent army,” including the statement on
www.m4.cn mentioned earlier, suggest that they were engaging with ideo-
logical opponents within Chinese society (Han, 2015). Similarly, Little
Pinkos would also refer to “public intellectuals” or “liberal elites” in an
ironic or critical manner. In other words, the realm of public opinion in
China has become diversified across many different sectors. There is not
necessarily a general consensus, even concerning the issue of nationalism.
Calling All “Spendthrift Chicks”

If Little Pinkos represent gendered subjects of nationalism, another even
more famous term, “Spendthrift Chicks,” denotes gendered subjects of
consumerism. On November 11, 2015, the arena inside the Beijing
National Aquatics Centre was packed. The stage looked spectacular, with
a huge screen erected in front of the audience and beaming live updates
from all over China. All the performers were A-list celebrities, including
Hollywood superstars like Kevin Spacey and Daniel Craig. The atmo-
sphere was jubilant and reached a climax with the countdown to mid-
night. One might have mistaken this for the Chinese Spring Festival Gala
that CCTV produces every year, attracting both domestic and overseas
Chinese audiences for the celebration of the Lunar New Year. But this
event, organized by the e-commerce company Alibaba, sought to bring
together another type of imagined community, not a nationalist, but a
consumerist one.
Initially 11.11, or “Double Eleven,” was an event aimed only at Chinese
college students and known as “Singleton’s Day,” playing on the four
“ones” that form the date November 11. From 2009, several major online
retailers decided to offer significant discounts on their websites on 11.11,
in an attempt to boost sales between the National Day holiday in October
and the Christmas season. In 2012, Alibaba registered the trademark
“11.11 Carnival” and, within the short span of the following four years,
the e-commerce giant successfully turned a self-mocking joke among
youngsters into a national shopping festival. Moreover, a highly gendered
discourse of consumerism arose online during this process, culminating in
the term “Spendthrift Chicks” (败家娘们). Not only are female bodies
used in advertisements to sell commodities, but women are targeted by
these campaigns as the most important consumers. This emphasis on the
female consumer was clear in 2014, when, after another record-breaking
Double Eleven sale, the CEO of Alibaba, Jack Ma, thanked all Chinese
women for always thinking about others, observing that “they are cer-
tainly making the purchase not just for themselves, but also for their par-
ents, their husbands and their children” (Ifeng Tech, 2014). Two of the
top five product types recording the highest sales in the 2015 Double
Eleven sale, cosmetics and baby/maternity products, specifically target
women. Purchasing decisions in the other three categories, namely home
144 B. MENG
appliances, smartphones and clothing, also rest predominantly with

women. A 2007 Ernst & Young report on China claimed that 78 percent
of married women were in charge of making decisions about everyday
expenditure and clothing purchases for the family (Zhang & Liu, 2007).
Expressing his gratitude for the purchasing power of female consumers,
Jack Ma observed that women accounted for 70 percent of buyers on
Alibaba and that “without them, Alibaba would never have been able to
launch its IPO on NYSE” (Ifeng Tech, 2014).
Originating from a song by Daqing and Xiaofang (大庆小芳), an online
singing duo known for their unassuming style and down-to-earth lyrics,
“Spendthrift Chicks” (败家娘们) has become a catchphrase for Double
Eleven and online shopping. The song depicts a quarrel between a hard-
working husband and a housewife. The husband reproaches his wife for her
endless material demands, such as constant upgrading to the latest model
iPhone. She is portrayed in the song as “spending all day doing her make-up
and humming around in her little red dress.” The wife taunts the husband,
emphasizing that she spends all day taking care of the children, cooking and
doing laundry without much compensation, and implying that the husband
should reflect on his own incompetence in earning money rather than ques-
tioning her spending habits: “I didn’t ask you for a new car or a bigger
house; look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.” In the end the couple reach an
agreement that a husband should always take good care of his wife because
she is the one who does all the housework and makes him happy. The lyrics
of the song unabashedly promote a conventional gendered division of labor
that fixes women’s role as “consumers-in-chief” who support and motivate
men as breadwinners. They depict the “housewifization” (Mies, 1986) of
urban Chinese women, whose subjectivity is defined by feminine beauty and
motherhood, both heavily mediated through consumption.
The term spendthrift chicks is pejorative, yet playful, and has quickly
seeped into institutional and popular discourses. Liang Haiming, an econ-
omist and columnist for Sina Finance, emphasized after Double Eleven in
2014 the importance of boosting Chinese women’s consumption, noting
that “from the traditional women who raise children and assist their hus-
bands … to those ‘Spendthrift Chicks’ who could not refrain from splurg-
ing … It is not exaggerating to say that women hold up half, if not more
than half, of the sky for the Chinese economy” (Liang, 2014). While the
Maoist rhetoric of women “holding up half the sky” emphasized women’s
equal participation in public affairs and social production, by contrast
Liang focuses on encouraging women’s consumption in order to bring the
economy out of stagnation.
Chinese spendthrift chicks were also hailed in the Weibo post in Fig. 5.1
as saviors of the US economy. Alipay, the online payment division of
Alibaba, claimed that, thanks to free postage and direct purchase from
overseas retailers on Black Friday 2015, sales volume increased 30-fold
compared with the previous year. More than 75 percent of online shop-
pers were reported to be Chinese women aged between 25 and 40. The
Weibo post also details the top-selling products, such as face masks, face
cream, handbags and “shapewear” leggings, praising the “high standard
that young Chinese young women hold for their own figures.”
Although the interpellation of spendthrift chicks seems directed at all
women, not everyone in an increasingly stratified post-socialist China is
able to join in conspicuous consumption. The thinly-veiled classism of the
Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of Alipay Weibo entry

146 B. MENG
term is made crystal clear in the two pictures in Figs. 5.2 and 5.3, which
contrast spendthrift chicks with “thrifty wives” (省钱媳妇). The origin of
this juxtaposition is hard to trace, but the pair of photos appeared on
online forums and social media, particularly around the time of Double
Eleven in 2015. The joke starts by asking women “what kind of wife do
you aspire to be? Spendthrift or thrifty?” and the text points to the photos,
saying “this is what they look like in the eyes of men.” The first picture,
captioned “thrifty wives,” shows a group of middle-aged women from
rural China with modest clothing and no make-up. They appear to be
singing, but only one of them seems, somewhat sheepishly, to be looking
at the camera. The second picture is captioned “spendthrift chicks.” It
features the same number of younger and slender women, all dressed in
perfectly color-coordinated fashionable outfits. They have long wavy hair,
are wearing heavy make-up and are looking confidently at the camera,
which imitates a male gaze (Mulvey, 1975). The two pictures metaphorically
constitute a historical juxtaposition between the “iron woman” from the
Mao era who bears no trace of femininity and the “modernized” woman
who “liberates” her true nature and beauty. What is more, the “makeover”
Fig. 5.2 Spendthrift Chicks vs. Thrifty Wives

Fig. 5.3 Spendthrift Chicks vs. Thrifty Wives
paradigm that underlines the appeal of personal transformation (Sender,

2006) is articulated with consumption. Hence the answer to the question
is obvious: femininity is defined by ability to consume, which in turn
sculpts female bodies into objects of male desire.
The discourse around spendthrift chicks is exemplary in articulating
state patriarchy and consumer capitalism—the two key components of
patriarchal capitalism. Young, affluent and shopaholic women are hailed as
the driving force behind the national, and even the global, economy, and
the discourse projects them as the norm of female subjectivity. The bour-
geois reference to spendthrift chicks is reminiscent of the “post-feminist
masquerade” that feminist scholars in the West have critiqued (Banet-
Weiser, 2012; Gill, 2007; McRobbie, 2007, 2009; Ringrose & Walkerdine,
2008). McRobbie (2007) argues, for example, that the fashion and beauty
system in the “advanced democracies” of the West has displaced the tradi-
tional mode of patriarchal authority in order to reinstate young women
into the repertoire of femininity. Two analogies illustrate how the gender
148 B. MENG
order is always an integral part of an overall political economic structure.

Post-feminist discourse ascended in the 1990s concurrently with the neo-
liberal turn in the United Kingdom and the United States, when the wel-
fare state had been in retreat since the 1980s and women were incessantly
being reminded to improve their competitiveness through the right kind
of consumption. The call for Chinese women to take great pride in being
savvy shoppers emerged at a time when the state was withdrawing from its
aspirations to employment equity. In addition, this discursive construction
of bourgeois femininity is contingent upon the designation of an “abject”
(Tyler, 2013). In the United Kingdom, for instance, working-class women
are the “identificatory sites of desire, disgust, and fear of failure in the
constitution of rational, reflexive subjectivity” (Ringrose & Walkerdine,
2008, p. 242). In China, it is the population of rural migrant women that
is deemed to be in need of transformation (Anagnost, 2004; Pun, 2003;
Sun, 2010). The “thrifty wives” in the above picture are located in the
uneducated, “low-quality” (suzhi di) group that is yet to become, via con-
sumption, a sophisticated and attractive group. Nonetheless, compared
with the post-feminist notion of “girl power” (McRobbie, 2007) that
simultaneously addresses young women’s capacity and rising income in
the Western context, the spendthrift chicks interpellated by the Double
Eleven discourse appear to be fixed in the conventional gender role and as
financially dependent.
The phenomenon of spendthrift chicks emerged at a time in China
when state capitalism has been overriding socialist institutions, with patri-
archal ideology further intensified through consumerism. Ironically, as the
intersectionality of class and gender become increasingly manifest in
Chinese society (Song & Hird, 2014, p. 26), the state, corporations and
consumers are converging on multilayered discursive practices that
denounce socialist feminism for its gender-blindness while celebrating
consumption-based femininity. The patriarchal capitalist ideology articu-
lated through spendthrift chicks and the current political economy of
China are mutually constitutive. Given the recent history of Chinese
socialism, this ideology gains potency particularly by positioning itself as
the liberal counterpoint to a state feminism that subsumes women’s libera-
tion within the class struggle. The socialist feminist project of emancipa-
tion from feudalist and capitalist patriarchy has been usurped by the
consumerist project of emancipation through capitalist patriarchy. Nothing
illustrates this shift more vividly than a series of spoofs of socialist posters
that circulated online during Double Eleven.
A Google search for images and texts in Mandarin depicting spendthrift

chicks yields a kaleidoscope of online parodies that appropriate socialist
propaganda posters to celebrate and mobilize online consumption, many
of which are heavily gendered. Figures 5.4 and 5.5 contrast an anti-
American poster from the Korean War period with a spoof that appeared
on social media before the 2016 Double Eleven shopping festival. Two
male soldiers, one wearing the People’s Liberation Army uniform and the
other in civilian clothes with a Mao badge pinned to his coat, occupy most
of the picture. They both appear to express outrage and vigilance, and to
be staring down at the enemies in front of them. The man at the back is
holding a grenade, while the one at the front has his right hand on the
trigger of a rifle while his left hand forms a stop sign and faces the enemy.
They are standing on snow-covered ground with the silhouettes of pine
trees as a backdrop—clear references to the setting in which the Korean
War took place. In the original poster, there are more soldiers in the back-
ground, together with a large bulletin board reading “no invasion would
be allowed into the sacred land of China.” These are removed in the par-
ody. At the bottom of the picture, the original caption says: “we will not
attack unless we are attacked, if we are attacked, we will certainly counter-
attack.” This is changed in the new version to “Double Eleven, stay vigi-
lant against fire, theft and spendthrifts.” While the masculine figures in the
original poster are poised to protect the motherland from imperialist
Fig. 5.4 Korean War poster and its parody

150 B. MENG
Fig. 5.5 Korean War poster and its parody
intruders, in the spoof the men take on the task of defending their savings
and property against shopaholic women. A patriarchal tone underpins the
juxtaposition. While the original socialist poster features heroic sons pro-
tecting the motherland from imperialist intruders, in the spoof the men
take on the task of defending their hard-earned assets against shopaholic
women.
The second pair of posters (Figs. 5.6 and 5.7) feature a young woman
in militia uniform standing in front of a photo from a staging of The Legend
of the Red Lantern, one of the eight model plays that constituted the offi-
cial repertoire during the Cultural Revolution. This modernized Peking
Opera tells the story of how Li Tiemei, whose parents sacrificed their lives
in the underground struggle against Japanese invasion, followed in their
footsteps and became a revolutionary. In the original poster, the caption
on the left says “I shall aspire to become someone like that,” which was
Tiemei’s line in the play after she heard the stories of her parents. At the
bottom it says “carrying out the revolution until the very end.” The par-
ody eliminates the message at the bottom of the picture and changes the
caption to “I shall aspire to become an extravagant woman.” A recon-
struction of desire (Rofel, 2007) is manifest in this pair of posters.
The third Double Eleven parody (Figs. 5.8 and 5.9) is based on another
widely circulated socialist poster from the late 1970s, which promotes the
alliance of workers and peasants. Two women seem to be earnestly shaking
Fig. 5.6 The Legend of the Red Lantern poster and its parody
hands, one dressed like a factory worker, the other as a farmer. Behind
them, machinery and sacks are piled high on a truck and on a tractor,
which seems to confirm their respective identities. Red flags and a red ban-
ner can be seen farther away in the background. In the spoof the original
slogan “workers and peasants marching forward hand in hand” is changed
to “share your Taobao5 link with me now!”
Socialist symbols are being appropriated to re-signify a consumerist ide-
ology. Zhao and Belk (2008, p. 231) analyze how advertising has reconfig-
ured “both key political symbolism and communist propaganda strategies”
152 B. MENG
Fig. 5.7 The Legend of the Red Lantern poster and its parody
to promote consumption during China’s political and economic transition

from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Li (2008, p. 1125) points out that
Chinese advertisers often “sell nationalism by celebrating Chinese history,
contemporary events, and Chinese lineage.” Yet, social media posts cele-
brating the Double Eleven Shopping Festival differ from earlier advertising
campaigns in two ways. There is, first, a shift from p
roduction to consump-
tion. Be they Changhong TV naming its main product line “the red sun,”
or Maotai liquor’s slogan of “carry on the spirit of the Long March6 and
rejuvenate national industry,” advertisements utilizing socialist symbols
can be read as seeking to build a brand by invoking developmentalist and
Fig. 5.8 The Worker–Peasant Alliance poster and its parody
Fig. 5.9 The Worker–Peasant Alliance poster and its parody

154 B. MENG
nationalist elements of socialism. The underlying message is that a strong

nation requires strong economic growth, which in turn is driven by pro-
duction. In contrast, the Double Eleven spoofs impoverish the original
connotations of the socialist posters. The variety of politicized passions in
the Mao era is now being homogenized and channeled through a passion
for consumption. The spoof posters fetishize consumption as the basis for
mass mobilization (Fig. 5.5), for developing shared experience and social
ties (Fig. 5.9) and as the ultimate life aspiration (Fig. 5.7). Thus “the pro-
ductivist logic of Maoist China has now been replaced by a consuming
desire, construing a yearning for setting China on the rail of global moder-
nity” (Pun, 2003, p. 487). The argument is that, as the global economy
slows down, what China has lost as a world factory can be compensated for
only via strength as a market for global products. As manifested in the
Chinese premier’s congratulatory message to Alibaba, driving up domestic
consumer demand is the government’s priority in its efforts to boost and
sustain economic growth. In this context, the performativity (Butler,
1990) of Double Eleven speech acts is even more significant than the
actual sales figures, since these are key steps toward the construction of a
gendered consumer subject.
Second, as much as sexism has always been present in advertising, these
texts drawn from social media posts stand out in their interpellation of
women as consumers and only as consumers. Women appear in socialist
posters in a wide range of professions—workers, farmers, soldiers, scien-
tists—taking an active part in building and defending the collective proj-
ect. Even when they are alluded to on rare occasions as wives and mothers,
with their husbands and children in the same image, women are never
assigned only a domestic role. They are depicted as model socialist workers
who proudly show their children their certificates of commendation, or as
conscientious citizens responding to the government’s call for family plan-
ning. The Double Eleven spoofs subvert the history and ideology of
Chinese state feminism. The multiple female roles in social life are reduced
to the single role of consumer by the discursive practices of Double Eleven,
which are collectively constructed by the state, the private sector, the
media, and middle-class internet users. Instead of men and women defend-
ing the nation, a gendered war between men as breadwinners and women
as spendthrifts is presented. Such reversion to the conventional gender
division of labor repudiates the progress made on gender equality in social-
ist China and reduces the care work women provide for the family to com-
modity purchasing (Brown, 2015, pp. 104–105). Although Double
Eleven spoofs reject the ethos of socialism, they effectively take advantage
of the rhetorical style of socialist propaganda, which is direct, with little or
no room for contestation or ambivalence. The mode of address in the
original posters is an example of what Althusser (2008, p. 47) calls “hail-
ing” where “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as con-
crete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.” While
the socialist state called on its citizens to contribute to a common project,
consumerist ideology hails its subjects as women who define their feminin-
ity through individualistic consumption.
A highly gendered discourse of consumerism is nothing new. What
makes the genealogy of spendthrift chicks worth pondering on is how
e-commerce has become an important site for the undoing of socialist
feminism, and more broadly the undoing of the whole socialist legacy. The
shift from state feminism to patriarchal capitalism was driven by the com-
bined force of market, state, and liberal intellectuals, coupled with what
Rofel (2007) calls a “desiring public” keen to shed the political burden of
the Mao era. In Mao’s China, class subjectivity was “the defining mark not
just of one’s humanity but of one’s role in historical progress” (Rofel,
2007, p. 22; see also Lin, 2014; Wu, 2014). After the Cultural Revolution,
as the Party-state’s priority changed from class struggle oriented toward
egalitarianism to economic growth aimed at prosperity, the political pas-
sion of Chinese people gave way to other sentiments such as material,
sexual and affective longings (Rofel, 2007). Around the same time,
Chinese intellectuals engaged in a lively debate about “humanity” (renx-
ing) and “humanism” (rendao zhuyi), notions which had been deemed
“bourgeois” in Maoist China (Wang, 1996). An important component of
this debate was the attempt by female writers and scholars to retrieve
“femininity” and “womanhood” after the era of so-called “socialist
androgyny” (Young, 1989). Propelled by the desire to embark on a new
route toward China’s modernization and by the subjectivity of modern
women, in these discussions of femininity and womanhood the diverse
and complicated experiences of women in socialist China7 were often con-
densed into the stereotypical image of the “iron girl” who behaved in the
same way as men and bore no trace of femininity. This image was largely
rejected by the younger generation of Chinese women for its lack of
“female essence” (nvxing qizhi). For those born after the Cultural
Revolution, liberation is understood as freedom from state control and
from an over-politicized daily life, rather than as being emancipated from
the oppression of feudalist and capitalist patriarchy. Women’s emancipation,
156 B. MENG
once a collective project premised in China on participation in socialist

production, is now broken down into dispersed individual efforts chan-
neled through consumption.
Achieving a Good Life Through Good Parenting

The third example that further challenges the monolithic view of Chinese
society and foregrounds the disciplinary power of the market has to do
with the parenting discourses circulating on WeChat, which is by far the
most popular social media platform in China. This does not seem the most
obvious angle for addressing internet-mediated politics, for two reasons.
Most research on the Chinese internet, even if not always referring to
Habermas, tends to evaluate mediated politics in the digital realm against
the normative ideal of a liberal bourgeois public sphere. Although there is
less optimism about the internet contributing to democratization of China
compared with a decade ago, the research focus is still on the rise and fall
of civil society. Here civil society is conceptualized as “the genuine domain
of private autonomy that stood opposed to the state” (Habermas, 1989,
p. 12). Capitalist market economies formed the basis of this civil society
(Calhoun, 1992, pp. 7–8). In an authoritarian country where the omni-
present state is considered the most powerful entity restricting individual
autonomy and freedom, the prospect of an expanding civil society enabled
by digital networks is particularly appealing (Chen, 2014; Hung, 2013; Li
& Li, 2017; Tai, 2006; G. Yang, 2003a, 2003b; Zhang, 2016; Zhang &
Shaw, 2015). There is much less discussion, however, of the inequality and
exclusion inherent in the market-based mechanism of civic engagement.
For example, other than a handful of scholarly works (Qiu, 2009; Sun &
Guo, 2013; Wu, 2012; Xing, 2012; Zhao, 2008), very little research
focuses on, or even acknowledges, class conflicts and struggles in Chinese
cyberspace. Middle-class parenting advice is a fruitful discursive site for
studying social stratification and the classed formation of subjectivity. The
second reason, also related to the Habermasian framework and even less
often addressed than the first, is the problematic demarcation of public
and private. Feminist scholars have used the example of domestic violence
to argue against any naturally given notion of public matters and an
a-priori boundary between “common good” and “private interest.” It is
through discursive contestation that the agenda of common concern
could be determined, and this would not necessarily be agreed on by
everyone (Fraser, 1992, pp. 128–129). Viewed from the conventional
liberal democratic perspective, the issue of parenting falls squarely into the
private domain and is excluded from public concerns. I would argue, how-
ever, that discourses around the ideal and practices of parenting provide
useful materials that offer unique insights into the subjectivity of the
Chinese bourgeoisie. To a great extent, middle-class identity, agenda,
positionality and aspiration are all distilled in parents’ anxiety over bring-
ing about a good life for their children.
The empirical material for this section was collected in two ways:
through thematic and discourse analysis of parenting advice offered by
WeChat Public Accounts (微信公众号) and through in-depth interviews
with urban, middle-class mothers. The highly gendered division of labor
in parenting is another pervasive issue, but is not the focus of my discus-
sion here.
Before looking into the discursive construction of good parenting, I
shall first turn attention to the social context engendering the significant
growth of parenting-related content on WeChat. It has been well docu-
mented by social research that the growing Chinese middle class put chil-
dren’s education as one of their top priorities (Goodman, 2014,
pp. 109–116; Rocca, 2017, pp. 21–69). Rosen (2004) recalls the telling
story of Liu Yiting, who was accepted into Harvard with a full scholarship
in 1999 at the age of 18. Her parents wrote a book called Harvard Girl
Liu Yiting to proudly recount how they prepared their daughter from
birth to enter America’s most prestigious university. The book instantly
became required reading for Chinese parents, selling 1.1 million copies in
2001. It even triggered a string of imitations, such as Harvard Boy,
Cambridge Girl, and Tokyo University Boy (Rosen, 2004, p.43).
Highlighting a similar ethos, Vanessa Fong (2006) titled her book on the
first cohort of youth born under China’s one-child policy between 1979
and 1986 Only Hope. According to a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
report, 70 percent of Beijing parents aged between 35 and 44 said the
only purpose of their family savings was to pay for their children’s educa-
tion, and about 60 percent of Chinese families in major cities now spend
one-third of their monthly income on this (Xinhua, 2007). More recent
research by both global consulting firms (Goldman Sachs, 2015; ICEF,
2016) and social scientists (Crabb, 2010) continues to underline urban,
middle-class parents’ willingness to invest in their children’s education,
and their deep anxiety over the next generation’s upward mobility.
Such anxiety is further exacerbated by the increasing commercialization
of education at every level and the rapid commodification of all sorts of
158 B. MENG
educational products and services. Driven by the “fear of not getting

ahead” (Crabb, 2010, p. 399), middle-class parents start fretting over the
“right choice” the moment their children are born, or even before they
are born. Alluding to the famous Chinese saying “Don’t let the child lose
at the starting line,” a recent Hong Kong TVB documentary entitled No
Starting Line featured a middle-class couple determined to have their
forthcoming child “win in the womb”—referring to the fact that certain
highly selective kindergartens only admit a small number of children born
during a specific period of the year. The insecurities of middle-class parents
about their children’s future are certainly not unique to China. Ehrenreich
(1989) attributes the “retreat from liberalism” by the professional middle
class in America between the 1950s and the 1980s to a “fear of falling.”
She points out that the creation of “professionals” as a category was
designed as much to keep people out as to let them in. Unlike the truly
wealthy, who are sure that their children will also be wealthy, the profes-
sional middle class now worry that their children may not be able to gain
admission to the club they themselves are in. Middle-class parents discov-
ered that the barriers erected to exclude other lower classes from moving
up could also be placed in the way of middle-class youth, and this discov-
ery lead to “pervasive and deep-seated anxiety.” However, unlike the
American middle class in the 1980s, whose key reference points were the
counterculture movement of the 1960s, and the neoconservatives, who
had co-opted the American working class as representing traditional
American values, the newly emerged Chinese middle class on the one
hand rejects the socialist values of egalitarianism and collectivity, while on
the other hand embracing neoliberal tenets of “valorized subjectivity”
(Ong, 1999, p. 19). Parenting, which includes, but goes far beyond,
investing in education, is therefore the fundamental provision that
increases children’s market value so that they can gain an advantageous
position in cut-throat competition.
As mentioned in my discussion in the previous chapter of different
types of reality show participants, suzhi discourse has emerged as a new
form of governmentality in the recent decades. The growing importance
of suzhi in post-Mao China has to do with two major propaganda cam-
paigns, on population planning and on educational reform, both of which
are closely related to parenting. When the government introduced its
birth-control policy in the late 1970s, the rationale was explained as
improving the quality of the population (人口素质) by reducing the quan-
tity. Later in the 1980s, China’s education reformers started to use the
term suzhi jiaoyu (education for quality) to describe the type of well-
rounded education they advocated, as opposed to yingshi jiaoyu (test-
driven education) and shengxue jiaoyu (education for the purpose of
testing on to the next level) (Kipnis, 2006, pp. 298–299). Throughout
the 1990s, suzhi jiaoyu was constantly emphasized, if not always explained.
Since the phrase formally entered national education policy in 1999, “all
proposals for education reform, no matter how contradictory, are described
as suzhi jiaoyu” (Kipnis, 2006, p.300). The bestseller Harvard Girl Liu
Yiting was very much riding on the wave of suzhi jiaoyu. The mother care-
fully reported every step taken to cultivate Liu Yiting’s suzhi, from eating
the right food during pregnancy to going to the right kind of place on
family vacations so as to broaden the girl’s mind. It is true that, as Kipnis
(2006) aptly points out, the broad connotations of suzhi can be traced to
state-policy concerns over eugenics that started at the beginning of the
twentieth century, as well as to the popular tradition of self-cultivation.
Hence it is problematic to “view neoliberalism as an overarching context
within which a more limited suzhi discourse operates” (Kipnis, 2007,
p. 395), as some anthropologists seem to suggest (Anagnost, 2004; Pun,
2003; Yan, 2003). Instead, Kipnis urges more context-specific analysis dif-
ferentiating between various forms of neoliberalism and non-liberal think-
ing. I would argue that the obsession of Chinese urban middle-class
parents with improving children’s suzhi (quality) has a strong neoliberal
component in terms of treating human life as a new site of capital accumu-
lation. This neoliberal component is further intensified through two
mechanisms underpinning the mediated discourse of parenting, namely
surveillance and commodification.
As one of the three dominant internet companies in China, Tencent
boasts an impressive record when it comes to its most successful product.
Launched in January 2011, WeChat reached 50 million users in only 10
months (Harwit, 2016) and has enjoyed a 35 percent yearly increase in
user numbers. By the end of 2016, its daily active users reached 800 mil-
lion, with 50 percent of these using WeChat for more than 90 minutes
every day (Tencent, 2016). The rapid growth of WeChat has been accom-
panied by the decline in users on other social media platforms, especially
Weibo. Harwit delineates the evolution of this social media platform by
retrieving the gradual development of its wide range of functions. From
the end of 2012 to the middle of 2015, microblog use fell from about 300
million users to 200 million users. However, during this period, WeChat
tripled its base from less than 200 million to 600 million users (Harwit,
160 B. MENG
2016, p.9). According to a report released by Tencent in 2015, 28 percent

of data content consumed by WeChat users was through various WeChat
functions, while only 5 percent of their data consumption was through
Weibo (Tencent, 2015). In other words, WeChat users consume far more
content on WeChat than any other app. As the popularity of the app
expands, more and more services are being offered via WeChat, including
taxis, hospital appointments, restaurant bookings, takeout ordering, travel
bookings, banking and online shopping, all of which further reinforce the
power of the platform.
Three of WeChat’s functionalities are particularly relevant to the circu-
lation of parenting discourse. The Moment function allows users to post
messages and photos that are visible to everyone on their contact list. The
Group function is indispensable for urban, middle-class parents—all the
mothers I talked to belong to at least one, and often between three and
five, parenting-related WeChat groups. WeChat is the preferred channel
for parents to exchange information about school life, to communicate
with teachers, to arrange playdates and small-group activities, and to dis-
cuss every topic that has to do with child-rearing. The third and most
important feature is WeChat’s Public Account (also referred to as “official
account”) function, which allows individuals and small businesses to set
up their own channel for content distribution. Generally speaking, com-
munication on WeChat is more close-knit than on Weibo, because indi-
vidual account users can only communicate with those already on their
contact list. The current upper limit for group membership is 500, which
restricts the scale of broad-based communication. But a Public Account,
which anyone can set up as long as they follow the registration procedure,
provides a form of “one-to-many” communication by allowing an unlim-
ited number of subscribers to access the textual and visual messages
released. By late 2014, almost 80 percent of WeChat users were following
Public Accounts, with the top two reasons being to “get information”
(41.1 percent) and to “complement their lifestyle” (36.6 percent)
(Tencent, 2015). Small- to medium-sized businesses are especially keen to
invest in Public Accounts, so as to have a strong presence on the most
popular social media platform. Parenting-related public accounts mush-
roomed, offering a wide variety of specialized content, from child devel-
opment to study abroad agencies, from online English courses to liberal
arts education. Some of these are on the WeChat channel for existing
businesses, while others are first set up as interest groups, but soon find a
way to cash in on the anxiety of urban, middle-class parents. Generally

speaking, the technological affordances of WeChat are conducive to small-
group, interest-based discussion and to niche marketing disguised as life-
style advice.
During two research trips in March 2015 and April 2016, I conducted
a total of 16 in-depth interviews with middle-class mothers in Beijing and
Shanghai about their WeChat use related to parenting. During each inter-
view, I asked the mother to show me some of the public accounts they
subscribed to, from which I picked the top five most popular accounts and
started following these myself. Below, I first identify the main themes on
the basis of the content offered by these accounts. I then juxtapose this
with thematic analysis of interviews in order to examine the mutual con-
stitution of commercial discourse and middle-class mentality, before mak-
ing an argument about how the state, private educational businesses and
middle-class parents co-produce a set of parenting discourses with a strong
neoliberal component.
Broadly speaking, public accounts targeting urban middle-class parents
offer both educational and non-educational content. The latter includes
detailed reviews of all kinds of children’s products, information about chil-
dren’s activities and new leisure facilities in the city, travelogues and travel
tips for family vacations, and so on and so forth. Some of this genuinely
consists of sharing information or experience, but a large proportion is
essentially promotional content that offers the opportunity to purchase
products or services mentioned at a discounted price through the public
account. Chinese internet users’ group-purchasing behavior is a
well-studied phenomenon (Liu, Brock, Shi, Chu, & Tseng, 2013; Zhang
& Tsai, 2015), WeChat creates yet another channel for consumers with
similar profiles to gather and bargain for group discounts. But making
purchases through a WeChat parenting account carries with it an extra
layer of trust, peer learning and sense of community. One mother put it
this way:
I know they run promotional content every now and then, but I am not put
off by it. Actually some of this is useful information. I mean, they also have
original content about schools, about how to best interact with kids etc. It’s
not just an advertising channel, you know. Choosing the right product for
children can be overwhelming. At least I could refer to other parents’ hon-
est opinion. (BM02)8
162 B. MENG
What often happens is that, once a public account with a parenting

focus has accumulated a large number of followers, usually by offering
interest-based, non-promotional content at the beginning, on the one
hand the creator of the account will want to monetize the attention
accrued, while on the other hand companies targeting the children’s mar-
ket will start identifying the account as a potential venue for advertising.
But even when these public accounts start carrying promotional content,
they make sure it is never a hard sell, which they think will damage the
sense of community. For example, in a review article, discount purchases
were often referred to as a “bonus” (福利) or an “Easter egg” (彩蛋) for
subscribers to the account. iKids is a Shanghai-based parenting account
that distinguishes itself as being the most “high-end, classy and upper-
scale” (高大上) among its competitors and aims to “cultivate young cos-
mopolitan global citizens.”9 When iKids offered a group purchasing
opportunity for buying a Moll Children’s desk priced between RMB 5000
and RMB 7000 (US $750 and 1000), it published a detailed review sing-
ing the praises of every component of the product. But the tone was highly
personal, emphasizing how the German brand addresses a caring mother’s
every single concern about her child’s health and safety.
The educational content can be roughly categorized into two groups:
that to do with curriculum-based learning and school education, and that
to do with extra-curricular skills and emotional wellbeing. These two
types of content, wide-ranging and sophisticated as they are, are united on
two premises: (1) dissatisfaction with Chinese school education; and (2)
admiration for what Chinese parents perceive as “Western-style” (mainly
American) liberal education. As far as urban middle-class parents are con-
cerned, conventional Chinese-style schooling places too much emphasis
on rote learning and standardized skills, while neglecting critical thinking
and creative problem-solving, which are two of the most important quali-
ties (suzhi) to ensure success in global competition. Incessantly fueling
middle-class parents’ anxiety over their children’s suzhi and their adula-
tion of Western education are the booming educational businesses that
promise to make up for everything lacking in regular Chinese schools,
through a variety of commercial products and services. A large proportion
of the educational content distributed via public WeChat accounts con-
cerned with parenting is therefore about English-language learning, read-
ing children’s books by foreign authors and honing analytical writing
skills. Online courses are offered to both parents and children on a pay-
per-access basis, and phrases like “Ivy-League-trained teacher” and
“Anglo-American elite school teaching materials” are the most common

advertising lines. Two of the five parenting accounts I followed, YouthMBA
(少年商学院) and TBEducation (外滩教育), specialize in providing infor-
mation about study abroad. YouthMBA brands itself as a “mobile interna-
tional school” that brings to Chinese students “the best suzhi education
curriculum around the globe,”10 while TBEducation promises to help par-
ents “break out of the Chinese education system” by offering advice on
“cultivating capabilities and choosing the right school overseas.”11 Even
for non-academic content, the “West” is always the gold standard, which
is reflected in headlines such as “Happy Schooling in Nordic Countries,”
“Why American School Is The Best Choice For Sporty Kids,” “What’s So
Damaging About Chinese-Style Negativity,” “This Is How American
High Schools Foster Leadership,” to pick just a few.
Middle-class parents do find being bombarded with this kind of con-
tent overwhelming. One of the mothers I talked to said she had to turn off
the update alert of the parenting accounts she subscribed to, “because it
was too much. Sometimes I almost wanted to be an ostrich, just to bury
my head in the sand so that I don’t have to constantly make choices and
make comparisons.” But when asked why she did not simply unsubscribe
from some of the accounts, she said, “I don’t want to miss out. My daugh-
ter will go abroad sooner or later. I guess we need to stay informed.”
(SM15). Another interviewee talked at length about how demanding it is
to be a parent nowadays:
you need to be mentally very, very strong (心理很强大). You need to know
what exactly you want and what’s the best plan for your child. I have to
admit I don’t always know for sure. You read one thing today and you read
another piece of advice tomorrow. They might even be contradictory, or at
least you can’t really carry out everything that is good for the kid. But I look
at people like XXX or XXX in my [WeChat] friends circle—they all seem to
be strong mothers who have firm ideas. (SM12)
The enormous anxiety over “making the right choice” for the chil-
dren’s future was a recurring motif across all the interviews. As Crabb
(2010, p. 387) observes, “the growing middle class in urban China has a
fervent relationship to education,” such fervency, as much as it has to do
with the Confucian culture that has always valued education, is invigo-
rated both by the Chinese state and by a globalized education market. The
role of the state is manifest at both policy and ideological levels. The
164 B. MENG
Decisions on Educational Reform released by the Central Committee of

the CCP in 1985 was a key document that instigated a series of restructur-
ings of the Chinese education system, including moving from a central-
ized to a decentralized system, encouraging non-governmental sources of
support and investment, and diversifying the revenue base of schools and
universities. Just like many other sectors, the marketization and privatiza-
tion of education further increased in pace after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992
Southern Tour. The Law on the Promotion of Minban12 Education, passed
in 2002, and China’s accession to the WTO at the end of 2001 further
opened up the Chinese education market to international investors and
companies.
What is more significant is the changing orientation of education, from
political socialization in the Maoist era to optimizing human capital so as
to win in global competition. The 1985 document invoked Deng
Xiaoping’s famous proclamation, made in 1983, that education needs to
be “geared towards modernization, geared towards the world, geared
towards the future.” The document also mentioned in several places that
the goal of the Chinese education system should be “producing more
human talent” and improving “the quality (suzhi) of the nation.” From
the 1990s onwards, the “quality of the nation” (民族素质) has been more
explicitly linked to the quality of individuals. Crabb (2010) summarizes
the “success schema of reform-era China” in this way: “the focused, moti-
vated student, constantly acquiring new knowledge, skills, and credentials,
transforms into the entrepreneurial, self-actualizing, pragmatic and tech-
nologically sophisticated consumer and modern citizen of a globalized
China” (Crabb, 2010, p. 388). Anagnost (2004) points out that suzhi
discourse works ideologically to displace class discourse in talking about
social hierarchy and inequality. “The body that is recognized as having
value is thereby a body to which value has been added through educa-
tional investment rather than one from which surplus value has been
extracted.” (Anagnost, 2004, p. 191). As a result, the highly politicized
language of class conflict and class struggle is now replaced by a depoliti-
cized discussion of strategic optimization of quality resources and contin-
ual self-improvement.
WeChat serves as a perfect platform for enabling and enacting the gov-
ernmentality of suzhi discourse. The rapid take-off and the quick plat-
formization (Helmond, 2015; van Dijck, 2013) of WeChat have turned it
into part of the information infrastructure for urban mobile internet
users. Nearly all the mothers I interviewed described the app as being
“indispensable” or “very useful” for them in fulfilling their obligations as

a parent. This includes both practical tasks such as arranging childcare and
online shopping, and also the communicative activities that socialize them
into the role of parent. On a converged platform like WeChat, the discur-
sive and the practical are often intertwined. The information provided
about the pros and cons of different childcare options may affect the
actual arrangements people make. Discussion with other parents with
regard to suzhi-enhancing activities may lead to purchasing behavior. In
addition, the intensive communication facilitated by WeChat heightens
surveillance of parenting behavior as well as a “keeping up with the
Joneses” mentality. Many parents reported that discussions on WeChat
parents’ groups are going on “all the time” about either specific issues
related to children’s school or general topics of parenting. 13 of the 16
interviewees admitted that knowing more about what other kids are
doing adds an extra layer of pressure. Parents recognized that putting so
much pressure on themselves and on the children is not healthy, but they
did not seem to see an alternative. As one mother put it, “everybody says
‘never let your child lose at the starting line,’ but the starting line is con-
stantly moving forward and you have to keep up. Look at everyone else
around you!” (BM07). Needless to say, “everyone else around you” only
refers to parents of the same social class, given the strong self-selection
bias of social circles on WeChat.
Thirdly, WeChat quickly became a highly commercialized space. Amidst
the digital economy and internet start-up hype, many WeChat parenting
accounts were set up as the first stage of developing O2O (online to
offline) commerce. The idea is that a public account will first draw poten-
tial customers with original content on parenting, then find ways to mon-
etize the attention accumulated, for example either by offering discounted
products or by selling access to online courses. Within this kind of discur-
sive environment, parenting advice is frequently coupled with commodi-
fied solutions. Just as outdoor advertising in Shanghai depicts good
mothers as responsible individuals managing the family (Orgad & Meng,
2017), a good parent, as projected by the parenting discourse on WeChat,
is one who makes the right consumer choice for her children’s develop-
ment. Not only is this “choice” regularly presented in the form of a com-
modity, but “development” is commonly evaluated as the accumulation of
human capital to gain the upper hand in high-stakes competition. During
one of the interviews, a middle-class stay-at-home mom in Beijing was
flipping through the public WeChat parenting accounts she subscribed to
166 B. MENG
and then made the following comment: “you see, extra-curricular activi-
ties are also important. Ivy League universities do look at that. I have
started taking my son to perform on his violin at charity concerts. To build
the record, you know. It will look good on his resumé [when he applies to
universities].” (BM05). It is ironic that the liberal arts education that is
supposed to cultivate well-rounded individuals has now been streamlined,
with the help of commercial educational services, into a set of toolkits for
the technology of the self. Be it learning a musical instrument, or doing
sports, or taking part in community work, it is less about the flourishing of
humanity than about the production of human capital.
In this chapter I began by providing an overview of the burgeoning field

of Chinese internet research. Due to the chronic expectations in the West
concerning the democratizing potentials of new communication technolo-
gies on the one hand, and the impressive development of Chinese ICT
industries on the other, internet-mediated communication certainly enjoys
more attention from those who study China than other types of media.
While internet research in general has grown into a diverse and interdisci-
plinary field that draws insights from a wide range of social science disci-
plines, including, for example, economics, social psychology, political
science, sociology, anthropology, STS (science and technology studies) and
gender studies, research on the Chinese internet is still preoccupied with
the issue of democratization, although the tone has been changing from a
celebratory to a more sober one. Beneath the homogenous research agenda
lies much entrenched binary thinking: state vs. market, state vs. society,
censorship vs. freedom, centralized control vs. dispersed networks, delib-
eration vs. emotion, etc. The three case studies I have presented here on the
internet-mediated politics of everyday life aim to unsettle these binaries.
The Facebook Expedition of the Little Pinkos was a form of online
activism, but it does not fit with the common imaginary of contentious
politics on the Chinese internet. The campaign adamantly endorsed one
of the key political principles of the Chinese state, but it had to violate the
government policy of censorship in order to reach its targeted audience.
The participants expressed strong nationalist sentiments and appropriated
some of the official discourse, but they were also critical of the govern-
ment in some instances. The campaign had carnivalesque and performa-
tive elements, but also demonstrated a high level of media literacy and
debate. One participant made a perceptive comment on the event: “only
after climbing over the firewall did I realize that our wall is a technological
one, but many Taiwanese people are yet to get over a psychological wall.”
The gendered consumerism discourse around spendthrift chicks and

the case of WeChat parenting accounts fall outside the conventional remit
of online politics. But they illustrate the collusion between the state and
the market in configuring identity, desire and aspiration, all of which are
key dimensions of political subjectivity. In both cases, market logic aggres-
sively pushes forward discourses of consumerism, self-responsibility and
competition, while the state plays an enabling role by moving its own
agenda away from socialist commitments. It is in the discursive construc-
tion of spendthrift chicks and middle-class parenting norms that we see a
decentralized exercise of power that works in a more subtle way than by
the simple act of control or repression. The three cases also illustrate the
dialectic process of mediation, in the sense of media discourse being
embedded in social and political context while also shaping subjectivity
and practices.
Notes
1. This video from the New York Times captures the wide-ranging usage of WeChat:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000004574648/china-
internet-wechat.html?mcubz=2
2. Translation of speech by Rogier Creemers: https://chinacopyrightandme-
dia.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/xi-jinpings-19-august-speech-revealed-
translation/
3. The difference in internet penetration rates across provinces is an indication
of the level of economic development. Beijing and Shanghai have the high-
est rates of 77.8 percent and 74.1 percent respectively, while Yunnan prov-
ince, which is one of the least developed regions in China, is at the bottom
of the list with a penetration rate of 39.9 percent, significantly lower than
the national average of 53.2 percent.
4. This is similar to Yahoo! Answer, where registered users can post a question
to solicit the collective intelligence of others. But zhihu.com is much more
vibrant and attracts a much wider range of questions than Yahoo! Answer. It
practically functions as an open discussion forum, with all content visible to
registered and non-registered users alike. For example, the link included
above is to the more than two thousand answers to the question: “What do
you think of the Liyi Ba Jan. 20 Facebook expedition?”
5. Taobao.com is a major e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba.
6. Maotai is the most famous hard liquor brand in China, produced in Zunyi,
Guizhou. The city of Zunyi was also where an important meeting of the
Chinese Communist Party was held in 1935, after which Mao Zedong
decided to take the Red Army inland on the famous Long March.
168 B. MENG
7. Such simplification or even distortion is what propelled a group of women

scholars teaching and studying in the United States during the 1990s to
put together a collection of personal memoirs titled Some of Us (Zhong,
Wang, & Di, 2001), which told a different story about Chinese women
growing up in the Mao era.
8. I assign each interviewee a number based on the order of the interview
(M01–M16). I then indicate the location with the initial of the city (B
means Beijing, S means Shanghai).
9. These are the words used by the founder during an interview with me to
describe her aspiration.
10. http://www.youthmba.com/aboutus, accessed May 15, 2017.
11. http://www.wx135.com/wxes/TBEducation, accessed May 15, 2017.
12. Minban education generally refers to non-state schools, which can be
sponsored and operated by a variety of “social forces.”
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CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
I began this book by arguing for the continued relevance of China’s social-
ist history, not only in understanding the present, but also in imagining
the future. In each chapter I demonstrate, with cases drawn from a wide
range of media texts and communication practices, how historically
informed analysis could better unpack the consensus and contestation
around mediated politics in contemporary China. It probably makes sense
then, to conclude the book with yet another reference to the country’s
socialist past. This time, however, I would like to problematize the way in
which the international media1 bring history into their reporting of the
present.
Since he took power, many commentators have made an analogy
between Xi Jinping and Mao. A long profile piece by Evan Osnos in the
New Yorker, entitled “Born Red,” describes Xi as “ the most authoritarian
leader since Chairman Mao” (Osnos, 2015). Osnos notes that Xi has
revised the CCP’s approach to collective leadership after Mao through a
series of initiatives that recentralize political power. This has included cre-
ating and acquiring new titles for himself as in charge of some of the
Party’s most powerful committees on foreign policy, the economy and the
internet. Alongside an unprecedentedly forceful anticorruption campaign,
which has garnered strong support for Xi at the grassroots level, the
Chinese state has been particularly aggressive in persecuting political dis-
sidents and activists since 2012. The arrest of the “Feminist Five” (女权五
姐妹) took many China observers by surprise, as the anti-sexual-harassment
campaigns these young women had been organizing did not seem to be

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5_6
180 B. MENG
politically sensitive (Zeng, 2015). Although the five feminist activists were
subsequently released without any charges, their activities continue to be
closely monitored by public security officers. Another case in point con-
cerns a succession of raids carried out in December 2015 by police in
Guangdong province on labor rights organizations accused of “organizing
a crowd to disrupt social order” (Cao, 2015). This latter crackdown
attracted less attention from the international media, but arguably carries
higher political significance, considering the irony implicit in a Communist
Party-state branding a workers’ rights group as disruptive. In addition to
measures aimed at consolidating power and control, there also seems to be
an ascendancy of Xi’s personality cult, which is not necessarily authorized
by the leader himself but given his silent acquiescence. Bookstores across
China prominently display collections of Xi’s speeches and essays, which
have sold more than five million copies, reminiscent of Mao’s Little Red
Book (Beech, 2016; Osnos, 2015). Xinhua has churned out rap music
videos featuring animated images of a smiling Xi, accompanied by punchy
lyrics explaining his policy agenda. In some of these videos the state news
agency makes the unusual move of calling Xi by his nickname, Xi Dada
(Big Uncle Xi in Shaanxi dialect), ostensibly adding a populist touch to
the General Secretary of the CCP. There is even an attempt to construct a
“creation myth” featuring Xi in Liang Jiahe, the mountain village in
Shaanxi province where he spent seven years as a “sent-down youth” dur-
ing the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (Gracie, 2015). Xi
himself has said that he left his heart in Liang Jiahe and the hardship he
experienced there as a teenager is what made him who he is today (The
Paper, 2015). Local party officials did not miss the opportunity to make
an important claim to political fame, building a museum that offers an
account of the great leader’s coming of age in Liang Jiahe. In October
2015, a 45-episode television drama entitled Liang Jiahe went into pro-
duction with official approval from the State Administration of Radio,
Film & Television (SARFT).
The examples mentioned above are only some of the evidence that has
been used to support the assertion that Xi Jinping has ushered in a revival
of Maoism (Brown, 2016; Fenby, 2015; Keck, 2013; Moses, 2013;
Washington Post editorials, 2016; Yang, 2014; S. Zhao, 2016). I would
argue, however, that the analogy between Xi and Mao is a superficial one,
restricted to their limited similarities in terms of leadership style. Rather
than representing the resurgence of Maoism, Xi is resorting to heavy-
handed political control to plaster over the ideological disjunction that the
CONCLUSION 181
central leadership faces after the death of Maoism. The two most impor-
tant speeches he has so far made on ideology and culture, one on August
19, 2013, at the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference
(hereafter August 2013 Speech) and the other one year later at the Beijing
Forum on Literature and Art (hereafter Beijing Forum Talk), clearly
reflect an attempt to reclaim the “commanding heights” for the CCP. It is
also through juxtaposing these speeches with those of Mao on the same
topics that we can discern the profound differences beneath their seem-
ingly comparable forms of authoritarian leadership. I refer to the speech
made by Mao in March 1957 at the National Conference on Propaganda
Work (hereafter 1957 Speech) and to his famous Talks at the Yenan Forum
on Literature and Art in 1942 (hereafter Yenan Forum Talks). I do not
proceed to systematic comparisons here, as the historical and political con-
texts of these speeches differ drastically. But counterposing Xi’s talks
against their historical counterparts can help to illustrate the inconsistency,
contradictions and discrepancies in current “ideology work.” All four
speeches largely aim to consolidate the Party’s hegemonic control over
culture, although the Yenan talks were made before the CCP came to
power during the Anti-Japanese war. By examining how some common
themes, including the importance of Marxism, the relationship between
the people and the Party, and the main battleground of ideological strug-
gle, are addressed differently by the two Party leaders, I would argue that
Xi Jinping is in no sense Mao’s political heir. Xi’s two speeches sum up the
CCP’s strategy of “squaring the circle” in the realm of media, communi-
cation and culture, but the hegemony is increasingly unstable.
While Mao refers to Marxism as both an analytical approach to unpack-
ing the relationship between culture and politics, and the political princi-
ple to guide the Party’s propaganda work, Xi invokes Marxism as an
ideological doctrine with a strong moral component supporting the legiti-
macy of the Party. Mao’s application of dialectic materialism and historical
materialism is well illustrated by this paragraph from the Yenan Talks:
To study Marxism means to apply the dialectical materialist and historical

materialist viewpoint in our observation of the world, of society and of lit-
erature and art; it does not mean writing philosophical lectures into our
works of literature and art. Marxism embraces but cannot replace realism in
literary and artistic creation, just as it embraces but cannot replace the
atomic and electronic theories in physics. Empty, dry dogmatic formulas do
indeed destroy the creative mood; not only that, they first destroy Marxism.
182 B. MENG
Dogmatic ‘Marxism’ is not Marxism, it is anti-Marxism. Then does not

Marxism destroy the creative mood? Yes, it does. It definitely destroys cre-
ative moods that are feudal, bourgeois, petty bourgeois, liberalistic, indi-
vidualist, nihilist, art for art’s sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and
every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the
proletariat. So far as proletarian writers and artists are concerned, should not
these kinds of creative moods be destroyed? I think they should; they should
be utterly destroyed. And while they are being destroyed, something new
can be constructed. (Mao, 1942)
Xi, on the other hand, has had to lump together Marxism-Leninism,

Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Jiang Zemin’s “Three
Represents” thought and the scientific development view proposed by Hu
Jintao, all as part of the “theoretical system of socialism with Chinese char-
acteristics.” In the August 2013 Speech, he scolded some Party members
for moral corruption:
Among a few people, some have made criticism and mockery of Marxism
into a “fashion,” and into a comedy; some are spiritually vapid, and believe
that Communism is a purely illusory fantasy … some waver in their faith,
migrate their spouses, sons and daughters abroad, store money abroad, and
“leave a way back” for themselves, preparing to “jump ship” at any time;
some are slaves of material things, believe in the supremacy of money, the
supremacy of fame and the supremacy of enjoyment, they don’t have any
reverence in their hearts, and their acts don’t have any baseline at all. (Xi,
2013)
Xi called in his speech for cadres to “use scientific theory to arm minds and
to incessantly cultivate our spiritual garden,” so that “lofty beliefs and firm
convictions” would emerge (Xi, 2013). He did not elaborate on the the-
ory of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and neither did he explain
the rationale of a “scientific theory” providing moral guidance.
Both Mao and Xi emphasize that socialist literature and art should serve
the people, but they diverge on the very definition of “the people” and
how artists and intellectuals should best serve them. Given the history of
the Chinese revolution, which emerged from a peasant society rather than
from industrial proletarianization as envisaged by orthodox Marxism, “the
people” rather than “the proletariat” was the formulation often used to
refer to the peasant population that turned into agents of socialist trans-
formation. Hence “the people,” in the Maoist era, was a “primary marker
CONCLUSION 183
of class power” (Lin, 2014, p. 29). It was positively defined to include
multiple classes, and negatively defined against class enemies. The very
first problem Mao raised in the Yenan Talks was: “literature and art for
whom?” He defined the mass of the people as consisting of workers, peas-
ants, soldiers and the urban petit bourgeoisie. Asking writers and artists to
“take the class stand of the proletariat and not that of the petty bourgeoi-
sie”, in order to serve those four groups of people, Mao went on to ana-
lyze the class stance of intellectuals:
In certain respects they are fond of the workers, peasants and soldiers and
the cadres stemming from them; but there are times when they do not like
them and there are some respects in which they do not like them: they do
not like their feelings or their manner or their nascent literature and art (the
wall newspapers, murals, folk songs, folk tales, etc.). At times they are fond
of these things too, but that is when they are hunting for novelty, for some-
thing with which to embellish their own works, or even for certain backward
features. At other times they openly despise these things and are partial to
what belongs to the petty bourgeois intellectuals or even to the bourgeoisie.
(Mao, 1942)
Therefore intellectuals need to follow the “mass line” (see discussion of

Mao’s mass line in Chapter 3) in order to first educate themselves among
the people, before they can educate and serve the people. Mao reiterated
the same point in the 1957 Speech, urging intellectuals to integrate them-
selves with the mass of peasants and workers.
Xi Jinping’s call for literature and art to serve the people is a depoliti-
cized one that is void of class connotations. He criticized market logic
giving rise to “superficial” and “vulgar” works, but did not touch upon
how marketization and commercialization have reconfigured the class ori-
entation of cultural production. Advocating the “socialist market econ-
omy,” Xi could only say that when “social value” is in conflict with “market
value” the former should take priority. He advised writers and artists to
step out of the “ivory tower” so as to better understand life and “the
people,” yet completely ignored the growing class division between intel-
lectuals and the working class in contemporary China (Xi, 2015). Bypassing
class discourse is also an important strategy that enables the CCP leader-
ship to gloss over the tension between the Party principle (党性) and the
people’s principle (人民性) in the current era. During the socialist revolu-
tion, the Party was the vanguard of the working class, representing the
184 B. MENG
interest of the people. A two-part process brought about the CCP’s “crisis
of representativeness”: first, after the founding of the PRC and before the
economic reform, there was the bureaucratization of the Party, which
became one of the pivotal reasons for Mao to launch the Cultural
Revolution; second, the assimilation of the CCP’s function and form into
the state during the market reform drastically muted the representative-
ness and politics of the Party (Hui Wang, 2014). A glaring incongruity
emerges, “between the party’s claim to general representativeness as it
transcends previous class categories and its increasing distance from the
people, especially those from lower social strata” (Hui Wang, 2014,
p. 216). This is why, in his August 2013 Speech, Xi Jinping had to dedi-
cate one of the seven sections to arguing that the Party principle and the
people’s principle “have always been consistent and united.” Only by
sticking to this claim could he justify the principle that the Party must
manage the media, that propaganda and ideology workers “must conform
to the demands of the Party in what they persist in, what they oppose,
what they say and what they do” (Xi, 2013), since that would be the only
approach to serving the people. Xi made a careful effort to define “the
people,” while completely circumventing the class dimension and class
conflicts:
The people are concrete, not abstract. To persist in the spirit of the people,
we must earnestly research the ideological and cultural needs of the different
masses. Workers, peasants, the People’s Liberation Army, cadres, intellectu-
als, the elderly, youth, children: it must be clear where the commonalities
between the demands of different masses lie, and where the individualities
are, in order to launch work in a targeted manner. We must also launch work
in a focused manner targeting a series of new groups emerging in society,
such as the ant people,2 the northern floaters,3 those coming back from
overseas, those coming back from overseas who are jobless, small investors,
etc. (Xi, 2013)
This convoluted categorization of “the people,” based on mixed crite-

ria of occupation, age, educational experience, employment condition and
residential status, is extraordinary. It is a quintessential example of what
Lin (2014) calls one of the greatest ironies of Chinese communist rule,
that “class politics and discourse were taken to an extreme when the coun-
try was relatively egalitarian, and thoroughly stifled at a time of intense
class polarization and conflict” (p. 36).
CONCLUSION 185
In addition to their different invocations of Marxism and different defi-

nitions of “the people,” a third crucial difference between Mao’s and Xi’s
speeches lies in their different framing of ideological opponents. Mao’s
Yenan Talks position socialist culture against that of the petit bourgeois
and bourgeois. Mao contends that those who talk about art and literature
as transcending class are actually upholding the bourgeois culture while
opposing the culture of the proletariat. He acknowledges that most intel-
lectuals have the class stance of the petit bourgeois, with sympathy for the
working class but not siding firmly with workers, peasants and soldiers.
They will need to transform their worldviews through the process of
“going into the thick of practical struggles and through the process of
studying Marxism and society” (Mao, 1942). Only in this way can they
create literary and art works truly for the people. Then, in 1957, eight
years after the CCP took power, Mao cautioned all “ideology workers”
about the “line struggle” between capitalism and socialism. He stresses
that the consolidation of Chinese socialism is a long historical process that
requires “the socialist industrialization of the country,” “the socialist revo-
lution on the economic front,” “constant and arduous socialist revolu-
tionary struggles and socialist education on the political and ideological
fronts,” as well as “various complementary international conditions”
(Mao, 1957).
In Xi’s two speeches, words like “capitalists,” “bourgeois,” or “capital-
ism” are nowhere to be seen. What features in their place as the ideological
opponent of the CCP is “the West.” In the Beijing Forum Talk, Xi on the
one hand asks critics to “critically learn” from Western literary theories,
but on the other hand contends that Western theories cannot be used to
regulate the taste of Chinese people. In his August 2013 Speech, the sec-
tion entitled “Chinese characteristics and international comparison” cen-
ters on communicating the “China story” and the “China model” to a
global audience. Xi (2013) explains socialism with Chinese characteristics
as being grounded in the unique cultural traditions, unique historical des-
tinies and unique basic national conditions of China. Instead of being vigi-
lant against capitalism, as in the Maoist era, what ideology workers now
need to be wary of is how Western media control global public opinion.
To combat the hegemony of “the West” and to strengthen China’s voice
across the globe, Chinese media need to build their communication capac-
ity, innovate in their communication style, and strive to forge new con-
cepts and expressions (Xi, 2013). As discussed in Chapter 2, this is exactly
186 B. MENG
the kind of approach that the Chinese state media have been following in
their all-out campaigns promoting soft power, though with very limited
success. The issue at stake here is whether, beyond considerations of capac-
ity, style or expression, the disagreement between China and “the West” is
a question of socialism vs. capitalism, or of authoritarian vs. liberal styles of
managing capitalism.
Paradoxically, Xi Jinping’s warning against the hostile “West” and the
analogy made by international media between Xi and Mao follow the same
logic of what Wang Hui calls “depoliticized politics.” By framing the ideo-
logical contestation within China as conflicts between a Western perspec-
tive and Chinese realities and between Western values and the Chinese
model of development, Xi is circumventing the thorny issue of the politi-
cal representativeness of the CCP. That is to say, the extent to which griev-
ances and discontent in China are caused by a regime that claims to
represent “the people,” and to which nationalism has been mobilized to
fill the vacuum left by a betrayed socialist cause. Lin’s (2006) comment on
the trajectory of Chinese socialism resonates here:
in theory, the socialist state is the vehicle for society to achieve equality,
classlessness, and eventually self-management without bureaucracy. In real-
ity, the PRC state first institutionalized the urban–rural divide and later
allowed the old forms of class inequalities to be restored in the marketplace.
(p. 83)
By the same token, by only picking up on the similarly authoritarian

styles of Xi and Mao, the international media reinforce the stereotypical
image of liberal West vs. repressive China. Such a liberal democratic view,
with unmistakable racist undertones, essentially rejects China’s socialist
revolution as a genuine and hugely effective effort to explore an alterna-
tive to capitalist modernization. It also refuses to acknowledge the extent
to which inequality and injustice in China are inflicted by capitalist devel-
opment rather than by authoritarianism per se.
In their comprehensive and compelling analysis of the “mugging” phe-
nomenon in 1970s Britain (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts,
2013 [1978]), Hall and his colleagues develop the concept of a “conjunc-
ture” to refer to “a period when the antagonisms and contradictions,
which are always at work in society, begin to ‘fuse’ into a ‘ruptural unity’”
(p. xv). To conduct conjunctural analysis, they deploy a type of periodiza-
tion “based on a distinction between moments of relative stability and
CONCLUSION 187
those of intensifying struggles and unrest, which may result in a more

general social crisis” (p. xv). In their actual analysis, Hall et al. (2013
[1978]) pay close attention to “changing relations of force in the political
class struggle, to shifting ideological configurations, the changing balance
within and between the state apparatuses, etc.” (p. 215). Any attempt to
carry out a conjunctural analysis of contemporary Chinese society faces
evident challenges. The sheer size and complexity of the country compels
researchers to remain modest in the scope of their research and to be very
cautious in any claims they try to make. At the epistemological level,
unpacking ongoing ideological contestations without the benefit of hind-
sight is obviously restrictive. But the concept of the conjuncture is useful
for two major reasons. Building on the works of Gramsci and Althusser,
Hall always emphasized the dialectical relationship between base and the
superstructure (See, e.g., Hall, 1986, 2016). He had little patience for the
kind of instrumental Marxism that shows the tendency of economic or
class reductionism, but was equally critical of those who “forgot that there
was an economy at all” in their attempt to move away from economic
reductionism (Jhally, 2016, p. 337). In addition to dialecticism, the con-
cept of the conjuncture also conveys a non-teleological view of history in
its foregrounding of the “crisis of hegemony.” As Hall et al. (2013 [1978])
point out, “the resolution of the crisis can take different forms: there is no
preordained result” (p. xv).
What I have been trying to do throughout this book is to explore the
“crisis of hegemony” in contemporary China through the lens of media
politics. As I explain in the introductory chapter, theoretically this entails
a multidimensional view of power, a broader understanding of politics and
an appreciation of mediation as a dialectical process. Empirically, my
inquiry starts from the Chinese state’s efforts to regulate political com-
munication at the domestic level while taking strong initiatives to improve
communication with an international audience. In subsequent chapters on
the politics of the news industry, entertainment media and digital media,
I situate ideological contestation, as well as the discursive construction of
subjectivity, within the structural conditions of different types of media
platform—platforms both in the material sense of communication infra-
structure and in the metaphorical sense of contested discursive space.
Unlike the “mugging phenomenon” in 1970s Britain, which was resolved
in the triumph of neoliberalism represented by the election of Margaret
Thatcher, the “crisis of hegemony” in Chinese society is still unfolding
and developing. The two speeches on ideology and culture made by Xi
188 B. MENG
Jinping in 2013 and 2014 epitomize the contradictions, discrepancies and

disjunctions that the Party-state is facing in re-establishing hegemony. The
ideological struggles examined in my empirical chapters also seem to con-
firm Hall’s view of crises as not leading to any pre-ordained result. But one
thing seems certain: the history of China’s socialist revolution is still as
relevant as ever. The memory of socialism, be it nostalgic or disillusioned,
shapes the Chinese people’s assessment of the status quo as well as their
imagining of the future. As for the Chinese state, as long as the ruling
party has not stopped calling itself “communist,” socialist ideals of equal-
ity, justice and democracy linger on, either as sources of legitimacy or as
sources of criticism or even rebellion. The road forward is uncharted; what
is needed at this moment of intense struggle and uncertainty is probably,
as Gramsci famously advised, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the
will.”
Notes
1. I use the term international media here for lack of a better choice. I do not
want to use the label Western media, as I do not wish to play into the binary
of the West vs. China. But in reality, what dominates the international media
scene is English-language Anglo-American media.
2. “ant people” refers to newly graduated college students who share cheap
rental housing in the metropolis while holding a low-income job or still
looking for employment.
3. “northern floaters” refers to those who have moved from their provincial
home towns to Beijing seeking better career opportunities and are often
forced to accept flexible employment arrangements. They are called “float-
ers” also because the stringent house registration system in China prevents
them from enjoying the social benefits tied to official residential status in
Beijing.
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Index1
NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS B

1989 student movement, 2, 26, 29, Baidu, 10, 47, 95, 128, 133
30, 32, 50n3 Beijing News, 83, 86n5
2008 Beijing Olympics, 40, 41, Berlant, Lauren, 91, 113, 115
135 Bo, Xilai, 3, 4, 26, 27, 35, 36, 132
21 Century Business Herald, 77 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10
British Cultural Studies, 6, 7, 92
Broadcast conglomerates/media
A conglomerates, 10, 67, 69, 70,
ACG culture, 138 94, 95, 98, 106, 107
Advertising, 49, 65–67, 70, 77, 80,
81, 94, 106, 108, 112, 114, 151,
152, 154, 161–163, 165 C
Affective Intelligence, 137, 139 Caixin, 35, 86n4
Affective labour, 113, 114 Calhoun, Craig, 30, 50n3, 156
Alibaba, 10, 47, 80, 81, 83, 85, Censorship, 7, 16–18, 27, 76, 85,
95, 129, 143–145, 154, 128, 140, 166
167n5 Central China Television (CCTV),
Althusser, Louis, 11, 92, 155, 187 32, 39, 42–44, 77, 106, 107,
Anagnost, Ann, 111, 117, 118, 148, 143
159, 164 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 5, 58
Angry Youth, 127–167 Cheek, Timothy, 2, 61, 73
Anti-CNN, 135, 136 Chen, Yongzhou, 77, 78
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers to notes

1

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46214-5
220 INDEX
China Business Network (CBN), 83, Deliberation, 18, 63, 71, 92, 137,
86n3, 107 142, 166
China Film Group Corporation Deng, Xiangchao, 2, 19n1, 25, 26, 28,
(CBNC), 94 29, 31, 32, 34–36, 50n8, 64, 66,
China Global Television Network 103, 164, 182
(CGTV), 42 Depoliticized politics, 17, 32–36, 49,
China Internet Network Information 186
Center (CNNIC), 129, 132 Developmentalism, 36, 142, 152
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 2, Digital platform, 25, 80, 131
60, 97, 167n6 Discourse, 4, 10, 14, 16–18, 34–37,
Chinese Dream Show, 110 43, 45, 48, 49, 68, 82, 92, 93,
Chinese film industry, 9, 93, 105 101, 109, 111, 117, 118, 131,
Chinese television industry, 105, 106 132, 143, 144, 147, 148,
Chongqing Model, 4 155–161, 164–167, 183, 184
Chou, Tzu-yu, 133, 134 Discursive strategy, 75, 138
Civil society, 27, 156 Double Eleven, 143, 144, 146,
Class conflict, 47, 117, 156, 164, 184 148–150, 152, 154, 155
Clinton, Bill, 128 Dream works Animation, 95
Clinton, Hilary, 128 Du, Daozheng, 29, 109
Cold War, 9, 37, 38, 57, 58 Du shu, 74
Communist Youth League, 140
Confucis Institute, 50
Confucius Institute, 38, 40, 50 E
Conjuncture, 118, 186, 187 Educational reform, 158, 164
Constitutionalism, 36, 70–77 Entertainment media, 17, 18, 91–118,
Consumerism, 18, 111, 143, 148, 187
155, 167 Ethnic minority, 47, 48
Core socialist value system, 2
Corruption of journalists, 78
Couldry, Nick, 111, 113, 114, 130 F
Creative labour, 113, 114 Facebook, 18, 42, 128, 133–138,
Cruel Optimism, 110 140–142, 166, 167n4
Cultural diversity, 47, 67 Facebook Expedition (脸书出征), 18,
Cultural Revolution, 2, 26–28, 35, 46, 133, 135–137, 140, 141, 166,
50n6, 50n7, 50n10, 64, 100, 167n4
136, 150, 155, 180, 184 Fallows, James, 2, 27
Curran, James, 5, 67, 68 Falun Gong, 29, 36, 140
Cyber-nationalism, 134, 137, 142 Family planning/birth control policy,
154
Fandom, 135
D Femininity, 146–148, 155
Dai, Zhiyong, 71, 94, 103, 104 Fifty-cent army, 136, 137, 142
Dapian (big picture), 94 Foucault, Michel, 14
INDEX
221
Four Theories of the Press, 5, 6, 57 Hukou, 12

Fraser, Nancy, 11–13, 156 Human capital, 164–166
Fukuyama, Francis, 6, 37 Hunan TV, 107–109
G I
Global capitalism, 7, 9, 27, 49, 75, 92 Ideological battleground, 4, 65, 77
Global Times, 42, 71, 140 Ideology, 8, 10, 11, 18, 29, 31, 37,
Globalization, 9, 11, 27, 33, 35, 74 38, 58, 60, 63, 91–93, 96–98,
The good life, 115, 117, 133, 110, 131, 142, 148, 151, 154,
156–167 155, 181, 184, 185, 187
Google, 80, 128, 149 Independent film, 100
Governmentality, 110, 118, 158, Inequality, 2, 12–14, 34, 47, 49, 73,
164 92, 93, 111, 117, 130, 132, 156,
Gramsci, Antonio, 91, 92, 187, 188 164, 186
Great Firewall, 133, 139 Internet Plus, 129
Guo, Songmin, 31 Iron and Blood (铁血社区), 133–143
Iron woman, 146
H
Habermas, Jürgen, 156 J
Hall, Stuart, 7, 11, 18, 91–93, 110, Jakubowicz, Karol, 4
118, 186–188 Jia, Xingjia, 102
Hallin, Daniel, 57–59 Jiang, Zemin, 2, 26, 34, 38, 50n9
Han, Sanping, 97, 98 Jinjiang Literary City (晋江文学城),
Harmonious socialist society, 2, 34 134, 140
Harootunian, Harry, 6 Jinri Toutiao, 80, 81
Hegemony, 10, 18, 34, 36, 70, 92, Journalism, 3, 44, 57, 59–61, 63, 64,
181, 185, 188 77, 82–85, 91
Historical continuity, 1 Journalist workforce, 81–85
Historical memory, 4, 5, 105 Journalistic practice, 64
History, 1–7, 18, 27–29, 31, 32,
35–37, 45–50, 58, 59, 72–74,
109, 148, 152, 154, 179, 182, K
187, 188 Kipnis, Andew, 117, 159
Hollywood, 9, 10, 93–100, 143 Korean War, 149
Hong, Zhenkuai, 30, 31, 69, 127 Kung Fu Panda, 96
Honneth, Axel, 11, 12
Hu, Jintao, 2, 26, 32, 34, 38, 40, 44,
138, 182 L
Hu, Yaobang, 29, 30 Laid off workers, 93, 100, 104
Huang, Jisu, 3, 49, 67 Lee, Chin-Chuan, 3, 4, 8, 32, 58, 67,
Hughes, Christopher, 134, 141 68, 70, 101, 103, 140
222 INDEX
The Legend of the Red Lantern, Metropolitan newspapers, 3, 68, 83

150–152 Middle class, 13, 14, 60, 70, 111,
Legitimacy, 2, 3, 7, 28, 33–35, 47, 49, 117, 118, 132, 154, 156–163,
131, 142, 181, 188 165, 167
Lenin, Vladimir, 61–63, 67 Middle-class parenting, 156, 167
Li, Changchun, 39, 41, 44 Mignolo, Walter, 5, 6
Li, Keqiang, 129 Mobilization, 8, 33, 63, 130, 134,
Liberal democracy, 5, 7, 34, 36, 37, 140, 154
49, 58, 74, 75, 85, 128, 136
Liberal intellectuals, 25, 30, 31, 73,
74, 155 N
Lin, Chun, 47, 59, 61, 63, 65, 101, Nanfang Media Group (NMG),
142, 155, 183, 184, 186 68–71, 76, 78, 79, 85n2
Line struggle, 33, 36, 185 National identity, 48, 135
Little Pinkos (小粉红), 18, 133, 143, National image, 40–45
166 National People’s Congress, 48
Liu, Yiting, 104, 113, 157, 159 Nationalism, 16, 35, 59, 129, 132,
Liyi Ba (Di Ba, D8), 133 134–136, 142, 143, 152, 186
Neoliberal exception, 112
Neoliberalism, 110–112, 159, 187
M Nerone, John, 6, 57, 58
Ma, Jack, 47, 143, 144 New Express, 77–79
Main melody films, 97 New Left, 74–76
Mancini, Paolo, 57–59 New Workers’ Art Troupe, 115
Mao, Zedong (Maoist, Maoism), 18, New York Times, 25, 30, 74, 167n1
19n2, 25, 28, 31–33, 35, 50n8, News aggregator, 80
50n10, 60–63, 146, 149, 154, News industry, 17, 67, 82, 85, 106,
155, 167n6, 168n7, 179–186 187
Market logic, 70, 167, 183 News workers, 62
Marx, Karl, 92, 104 NMG, see Nanfang Media Group
Marxism, 57, 62, 102, 181, 182, 185, Northeast (东北 ), 100, 103, 104
187 Nye, Joseph, 36–38, 40, 49
Mass line, 33, 60–64, 85, 183
McRobbie, Angela, 147, 148
Media commercialization, 3, 17, 65, O
73, 107 OMP, see Oriental Morning Post
Media conglomeration, 67 Ong, Aihwa, 111, 112, 155, 158
Media convergence, 10, 65, 68–70 Online activism, 18, 127, 128, 132,
Media literacy, 135, 137, 141, 166 135, 166
Media marketization, 3, 8, 11, 65 Oriental Dream Works, 96
Media ritual, 113, 130 Oriental Morning Post (OMP), 79
Mediation, 15–18, 167, 187 Over-determination, 92
INDEX
223
P Q
The Paper, 79, 80, 82, 180 Qiu, Bing, 79, 127–129, 156
Participation, 8, 15, 63, 84, 108, 110, QQ, 134, 137
113, 117, 141, 144, 156
Party journalism, 63
Party principle, 26, 60, 70, 183, 184 R
Party-organ newspapers, 29, 67, 69 Rao, Jin, 135
Party-state, 3, 7, 17, 30, 36, 48, 64, Reality TV, 93, 105, 108, 110–113,
65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 85, 111, 131, 115, 118
132, 155, 180 Recognition, 11–14, 142
Patriarchal capitalism, 147, 155 Reform and Opening Up, 34, 46, 47
Pei, Minxin, 28, 65 Revolutionary history, 2–4, 7, 27, 28,
People’s Daily, 3, 42, 44, 69, 140 36, 49
People’s principle, 183 Rofel, Lisa, 74, 111, 150, 155
The Piano in a Factory (钢的琴), 18, Russia Today (RT), 43
99–105, 118
Picun, 116, 117
Policing the Crisis, 93 S
Political economy, 9, 17, 18, 28, 61, Scientific concept of development, 34
64, 65, 67, 85, 93–100, 105, Sewell, William, 1
111, 118, 148 Sexism, 154
Post-feminism, 148 Shanghai Media Group (SMG), 107
Post-socialism, 142, 145 Shanghai United Media, 79
Post-socialist era, 17, 49 Shen Hao, 78
Power, 2, 4, 5, 7–11, 14–18, 27, 29, Silverstone, Roger, 15
33, 35, 36, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, Smythe, Dallas, 65
58, 61–65, 68, 74, 76, 77, 79, Socialism, 5, 19, 34–36, 38, 39, 47,
85, 97, 110–113, 115, 131, 132, 49, 59, 64, 103, 108, 111, 148,
134, 135, 144, 148, 156, 160, 154, 155, 185, 186, 188
167, 179–181, 183, 185, 187 Socialism with Chinese characteristics,
Precarious labor, 110 34, 59, 182, 185
Press conglomerates, 67, 68 Socialist history, 7, 18, 47, 74, 179
Press groups, 3, 42, 65, 67–70, 76, Socialist market economy, 26, 183
79, 94, 140 Socialist modernization, 28, 142
Propaganda, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, Soft power, 36–40, 42, 44, 45, 49, 186
61–63, 67, 68, 71–73, 76, 79, Southern Tour, 25, 66, 103, 164
96, 106, 131, 138, 149, 151, Southern Weekly (SW), 70–76, 85n1
152, 155, 158, 181, 184 Soviet Union, 37, 38, 58, 105
Public opinion, 7, 8, 33, 34, 50n8, Spendthrift Chicks (败家娘们), 18,
131, 132, 140–142, 185 143–156, 167
Public sphere, 5, 59, 92, 141, 156 State Administration of Press and
Pun, Ngai, 98, 148, 154, 159 Publication (SAPP), 28, 67
224 INDEX
State Administration of Radio, Film, V

and Television (SARFT), 106, Van Zoonen, Lisbet, 91, 137
119n5, 180 Voice of China (Voice), 110–118
State control, 8, 29, 62, 67, 69, 91, Voluntary fifty-cent army, 136, 137,
98, 155 142
State Council, 38, 45, 69, 129
State feminism, 148, 154, 155
State Owned Enterprises (SOE), 4, 5, W
73, 79, 100–102, 104, 105 Wanda Group, 95, 98
Subjectivity, 18, 57, 92, 93, 105, Wang, Binbin, 74, 75
144, 147, 148, 155–158, 167, Wang, Bing, 103
187 Wang, Hui, 17, 27, 33, 35, 48, 49,
Sun, Wanning, 13, 14, 39, 40, 43, 44, 74, 75, 105, 111, 127, 130,
91, 112, 117, 148, 156 132, 133, 135, 138, 141, 184,
Super Girl, 107–109, 112 186
Suzhi, 112, 117, 118, 158, 159, Wang, Jianlin, 95, 96, 98, 109, 134,
162–165 155
Suzhi jiaoyu (素质教育), 159 WeChat, 13, 18, 129, 133, 156, 157,
Symbolic power, 11, 15, 113 159–165, 167, 167n1
WeChat Public Accounts (微信公众
号), 157, 160
T Weibo (microblog), 4, 13, 31, 71, 72,
Tang Jie, 135 78, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141,
Taobao, 151 145, 159, 160
Tencent, 10, 69, 80, 81, 84, 85, 95, Wen, Jiabao, 26, 27
129, 159, 160 West of the Tracks (铁西区), 103
The Third Plenum of the 11th Central Williams, Raymond, 7, 127
Committee, 28 Womanhood, 155
Thompson, Jonn B., 15, 45 Working class, 4, 7, 14, 34, 35, 48,
Thornton, Patricia, 33 62, 63, 68, 73, 93, 102, 103,
Three represents, 2, 34, 182 105, 116, 128, 148, 158, 183,
Thrifty wives, 146–148 185
Trump, Donald, 9, 27 World Trade Organization (WTO), 9,
Tsai Ing-wen, 133, 134, 138 33, 67, 73, 93–95, 164
Tsou, Tang, 28, 32, 35, 47
Tuo Zhen, 71–73, 76
X
Xi, Jinping, 2, 9, 18, 26, 27, 29, 34,
U 36, 43, 45, 131, 179–187
Under-privileged social group, 48 Xinhua News Agency, 3, 27, 29, 38,
Universal values, 36, 74, 136 42, 50n1
INDEX
225
Y Zhang, Yimou, 32, 97

Yan, Hairong, 111, 118 Zhao, Yuezhi, 2, 6, 9, 17, 26, 27, 34,
Yang, Guobin, 127, 128, 130, 138, 38, 50n3, 61, 63, 65–67, 70, 73,
142, 156, 180 75, 76, 93, 105, 107, 108, 132,
Yang, Jisheng, 28, 50n2 140, 151, 156
YanHuang ChunQiu (YHCQ), Zhao, Ziyang, 29, 30
28–30, 35 Zhejiang Satellite TV, 112
Young, Iris M., 11, 12, 144, 147 Zhejiang TV, 106, 115
Yu, Andrea, 44 Zhou, Enlai, 4
Yuan, Tengfei, 32, 83 Zhou, Libo, 115–117
Zhou, Yongming, 16, 135, 136,
142
Z Zhu, Rongji, 100
Zhang, Meng, 99, 102, 103 Zuckerberg, Mark, 128

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THE POLITICS OF

More information about this series at

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960342

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: Jime Eversole / EyeEm

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Understanding the Politics of Chinese Media 1

2 The Chinese State: Moving Left? Moving Right? or

3 Looking beyond the Liberal Lens: News Media

4 The Cultural Politics of the Entertainment Media 91

5 From Angry Youth to Anxious Parents: The Mediated

Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of Alipay Weibo entry 145

Why History Matters

© The Author(s) 2018 1

over today’s reality” (Y. Zhao, 2009, p. 176), including the characteristics

Chinese Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. If we utterly dismiss the slogans of the

Secondly, mainstream media institutions, especially news media, are still

public service broadcaster. He initiated the “red song campaign” (唱红

resulting from the privatization of SOEs. In other words, the historical

Despite postcolonial scholars’ call, decades ago, for “provincializing

history is inevitably lost in the spatial expansion of the Eurocentric frame-

Thompson’s (1966) social history of the English working class, to Paul

wide range of non-media sectors. The three leading Chinese Internet

“depend on the material or symbolic power accumulated by the agents (or

The Cultural Politics of Recognition

or potentially share, with other citizens” (Gutman, 1994, p. 7). Honneth

parents’ objection to their daughter dating a man from rural working-class

Mediation as a Dialectic Process

[M]ediation requires us to understand how processes of communication

Silverstone highlights power as the key dimension in studying media-

representation feeds back into inclusions or exclusions in the lifeworld.

policy (Zhao, 2008). Any research attempting to investigate the enabling or

changing journalistic ethos and the new power dynamics of a converged

In the concluding chapter, I revisit the contemporary relevance of

the memory of socialism, be it nostalgic or disillusioned, shapes the

Sun, W. (2013). Inequality and culture: A new pathway to understanding social

Zhao, Y. (2008). Communication in China: Political economy, power and conflict.

The Chinese State: Moving Left? Moving

Historicized Understanding of Left and Right

© The Author(s) 2018 25

legacy. On the ideological front, Bo tried to revive revolutionary history

These episodes, which were by no means exceptional, seem to confirm

Contestation of Historical Accounts

Ziyang’s ouster resulted from the 1989 student movement, it was Hu

basic academic freedom and I shall keep my integrity as an intellectual”

him the ultimate symbol of communist tyranny, often with a reluctant

Depoliticized Politics and the Resurgence

has shifted from mass mobilization in the revolutionary era to staying in

options” (p. 241). Hence, despite inheriting a good part of the Mao-era

leading up to the trial of Bo Xilai, was the temporary shutdown of the

Building Soft Power: The Depoliticized Style?

soft resources as communist ideology, the myth of inevitability, and trans-

We must go “global,” strengthening our foreign language channels, expand-

As Sun points out, Li’s statement conveys a vision of expansion on the

In reporting important events inside and outside China, we must aim to be

ways of thinking. Taking advantage of modern communication technologies

Rebranding the National Image

1 Introduction: Understanding the Politics of Chinese Media 1

2 The Chinese State: Moving Left? Moving Right? or

3 Looking beyond the Liberal Lens: News Media

4 The Cultural Politics of the Entertainment Media 91

5 From Angry Youth to Anxious Parents: The Mediated

Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of Alipay Weibo entry 145

flourishing. Starting from 1995, China agreed to import up to ten first-