Chinese Press System - Essay Example

Chinese Press System Although the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 by the then Communist parties which were committed to the socialistideology and a planned economy, but today communism is no more observed in China. Communist parties are still there; thereby retaining their political monopolies in the form of what Chuan Lee has referred to as ‘patriotic nationalism’. Chinese media has been actively participating in combining democracy with nationalism but still it remains unable to bridge the gap between the two, the best examples of its failure in bringing democracy is the incident of Tiananmen Square Protest, which we would discuss later. Democracy was never followed in Peoples Republic of China (PRC), be it the Chinese media or press, all were owned by the Chinese government. And the most annoying dilemma to which U.S was confronted since the beginning of Chinese independence was the failure of U.S government to introduce political reforms in China. Since the beginning, U.S was interested in bringing democracy to China, to which he allegedly failed. On the other hand Chinese media has always vehemently condemned the United States as a real enemy over a series of crises and why it shouldn’t blame the U.S as the press and media are the well known governmental bodies of PRC: the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; the row over human rights, trade, and Taiwan; the alleged Chinese espionage on U. S. nuclear intelligence, and a U. S. spy plane crashing into a Chinese fighter plane. These all examples escort us to the fact that nationalist feelings is China’s genuine hunger for international status, for which today PRC has changed its dimensions with the media hailing the upcoming 2008 Olympics and WTO membership as milestones of national importance. (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 2) According to Xiaogang, “there is something unique about the press in China’s transition to the market, namely the duality of its formal and informal roles. On the formal side, all media are required to toe the official propaganda line. Press controls in China are not based upon codified censorship but are issue-specific. In order to ensure that the media interpret the news in a way favorable to the regime, the state decides what the press can and cannot report, who deals with particular issues and how these news items are to be presented. On the informal side, journalists have been attempting to break free from state control as their media seek liberties in the marketplace. Though all Chinese media have bureaucratic affiliations, their operations have been increasingly commercialized, and they can express opinions, which are quite different from those prescribed by their bureaucratic affiliations”. (Xiaogang, 1999) Background of Chinese Politics The American image of China despite of dating back to the colonial period and the early trade with the Chinese has never been considered friendly, but the degree and the level to which orientalist views about China were normalized, domesticated, and popularized in the World War II era which is unmatched by any other period in American history. Unique to the American orientalist discourse of this period was the way it tended to measure and define America according to carefully calibrated terms of modernity. Modernity at this juncture in history, more than at any other time, was most closely associated with material luxuries and conveniences afforded by the advancement of technology as well as the adoption of beliefs that promoted the progress of civilization. This has been the reason why the Chinese culture and civilization apart from the governmental level has been under deep influence of U.S. To believe in progress was to believe in the promise of science and the values embedded in American notions of democracy. In short, being American for Chinese was synonymous with being modern. (Heyung, 2000, p. 32) Chinese Americans Expectations Chinese Americans in the 1930s challenge the perspective that assumes cultural subjects that typically aspire to blend in with the norms of mainstream America. In fact, they chose to highlight their cultural differences, albeit selectively, thereby maintaining their integrity as ethnic persons rather than becoming indistinguishable from the rest. While they did enjoy the prestige and social standing that came with being native informants who could adroitly manage the orientalist system, they were actually anthropologists in their own right, generating views about China, its people, and Chinese America that differed in important ways from the prevailing, dominant discourse about the Chinese. First and foremost, Chinese Americans were motivated by the desire to push at the American doors of opportunity for the Chinese, which were only beginning to open in the World War II era. Their views indubitably served to promote the economic and social advancement of Chinese America. (Heyung, 2000, p. 43) A political change took place in the era of 1940 in which Chinese youth started striking with awareness and started realizing that they were just compromising the interests of their ancestral land with Americans. At the height of so-called ‘friendly relations’ between China and the United States, some felt emboldened to publicly denounce policies and rhetorical practices that denigrated their ancestry. Of primary concern to many Chinese Americans was the repeal of the overtly racist Chinese Exclusion Act, first implemented in 1882, which severely curtailed Chinese immigration and made Chinese ineligible for citizenship. (Heyung, 2000, p. 45) But the horrid of Chinese government towards democracy led their expectations down, when the incidence of massacre of Chinese Americans in Tiananmen Square took place. Chinese Media Diplomacy Today Chinese media is renowned for the diplomatic steps it has taken towards the sectors, which are deeply being impacted of the WTO foreign competition. According to analysts, telecommunications, finance, and insurance are the most benefiting sectors of PRC. State monopolies have reaped large profits from these capital and technology-intensive industries despite their low-quality service. In the 1990s, the telecommunications industry registered a profit margin of 33 per cent per year, compared to 24.6 per cent of the tertiary industries’ average. The next tier of the market to be affected will be advertising, motion pictures, publishing, tourism, and information services, all of which have great market potential but lower profit levels (8-19 per cent). The Dilemma Chinese media have always been vulnerable to subjectivity. The media for what it is today was not like that till the 1980s. Perhaps one reason for this is the lack of freedom through which it has always suffered right from the PRC independence to the sufferings of Tiananmen massacre. Except for the Voice of America and the BBC in China, news sources from mainland China were under the strict influence of the Communist Party, and this was not new to the institutional reforms. The dilemma remained there as what usually came from these state-run news sources was propaganda, or something close to it. The Party was usually more concerned with convincing their own citizens of the legitimacy of their actions rather than the outside world. Similarly, anti-Communist sources bended the facts or quote them out of context to distort the image of the Chinese government. Consequently, the readers used to be careful in discerning the truth. (Han & John, 1992, p. 8) as Chinese people at that time were so much used to the sovereignty limited by boundaries, that while reading newspapers or listening news, they assumed it to be their own responsibility to explore the truth. Entering the WTO Entering the WTO has not been an easy task, as China has to make certain confessions to open up the media and telecommunications markets as part of the conditions for the WTO entry. Formulating specific laws and regulations compliant with the WTO agreements will be highly contested. How China meets the challenge in the first five years will have a decisive influence on its long-term policy landscape. The Chinese authorities have to balance the goals of harnessing new media technology to economic growth with those of protecting their own ideological power. Policy makers seem to divide the media into the hardware and software components. Foreign investment in information infrastructures, service provision, and technological knowledge is viewed as compatible with the regime’s economic agendas. The seemingly “non-ideological” content is negotiable: Disney’s ESPN and Viacom’s MTV have made inroads into inland cable channels, while CCTV sports has made Michael Jordan the most admired American in China. The WTO will open the door for foreign capital to invest in media advertising and management. But under no circumstances will the Party-state relinquish its editorial authority. (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 12) News media, press and television, as the last propaganda strongholds of the Party-state, are to be sheltered from foreign competition. These monopolies are China’s last windfall enterprises in which advertising revenues grew 200 per cent in the 1990s, averaging 35 per cent annually. As foreign media giants are waiting to jump in on China’s lucrative media and television market, the Party-state still seems intent upon keeping a strong hold on it. CCTV will maintain its dominant position and prosper from an advertising gold mine in the 2008 Olympics. Yu Guoming (2002) predicts that China’s media advertising revenue has room to grow, but the soaring costs of interconglomerate competition will flatten its growth rate from 35 per cent to 10-15 per cent per year. (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 12) The film industry will be a victim of inflexible foreign competition. When China committed itself in 1995 to importing ten Hollywood blockbuster movies per year, the policy was generally greeted as a boon to creative artists and directors toward cultural liberalization. Despite its market potential, China’s telecommunications infrastructure remains seriously underdeveloped. Teledensity remains very low; as of 2000, the Internet had penetrated merely 1.4 per cent of the nation’s households, with Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Qingdao accounting for half of the growth (DeWoskin, 2001). China has tried to strengthen the state-owned and other domestic entities through restructuring and controlled domestic competition. In anticipation of WTO entry, the state issued, in the year 2000 alone, a series of seven decrees on the Internet to reaffirm its own authority in approving Internet or BBS services, while warning that the Internet must not carry unlawful information or have links with foreign websites. It is a conscious state policy to “colonize” this cyberspace by filling it up with a preponderance of government and enterprises websites. By the end of 1999, about 1,000 newspapers and 200 radio and TV networks had gone on line, but only the websites operated by central, provincial, and ministerial-level media are allowed to carry news information (Sun, 2001). Most of the online newspapers do not differ much from their print versions; there is little public discourse under tight state stricture (He and Zhu, 2002). Chinese Commercial Culture Media technologies are playing an increasingly crucial role in the negotiations between state and market, as well as between the national and the global, in view of China’s entry into the WTO. Today the Internet has created media spaces, that some of the imported content is potentially rebellious to official ideology, and that the imported business culture may promote individual and enterprise autonomy. This issue can be viewed critically regarding how technologies and the globalizing forces negotiate with the existing political, economic, and social institutions. First, China is enthusiastic about promoting the commercial applications of new technologies, but is keen on controlling their negative political ramifications; the profit-hungry global media giants are unlikely to disobey these priorities. Given its conflicting priorities, the state policy will continue to be uncertain and ambiguous. Second, the diffusion and utilization of telecommunications in China will continue to mirror and bolster the socio-economic divide. That new media technologies exhibit less centralized and more commercialized institutional frameworks than television (Lynch, 2000) suggests that their subversive, oppositional, and system-changing role should not be overstated, but the urban elite will benefit from easier technological access to commercial and academic information. Third and the most important concern is the role of telecommunications, as it has promoted the ascendancy of commercial culture in China, how will it work both with and against the authoritarian regime? (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 33) Existing major concerns Membership to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sponsorship of the 2008 Olympics were two major ongoing stories in the Chinese media in the 1990s and 2001. As the twin milestones in China’s integration with global capitalism, both events have profound implications for China and a rapidly transforming global order. (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 33) While the last few milestones in China’s long march to the WTO were overshadowed by the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the story took many dramatic twists and turns, including Zhu Rongji’s controversial WTO offer to the United States in April 1999, the U. S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 which led to a surge of and-American sentiments in China, and the suspension of the U. S. China WTO negotiations for several months. The climax, however, was no doubt the signing of the U. S. -China WTO accession agreement on November 15, 1999 as the United States, being the global superpower, has de facto veto power on China’s WTO membership. (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 33) Beijing’s 2008 Olympics The 2008 experience will be the most engrossing installment in the complex history of Chinese involvement in the Olympics (Kolatch, 1972). In recent decades, that history has entailed the seating of the People’s Republic of China in 1971, tensions and compromises over Taiwan’s membership, and Chinese athletic headway in a range of sports, paralleling the PRC’s growing prominence on the world stage. Beijing came tantalizingly close to landing the 2000 Olympics, losing to Sydney by just two votes in the fourth round of International Olympic Committee (IOC) balloting (Brownell, 1995). Having skipped the competition for 2004, which was awarded to Athens, Beijing became one of five candidate cities, narrowed from an initial field of eight applicants, under consideration for 2008, and was selected to host those Games at an IOC meeting in Moscow in July 2001. (Chuan Lee, 2003, p. 57) Tiananmen Square Protest The period since the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in June 1989 illustrates both the obstacles to press freedoms and hopes that they will grow along with the country’s market-oriented reform. (Xiaogang, 1993) Tiananmen Square Protests resulting in massacre is the best example of how far the Government can go ending up the democratic reforms. Throughout history, developing China usually meant threatening its social stability. The first-generation revolutionary rulers of present-day China were aware of this fact that China would never implement democracy; remembering the country’s past with vivid apprehension, they held tenaciously to their rule while preventing any inkling of possible chaos. Yet against the hardened wall of the government’s entrenched bureaucracy, a group of enthusiastic university students felt they should play a leading role to correct the problems that have continually spread throughout their country. According to several critical statements, among the university students who protested, majority were Chinese Americans; this is also assumed that behind those concerns were hidden U.S benefits as America has always wanted China to be in the list of democracy; On the other hand, China’s youth demonstrated protests because they believed that the country’s political structure had to change if long-awaited social and economic reforms were to be realized. In this respect, the 1989 student democracy movement in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an attempt to consolidate a wave of grievances that had been building up to the Tiananmen crackdown ever since the scars of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), This movement is historically important because it was a popular movement, managing to gather active support from all walks of Chinese life even perhaps the military. The mass protests gave the government every reason to believe that their legitimacy was being questioned and why they should have lacked behind, when they were aware of their vulnerable concerns in front of Chinese government. It was only through agendas and propagandas that let them know about the happenings in PRC. (Han & John, 1992, p. 2) In one sense, the students’ demands were aimed toward abstract goals consisting of freedoms and a general liberalization of the political system. Western watchers were quick to note the idea of democracy, which appeared to be the students’ ideological platform. Yet closer scrutiny of the movement shows that the students called for concrete changes. They demanded an end to bureaucratic corruption and the severe inflation. They also wanted more press freedom and freedom of assembly. At the outset of the movement, the students seemed to have a strategy: to legitimize the popular movement as a legal entity. Perhaps the most fervent of demands by the students was the government appraisal of the movement as such. Frustrated, the students believed that only a challenge to the dictatorship of the Party would force the regime to allow more competent participation in government and access to civil liberties. (Han & John, 1992, p. 2) The dilemmas which remained with the Tiananmen massacre were not only limited to thousands of lost lives, but also the prohibition which the government imposed on newspapers and media not to report on any acts of student violence. The prohibition extended to articles, photographs, and videos; only organized mourning activities by the students and people from different work units were allowed to be reported. Today, the Chinese government still censors public discussions, although Chinese news media and the Internet are more open today than they were in the past. Chinese journalists have more freedom to comment and investigate those issues that were banned to investigate not only for reporters but for the media as well. Chinese reporters have complete freedom for investigative reporting on issues like police abuse and official corruption. In cases where popular sentiment is strong, the media acts as a pressure valve for social unrest, and sometimes successfully pressures courts and the police. At the same time, the Chinese government does not lag behind in exercising its authority to restrict certain speech or punish people for holding and sharing their political concerns. China seems to allow free expression only until officials decide that it has become threatening to the government’s power. If government censors are worried by some speech or opinion, they crack down on editors, journalists and web users. Local propaganda departments monitor newspapers, television and radio, while police monitor the Internet; news media and the Internet are each governed by separate and overlapping laws and regulations. (Beijing, 2008) Under such circumstances one can hope that perhaps one day, PRC would change its authoritative attitude in the direction of democracy in order to fulfil impacts other than entering WTO. 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Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers Lynch, Daniel (2000), “The nature and consequences of China’s unique pattern of telecommunications development, ” in Chin-Chuan Lee (ed.), Power, Money, and Media: Communication Patterns and Bureaucratic Control in Cultural China. Evanston, IL: North- western University Press. Sun, Xupei (2001), “Accession to the WTO and development of China’s digital media, ” unpublished paper. Xiaogang Zhan, (1993) The Market versus the State: The Chinese Press since Tiananmen. In Journal of International Affairs. Volume: 47: 1. Columbia University School of International Public Affairs Read More