This paper explores the accommodations and tensions between Party journalism and market-driven journalism in the Chinese press by focussing on the Beijing Youth News, the Beijing Communist Youth League organ that has achieved remarkable commercial success in recent years. It argues that while market mechanisms have led to innovations and created some relative autonomy in some areas, the introduction of market logic into Party journalism may lead to the emergence of a propaganda/commercial model of journalism which performs more subtle and less didactic ideological work for the Party.
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