Profit or ideology? The Chinese press between party and market

Abstract

Economic reforms have taken priority over political reforms in post-Mao China. This has caused the serious dilemma in which most newspapers find themselves. On the one hand, they are no longer financed or subsidized by the state; on the other hand, they are still expected to be at the ideological service of the state. The party-state has the last say in whether they can be published and who should be appointed editor-in-chief. Hence, the press in China now continues to be controlled by the party ideologically, while it relies on the market financially. This divorce between ideological dependence and financial independence has led to two interesting tendencies: first, most newspapers have started to increase their volume to print light-hearted material in order to increase readership and ultimately to maximize advertising income; second, some have even started to run other businesses such as service industries and thus to become a kind of media conglomerate. In this sense, newspapers are on the way to becoming true profit-making enterprises which eventually will undermine the role of mouthpiece for the party-state. This article analyses these problems, using several national and regional papers as exemplars to illustrate the tensions much of the Chinese press is going through.