Abstract
Since the implementation of reform and opening-up, China has been in the mode of imagining and imitating the West, especially the United States, revealing, arguably, an ideological transition from the Communist Utopia to “the American Utopia.” In this process, the media not only has played the role of an ideological purveyor but also has itself been transformed and reconfigured along the way. It may be said that such a transformation is facilitated by the matching ideological underpinnings between the “administrative research” mode of theorizing communication in the United States and the market-oriented reforms in China. 1 Under such circumstances, the problem of “erosion of the media by market and capital,” which has long been presented as a problem of the West in Chinese scholarly writings and is being materialized in China as well during the reforms, has been mostly neglected or even carefully avoided in the country’s scholarly and policy discourses. In the meantime, the official agencies of the party-state that implemented the media reforms found themselves in a conundrum. On one hand, they could no longer fight the losing battles of breathing life to the old media institutions by salvaging the ruling Party’s orthodoxy theories; on the other, their pathetically orchestrated projects of Marxist Theoretical Construction imposed upon higher education institutions and the media come across more like dogmatic indoctrination than meaningful intellectual efforts.
Such conditions raise serious theoretical issues that are at the core of China’s political economic research on communication. Among them are the following: How to re-envision the Marxist theoretical tradition in journalism? How to articulate and rejuvenate this tradition with the current journalistic practices and social changes in China? How to enrich the Global Left and Western Marxist discourses with research in China? Questions along this line constitute the context of problematics for the book series Critical Communication that was launched in 2015. The book series, co-edited by Yuezhi Zhao, Professor of Communication in Simon Fraser University, and Xinyu Lü, Professor of Communication in East China Normal University, is an ambitious academic publication project. The first batch of books chosen to be published involve more than 20 volumes of domestically produced as well as translated academic books in the area of the political economy of communication.
The books to appear in this series fall into three categories: “Critical Communication Theories,” “Translated Works in Critical Communication,” and “Critical Communication in Practices.” The theory category will include monographs, collected lectures, and papers, as well as reports and proceedings of workshops that showcase the frontiers of the communication research in the contemporary Chinese Marxist tradition, addressing issues such as the publicness of the media, network and Chinese politics, and reflections on the Chinese political economy and world communication system. The collection of the translated works will introduce classic writings as well as the latest achievements in critical communication research from outside of China. The classic works include Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 1978) and Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication (Smythe & Guback, 1994). Newer works include The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications (Wasko, Murdoch, & Sousa, 2011), Marx Is Back—The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today (Fuchs & Mosco, 2012), and Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (McChesney, 2013), among others. The collection on communication practices focuses on research by both domestic and international scholars that addresses China’s communication practices and experiences such as the labor processes in communication and communication practitioners’ self-reflections of being communication laborers and targets.
Three stages: political economy of communication in China
The publication of this book series is a culmination of developing the political economic communication research in China in the past three decades. This research tradition arrived in China in the 1980s, at a time when various communication theories from the West were introduced to China, including those in the critical tradition and those in the US-based administrative tradition. But unlike the latter, the political economic tradition did not incite immediate enthusiasm from Chinese scholars. One reason may be that with China eagerly embracing the neoliberal ideas, critical theories such as political economic studies of communication were neglected with some structural impetus. Correspondingly, the central concerns of political economic studies such as “media ownership” and “audience commodification” were pushed out of the realm of visibility. Another reason is that quantitative methods commonly adopted in the administrative research were novel to Chinese scholars at the time. They appeared to be powerful rebuttals of the “propaganda model” of the Chinese press.
Based on my own archival search, the starting point can be traced to the first issue of Journal of International Communication (Guoji Xinwenjie) in 1979. It published Professor Shan Lin’s abridged Chinese translation of Herbert Schiller’s Mass Communication and American Empire (1969/1979). The book was introduced in a framework that came to dominate the treatment of political economy of communication among Chinese scholars: It is a theoretical resource for criticizing the communication system of Western capitalism. It took more than 15 years for Chinese communication scholars to break out of this confine. 2 By then, the fever of marketization had brought problems concerning the media under the glaring public and scholarly attention. It seemed that the issues arising from the capitalist articulation of the media and the market economy were not exclusively problems of the West, and the political economic analysis of communication was no longer a lens for a critical analysis of the West. Marking this new development, the fifth issue of Modern Communication (Xiandai Chuanbo) in 1999 published Zhenzhi Guo’s article, “New Media and Political economy.” The article took the form of a dialogue with Vincent Mosco during Guo’s exchange visit to Canada. This dialogue clearly showed that Chinese scholars at the time started thinking about how to adapt the political economic perspective to understand communication in China. This was also the time when Yuezhi Zhao established herself as a leading scholar in the discipline. According to Guo (2002 pp. 34–37), Zhao introduced the political economy of communication to her. During her visit to Zhao, “for a whole week, I stayed at her home, reading her doctoral dissertation, and taking theoretical bombardment from her.”
The third phase of political economy of communication in China happened after 2008, when a new round of economic crisis hit the West. Neoliberalism came under stronger critical challenges; many Chinese scholars became even more disenchanted with the West and its model of economic and social structuring. More and more Chinese scholars in the past decade have produced such critical analyses and their voices have become increasingly voluminous. In general, these voices insist that while the market is a necessary realm for an economy and a society, it is inscribed with the inner logic of alienation, that is, when left unchecked, it may engulf the state and society, which are formations for public authority and moral fabric. Pertinent to China, a pointed question is whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the media under its control contain the forces of capital or whether alternatively they are entrapped by capital. Clearly, behind this rise of political economy of communication is a changing configuration of much broader discursive contestations. Viewed together with the early rise of communication theories that embodied liberalism, we can see indications of shifting research paradigms.
This brief sketch of the development trajectory shows that the changing contexts conditioned the changing relevance of the political economy of communication in China. After three decades of development, political economy of communication in China has shown its strengths by insisting on empirical observations of current structural changes in the Chinese media and society and interpreting such observations through a theoretically informed and historically situated lens. Reflecting this effort are the works with the following titles: “Relationship between Production of Media Content and Labor,” “Copyright and Capital Control,” and “Communication and Class in the New Media Era.” Together, these works re-affirm Mosco’s (1996) point about the four ideas—social change and history, social totality, moral philosophy, and praxis—as “the cornerstone” (p. 17) of political economy of communication.
China and the world: rejuvenating the socialist legacy
In early 1970s, Dallas Smythe, a renowned scholar in political economy, paid a visit to China. After the trip, he wrote an article entitled “After Bicycles, What?” (Smythe, 2014, pp. 95–107). The article did not come to the attention of Chinese scholars until very recently. As a founder of political economy of communication, Smythe made a prolepsis of some issues concerning the development of Chinese media and society and predicted the situation where there would be a lack of public (and cultural) product supply and the popularity of consumerism, both material and cultural, as technologies are increasingly incorporated in China’s economic development. Recently, Smythe’s essay was translated into Chinese and its publication stirred up a wave of critical reflections on the neoliberal path that China had embarked on. This event and the inclusion of translated works in the book series make it clear that Chinese scholars wish to join the intellectual community of political economy of communication in the world.
But China’s problems must be addressed in China, where socialism is not simply a label. Rather, it also signifies the fact that China is the most prominent country in the world with a booming economy under, at least as far as the official discourse is concerned, socialism. Situated in such a historical reality, how to inherit the socialist legacy is of great importance. Yuezhi Zhao holds that neither the general social theory nor the political economy of communication in the West has contributed needed theoretical resources for analyzing modern China. As the grassroots class seeking to revive their right for class-based struggle, the leadership is also seeking to reconstruct their cultural hegemony so as to win back the support from the bottom of the society (Zhao, 2014, pp. 151–179). From another angle, Yuezhi Zhao and Xinyu Lü argue that theoretical development in the Chinese political economy of communication needs to consider simultaneously two questions: “How to handle the challenges from Western neo-liberalism?” and “how to achieve the sinification of political economy of communication?” As they see it, many authors contributing to the book series have attempted to address how we may re-articulate the present conditions with the historical trajectory marked by moments such as “The May Fourth Movement,” “The Yan’an Period,” and “The First Three Decades of the New China” (i.e. 1949–1979). Only by identifying the unique and uniquely complex Chinese problems in the 20th century can we avoid the simplistic reading of China as a capitalist country, or the view of China’s media reforms as being equivalent to the media marketization in the West, or the separation of the contemporary China into “the first and second three decades.”
Accordingly, how to take China as subject matter of research and as a method has become a focal concern of the current Chinese political economy of communication. On one hand, China’s communication is embedded in the country’s political and economic structure, with a communication pattern that is part of state structure. On the other, there is a great disparity in both the levels of development and compositions of different economies. Under such conditions, these ideas from Zhao and Lü have outlined a path toward fruitful Chinese communication research. For example, migrant workers’ uses of media and digitalization of the national CATV may not simply be a matter of media uses and effects but emerging constituents of China’s urbanization and information and communications technology (ICT) developments; they are aspects of the social formation involving differential relationships between China’s media across the urban and rural divide.
Reflecting this effort of reclaiming China’s socialist heritage, recently, Lü also launched an exposition of the Party Press theory attributed to Marx and Lenin. The effort along this line has focused on the role of the state and the CCP in the articulation and realization of the publicness of the media. As Lü (2015) states,
In the process of the Chinese revolution and the state building, the theory of China’s Party press provided space and power for the construction of the proletarian subjectivity. The publicness based on the class nature is the source of legitimacy in this country. … Ultimately, the innovation and transformation of the Party press theory is closely related to the ruling Party’s own reconstruction. (p. 97)
Of course, when faced with the ruling Party’s officially imposed tune on its historical issues, and the situation where the state is governed “by simultaneously leaning toward the left in political governance and toward the right in economic policies” and the public is “apathetic toward politics and enthusiastic toward economic growth,” it is difficult for Chinese scholars of political economy of communication to redefine “the ideal, fair and just” social order and communication order. In other words, the current problems in China’s media reform and social transformation have brought to the forefront the issue of rebuilding of web of publicness in China, for both the Chinese state and society.
Academic community: subject consciousness, possible alternative paths
The aforementioned article “After Bicycles, What?” was not published during Smythe’s lifetime, but it was circulated widely among the Western scholars of critical political economy. In 1986, Smythe gave a hard copy to Yuezhi Zhao who had just arrived in Canada to start her graduate study. That was the beginning of a process that led Zhao to be a bridge for Chinese scholars to understand the Western theories of political economy and to provide the foundation for a political economy of China’s media and telecommunication system. As her collaborator on the book series Xinyu Lü (2015) testifies,
I had already started to rethink about political economy because of my dissatisfaction with the approach of media economics … Yet at the beginning, I was foggy about the intellectual development of the Western political economy of communication, until around 2001, when I read Mosco’s The Political economy of Communication. I wish I had read this book earlier. (p. 104)
For Zhao, it was after reading Xinyu Lü’s article Ruins of the Future: Class and History in Wang Bing’s Tiexi District published in New Left Review that she found Lü as a scholar with shared theoretical interests.
In North America, the group of scholars of political economy of communication is not large in size, but there are traceable paths, academic connections, and even intellectual succession among them. The ties connecting Smythe seem to have started a similar pattern. Zhao and Lü have been collaborating closely in the past decade; their efforts have led to the emergence of a sizeable academic community, populated by other younger scholars and graduate students who are either trained or mentored by them. The presence of this community has made the book series possible and through the project, which is expected to facilitate not only more fruitful political economic research in China but also contributions to the world’s scholarly knowledge with Chinese experiences.
Some have questioned, why the case that political economy of communication does not have a hospitable environment of growth in China, given the numerous ideational similarities with what the CCP professes to uphold? The answer lies in the critical reappraisal of the CCP’s history that political economists insist upon; they reject the “no debate” approach that the CCP leadership has adopted and advocate instead “theorizing in concrete historical contexts.” This is not a position that is commensurate with the official discourse of the CCP. For example, the central Party authorities required Chinese media organizations to implement the compulsory training of their staffs in “Marxist Theories of Journalism.” Political economy scholars believe that such an approach, which only gets trainees to recite a few classic quotes of Marxist writings, is likely to backfire. They insist on the approach of media practitioners to develop Marxist understandings of concrete historical conditions and processes. A political economic analysis would suggest that in the Western liberal democratic countries, the mainstream values concerning the media are deeply inscribed in and integrated with their media education systems, legal systems, professional norms, mechanisms of human resource management, and so on. The integration of these factors gives the Western media their subjectivity. In contrast, the Chinese media does not have the comparable conditions to develop its unique subjectivity. Now that political economic scholars have raised the issue of historically rooted and class-based subjectivity, to what extent will Chinese media acquire and put into practices of such consciousness? The answer remains elusive; ultimately, practical steps toward a satisfactory answer will depend on the policy orientation of the Party.
Today’s China is an ideological battleground. As a theoretical approach, political economy of communications shares the critical stands and theoretical resources with various New Left theories. They may necessarily be confronted by the arguments based on the ideological right. This ideological left–right contention itself also raises a question about the condition of contemporary China. That is, to what extent can the two sides have a hospitable space to engage in exchanges on an equal footing.
As Chun Lin (2006, p. 223), a political scientist at London School of Economics and Political Science, said, in its socialist transformation, China must keep a balance between market-based dynamics and individual inspirations, as well as a balance between social cohesion and justice. Articulating the same position in media studies, Yu Hong (2014, pp. 610–627), a US-based Chinese media scholar, argues that the Chinese media industry must find the point of balance between enterprising development and public service in the reforms under the auspices of reforming the cultural system. These arguments suggest to me that in China, debates and collisions between intellectual Left and Right are much needed in the search for a “less bad way” for the country’s development.
Such contentions are waged in search of a path for the country that is entrapped in neither the prescription of economically developed capitalist countries nor the model of the former Soviet Union and its subsidiaries. Whether finding such an alternative and putting it into practice can be successful depend, of course, on not only theorists but also the national leadership and the public. The scholars rallied around the book series also know that the problematic that they have formulated and embarked on defies an easy solution or quick fixes; rather, it calls for persistent efforts in critical studies. A critical point here is that such efforts open up new possibilities, possibilities of alternatives to the known models of human development. Such epistemic and ideological openness is sorely lacking in our imagination, in both scholarly and policy realms, of the formation of not only media and communication systems but also society. China is now at a critical juncture where opening up for possible alternatives may potentially not only set her on a path of more just and sustained development but also accumulate unique Chinese contributions to a more just global system. This is the ambitious mission of the book series under review.