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Four Models of the Fourth Estate: A Typology of Contemporary Chinese Journalists*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

Jonathan Hassid
Jonathan Hassid
Affiliation:
University of Technology, Sydney. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Scholarly attention has not kept pace with the rapid changes in the professional role of Chinese journalists. Instead, two older views prevail. The first, which sees Chinese journalists as “mouthpieces” of the Communist Party unchanged from the Maoist era, downplays the tremendous changes in the media since 1978. The second view, holding that they are increasingly becoming “American-style professionals,” overstates the influence of international media norms on Chinese news workers' day-to-day reality. While such communist and American-style professionals do exist in contemporary China, both are far less influential and numerous than stereotypes would suggest. Exclusive scholarly focus on these groups ignores two other more numerous and influential orientations: “advocate professionals,” those who write to influence opinion and policy, and “workaday journalists,” who work mainly for money and lack a commitment to public service. This article delineates all four types of Chinese journalist and explains why an understanding of the latter two professional orientations is critical to understanding China's media, politics and society.

Keywords

Chinese mediajournalismprofessionalizationpolitical advocacysocial change
Type
Special Section on the Chinese Media
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 208 , December 2011 , pp. 813 - 832
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2011

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References

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4 The term is adapted from Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who refer to such journalists as belonging to the “North Atlantic” or “Liberal” model of journalism.

5 Lin, “Organizational construction or individual's deed?” p. 176.

6 Note that the four categories are derived primarily from interviews and research on Chinese periodicals, and their application to radio, television or internet journalists is somewhat speculative. Without a sample from a representative survey, I cannot provide reliable frequency estimates.

7 See Rachel E. Stern and Jonathan Hassid, “Amplifying silence: uncertainty and control parables in contemporary China,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 45, No. 10 (forthcoming 2012).

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24 In this case, the belief that they serve society by serving the CCP.

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27 Lin, “Organizational construction or individual's deed?” p. 176.

28 Yuezhi Zhao, Communication in China, p. 268.

29 Ibid. p. 253.

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35 Interview HH05-2A.

36 Interview HE24-2.

37 Interview GX31-2.

38 Interview HL9-4.

39 Interview GM08-2.

40 The Li Datong quotation is from the title of Datong, Li, Yong xinwen yingxiang jintian – “bingdian” zhoukan jishi (Using News to Influence Today – The Freezing Point Chronicle) (Hong Kong: Xianggang taide shidai chuban youxian gongsi, 2006)Google Scholar.

41 Interview GX31-2.

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43 Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, esp. ch. 8.

44 For example, the University of California, Berkeley alone hosts several visiting Chinese journalists every year as visiting scholars attached to the Graduate School of Journalism.

45 There are at least three such groups in Beijing and one in Guangzhou, for instance.

46 I borrow the concept from Rachel E. Stern, “Navigating the boundaries of political tolerance: environmental litigation in China,” PhD dissertation in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2009.

47 Interview EU30-3.

48 Li Datong, Using News to Influence Today, p. 1, my translation.

49 Interview GM14-2B.

50 I.e. their content is mostly, though not entirely, for internal government reference (neibu) only and not for general circulation.

51 Something that happens surprisingly often, apparently.

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54 Strictly speaking, one must have a residence permit to live in Chinese cities, and the vast majority of peasant labourers lack this permit, called a hukou. For more on the hukou system, see Mallee, Hein, “Migration, hukou, and resistance in reform China,” in Perry, E.J. and Selden, M. (eds.), Chinese Society, 2nd Edition: Change, Conflict and Resistance (London & New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 136–57Google Scholar.

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60 According to The Economist at http://www.economist.com/countries/China/profile.cfm?folder=Profile-Political%20Forces, accessed 8 May 2009.

61 Lowell Dittmer, “The politics of publicity in reform China,” in Chin-Chuan Lee, China's Media, Media's China, pp. 89–112; Chin-Chuan Lee, “The conception of Chinese journalists.”

62 That is, articles written for the party-state bureaucracy only and not the general public.

63 Lin, “Organizational construction or individual's deed?” p. 179.

64 Interview HY20-5B.

65 Interview GM05-2.

66 Interview ET09-2B.

67 Chen, Zhu and Wu, “The Chinese journalist,” p. 25.

68 People's Daily Staff, “Tibetan separatist exposes Dalai Lama's ‘democracy myth’,” People's Daily English Edition, 21 October 2009, http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/6789022.html.

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71 Under Chinese law, internet sites are barred from doing original reporting, and can only “relay news from Xinhua or news units directly under the control of provincial governments” (Brady, Marketing Dictatorship, p. 129). Some sites do original reporting anyway, however.

72 Renwei, Tan, “A Shanxi incident: a reporter gets beaten violently to death at a coal mine,” Nanfang dushi bao (Southern Metropolis Daily), 16 January 2007Google Scholar, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20070116_1.htm, as translated by Roland Soong at the EastSouthWestNorth blog.

73 See Xiaojun, Dai, “Zhenjia jizhe paidui ling ‘fenkou fei’” (“Real and fake journalists line up to receive ‘gag fees’”), Zhongguo qingnian bao (China Youth Daily), 27 October 2008, p. A7, for an uncommon example of a Chinese press exposé of such behaviourGoogle Scholar.

74 Interview HL9-4.

75 Edward Cody, “Blackmailing by journalists in China seen as ‘frequent’,” The Washington Post, 25 January 2007, p. A1, emphasis added.

76 Quoted in Reuters, “Beijing to introduce journalist ‘blacklist’,” Reuters, 13 February 2009Google Scholar.

77 Polumbaum and Lei Xiong, China Ink, p. 44.

78 Interview HL2-2.

79 Ibid.

80 Interview GM10-2B.

81 Interview ET04-3.

82 Cody, “Blackmailing by journalists in China seen as ‘frequent’.”

83 Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market and Democracy in China, p. 72.

84 One of the more prominent examples of this involves the aftermath of the Sun Zhigang case. See Hand, Keith J., “Using law for a righteous purpose: the Sun Zhigang incident and evolving forms of citizen action in the People's Republic of China,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2006), pp. 114–95Google Scholar, and Hassid, “Controlling the Chinese media.”

85 I am not aiming to impose a normative standard on Chinese journalists. Rather, they themselves usually condemn such behaviour in principle, if not in practice. See Lo, Ven-hwei, Chan, Joseph M. and Pan, Zhongdang, “Ethical attitudes and perceived practice: a comparative study of journalists in China,Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Asian Journal of Communication, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2005), pp. 154–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an interesting and important comparative survey of journalists' ethical attitudes.

86 Interview HE24-2.

87 Interview HL9-4.

88 This type of flowery language is very common in advocate journalists' writing. In this case, the title refers to the price that must be paid inside the artistic community and the psychic wounds on the artists themselves, for the refinements they demonstrate to the world.

89 Ying, Zhang and Yi, Wu, “Jinxing: qiangwai piaoxiang de qiangnei jiazhi” (“Venus: the price inside the wall for the floating fragrance outside the wall”), Nanfang zhoumo (Southern Weekend), 28 July 2005, p. D28Google Scholar.

90 Such a role orientation is hardly exclusive to China. Hallin and Mancini speak of European reporters who “retain more of the ‘publicist’ role that once prevailed in political journalism – that is, an orientation toward influencing public opinion.” They see this attitude prevalent in what they call the “Polarized Pluralist” model of the news, a model similar to the practice by China's advocate journalists. Such reporters aim to push a specific agenda in their writing and influence public opinion through overt persuasion. Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, p. 28.

91 Lin, “Organizational construction or individual's deed,” p. 178.

92 Interview HB20-2.

93 Interview EL30-0.

94 Interview ET02-3. For him, it was indeed impossible: he was later fired for his outspokenness.

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96 Interview GX20-2.

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98 Ibid. p. 68.

99 See Kluver, Randy, “Elite-based discourse in Chinese civil society,” in Kluver, R. and Powers, J.H. (eds.), Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities (Stamford, CN: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1999), for a discussion of this traditional roleGoogle Scholar.

100 Judge, Print and Politics, p. 10.

101 Interview HE24-2.

102 Interview HL6-4.

103 Interview GX30-2.

104 Liu Jianqiang interview in Polumbaum and Xiong, China Ink, p. 83.

105 Market pressure is clearly critical in the longer term, but over shorter time horizons the causality between market competition and newspaper content is far from clear. See Jonathan Hassid, “Pressing back: the struggle for control over China's journalists,” paper presented at the Workshop on Media in Contemporary Chinese Politics, Harvard, 25 April 2009.