I don’t believe that the government has ever been confused about its own stance on media controls. The core principle of the CCP’s Leninist notion of the press is that the Party controls the media, and the media should be the mouthpiece of the Party and the people. From Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, even up to Xi Jinping, this stance has never changed.
Beginning with the founding of the Western China City Daily in 1993 and culminating in the Southern Weekly incident in 2013, twenty years of commercialization of the press in China have given many outsiders the impression that media controls are on the wane. But this is a misconception.
At the time of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 “southern tour,” Party newspapers had no competitive market power and were funded primarily by subsidies from the government. With the introduction of market reforms, Party newspapers started founding daughter publications with stronger market appeal, whose proceeds could then support the operations of their parent newspapers and lighten their financial loads.
The authorities have never loosened their grip over these daughter publications, the commercial press. In general, the parent newspaper assigns the top staff of commercial newspapers, and the Party’s propaganda organs continue to exert direct influence over the commercial media outlets, using phone calls, critiques of already published articles, and other measures to intervene on matters of content, overall direction, and personnel assignments. Nevertheless, over the past two decades, the staff of commercial newspapers have gradually adopted a value system and a market position similar to that of the Western media, resulting in friction between them and the authorities. The Southern Weekly is a good example of this.
As digital technology has accelerated the spread of information and the commercial media have become more influential, the government has continued to implement targeted restrictions in an effort to control the press. These include passing laws that prohibit Sina.com and other websites from reprinting articles published in commercial newspapers, and other measures that limit the growth of commercial media. This trend came to a head in early 2013 when the Propaganda Department of Guangdong province forced Southern Weekly to pull its annual New Year editorial and replace it with one glorifying the Party, sparking protests from the staff and public. This was the final consequence of a steadily escalating campaign to reign in the power of commercial media.
Xi Jinping’s speech on August 19th, 2013 signaled that the fifth generation of CCP leadership planned to tighten its grip on media and ideology even further. Since then, a number of prominent Internet commentators have been arrested in harsh cyberspace purges, and at the same time the government has adopted a series of stricter measures, including banning the system of “cross-regional reporting” [that Chinese media outlets used to expose corruption], requiring newspapers to publish only the Xinhua News Agency’s coverage of non-local stories, forbidding journalists to report outside their regular beats, imposing strict limitations on visas for foreign journalists, prohibiting reporters from using social media without approval from their organizations, and banning journalists from publishing unofficial critical reports. Most recently, under a set of new rules, Chinese journalists are barred from “illegally recording and transmitting state secrets” or writing articles for foreign news outlets, and are required to sign confidentiality agreements. Shortly beforehand, the 70-year-old veteran journalist Gao Yu was arrested for “divulging state secrets.” All this testifies to the state’s continuing determination to keep commercial media under its thumb.
— Translated by Austin Woerner
