Book Review: Knowledge Workers in Contemporary China: Reform and Resistance in the Publishing Industry by Jianhua Yao

Abstract

Knowledge Workers in Contemporary China: Reform and Resistance in the Publishing Industry. Jianhua Yao. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. 192 pp. $90.00 hbk.If I had a time machine, I would like to take back about four decades and tell my anticommunist father what has become of China. First, Dad, we live in a world, in 2016, in which China, still nominally run by its Communist Party, now engages in capitalist boom-and-bust cycles not unlike those the United States experienced during its Gilded Age, more than a century ago, with more than 10 times as many people. Moves in the Shanghai stock (my Dad might ask: China has a stock market?) have become a very strong tail that sometimes wags the world capitalist dog, with markets undulating on speculations of Chinese growth rates. No, Dad, this isn't my father's world-Vietnam has a stock named after its former communist leader Ho Chi Minh, leading one to wonder, perhaps, who won that war.Chinese publishing, like the rest of its fascinating and swiftly changing society, sometimes does not fit the boxes prescribed for by Communist Party organization charts that subordinate editors to government agencies. The number of publishing enterprises exploded by a factor of 10 between 1978 and 2008, with many that serve the familiar drivers of media in capitalist countries (perceptions of audience desires and profit). The government maintains its own publishing enterprises as well. All of these are subject to censorship of varying forms and intensity. The Communist hierarchy resembles nothing so much as a rider of a gigantic, restless horse doing its best to cope with swiftly changing realities, hoping will not be bucked off with the same force that terminated the Soviet Union. A nation of 1.4 billion has conflicts; does not conduct its affairs in an air of seamless tranquility.Author Jianhua Yao has his finger on the pulse of this rapidly evolving industry, and of its publishers, editors, and writers, who have been re-defining their relationships with state power. His is a study, in Yao's words, about the reconfiguration of class power during China's market reform, about which he writes becomes impossible to fully understand the characteristics of China's socioeconomic changes without clarifying China's social classes, or conceptualizing China's class relations (p. 3). In this context, writes Yao, have become important figures. Thus, insomuch as China remains socialist, the computer keyboard joins the hammer and sickle as important symbols for the society as a whole.Yao's focus concerns how knowledge workers (mainly editors) in China's publishing industry are responding to the pressure brought about by media reform and social (p. 6). These pressures include the transformation from state agencies to private enterprises as technology develops to incorporate electronic publishing with older methods, as Chinese publishing also has become increasingly integrated into the world economy.The author uses archival studies, surveys, interviews, and case studies, concentrating on two large Chinese publishing houses: The Shanghai Science and Technology Publishing House (which issues about 1,000 titles a year, as well as magazines and academic journals), and the Shanghai Education Publishing House (with about 2,000 kinds of books, newspapers, and magazines).Yao describes a system that has evolved after economic reform began in 1978 that presents Chinese editors with a dual challenge of dealing with a state elite as described by the propaganda model, as well as dealing with the commodification process led by the economic elite that has profited from it (p. …