The Control of the Media in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

This dissertation examines the motivations, logic, and functions of media control in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Rather than telling the history of media control in modern China, or giving a comprehensive account of the techniques employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the media, it investigates the origins of the CCP’s theoretical approach to the media, as well as the consequences of the resulting concepts for practical media work in the PRC. The first half of the thesis tracks the genesis of the Party’s media concept and reconstructs the conditions that contributed to its rise in the first half of the twentieth century; the chapters in the latter half follow this concept in its implementation through a number of case studies from the early 1950s through the late 1990s. Since the day of its founding, the CCP has placed great emphasis on questions of media and propaganda; after 1949 the party-state has claimed full control of the Chinese print, broadcast, and electronic media. Asking for the reasons behind this claim, I argue that it must be traced back to the Party’s desire to bring about the transformation of human consciousness and to create an environment conducive to this process, a utopian project informed as much by the Leninist version of Marxism as by Neo-Confucian ideas of education and state-society relations prevalent in the late imperial era. This project and its underlying fundamental assumptions have survived – in greatly transmuted form – to the present day and continue to inform the strict control of the Chinese media, even when such controls clash with other political and socio-economic interests of the Party-state. I propose to take the media as a variable to measure changes in the CCP’s approach to governance. The Party’s handling of the media serves as a mirror of state-society relations; consequently, the investigation into the media provides us with information on the CCP’s conceptions of governance under changing circumstances. I argue that over the past twenty years, the CCP has successfully altered and reinterpreted its vision of the state and its position therein; it has adopted a more flexible set of methods to achieve its fundamental political objectives. At the same time, however, the ultimate goals of the Party – originally formulated in Yan’an – have changed remarkably little.