Media Power and its Control in Contemporary China

This chapter introduces the key lines of inquiry to be discussed in the book. Since 2014, President Xi Jinping has envisioned a cultural approach toward ‘the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation’, as a prescription for enhancing ideological unity at home and promoting China’s national images globally. The role of state media in facilitating nation building and nation branding has figured prominently in China’s cultural policies since the 2010s (Barr, East Asia 29:81–94, 2012; Meng, The politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and contestation, Springer Nature, 2018). After more than a decade of digital commercialisation, China’s cultural industry is reverting to a highly regulated model. The political need to contain ideological fragmentation in the digital public sphere gives rise to the government’s initiative of enhancing interventive measures in media production. While China’s media sector remains an effective tool for ideological cultivation at the domestic level, it is now in desperate need to find its voice in the global cultural sphere. The complex interplay between the state, media institutions and the global audience marketplace shapes the transnational, digital regulatory regime.

For China’s cultural sectors, maintaining ideological unity at home and improving national image abroad are now key objectives of recomposing contemporary national discourse as well as expediting their access to the global market. Cultural content, especially documentaries, has become a favourite format for China’s state-run media to ‘present an officially sanctioned view of history’ (Müller, Documentary, world history, and national power in the PRC: Global rise in Chinese eyes, Routledge, 2013, p. 1), given the power of narration figured in the discursive elements of factual production. Scholars are debating the public and global values geared towards assimilating cultural discourse to the political and diplomatic interests of the country. This chapter reviews the problems of ideological mediation and contestations in the digital communication spaces by interrogating the historical and contemporary arguments around China’s state-led communication network, its national cultural policy and its soft power initiative. In particular, it highlights state media’s engagement with national policy, and how they negotiate, thereby assessing the role of China’s media industries in the interconnected, competitive global cultural sphere.

This chapter reflects on my experience of undertaking production research in China and the UK during a movement of digital globalisation. It begins with a discussion of the methodology developed from ethnography, taking into account the changes and continuity of China’s digital cultural spaces. It outlines the methods (including semi-structured interviews and participant observation) used to investigate the shifting power dynamics of China’s contemporary broadcasting sectors and explains how the role of the researcher has been conceived and enacted. It looks at the interactions between local, national and transnational markets, pointing to a need to internationalise the research contexts because of the complex nature of contemporary media politics that integrates China’s cultural sector with the global marketplace.

In the past decade, the prevalence of digital communication has led to China’s increasing policy initiative of recentralising its media networks through the establishment of a digital regulatory regime. This chapter employs ethnographic evidence to investigate the mechanisms of media regulation and control performed across China’s national broadcasters and streaming services. In examining the interactions between media institutions, government bodies, and the publics, this chapter explains the political imperative of regulating the fragmented public sphere and reveals the expansion of the ideological terrain behind the recentralisation of regulatory power. While recognising the current challenges for traditional and digital media, but also for regulators, in terms of negotiating the ideological boundaries in full transparency, it argues that the shifting negotiating space lies in the interplay between self-censorship by media professionals, the exercises of platform regulation (on which increasing policy emphasis has been placed), and administrative measures taken by the regulators.

This chapter takes forward China’s recent policy initiatives to enhance digital regulation based on the conventional model of self-censorship and administrative intervention. The exercises of digital censorship are fundamentally about a balancing act of discerning the red line around what can be publicly represented as national ideology. In order to explain the current transition of the regulatory framework applied to the digital content industry, this chapter looks into the industry’s performances of interpreting and implementing the regulatory criteria in terms of recomposing national cultural values. Drawing on evidence found within national broadcasters and streaming services, it maintains that the compliance to politically acceptable discourse remains essential to the norms of a collective mainstream identity, especially when it involves the areas of national sovereignty, religion, and political legitimacy. This shows the continuity in policy thinking of mediating ideological conflicts and leads to questions about cultural identity and the politics of recognition.

This chapter examines China’s digital broadcasting culture in transition during the past decade, whereby the spread of commercial logics has sparked the regulatory initiative foregrounded by political intervention. This chapter takes a politico-economic perspective to evaluate the shifting institutional logic of China’s media firms in terms of commercialisation, content commodification, and regulation. The established state-controlled model of national media and the expansion of digital platforms lead to a key tension in the policy endeavour to restructure the media landscape. Given the intensified competition between digital media outlets for market share, China’s regulators need to build their regulatory framework around emerging concepts including the development of convergence infrastructures, the measurement of audience traffic, and the legislation of intellectual property rights (IPR).

In the past decade, the cultural projection of China has become increasingly important to the Communist Party of China (CPC) and to the state in terms of enhancing its soft power amid global competition. This chapter examines how China’s media institutions contribute to the construction of China’s contemporary identity, drawing on two case studies of CCTV-9 and China Global Television Network (CGTN). It uses document analysis, in-depth interviews and participant observation, to explore the gap between the cultural policy regime and its implementation in state media, taking into account the interplay between broadcasters, political bodies, producers and international audiences. In doing so, it reveals the tensions not only between political control and commercial imperative, but also between the national regulatory framework and the need for global engagement. It argues that the increasingly explicit political priority of promoting China’s national discourse globally entails an assertive diplomatic agenda toward nation branding, but market disadvantages and the uncertainty of audience reception challenge the policy pursuit for using its state media as a means for public diplomacy.

Given the intensity of the global competition for cultural power, this chapter examines tensions arising between the political imperative for ideological unity at home and the diplomatic need for global engagement. It approaches the question through the investigation of international co-production practices and intellectual property rights (IPR) trade, in a case study of Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival (GZDOC, China’s only state-level documentary festival, established in 2003). In incorporating market practices into its state-led regime, GZDOC has appropriated a model of cultural diplomacy to balance the political need for regional integration and nation branding with the commercial imperative of engaging with the global marketplace—to mediate the conflict between ‘localisation’ and ‘internationalisation’ of the cultural brand. However, the main challenges facing the festival agenda lie in the uncertainties of the regulatory regime involving censorship and legislation for intellectual property rights.

This chapter presents some concluding remarks and thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters. This book seeks to explain a discursive shift in China’s cultural policy, foregrounded by the resurgence of politico-ideological role of media in maintaining social stability at home and promoting national discourse abroad. This policy transition needs to be situated in a phase of digital globalisation and geopolitical collisions, wherein digital competition and commercialisation lead to the fragmentation of national identity, and regional conflicts give rise to global competition for political and ideological power. However, an essential question, insistently at the heart of contemporary media politics, is concerned with the role of the digital regulatory regime in mediating a consensus over national and global orders while at the same time sustaining the vitality of ideological contestations in the interconnected, competitive digital cultural sphere. This points to the pragmatic needs for regulators in terms of policy adaptations to the complex and contested digital cultural scene.