Abstract
If I had a time machine, I would like to take it 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 market (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 market 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 it 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 it will not be bucked off with the same force that terminated the Soviet Union. A nation of 1.4 billion has conflicts; it 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 “it 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, “knowledge workers” 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 transformation” (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. 17). The state still expects editors to follow dictates of censorship according to its professed goals, even as the market-driven pressures seek “business information and infotainment” (p. 37). Tensions have intensified as class stratification increases in what the propaganda model once regarded as a classless society.
At the same time, market forces and an emphasis on democratization push editors toward a model that sounds much like that taught in the U.S. schools of communication: reporting based on issues that interest and affect citizens, agenda setting keyed to important issues of the day, providing a forum for expression of ideas that conflict, incentives for citizen involvement, development of media independent of outside forces, all couched in an ethic that serves the audience. A list of these attributes provided by Yao (p. 26) could very well have been composed by Thomas Jefferson. It is, instead, part of an evolution sparked by a sometimes-conflicting series of events under the rubric of a “socialist commodity economy,” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (pp. 21-22).
Until 1978 (and, in some quarters, still in theory), the main purpose of mass media in China was to “strengthen socialist education, to promote proletarianism, and [to] wipe out capitalism” (pp. 45-46), a far cry from prevailing daily practice today in a publishing industry that has exploded in number of titles, revenue, and audience (along with the rest of China’s economy) since reform was initiated. Some publishers now trade on Chinese stock markets, and advertising, which was restored to legality in 1979, has become an increasingly important source of revenue. Chinese advertising agencies now rank, according to Yao, among “the largest of its kind in the world today” (p. 60).
Yao also devotes considerable attention to editors’ working conditions, which his surveys indicate have been in decline as companies for which they work have been privatized. Where employment in a planned economy often was for life, it is now on contracts ranging from 1 to 3 years, as work-related pressures have increased, due to a wider range of assignments and demands from rapidly developing technology. Social benefits have declined. Junior editors complain that editorial judgment has been largely removed from their work, as they are confined mainly to checking manuscripts and galley proofs for typographical errors and conformity to Communist Party doctrine.
Workers’ grievances may be aired in trade unions and professional associations, which are autonomous in theory, but limited in practice by state power. As China has evolved from a socialist economy to a mix of state enterprises and quasi-capitalism, Yao describes increased labor unrest, including demonstrations and strikes, across China’s industrial landscape, as state policies and owners’ desire for profits come into conflict with workers’ needs.
Yao’s study provides a fascinating window on swiftly changing working life in a publishing industry that faces a degree of tension not known among manufacturers that can generate profits without being part of the Party’s propaganda apparatus.