Popular Journalism in Contemporary China: Politics, Market, Culture and Technology [1 ed.] 9783031405297, 9783031405303, 3031405293

Table of contents :
Foreword
Preface
Contents
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Conceptualizing Popular Journalism
1.1 What Is Popular Journalism?
1.2 Debate on Popular Journalism: A Critical Review of Literature
1.2.1 Tabloid Journalism as Seen Through the Lens of Serious Journalism
1.2.2 The Value and Importance of Tabloid Journalism in Its Own Right
1.2.3 Toward a ‘Popular Journalism’: Beyond the ‘Tabloid vs Serious’ Binary
1.3 Research on Popular Journalism in Non-Western Contexts
1.4 The Situation of Popular Journalism Studies in China
1.4.1 The Conceptual Matter
1.4.2 The Matter of Theorizing
1.5 Research Contributions and Methods
References
Chapter 2: Mao’s War on ‘Yellow’ Journalism
2.1 Popular Journalism in Late Qing Dynasty and the ROC
2.2 The Banning of Popular Journalism Under Mao
2.3 The Ideological Root of Mao’s Problem with (Popular) Journalism
2.4 The Death of Popular Citizenship Under Radical Maoism
References
Chapter 3: Popular Journalism in China’s Early Reform Era
3.1 The Debate on News and Propaganda
3.2 The ‘Evening Newspaper Effect’ and Its Limitations
3.3 The Short-Lived Liberal-Minded Press Approach
3.4 Popular Journalism in the Broader Context of Popular Culture
References
Chapter 4: Popular Journalism Comes to the Center Stage
4.1 Media Commercialization Under ‘Socialist Market Economy’
4.1.1 Toward a Market-Oriented New Media Economics
4.1.2 Manifestations of Media Commercialization
4.2 The Rise of a Tabloid Journalism with Chinese Characteristics
4.2.1 Commercialization as Popularization
4.2.2 The ‘Metro Paper Phenomenon’: Tabloids with Chinese Characteristics
4.3 Impact and Implications of Popular Journalistic Practices
4.4 Limitations of the Metro Paper Model
References
Chapter 5: The Fall of Tabloids and Party Organs’ Dubious Resurgence
5.1 How the Metro Paper Sector Ran Into a Rock Wall
5.1.1 The Decade of Stagnation
5.1.2 Tabloids Became History (Again) After Making History
5.2 The Myth of Party Organs’ ‘Resurgence’ and ‘(Re-)Popularization’
5.2.1 ‘Popular Official Media’ as a New Press Category?
5.2.2 Has the Market Failed the Popular Press Sector (This Time)?
5.2.3 Is ‘Cute’ Propaganda Winning the Digital Popular Journalism War?
5.3 Tabloids Down and Party Organs Up: Implications and Lessons
References
Chapter 6: China’s Popular Journalism in the Digital Media Era
6.1 Popular Journalism in Xi’s Paradox ‘New Era’
6.2 Structural Features of China’s Digital Popular Journalism
6.3 The Art of Politics and Business of Playing the Fun Game
6.4 Commentary Critical Citizen Popular Journalism
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Ongoing Business of Making Fun and Trouble
References
Index

Citation preview

EAST ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE

Popular Journalism in Contemporary China Politics, Market, Culture and Technology Chengju Huang

East Asian Popular Culture Series Editors

Yasue Kuwahara Department of Communication Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights, KY, USA John A. Lent International Journal of Comic Art Drexel Hill, PA, USA

This series focuses on the study of popular culture in East Asia (referring to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) in order to meet a growing interest in the subject among students as well as scholars of various disciplines. The series examines cultural production in East Asian countries, both individually and collectively, as its popularity extends beyond the region. It continues the scholarly discourse on the recent prominence of East Asian popular culture as well as the give and take between Eastern and Western cultures.

Chengju Huang

Popular Journalism in Contemporary China Politics, Market, Culture and Technology

Chengju Huang School of Media and Communication RMIT University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2634-5935     ISSN 2634-5943 (electronic) East Asian Popular Culture ISBN 978-3-031-40529-7    ISBN 978-3-031-40530-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40530-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Qiong and Catherine (Chu Yin)

Foreword

I first came across the work of Chengju Huang on Chinese media issues when I was, with Scott Eldridge, searching for a contributor to a volume on global trends within tabloid journalism. He provided us with an outstanding contribution that enabled the book to circumnavigate the globe—or as much as one can in a volume of thirteen chapters. His account of the emergence of tabloid journalism in China provided a necessary introduction to a vast market of readers within a very distinctive political economy. On the back of this work, I was therefore delighted to hear that he has extended aspects of his long-term research agenda to provide us with an account of the evolution and significance of popular journalism more generally in China. Defining popular journalism and distinguishing Chinese characteristics within what has become a global and tendentiously Western set of discourses. Expanding the global reach of journalism studies to include examinations of countries often excluded from debate is of vital intellectual and political importance. This is particularly the case when it concerns the highly volatile and sensitive issue of journalism as it relates to the adjective ‘popular’ given that it is such a complex word and develops still more nuance in different geo-political contexts. Some might argue that all journalism must be ‘popular’. Rather than focus on popular journalism as sui generis it may help us to understand the fundamentally popular nature of journalism as a communicative form. What is the alternative to journalism that seeks to reach a generalist audience in a way that is attractive to both readers and advertisers? What form of journalism is non-popular, that is, elitist when even publications aimed at the higher end of the vii

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socio-economic scale sell in one form or another to hundreds of thousands or even millions? When it comes to journalism, niche is nowhere. The popular, as generally representing the tastes and views of people outside the elite, is most often articulated within a national frame, and so clearly an assessment of how popular journalism functions in a Chinese context is hugely valuable on account of the special features of China’s engagement with the concept of the people in general. With a full historicisation of what is often considered merely part of an eternal present of popular/youth culture, he is able to further revise our understanding of the context of journalism in China beyond the too well-­ trodden path of the ‘missionary moment’. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the term ‘popular’ has a special resonance in a Communist country, and this issue is fully engaged with in an exploration of the Mao-era hostility and its reappropriation of the term with regard to journalism. The key issue of how journalism can relate to the interests and tastes of the ordinary citizen is explored in the post-Mao era, leading to a more subtle rapprochement between the needs of readers and the political objectives of the political class. This study includes a longer-term view of the recent past developments and changes in state-run attempts to foster a national tabloid from ‘City Newspapers’ to a broadloid press in staking out a less interventionist approach to popular journalism for the masses. Huang guides us expertly through market-oriented reforms in the 2000s, including the collapse of a hitherto successful tabloid model, into the digital maelstrom and the challenges this poses for the Xi era. A slow but steady acceptance has dawned that the ‘fun and trouble’ to be enjoyed in equal measure by readers of popular news media are inevitable aspects of an increasingly sophisticated media consumption in China. The book is richly illustrated by examples from the press itself and from detailed commentary on developments and key protagonists over time. Both of these strategies enliven the account considerably. Of equal importance to the substance of the book’s narrative is the opening of further avenues within China-oriented sources to enable scholars to further contextualise their own work. Rigorous and astute in equal measure, Huang has provided the academic community with an important contribution to contemporary research on popular journalism that will have a long-term impact on the field. Martin Conboy Department of Journalism Studies University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK May 2023

Preface

This book, the first of its kind, investigates the historical trajectory and current situation of popular journalism in the People’s Republic of China. While its primary aim is to address major knowledge gaps in this research area, it may also shed new light on popular journalism studies in general. To a certain extent, some of the gaps identified in the Chinese context are also commonly found across this research area globally. What inspired me to write this volume were basically three factors. First, my long research interest in popular journalism in post-Mao China. This interest dates back to the early 1990s when China’s newspaper industry took the initiative to experiment with some brave and creative market-­ oriented reforms in order to survive the harsh political and economic reality after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. As shown in some of my previous publications, this interest grew further and became even stronger over the next two decades when comprehensive commercialization swept across China’s media industry. Second, in 2019, I was invited to contribute a chapter on tabloid journalism in post-Mao China to a book project on tabloid practices across the globe proposed by Martin Conboy and Scott Eldridge. Through the research and writing process, which resulted in the chapter being included in the published version of the project Global Tabloid, I had a deeper understanding of tabloid journalism in China from a historical-global perspective. However, I also realized that the term ‘tabloid’ was somewhat insufficient in conceptualizing diverse and dynamic ‘popular’ journalistic phenomena in contemporary China. Coincidentally, it was at this time that I became aware of Palgrave’s East Asian Popular Culture series. This series drew my attention and became the direct trigger ix

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for my idea and desire to write a book about popular journalism in contemporary China from a popular cultural perspective, as such an account had remained absent in the research literature. Chapter 1 of this book starts with arguing the necessity of distinguishing between ‘popular journalism’ and ‘tabloid journalism’ as two related but also distinctive terms. While the term ‘tabloid journalism’ is often used to refer to sensational and personalized news content and style, the term ‘popular journalism’ has been relatively underused and seldom defined in journalism studies. Furthermore, the two terms have often been interchangeably used by researchers and professionals alike. I argue that this is a problem, as not all ‘popular’ journalism can be fully understood by the definition of tabloid journalism. I also emphasize that popular journalism should not be understood as just a type of media, but also and more particularly a journalistic genre that may be used across media platforms by all kinds of popular journalism players, including citizen journalists. This latter point has become particularly important in the era of digital media, and more specifically in the case of China where print tabloid journalism has been eradicated. From there, based on an extensive critical review of literature on the debate on serious and/vs. popular/tabloid journalism, I give ‘popular journalism’ a working definition. I then identify the major knowledge gaps in relation to contemporary Chinese popular journalism studies and state this book’s aim to bridge or substantially narrow those gaps. In Chap. 2, I examine how and why popular journalism was quickly demolished in Mao’s communist ‘new’ China (1949–1976) after an extensive development in late Qing China and the Republic of China (1912–1949). Among other things, my discussion focuses particularly on the historical and ideological roots of Mao’s hostility against popular journalism, which is vitally important for the understanding of not only the rerise of but also continuing constraints on popular journalism in the post-­ Mao era as discussed in subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 inspects the re-emergence and development of popular journalism in China’s early reform era (1978–1989) after 30  years of ban under Mao. It argues that despite the fact that the mediascape during this period continued to be dominated by (new) propagandistic grand media narratives such as ‘reform’, ‘opening’, ‘productivity’, ‘work efficiency’, ‘anti-bureaucratism’, ‘modernization’, and later even ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, the ‘fun’ of popular journalism and certainly popular culture at large became irresistible to the public.

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Chapter 4 investigates a range of market-oriented press reforms during the 1990s and 2000s. It focuses particularly on media commercialization under the government’s new ‘socialist market economy’ policy as represented by the rise of dozens of newly established Chinese-style tabloid titles, the most significant popular journalistic development since Mao’s death as popular journalism came to the center stage of China’s media reforms. Chapter 5 addresses the major concerns and challenges facing China’s popular journalism since the mid-2000s, particularly the 2010s under the Xi Jinping administration. It discusses how a range of political, cultural, and market-technological factors have led to the surprising fall of the tabloid press sector and the dubious resurgence of the Party press organ sector and the implications of these extraordinary developments. Chapter 6 is devoted to examining the challenges and opportunities that China’s digital popular journalism faces. With the collapse of the tabloid press sector and the decline of traditional and particularly print journalism in general by the mid-2010s, online and social media-based digital popular journalism, including digital citizen popular journalism, has become the new source for ‘fun’ stories and popular criticisms. The Conclusion chapter of the book highlights the significant impact of four major macro forces, namely politics, the market, culture, and technology, on the evolving landscape of popular journalism in contemporary China. I also contend that despite fluctuations in these macro factors, the fundamental nature of popular journalism, which involves making fun of, and in, life and causing trouble for those in power, has remained the same. The conclusion also briefly discusses some micro-level issues and concerns related to the development of popular journalism in China. Many people have encouraged, helped, and/or inspired me during my journey to complete this project and in my career in general. I am extremely grateful to the late Professor Ding Gannin of the Journalism School at Fudan University, China, for his immense support, help, and guidance. Retired Professor Loneroid L. Chu of the Communication School at Hong Kong Baptist University has been a great mentor of mine since the mid-1990s. I have benefited greatly from my conversations with Professor Huang Hu of Fudan Journalism School about Chinese journalism over the years. Some of the data used in this project were collected years, and even more than a couple of decades, ago in China, when I undertook my PhD and

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some other research projects on Chinese journalism. During those times, many people sacrificed their precious time and offered me great help, which I have never forgotten. My thanks are due to Ai Feng, the late editor-inchief of the Press Circles magazine (xinwen jie), Xiao Xiaodong, the late senior editor of the Sichuan Daily, Associate Professor Huang Xiaozhong of Sichuan University, Lu Cairong, senior editor of the Guangmin Daily, and Lu Xiaomin, senior editor of the Xinhua News Agency for their great assistance back to the 1990s and the 2000s. I am also deeply thankful to the great people at the School of Literature and Journalism at Chongqing University. During our research trip to Chongqing in 2009, they provided immense help and support to me and my colleagues from RMIT University, Australia. They not only assisted us in collecting valuable research materials but also introduced us to various local organizations and individuals who kindly accepted our visits and interviews. I would like to express my gratitude to many of my current and former colleagues in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, although I can only name a few of them here. I am truly grateful to Professor Catherine Gomes for taking the time to read the early draft of my book proposal and giving valuable feedback. My thanks also go to Dr Antonio Castillo Rojas and Dr John Postill for their encouragement and spirit of collegiality. I would like to thank my former colleagues Associate Professor Chris Hudson, Dr Vincent O’Donnell, and the late Dr  Sheldon Harsel who always showed their great support to me and enormous interest in my research. I am tremendously grateful to Professor Martin Conboy in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield for kindly agreeing to write a Foreword for this small volume. I am deeply honored and humbled by his comments. I would like to thank the editors of the East Asian Popular Culture series, Professor Yasue Kuwahara and Professor John A. Lent, for their appreciation of, and great support for, this book project. My thanks are also due to many people in Palgrave Macmillan whose timely, professional support was always available throughout this project. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my wife, Qiong, and daughter, Catherine (Chu Yin). Without their love, encouragement, and great support, this book project would not have been possible. Melbourne, VIC, Australia June 2023

Chengju Huang

Contents

1 Conceptualizing Popular Journalism  1 2 Mao’s War on ‘Yellow’ Journalism 41 3 Popular Journalism in China’s Early Reform Era 67 4 Popular Journalism Comes to the Center Stage 89 5 The  Fall of Tabloids and Party Organs’ Dubious Resurgence119 6 China’s Popular Journalism in the Digital Media Era151 7 Conclusion:  The Ongoing Business of Making Fun and Trouble177 Index183

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List of Tables

Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6

Table 6.7

An overview of China’s digital popular journalism landscape 155 The Page’s short-video news headlines (first week of Feb. 2023) 164 The Page’s short-video news headlines (1st week of March 2023) 165 The Page’s short-video news headlines (1st week of April 2023) 166 Examples of critical comments on ‘Work Hard, Life will Become Sweeter and Sweeter’ (https://www.163.com/ dy/article/HTN9ED6S0552YH0X.html)170 Examples of popular critical comments on ‘#Reporter: Personal Story after Contracting Coronavirus#’, based on limited data available at https://weibo.com/6351705477/ Mj8SIbx6V#repost171 Examples of popular critical comments on ‘Peng Shuai Accused Zhang Gaoli #MeToo’ (https://www.6parknews. com/newspark/view.php?app=news&act=view&nid=515602)173

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CHAPTER 1

Conceptualizing Popular Journalism

1.1   What Is Popular Journalism? It is interesting to note that compared with ‘tabloid journalism’, the term ‘popular journalism’ has not only been relatively much less used in journalism studies but also rarely defined by researchers in a formal manner. As the term has often been interchangeably used by media researchers and professionals alike with tabloid journalism (among some other similar but relatively less popular terms, as will be touched upon later) as a nearly ‘everyone-knows’ concept (despite continuing debate on this, e.g., see Biressi and Nunn 2008; Sparks 2000), few researchers have seemingly seen defining ‘popular journalism’ as a particularly necessary matter. Moreover, as Conboy noted, scholars like William (1976) and Sparks (1992) (and partly, Conboy himself) had seemingly intended not to ‘close down popular culture prescriptively’ when they approached the term (Conboy 2001, pp. 5–6). This approach has seemingly also impacted researchers’ thinking on the definition of popular journalism as a form of popular culture. Major studies in this area, among them Dahlgren (1992), Sparks (1992), Hartley (1996, 2008, 2012), Langer (1998), Sparks and Tulloch (2000), Gripsrud (2000), Conboy (2001, 2007), Meijer (2001), Matheson (2007), and Johansson (2008), have all used ‘popular journalism’—often interchangeably with tabloid journalism in an explicit or implicit way— without formally defining it.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Huang, Popular Journalism in Contemporary China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40530-3_1

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Some studies have attempted to define the term separately but often in an incomplete, implicit, and/or even confusing manner. Deuze (2005), for example, while seemingly intending to treat popular journalism as an overarching concept to accommodate a range of subcategories of popular media based on relevant press typologies advanced by Sparks (2000, pp. 14–15) and van Zoonen (1998, p. 114), stopped short of spelling this idea out and elaborating it further by, for example, offering a definition of the term. Hallin went further to define popular journalism as ‘journalism, that is, which, in search of a mass audience mixes entertainment and news, slants towards the visual, emotional, and “sensational,” and privileges the personal experience of ordinary people’ (Hallin 2000, p. 281). While this definition of popular journalism hardly differentiated the term from traditional understanding of tabloid journalism, Hallin’s interchangeable usage of the two terms in the same article further confused the matter. In comparison, Gripsrud clearly pointed out that ‘[t]he meanings of “tabloid journalism” are now in common usage hard to distinguish from those of “popular journalism”’. He argued that not all popular journalistic forms were tabloid and not all tabloid forms were ‘trash’ (Gripsrud 2000, pp. 289). For example, ‘[m]any nontabloid forms and contents are popular in the simple sense that they enjoyed widespread popularity’: Newspaper pages or TV programs devoted to local news of various politically relevant kinds (“Should a new bridge be built?” “Nurses on strike,” and so on) could be one example and so could much coverage of health and everyday psychology, wildlife, sports, and the like. Even interviews with celebrities may well serve as examples of nontabloid but still popular journalism, for instance when they focus on the interviewee’s professional activities or life experiences with some sort of general relevance. (Gripsrud 2000, p. 290)

Gripsrud thus argued that there was ‘an obvious need for distinctions within the field of popular journalism’ which included ‘tabloid and other forms of popular journalism’. Otherwise, this ‘conceptual confusion’ of mixing up tabloid with popular might ‘obscure the existence and potential of a popular journalism’ (Gripsrud 2000, pp. 285, 289, 290). Gripsrud made two important points here: first, popular journalism and tabloid journalism should be conceptually separated as the latter was just one form of the former; and second, popular journalism referred to not just one particular type of media but also a particular journalistic genre

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that may be used by all types of media. However, despite these extraordinary insights, in the same article, Gripsrud somewhat reaffirmed his previous argument (in Gripsrud 1992) that ‘sensationalism and personalization are two defining characteristics of popular journalism’ (Gripsrud 2000, p.  290), which may be seen as his quasi-definition of the term in the absence of a formal one. Without further elaboration and clarification, this view on popular journalism somewhat contradicted his own observation of the ‘popularity’ (not necessarily sensational) essence of the term and, thus, to a certain extent, confused it with tabloid journalism as one form of it again. This may become clearer if we compare this view with a typical definition of tabloid—for example, the one given by Sparks: […] the tabloid is a form marked by two major features: it devotes relatively little attention to politics, economics, and society and relatively much to diversions like sports, scandal, and popular entertainment; it devotes relative much attention to the personal and private lives of people, both celebrities and ordinary people, and relatively little to  political processes, economic developments, and social changes. (Sparks 2000, p. 10)

Similarly, Conboy seemingly rather purposely used ‘popular journalism’ rather than ‘tabloid journalism’ (as well as ‘popularizations’ rather than ‘tabloidization’) to conceptualize ‘a variety of forms of popular journalism from different national, technological and demographic contexts’ (Conboy 2007, p. 2) as shown in relevant studies collected in a Journalism Studies special issue (‘poplar journalism in the new millennium’) that he guest-­ edited. However, he stopped short of offering a working definition of the term, and also seemingly consciously or unconsciously used ‘tabloid’ and ‘tabloidization’ again to conceptualize diverse forms of popular journalism later elsewhere (e.g., Bingham and Conboy 2015; Conboy and Eldridge II 2021). In their respective discussions of definitional issues regarding popular/tabloid journalism, both Gripsrud and Sparks, echoing a similar argument in Hartley (1996, pp. 27–28), were also unsatisfied with ‘the traditional British dichotomy’ (Gripsrud 2000, p. 290) or ‘simple binary opposition’ (Sparks 2000, p. 13) regarding the relationship between serious journalism and tabloid journalism. Gripsrud responded to this concern by reconceptualizing Paletz’ (1998) ‘simple and commonsensical’ suggestion of four descriptive categories of news media—elite, prestige, popular, and tabloid—as a more sophisticated four-parameter framework

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of media categorization: subject matters or content (the inclusion or exclusion of certain types of stories), proportions and priorities of various kinds of content, forms of presentation, and journalistic techniques and ethics (Gripsrud 2000, pp.  292–293). Sparks, on the other hand, suggested a more specific ‘five kinds of newspapers’ scheme based on the fact that particular press titles’ ‘relative emphasis lies upon the private/public axis and the hard/soft axis’. He named the ‘five kinds of newspapers’ as the serious press, the semiserious press, the serious-popular press, the newsstand tabloid press, and the supermarket tabloid press (Sparks 2000, pp. 13, 14–15). Despite these insights about press/media typology, neither study offered much room for the idea of ‘popular journalism’ in its suggestions. Inspired by, and through a critical review of, Gripsrud (2000), Sparks (2000), Conboy (2001, 2007), and Hartley (2008, 2012), this author questions the convenient practice of interchangeably using ‘popular journalism’ with ‘tabloid journalism’ and certain other related terms such as popular tabloid journalism, popular press/newspapers, popular media, tabloid press/newspapers, and tabloid media. I believe that the two keywords that form the term popular journalism, popular and journalism, precisely capture its core meaning. This gives the term an arguably special conceptual capacity that other similar terms can hardly match. Historically, popular journalism as a form of popular culture makes it a rather different term from tabloid journalism, which traditionally referred more specifically to a sensationalist subgenre of the former based on the practice of such American and British titles as New York World and The Daily Mirror in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bingham and Conboy 2015). Furthermore, it should be noted that sensationalism and personalization are not the only ways to help make a media outlet or certain media product/content popular (attractive to audiences). On the other hand, deploying a tabloid approach may not necessarily lead to popularity either (e.g., see Hayashi 2000; Hume 1996; Schoenbach 2000). Though ‘tabloid’ has nowadays also been more broadly used by some as a term to describe a perceived trend of tabloidization or infotainment of journalism across diverse media platforms (e.g., see Conboy 2021), the difference between ‘popular journalism’ and ‘tabloid journalism’ remains in both semantical and historical terms. Prominent journalism historians such as Conboy (2001, 2007), Hartley (2008), and Bingham and Conboy (2015) have all suggested the emergence of ‘popular’ press prior to the coming of ‘tabloid’ press as a distinctive form of the former. In the

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meantime, despite varying and changing views on ‘tabloid’ over time, as will be further discussed later, a deeply rooted sense of negativity attached to the term is unlikely to go away any time soon (if ever). In addition, it is important to note that in the era of the Internet and social media, popular journalism is not just about tabloid newspapers or the so-called tabloidization (though I would call it ‘popularization’) of other traditional media. It also refers to ordinary netizens’ proactive participation in ‘fun’ (popular) journalistic practice in various means across diverse digital platforms. This massive and massively diverse and often transnational popular journalistic practice can hardly be defined by the term ‘tabloid’, if this is possible at all. ‘Popular journalism’ also distinguishes itself from the popular press, newspapers, or media. Compared with certain forms of media, ‘journalism’ refers more broadly to an act of gathering and presenting news and news-related information, or the product of such activities, or media outlets focusing on news communication, or an area of journalism studies, depending on the specific context in which the term may be used. In short, ‘popular journalism’ is arguably the most conceptually inclusive and emancipatory term in comparison with ‘tabloid journalism’ and other similar terms. It would be risky, if not overly simplistic, to treat a wide range of popular journalistic ideas, techniques, practices, and products as simply tabloid (sensational) journalism, or focus on tabloid journalism only, while overlooking other forms of popular journalism. It thus becomes necessary to clearly define ‘popular journalism’ as a term in its own right to avoid likely conceptual confusion. It is for this purpose and based on my discussion above and a more detailed review of literature as discussed in the next section of this chapter that, from a popular cultural perspective, I define ‘popular journalism’ as: (1) a term that denotes an ordinary people-oriented and/or -participated, non-elite and non-orthodox journalistic genre characterized by sensationalism, personalization, populism, comicality, sarcasm, wittiness, entertainingness and/or playfulness in terms of both topic preference and style of presentation that may be used by all sorts of news communicators and participants (individuals and organizations, and professionals and citizen journalists) through diverse online and offline platforms and in diverse forms such as news reports, letters to the editor, short audio/video-news clips, blogs, text and voice messages, comments, and symbols; (2) those news media outlets—from media corporations to self-media—based primarily on such genre (or simply, popular media); (3) news products

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created through such genre (or simply, popular news); and (4) an academic area focusing on this particular journalistic genre. It is not my intention to use this broadly described working definition to attempt to solve all concerns at stake in relation to the term and associated broader matters concerning media/journalism categorization. Nevertheless, it may be useful to highlight several key elements of this definition: • its emphasis on popular journalism’s ‘for people’ and increasingly, in the digital media era, ‘by people’, and non-elite and non-orthodox nature and aesthetics as a form of popular culture; • its recognition of diverse and multifaceted contemporary popular journalistic practice across all types of media platforms by individuals, groups, and organizations powered by digital technologies; • its conceptual inclusion of popular journalistic practice in all societies; and • its stress on the fact that the term may be used to refer to ‘popular’ media, products, and research Already, many studies have mentioned various forms of popular journalism as a journalistic genre or type of media, such as tabloid journalism, broadloid journalism (Franklin 2005a; Huang 2016), tabloid television (e.g., Langer 1998; Vettehen et  al. 2005; Zhou 2005), lifestyle/travel journalism (e.g., see Fürsich 2002, 2012; Fürsich and Kavoori 2001), melodramatic news (e.g., see Gripsrud 1992; Mujica 2016; Mujica and Bachmann 2015), video-oriented online news and animated news (e.g., Lo and Cheng 2015), rap news (e.g., see Tuoi Tre News 2014), diasporic popular journalism (e.g., Ogunyemi 2007), popular teenage-magazine journalism (e.g., Hayashi 2000; Nice 2007), popular music ‘as a variety of journalism at certain historic moments and in specific contexts’ (Mano 2007, p. 61), and the ceaseless flow of the enormous volume of online and app-based popular news and information created and shared by professional news organizations as well as countless ordinary netizens (e.g., Meijer 2007; Singer 2007). However, I would argue that conceptually, these hugely diverse and somewhat isolated and fragmentary practices may make much better sense to us when placed under the domain of ‘popular journalism’ as defined above. Otherwise, they can be conceptually confusing, if not chaotic.

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1.2   Debate on Popular Journalism: A Critical Review of Literature 1.2.1   Tabloid Journalism as Seen Through the Lens of Serious Journalism Before starting, it should be noted that, as discussed above, ‘tabloid’ journalism has been commonly used by researchers to describe not only (though seemingly mainly) ‘sensational’ journalism but also (particularly more recently) a range of other, non-sensational popular journalistic practices. For this reason, readers should keep in mind that the so-called tabloid journalism discussed in this and the next sections should really be better understood as ‘popular’ journalism. However, for the purpose of keeping the original form of relevant discussions in the literature and the convenience of my discussion here, I still mostly use ‘tabloid’ rather than ‘popular’ journalism (unless otherwise specified). It is well known that tabloid journalism has long been often seen and judged through the lens of serious journalism in both the media academy and the press community. As Örnebring and Jönsson observed, for many, tabloid journalism ‘lowers the standards of public discourse’ and ‘may even actually be a threat to democracy, breeding cynicism and a lack of interest in politics, while ignoring the real political issues in favor of superficial political scandal’. In other words, tabloid journalism has been simply regarded as ‘bad journalism’ and ‘a kind of journalistic other, used as a warning example and symbol for all that is wrong with modern journalism’. Being deeply concerned about such negative and biased views on tabloid journalism, the authors also noted that ‘[t]his is potentially a source of problems for social scientists investigating tabloid journalism’ who might easily take on this ‘common’ perspective and see tabloid journalism as ‘everything which serious, responsible, good-quality journalism is not: sensationalist, over-simplified, populist etc.’ (Örnebring and Jönsson 2004, pp. 283, 284). Despite being vigorously challenged by rival critics, as will be discussed a little later, this powerful conventional view of tabloid journalism is seemingly more or less still received by some, if not many, as nearly commonsense knowledge to date (e.g., Popovic and Popovic 2014). As far as its critics are concerned, at the center of this argument is a deeply historically rooted serious journalism-centered privilege and prejudice against tabloid journalism. This perspective views tabloid journalism as being apolitical,

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sensationalist, and focusing on ‘petty’ issues with little value in relation to such grand narratives as democracy, citizenship, and journalistic professional and ethical standards. In contrast, serious journalism has been widely perceived as almost the exact opposite, serving as the ‘fourth power’ to safeguard democratic practices by offering quality coverage of important political, economic, and social issues of public interest. In short, tabloid journalism has been criticized as not only a kind of ‘trivial’ journalism but also ‘for trivializing journalism, to the detriment of the general media climate’ (Johansson 2008, p. 402). Typically, Sparks, for example, argued that there was a clear confrontation between two ‘rival professional models’—tabloid journalism as ‘the profitable business of attracting readers, viewers, and listeners with sensational entertainment’ and serious journalism as ‘[t]he serious business of informing the public about the commonweal’. And ‘[t]his is a difference within journalism, certainly involving its priorities and, arguably, its accuracy and objectivity’ and a matter that ‘involves the boundaries of journalism as opposed to other media output’ and ‘gives rise to the questions of whether the rise of the tabloid constitutes a crisis for democracy’ (Sparks 2000, pp. 10, 11). He then concluded that even while he acknowledged entirely the argument of the defenders of the tabloid that ‘there are elements of the form that constitute a genuine widening, and thus democratization, of the public life’, serious and tabloid journalism still ultimately offered two kinds of knowledge that would facilitate two kinds of social action: ‘The aim of serious journalism is to facilitate political involvement and democratic participation. Tabloid journalism facilitates private enjoyment and pleasure’. In other words, ‘there is no doubt that the successes of the tabloid form demonstrate very clearly that it can address the individual as consumer, but there can be equally little doubt that it has little or nothing to contribute to the life of the citizens’ (Sparks 2000, pp. 28, 29). This argument echoed a similar comment that Sparks had made earlier. After some lengthy and brilliant discussion of a complex and discursive history of ‘the popular’, he argued that ‘[h]owever attractive the prospect of “capturing” the popular for the forces of social progress may appear’, tabloid journalism ultimately ‘prevents them [‘the people’] becoming aware of their status as members of social classes’. In other words, unlike serious journalism, ‘[w]hat it can never be is one which generates a picture of the world in which social classes are capable of transforming the fundamental structure of social life through their own self-activity’. And this

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ultimately qualified tabloid journalism as ‘a necessarily reactionary category’ even if it might be politically ‘progressive’ in certain circumstances (Sparks 1992, p. 42). Accordingly, this view of tabloid journalism has also extended its concerns to a perceived tendency of tabloidization of journalism in the West and beyond as characteristically addressed in Franklin’s (1997, 2005b) forceful examination of this matter. Sparks (2000, p. 21) also noted ‘an increase of the market share of the tabloid media as against their more serious rivals’ on the one hand, and ‘changes to the serious media that bring them more in line with the tabloids’ on the other. Some have described such a shift as ‘the colonization of the public sphere and mainstream media by tabloid values and aesthetics’ (Biressi and Nunn 2008, p.  10) which may further compromise the already weakening Western democracy (e.g., see Bird 1998; Franklin 2005b; relevant discussions in Sparks and Tulloch 2000; Thussu 2008). More specifically, Sparks (2000, p. 28) argued that ‘it is not simply that tabloids and tabloidization constitute a threat to an existing democracy; rather they make its practical functioning an impossibility because they are unable to provide the audience with the kinds of knowledge that are essential to the exercise of their rights as citizen’. 1.2.2   The Value and Importance of Tabloid Journalism in Its Own Right Responding to ‘biased’ criticisms of tabloid journalism as discussed above, some scholars have refuted outright denunciations of tabloid journalism and argued about, among other things, its role in democratizing communication at the grassroots level by accommodating non-elite audiences, issues, and values to create a new kind of, or alternative, postmodern popular public sphere. They have also disputed that serious journalism and tabloid journalism as two seemingly vastly different journalistic approaches are hardly opposite and antagonistic as often perceived. Instead, they argue that these two journalistic approaches share certain similar professional and ethical codes (with their respective emphasis and interpretation) and are equally journalistically valuable and socially important in their own right. For example, Fiske (1992) argued that unlike serious press that served an elite readership and the dominant ‘power bloc’, tabloids as a form of popular resistance were profoundly people-oriented and ordinary readers could use such outlets to make sense of both politics and their everyday

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life and ultimately empower themselves. Gripsrud (2000, p. 298) also suggested that ‘[t]he populism of popular journalism often harbor a disrespect for authorities, which may well produce valuable challenges to those in powerful positions’. Singer examined how popular blogs might proactively contribute to truth-seeking and public accountability as serious professional journalism did. She also noted ‘bloggers’ self-appointed role as watchdogs of the watchdogs’: ‘[m]any of the most widely read bloggers carefully and continuously monitor what journalists report and how they report it and call attention to perceived problems. These cover a broad spectrum but commonly include hypocrisy, bias, inaccuracy and inattention to potentially big stories’ (Singer 2007, p. 89). From the perspective of the receiving end of the audiences, Dahlgren argued that reception involved proactive sense-making by ordinary people in their everyday life who could interpret and use media contents in many other ways that might be well beyond what ‘serious journalists’ intended. For example, ‘the meaning of “information” [which was believed mainly conveyed by ‘serious’ press] and “entertainment” [as perceived as mainly the job of the ‘tabloid’] are not universal and the distinction between them can be negotiable’. This was typically reflected in television viewing, which was ‘by no means a homogeneous and consistent experience’ and could instead ‘manifest multiple and shifting subjectivities, characterized by conflicting needs, fears and desires, which are often at work on an unconscious level’ (Dahlgren 1992, p.  12). Gripsrud further suggested that ‘typical popular and also tabloid forms provide the audience with existential and moral help, and support in the daily struggle to copy with an everyday life marked by the uncertainties characteristic of modernity’. This ‘ritual’ perspective of communication ‘regards media communication primarily as modern society’s communication with itself about itself, in ways that reproduce and instill in all its members as a sense of community and identity, of shared conditions, values, understandings, and so on’. He further argued that while a ritual journalism as typically practiced by popular media might be seen by some as treating the audience as ‘human beings’ rather than ‘citizens’, the notion of citizenship itself should be revisited by including citizens’ ‘cultural life; various forms of reflection on existential matters or “the human conditions”; the formations, maintenance, deconstruction of identities; and so on’ (Gripsrud 2000, pp. 295, 297; see also Hermes 2005). Noting that the traditional split between ‘popular’ journalism and ‘quality’ journalism was based on ‘a gendered and ethnocentric concept’

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of journalistic quality and citizenship, Meijer (2001, p. 189) credited ‘the public quality of popular journalism’ for its potential of offering ‘the possibility of incorporating “emotions”, “everyday life” and a “relative sense of self” into a more inclusive concept of public quality, media and citizenship’. More specifically, Johansson’s (2008) empirical study identified three important aspects to the appeal of tabloids: the enjoyment of reading tabloids ‘as a way to deal with day-to-day struggles, which, particularly through the deployment of humor, provides an opportunity for relaxation and the release of general everyday anxieties’; their social function as ‘a vent for frustration rooted in experiences of social inequality, which means that an equally significant attraction is being able to criticize social privilege within the reading experience’; and their role in helping readers ‘search for community’. These findings ‘show how tabloid material often considered trivial is made meaningful in the linkages between the papers, readers and the social structures surrounding readers’ everyday lives’, or in other words, ‘how main attractions of the newspapers relate to human desires, life experiences and uncertainties, as well as how these are shaped by a social context’ (Johansson 2008, p. 411). As to the idea of a popular public sphere, Garnham (1992, p.  360) critiqued that by defining public sphere as exclusively a form of political communication against the repressive state, Habermas ‘neglects both the rhetorical and playful aspects of communicative action, which leads to too sharp a distinction between information and entertainment and to a neglect of the link, in for instance Rousseau’s notion of public festivals, between citizenship and theatricality’. More specifically, Örnebring and Jönsson argued about tabloid journalism’s role as an alternative public sphere from a historical perspective: … the journalistic other of tabloid journalism has appeared throughout the history of journalism, and that elements and aspects of journalism defined as ‘bad’ in its own time in many cases served the public good as well as, if not better than, journalism considered to be more respectable. Tabloid journalism achieves this by positioning itself, in different ways, as an alternative to the issues, forms and audiences of the journalistic mainstream—as an alternative public sphere. (Örnebring and Jönsson 2004, p. 283)

Being theoretically inspired by Fraser (1989, 1992), they argued further that beyond some kind of mainstream-mediated public sphere consisting of elite news media, there was an objective need for one or more

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alternative-­mediated public spheres ‘where different people debate different issues in different ways’ and this would allow, literally, ‘everyone takes part in public life’. Noting that criticisms of tabloid journalism and tabloid form were more often made ‘using traditional criteria of political power (voting, participation in formal political activities etc.), rather than criteria of cultural recognition (representation, participation in other types of political activities etc.)’, they identified four related main forms or dimensions of the ‘alternative’: ‘the discourse itself takes place somewhere else other than in the mainstream mediated public sphere—in alternative media outlets, in specialized journals or fanzines, on the Internet, etc.’; ‘other participants than those normally dominating media discourse have access to and a place in the debates and discussions taking place’; ‘other issues than those commonly debated in the mainstream are discussed—or that issues not even debated at all in the mainstream are discussed in the alternative sphere’; and ‘the “alternativeness” may derive from the usage of other ways or forms of debating and discussing common issues than those commonly used in the mainstream, for example forms which encourage citizen participation and nonparliamentary direct action’ (Örnebring and Jönsson 2004, pp. 285, 286). This argument was also supported by some relevant empirical research. For example, drawing on interviews of 55 sampled regular tabloid readers, Johansson (2007, p.  94) found that ‘some tabloid readers do feel distanced from mainstream political processes, with a common distrust of both politicians and journalists’. Furthermore, she argued that it was ‘inaccurate’ to describe the reading of tabloids as apolitical as many suggested, as their ‘current affairs news is valued as part of the overall content’. Especially, those who used tabloids as the only accessible and participatory printed news and current affairs forums could use relevant information to ‘help clarify complex issues’ and provide ‘talking points’ for further interaction with others. Others have questioned any essential difference between serious journalism and tabloid journalism when it comes to their journalistic philosophy. Deuze (2005, pp. 878, 880), for instance, found that journalists in the tabloid sector ‘use the same discourse of journalism’s professional ideology as their colleagues elsewhere’, even though it was practiced in a more ‘utilitarian’ and ‘personalized’ manner. He argued that even controversies surrounding tabloid journalism’s ethical standards should be examined in context through a more dialectic approach:

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Ethical considerations have to do with competitor-colleague relations, to autonomy (“we can do things the others cannot do”) and especially to morality—sometimes assuming a higher moral ground (“we decide when to publish or not”). This particular conception of ethics is contextual: ethical decision-making is dependent on morality (considering the publication of details on an “extreme” sex-life for example), on competition and on personal norms and values (“Have I hurt somebody today or not?”). (Deuze 2005, p. 879)

Based on this dialectic and dynamic understanding of journalistic ethics, one may argue that serious media, like their tabloid peers, would merely follow certain ethical standards in the specific journalistic and business context that they face. And it thus becomes almost pointless to suggest serious media necessarily hold a higher moral ground. From a critical perspective, some scholars have gone even further to question serious journalism’s supposed pivotal role in promoting and safeguarding democracy. For example, as early as 1970, the editors of Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day warned that all those themes in relation to the supposed noble political, professional, and moral roles of ‘serious’ journalism as cited below were in one way or another challenged by relevant articles contained in their edited volume: Common to most historical accounts of the press are certain hallowed themes: the heroic struggle against state control of the press culminating in the establishment of an independent Fourth Estate; the key role of the Fourth Estate in maintaining a mature democracy; the transformation of journalists from venal hacks into socially responsible journalists committed to the ideals of objectivity, accuracy and truth; and in some critical accounts, the contest within the press between commercial and non-commercial goals, between conceptions of the press as an industry and as a public service. (Boyce et al. 1970, p. 17)

More recently, Merrill (2000) argued that in any society the press only gave ‘scant’ support to a society’s democratization, not only because it had ‘other priorities—such as entertaining the people and making money’, but also because the press was itself an ‘undemocratic’ institution. He thus saw the claim that the press was essential to democracy, or would bring about democracy to a non-democratic society, as a largely self-evident and exaggerated ‘myth’ (Merrill 2000, pp. 198, 199).

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In short, the key points of defenders of tabloid/popular journalism are that such journalism is not just about ‘the tripod Crime-Sex-Scandals’ (Seligman 2009, p. 142) as is often conveniently perceived by many, and even coverage of such and many other ‘fun’ or ‘trivial’ topics and issues is vitally journalistically and socially meaningful for people, particularly ordinary citizens, to make sense of their everyday life. One should also not expect that all citizens will or should read ‘serious’ or elite media. And importantly, alternative, popular public spheres based on tabloid/popular journalistic practices are possible and should be recognized and encouraged. 1.2.3   Toward a ‘Popular Journalism’: Beyond the ‘Tabloid vs Serious’ Binary While the debate between advocates of serious and tabloid journalism as discussed above was insightful and inspirational, it was seemingly still largely defined by the influential ‘tabloid vs. serious’ dichotomy which has made the debate by and large deadlocked. Joining in this debate, I revisited and (re)defined the term ‘popular journalism’ and suggested using it as an umbrella concept to accommodate various forms of popular journalistic phenomena (relevant ideas, practices, platforms, and research) earlier. Further to that, I would like to elaborate a little more about the value and importance of popular journalism in the digital media age from a popular cultural perspective by critically looking into relevant discussion in the literature while also adding some critical thoughts of my own. First, from the perspective of popular culture, it makes natural sense to see popular journalism (and even journalism at large) as a form of popular culture both historically and currently (Bingham and Conboy 2015; Conboy 2001, 2021; Dahlgren 1992; Hartley 2008, 2012). Popular culture may be generally defined as ‘artifacts and subjects of mass interest and appreciation’ (Irwin 2007). It ‘encompasses the most immediate and contemporary aspects of our lives’ (Delaney 2007) and ‘does not exclude people from appreciating it on the basis of class or formal education’ (Irwin 2007). From this perspective, Dahlgren questioned the dominant traditional approach that viewed popular culture and popular journalism as being separate from the allegedly superior ‘elite’ culture and journalism. He emphasized that calling for looking at journalism from a popular cultural perspective was not to argue ‘journalism “is nothing but” popular culture’; rather, this approach ‘offers new prisms through which to view

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and to better understand journalism’ beyond the pigeonhole of a ‘serious’ journalism-centered ‘occupational ideology’ (Dahlgren 1992, p. 4). From a historical perspective, Hartley (2008, p. 310) argued that popular culture was ‘the true origin of modern journalism, taking “origin” to refer both to empirical historical beginnings, in revolutionary France and industrializing Britain, and also to theoretical first principles, where popular culture is the subject (source) of journalism, not its object (destination)’. In other words, as he put it more specifically later, ‘[p]opular journalism was born of the European Enlightenment, French Revolution, and British industrialization and urbanization during the period from the 1790s to the 1840s’ as an integral part of the broader popular cultural movement (Hartley 2012, p. 62). However, this history of ‘popular journalism is a creation of popular culture, just as the labor movement has been almost entirely forgotten in journalism studies’ (Hartley 2008, p. 315). He further identified that, historically, popular culture also predates popular democracy by decades: Popular culture was the nutrient of democratic action; it succeeded in (and by) combining the rationalist, secular progressivism of the Enlightenment with the emotionalist, narrative “sensationalism” borrowed from the popular dramatic and musical traditions. It gave both individual agency and systematic shape to “the public.” Democracy was precipitated out of popular journalism rather than a being a precondition for it, and the admixture was saturated with potent concentrations of fiction, fun and faith, as well as realism, righteousness and reason. Catalyzed by simple, well-told stories, this incendiary mixture of journalism and popular culture generated much more political energy than either “rational” journalism or “emotional” popular culture taken alone, and it was capable occasionally of causing a truly explosive reaction. (Hartley 2008, p. 313)

Hartley thus strongly endorsed the empowering methodological significance of popular cultural perspectives to (popular) journalism studies. For him, journalism and popular culture, and journalism studies and cultural studies, were two very different paradigms (see Hartley 2008, p. 311 for details). Noting the ‘crisis’ of the long-time predominance of the journalism-­mediacentered paradigm, he welcomed the ‘popular culture’ model’s ‘immense boost in recent times, owing to the growth of user-led innovation, consumer-generated content, self-made media, DIY culture, citizen-journalism, the blogosphere and peer-to-peer social networks’ (Hartley 2008, p. 310). Echoing and further to Hartley, Conboy (2001, 2021) and Bingham and Conboy (2015) suggested that tabloid as a distinctive form of popular journalism appeared decades after the emergence of the latter, and serious

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journalism arrived even later as part of the popular culture and popular-­ tabloid journalism-nurtured popular democratic movement in Europe. In other words, these discoveries suggested such a historical sequence: there was popular culture first, then popular journalism, then tabloid journalism, and then serious journalism. As Conboy (2021, p. 1) observed, ‘historically, we might see the triumph of the daily, predominantly political, commercial, and respectable newspapers of the bourgeois public sphere as deviations from the long-term successful trajectory of the tabloid’ (and popular journalism and popular culture before it). Specifically, Conboy highlighted some of the key characteristics of the popular press as a form of popular culture, such as its people-orientation nature, commercial motivation, local specialty, and connection to the older oral folk language style (Conboy 2001, pp. 23–25). These characteristics were later further discussed in Bingham and Conboy (2015) in which the authors purposely looked at how the contents (topics) of British tabloid newspapers in the twentieth century closely related to people’s daily life. For example: … how the popular press represented Britain to its readers, not only narrating major public events such as wars, political campaigns and coronations, but also describing and defining personal and social identities such as gender, sexuality, class and race. This mixture of public and private, serious and trivial, lies at the heart of the tabloid model and helps to explain its popularity and resilience. (Bingham and Conboy 2015, p. vii)

Second, from a popular cultural perspective, while popular journalism may still be compared with serious journalism, they are ultimately just two equally important and irreplaceable journalistic approaches that may inform and learn from each other. Particularly, if we agree that all kinds of journalism should be ‘popular’ as Allan (1999) suggested, it then becomes logical to suggest the universal values of popular journalistic ideas and techniques for the entire journalism world. As Conboy (2007, p. 6) noted, ‘the popular is not simply an additional extra for journalism but one of its core commitments’. Third, a popular cultural perspective sees popular journalism as a profoundly non-elite and non-orthodox journalistic genre used by not only professional media outlets and journalists, but also, in the age of digital media, increasingly self-media and ordinary netizens who were traditionally treated as just ‘audiences’, ‘receivers’, or ‘consumers’. It seems that

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only very limited academic attention has been given to this important latter aspect of contemporary popular journalism to date. Furthermore, current discussion of digital public participation in journalism is also largely from a politically oriented ‘citizen journalism’ perspective. Overall, the existing research literature on popular journalism has still mainly focused on traditional professional popular news media (typically, in the form of hardcopy tabloid newspapers) and, to a lesser extent, their online platforms. However, this mediacentric approach has become increasingly outdated for its overlooking of the rise of a multifaceted and dynamic new popular journalistic communication landscape where the proactive participation of ordinary people has become an integral and extraordinarily significant part of it (as demonstrated in the case of China as discussed in Chap. 6 of this book). In other words, people nowadays do not have to rely on traditional popular media outlets, or use them at all, as the sole or even main source to experience their everyday popular life. Nor would they necessarily believe that traditional and even new/digital professional popular media outlets would necessarily, or would be necessarily able to, represent them by claiming they are ‘people’s’ media. Increasingly, they themselves want to be, and many of them have already been, part of the popular journalism game. This is revolutionary, a true ‘popular’ journalism in a truly popular cultural sense. Finally, from a popular cultural point of view, the matter of ‘tabloidization’ may be revisited and better understood in the shifting context of history, culture, and technology. Indeed, it may be more sensibly and appropriately called ‘popularization’. As discussed earlier, historically, popular journalism emerged before serious journalism and has been around throughout the entirety of modern journalism history (since the mid-­ eighteenth century at the latest) due to objective popular demands from society. The globalization of capitalism, consumerism, and popular/youth culture accompanied by the rise of television since the 1960s and more recently satellite television and Internet-based digital and social media has contributed to a certain degree of infotainment trend in journalism around the world. This, however, does not necessarily mean that there has been a worldwide wholesale journalistic tabloidization and demoralization. Tulloch (1992, p, 133), for example, criticized the current tabloidization claim as a contemporary version of the same old ‘spin on a debate that goes back over a hundred years and is reinvented every generation’. Gripsrud also criticized ‘tabloidization’ as a ‘utopian critique’ of ‘the ideal functions of mass media in liberal democracies’ and ‘a tabloid term, more

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of a journalistic buzzword than a scholarly concept’ based on ‘full-blown moral panic’. He challenged the tabloidization thesis as being essentially based on, and aiming to reinforce, the ‘good’ serious journalism myth and the prejudice against popular journalism (and indeed, self-media-based citizen journalism). For him, while complaints about the quality of journalism were understandable, ‘simplistic narratives about a historical fall from a once ideal, golden, age of journalism are unrealistic’. He warned that ‘hopes for an entirely serious, enlightening, and ethically impeccable journalism are futile’ (Gripsrud 2000, pp. 285, 287, 297). In the meantime, some empirical studies also questioned the tabloidization thesis. For instance, Connell’s (1998, p.  11) comparative content analysis of news discourses in five broadsheets and five tabloids in Britain found that ‘the “classical” news discourse has not been “tabloidized”, and this may also hold good for news discourse in tabloid newspapers’. If there is any kind of consensus regarding the issue of tabloidization, it is probably best reflected in Sparks and Tulloch’s summary of findings and observations of relevant studies collected in their co-edited volume Tabloid Tales: Overall, the empirical evidence presented in this section suggests that there is no simple and uniform process of tabloidization going on everywhere. On the contrary, there is much room for debate about exactly what features of the media constitute tabloid form and content, and the success of such innovations depends upon prevailing local circumstances. A trend toward the tabloid that might be marked in one country or one medium may be absent or even reversed in other places or in other media. (Sparks and Tulloch 2000, p. 42)

Furthermore, some have argued that even if to a certain extent some kind of ‘tabloidization’ tendency has been a de facto reality and is still developing (e.g., see Bird 1998; Conboy 2021; Thussu 2008), it is hardly surprising and not necessarily a bad thing, nor can, or should, it be contained or reversed. Many have noted ‘the long-term historical decline of professional journalism’ (Splichal and Dahlgren 2016, p. 5; see also Sparks 2000) and the rise of tabloid/popular journalism (e.g., Bingham and Conboy 2015; Conboy 2021). As Conboy suggested, we are in an era that is witnessing ‘a spectre stalking the global mediasphere. This spectre is the tabloid. Like any good spectre, it is hard to pin down’. He then declared that a globalized and generalized ‘tabloid culture’ was now ‘the mainstream, not a marginal, constituency’ (Conboy 2021, p. 11).

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1.3  Research on Popular Journalism in Non-Western Contexts While for obvious historical reasons the English-language research literature on tabloid/popular journalism has predominantly focused on relevant Western, particularly British and American, experiences, there has been a growing body of research on non-Western practices in this area. In this subsection, I will briefly discuss this body of work (except studies on popular journalism in China, which will be reviewed separately in the following subsection). Research on popular/tabloid journalism in Africa has attracted much scholarly attention since the 2000s. This has been represented by Wasserman’s Tabloid Journalism in South Africa: True Story! (2010), Chama’s trilogy on African tabloid journalism entitled Tabloid Journalism in Africa (2017), Anti-Corruption Tabloid Journalism in Africa (2019), and Tabloid Journalism and Press Freedom in Africa (2020), and many more in the form of journal articles and book chapters (e.g., Buiten and Naidoo 2013; Mabweazara and Strelitz 2009; Phiri 2008; Mano 2007; Mare 2017; Mchakulu 2018; Ogunyemi 2007; Smith et  al. 2012; Steenveld and Strelitz 2010). Echoing calls for looking at tabloid journalism from a popular cultural perspective in the literature, some of these studies examined tabloid journalism as an ‘alternative public sphere’, a ‘service journalism’, or site of constructing and representing masculinity and so forth in relevant African societies. Wasserman (2010), for example, examined how, in the rapidly changing political-journalistic sphere in South Africa, tabloid journalism, despite its sensational tendency and profit-driven approach, had not only tried to integrate ordinary people and their daily struggles with important political and social issues of the country as a young democracy, but also found an important place in popular and civic culture largely ignored by the elitist mainstream media and formal political channels. In particular, many studies have focused on tabloid journalism’s potential watchdog role in informing the society and empowering ordinary people in the African contexts where, in many cases, democratic constitutional regimes were still profoundly constrained by a range of historical, political, socio-economic, and cultural challenges. In other words, unlike in a typical Western context where tabloids and so-called tabloidization are often seen as a threat to journalism standards and, ultimately, the democratic system, tabloid journalism in the African contexts was often seen as

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a positive force to constitute and promote public discourses at the grassroots level against both the repressive state and the not particularly ‘serious’ mainstream media. It did so by granting information access to, and connecting with, previously marginalized people and their communities (typically, the working-class black majority readership in apartheid South Africa). Similarly, in Latin America where ‘many countries suffer democratic erosion or even backsliding’ (Ramírez 2022, p.  1), tabloid journalism played similar roles to that in many of their African counterparts: serving a popular readership with sensational stories and softened general and hard news on the one hand, and practicing a limited watchdog journalism and playing an alternative public sphere role on the other, in a politically challenging and commercially competitive media market. For instance, through a case study of the sensational Crónica roja (Red Chronical) genre from a cultural studies perspective, Pizzaro and Lugo-Ocando (2021, p. 168) examined ‘[w]hy sensationalism and crime still popular in the new Latin America media ecology’. The authors saw Crónica roja ‘as a space where popular urban culture is represented, with its own aesthetics, one which, in certain cases, can be subversive and critical’. Hallin’s case study of Mexico’s television sector revealed the diverse and complex roles of tabloid journalism in the country. The study identified a trend of tabloidization of the sector since the mid-1990s, resulting from two key factors: democratization and commercialization. He argued that tabloid journalism could ‘help to open the democratic public sphere’ by promoting popular interest in politics, but in the meantime might also lead to ‘more negative consequences, displacing political content in the news, distorting the public agenda, marginalizing and stereotyping certain social groups, or providing a propaganda vehicle by which media owners can influence public opinion’ (Hallin 2000, pp. 281–282). The complex interplay of democratization and commercialization that shaped Mexican tabloid journalism (and journalism at large) as noted by Hallin may also be used as a framework to understand the political-­ economy context in which popular journalism operated in some other non-Western democracies—typically, for example, post-Communist and post-authoritarian democracies in Eastern Europe and Asia. One example is Gulyás’ (2000) investigation of the emergence of tabloid journalism in post-Communist Hungary as a result of changing media finance, news consumption pattern, and professional culture, as well as the influence of Western/American consumer/popular culture. More recently, Price’s

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(2021) case study of two influential Bulgarian tabloid newspapers found that the two titles served first and foremost ‘as an antipode of the old, state controlled press of the communist era’. They offered readers a very different kind of journalism that provided them with not only diverse popular reports and commentaries, but also ‘entertainment and emotional authenticity as a way of dealing with the harsh reality of the transition’. The study argued that, in many ways, they ‘have become a type of “drug”, a “drug” that dulls the horror of readers’ tacit knowledge of a complex and difficult reality that they have to navigate alone’. Price concluded that: Whether they were branded as heroes or villains in public life, often accused of populism, undermining institutions, servitude to power, and other sins, they remain an important factor and institution in shaping public opinion in Bulgaria. They were pioneers in changing the post-communist press landscape, revolutionized news, and created the model of popular, accessible-to-­ all daily newspaper, in a form that Bulgarian readers liked and wanted to read at the end of the century. (Price 2021, p. 148)

In post-authoritarian democracies in Asia, while the previously tightly controlled media sector mushroomed, many media outlets soon faced fierce market competition and severe financial crisis and had to either shut down or take a sensationalist, and in some cases sensationally partisan, approach to try to survive. In the meantime, such a media environment has made it difficult to grow a Western style of serious journalism. In the case of Taiwan, for example, Rawnsley and Gong (2012, p. 64) noted that ‘Taiwan today enjoys a genuinely plural media environment. At the same time, Taiwan’s experience of political communication indicates the island is confronting many of the same challenges that all new or juvenile democracies face’, such as ‘the growth of tabloid-style political journalism’ and the issue of ‘news organizations now routinely resort to sensationalism to attract bigger audiences and advertising revenues, leading to concerns about finding ways to regulate lurid and invasive reporting’. Hioe (2021) also observed that ‘Taiwanese journalists are not jailed or censored by the state’, but ‘journalists are suffering from a [politically] polarized media environment dominated by sensationalism and the pursuit of profit’. In South Korea, ‘approximately 88.5% of online users have obtained news and information from news aggregators’ as rich sites of popular journalism. Recently, a ‘clickbait’-like ‘new type of tabloid journalism’ that aimed

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to attract users to click on ‘repetitive display of news by online news publishers’ had emerged on these news portals and been critically referred to as ‘news abuse’ (Kwak et  al. 2018, p.  1). In post-democratization Indonesia, while tabloid journalism offered ‘new perspectives by catering to the taste of the “untouched” readers previously ignored by mainstream newspapers’, it was still equated by most people to ‘crime newspaper’ or ‘pornographic newspaper’ and uncertainties remained when it came to how it might be ‘reinvented’ (Rahmitasari 2016, pp. 21, 38, 39). It may be somewhat unfair to blame tabloid journalism too much in these cases. The real issue here is hardly tabloid journalism as a particular form of popular journalistic genre itself, but more the complex challenges for transitional democracies to grow a strong and functioning Western style of serious journalism to bring about a more balanced and healthier media sphere. Compared with popular/tabloid journalism in non-Western democratic societies, such journalism in non-Western, authoritarian societies often faces pressures from both market competition and state censorship. While mainstream media are normally more censored in these societies, authoritarian regimes also keep a close eye on popular media as they worry that Western/liberal cultural influence may spill over and potentially threaten their political and ideological-moral legitimacy. In Singapore and Malaysia, for example, journalism is heavily defined by the so-called Asian values that emphasize traditional/conservative social-cultural norms and the ethics of collectivism, social order, loyalty, respecting authority, and ‘necessary’ political-media censorship for the so-called greater good of the society as a whole (Bokhorst-Heng 2002; Er and Hao 2002; Kenyon and Marjoribanks 2007; Mutalib 2000; Zakaria 1994). Similarly, in many authoritarian Islamic countries in the Middle East, journalists working for both mainstream and tabloid sectors are still required to ‘accept political, national, religious, or cultural boundaries to their work’, despite the growing though still gradual influence of widely accepted professional journalism ethics centered on freedom of speech (Hafez 2002, p. 225). Overall, studies of popular journalism in the non-Western context have applied similar theoretical frameworks used in Western popular journalism studies to identify and understand the characteristics and roles of popular journalism in local contexts. As a result, they have seemingly shared, to various extents, some similar strengths and limitations of popular journalism studies in the West. For example, most studies still applied ‘tabloid journalism’ as the conceptual domain for relevant discussion, while

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‘popular journalism’ as a term was barely studied and used. For example, in an interesting article titled ‘Three Mexico City Tabloid Newspapers: Some Surprises’ published in The Journal of Popular Culture, Hester (1984, p. 65) compared three Mexican tabloid titles with the American style of sensational tabloid journalism and discovered that ‘the tabloids do not fit the traditional picture of sensationalist publications but to varying degrees provide hard news, variety, even investigative reporting, and socially conscious types of content’. However, from a popular journalistic perspective, it may be argued that this finding is hardly particularly surprising, as the three surveyed titles could have been defined as popular, rather than tabloid, papers in the first place. As the author said, ‘[i]t is dangerous to generalize about newspapers by format or by stereotypes’ (Hester 1984, p.  76). Moreover, while popular cultural perspectives were explored in certain studies, traditional political economy analysis of popular journalism from a liberal perspective remained as the dominant research methodology. Still, research on popular journalism in non-Western contexts also predominantly focused on traditional popular media, particularly tabloid newspapers, while little research on online popular journalism, particularly ordinary citizens’ practice of it, is available.

1.4  The Situation of Popular Journalism Studies in China After being banned for decades under Mao (1949–1976), popular journalism, particularly popular print (newspaper) journalism, remerged in the late 1970s with the introduction of the ‘reform and opening’ policy. It developed considerably in the 1980s, and then explosively during the 1990s and the 2000s after the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) formal adoption of a ‘socialist market-economy’ in 1992, and China’s embrace of globalization with its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Since the 2010s, with the decline of traditional media, particularly the newspaper sector, and the rise of digital media, popular journalism has accordingly shifted to, and permeated in, diverse digital platforms and been practiced by both traditional and new digital media, and professional and citizen journalists. There has been a growing academic research interest in contemporary Chinese popular journalism since the early 1990s. Despite a considerable body of related literature, a specific and systematic book-length account of

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the subject under the contextual domain of ‘popular journalism’ from a historical and popular cultural perspective has remained absent. Most studies in this area are part of a broader investigation of relevant matters in relation to media commercialization in China since the early 1990s. A 1992 article by this author (Huang 1992) was one piece of major early research that examined some important emerging trends regarding China’s newspaper industry’s efforts in popularizing major newspaper titles’ content and improving their market performance in an extremely difficult political and economic situation in the first couple of years after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Those efforts were typically reflected in major newspaper titles’ expansion of the page number, introducing of popular/sensational weekend editions, improvement of visual aesthetics of page layout, and placing greater importance on upgrading communication technologies and improving internal management efficiency. Some of these observations were further discussed and enriched in Yu (1994) later. As more comprehensive media commercialization was picking up pace from the mid-1990s as most typically marked by the rise of mass appeal tabloid metro papers, more studies became available. Zhao’s (1997, 1998, 2002) investigation of the metro paper-represented media commercialization was pioneering and insightful, though her analysis was largely from a radical-critical perspective and at times seemed a little too rigid. Most others took a by and large more flexible approach to appreciate the significance of the extraordinary ‘metro paper phenomenon’ while also acknowledging its limitations. My own research on the tabloid metro papers and, more broadly, China’s media commercialization at large, stretching from the early 2000s to the present (Huang 2000, 2001, 2016, 2021, 2022; Huang et al. 2002), examined the rise and fall of the metro paper sector and a range of associated issues and lessons in changing political-­economy, sociocultural, and technological environments. Through a case study of the Beijing Youth Daily group, Zhang’s (2014) monograph focused on the impact of globalization on the market-oriented Chinese press. The book identified a series of relevant changes happening within the researched press group and examined their impact on, and implications for, China’s journalism. In the meantime, drawing on interviews with a group of metro paper journalists in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, Liu’s book explored how these journalists ‘make sense of their work and render their job meaningful’ through what she called an ‘aspiration-frustration-reconciliation’ framework (Liu 2017, pp. 15, 16).

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While most research focused on print tabloids, Zhu (2022) drew attention to the opportunities and challenges of the development of China’s ‘tabloid television’. More recently, some have noted the surprising ‘resurgence’ of the Party organ sector since the mid-2010s after having been substantially marginalized in the marketplace for two decades or so (Wang et al. 2019). Other studies relating to this matter went further to suggest China’s Party organs’ ‘regaining’ of popularity and credibility through ‘tabloidization’ against the falling popular metro press sector in the digital age (Fang 2022; see also relevant discussion in Long and Shao 2021; Xin 2022; Zhang et al. 2023; Zhu and Fu 2023; Zou 2021). 1.4.1   The Conceptual Matter Relevant researchers have used various terms or phrases to conceptualize popular media and popular journalistic practices in China, including ‘popular journalism’ (Huang et  al. 2002; Li 1998; Wang et  al. 2018; Xin 2022), ‘mass appeal’ metro newspapers (Zhao 1998), ‘city newspapers’ as ‘China’s state-run tabloids’ (Huang 2001), ‘commercialized press’ (Huang et  al. 2002), ‘popularization and localization’ (of China’s local newspaper context/market) (Hendrischke 2005), ‘popular official media’ (Wang et al. 2019), and ‘the tabloidization of Party Media’ (Fang 2022). A close look at these terms/phrases and associated discussions raises several concerns. First, like studies on popular journalism elsewhere, studies of China’s popular journalism first and foremost saw popular journalism as a particular type of professional news media (popular media) and paid much less attention to it as a journalistic genre. When popular journalism was occasionally indeed seen as a journalistic genre, relevant discussion once again largely focused on certain professional news outlets’ practice of it. This mediacentric approach has become particularly problematic in the era of digital media, given Chinese netizens’ proactive participation in, and practice of, popular journalism as discussed in this book (Chap. 6). In addition, the point I made earlier that ‘tabloid’ is insufficient in conceptualizing a variety of popular news media and popular journalistic practices applies to the popular journalistic landscape in China as well. It should be noted that even the extremely popular and influential mass appeal metro papers that emerged and rose during the mid-1990s and the 2000s may be best described as tabloids with Chinese characteristics.

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Unlike their Western counterparts, these Chinese ‘tabloid’ titles were still ultimately owned and controlled by relevant Party press conglomerates. This institutional constraint became a critical factor that contributed to their later fall, as I have discussed elsewhere (Huang 2016, 2021) and shall discuss further in Chap. 5 of this book. Similarly, other terms such as ‘mass appeal’ press and ‘commercialized press’ used in some previous studies, including some of this author’s own, also lack sufficiency in conceptualizing diverse and multifaceted popular journalistic practices in contemporary China. While the term ‘popular journalism’ was indeed used by some scholars (e.g., Huang et al. 2002; Li 1998; Wang et al. 2018), it was often not carefully examined or properly defined as an academic term, nor was it discussed in detail, but in a rather broad sense. There is a lack of more comprehensive and dynamic examination and more delicate definition of ‘popular journalism’ in the context of its relations with such associated terms and issues as tabloid, tabloidization, popular culture, citizenship, citizen (popular) journalism, and (popular) public sphere. In short, I believe that the working definition of ‘popular journalism’ as I discussed earlier in this chapter may serve as a very useful, if not ideal, term to conceptualize contemporary China’s diverse and multifaceted popular journalistic practices, as will be examined in the chapters that follow in this book. 1.4.2   The Matter of Theorizing When it comes to popular journalism’s impact on, and implications for, contemporary Chinese journalism and, more broadly, politics and society at large, three major arguments have been advanced. The first argument, which remained particularly popular at the height of China’s media commercialization during the 1990s and the 2000s, is that market-oriented popular journalism has substantially challenged propaganda-oriented Party journalism both journalistically and as a business model, and thus might potentially help create a more independent and professional journalism. This view is typically reflected in such optimistic narratives as the ‘demise of Communism in China’, ‘the self-liberalization of China’s mass media’, and the government’s awareness of ‘having lost control of the mass media’ (Pei 1994, pp. 177), the emergence of ‘China’s alternative media, which the Party has found to be disturbing but impossible to curb’ (Chu 1994, p. 9), popular media-led media commercialization’s potential

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of strengthening ‘the long-term evolutionary media democratization in China’ (Huang 1994, p.  239), ‘from Party journalism to professional journalism’ (Huang 2001), ‘the demise of the classic communist propaganda in a sense that the state tightly-controlled media have lost their audiences’ (Li 2003), and the discursive development of media ‘professionalism’ and ‘public sphere’ in China (e.g., see Cho 2014; Pan and Lu 2003; Simons et al. 2017). Contrary to this argument, some other scholars have countered that commercialized popular media like the metro newspapers as relevant Party organs’ market-oriented subsidiary outlets may have actually helped strengthen state control by selling popularized official propaganda (together with continued hard official propaganda). This second major argument in relation to the rise of China’s commercialized popular journalism was most typically reflected in Zhao (1998). Zhao challenged the libertarian ‘market-verse-state’ framework and argued that the non-­ democratic and even anti-democratic nature of capitalist development in China might even do more harm than good to China’s political-­journalistic democratization. For Zhao, both the repressive state and the greedy market were enemies of a grass-roots democratic press. She thus called for a community- and equality-oriented democratic alternative journalism in China. While acknowledging their critical insights, Lee critiqued that such observations and interpretations from Zhao and some other new-left critics not only ‘seem to have built rather ill-conceived and exaggerated narratives of capital domination in China, thus committing the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”’ (Ren 2000, p. 200), but also seemingly intended to see everyday life as all but an ideological struggle, and overstated the power of state propaganda while largely treating audiences as a monolithic, homogeneous, and passive body (Lee 2000, p. 569). A third major argument on the rise of popular journalism in contemporary China sits somewhere between the first two. Taking a more dialectic approach, some scholars warned from the very beginning of media commercialization in the early 1990s that the demise of Maoist communism in the era of the ‘socialist market economy’ did not mean the death of the CCP’s authoritarian political economy. They thus viewed the Chinese style of media marketization under continued one-party rule and state control of media ownership as a case of ‘commercialization without independence’ (Chan 1993, p. 1), or ‘professionalization without guarantees’ (Yu 1994, p.  23). For Yu, ‘[t]o argue that market forces will inevitably lead to political and journalistic freedom is only half true. Unless the press

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in China is able to function without government control and interference, media professionalism can hardly be guaranteed’ (Yu 1994, p.  39). Similarly, Chan (1993, p. 18) pointed out that ‘media commercialization represents an erosion of ideological control in China. However, it is not equivalent nor will it necessarily lead to a free press’. He argued that democracy, rule of law, and private media ownership are three major preconditions for the practice of freedom of expression. Nevertheless, this school of thought still generally believed that in the Chinese context, the historical significance of the rise of popular journalism should not be negated. As Lee argued, ‘[l]iberalism may not necessarily trigger media democratization, but democratization is historically and empirically inconceivable without the development of a strong market’, and in the Chinese context, ‘[c]ompetition, even in a distorted market, has lessened the ideological rigidity of official journalism while broadening the space for non-­ political discourses’ (Lee 2000, pp. 562, 571). Despite the insights presented by these three major arguments and their usefulness in their own right for the understanding of the ‘meanings’ of China’s popular journalism, and indeed the country’s journalism in general, they also share some common limitations. First, each of them, as I critiqued elsewhere (Huang 2007), intended to evaluate media commercialization, as exemplified by the rise of popular journalism, from a rather narrowly defined, traditional political economy perspective, focusing primarily on its democratic potential. As one (well-­ researched and argued) study typically put it, ‘[t]his paper examines how market-oriented reforms to media are changing the public sphere in contemporary China with particular concern for how the commercialization of media may impact the prospects for democracy’ (Liu and McCormick 2011, p. 101). Few studies have specifically and systematically investigated popular journalism’s meanings and values in the daily life of ordinary Chinese audiences from a popular cultural perspective. Methodologically, they all, to various extents, predominantly remain mediacentric while paying little attention to the role of ordinary citizens/netizens in China’s contemporary popular journalistic communication. I once described this research tendency elsewhere as a ‘media-­democracy linkup’ approach and questioned its ‘researcher-centred and elite-oriented tendency and the absence of communication audiences/users’. I argued that: while a highly politically and morally charged “democracy vs control” approach is indeed useful and powerful in dissecting the power and class

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structure of media commercialization in China, it should not be regarded as the only and, in certain circumstances, even superior perspective. To simplify media reforms in China as a sacred ideological and moral issue of press freedom can be misleading. (Huang 2007, pp. 403–404)

Later, Sparks (2010, 2012) also made some similar and further critique of the same approach by emphasizing the importance of looking further into other popular cultural genres such as films, pop culture, reality television shows, popular magazines, and non-news coverage in news media. Second, I suggested a ‘popular journalism vs Party journalism’ framework elsewhere (Huang 2001) to highlight popular journalism’s special journalistic and social significance in the Chinese context. Some critics have suggested the irrelevance of this framework given China’s Party organs’ alleged recent rerise and winning of the digital media war against commercial/popular media (e.g., Fang 2022; Wang et al. 2019). This is a vitally important matter in relation to China’s (popular) journalism studies which has remained profoundly under-researched and under-debated in the literature and will be discussed in some detail throughout this book. I argue that the framework remains useful for the understanding of the special power of popular journalism in the Chinese context as a kind of journalism that can bring people much ‘fun’ but also make much ‘trouble’ to propagandistic official media discourses and even the political status quo at large, and thus ultimately contribute to popular citizenship. Third and last, historically, and globally, popular journalism in contemporary China is not new. Long before this, popular journalism, and popular culture at large, emerged in the West and was later introduced to modern China and enjoyed an impressive development in the late Qing Dynasty (late 1840s–early 1910s) and the Republic of China (1912–1949). However, current debate on popular journalism in contemporary China has related little to these historical and global contexts and related literature. As will be discussed later in this book, both modern and contemporary popular journalism in China have remained considerably under-researched in the literature.

1.5  Research Contributions and Methods The current literature on contemporary Chinese popular journalism, as discussed above, lacks a clear and well-defined conceptual framework (e.g., among other things, a better understanding and clear definition of

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‘popular journalism’ as an academic term), a closer attention to and more serious consideration of a popular cultural approach, a good understanding of digital popular journalism including citizen participation in this regard, and a historical dimension. This book is the first systematic monograph-length investigation of contemporary Chinese popular journalism from a popular cultural perspective. While it primarily aims to respond to the knowledge gaps in the literature on contemporary Chinese popular journalism as identified above, it may also shed new light on popular journalism studies in general, as to a certain extent some of those gaps also commonly exist across this research area globally. This book applies a qualitative archival research methodology based on a critical-contextual analysis of data collected from a range of highly relevant media content both online and offline, Party and government documents, talks and speeches of CCP leaders and ideologues, survey reports, and secondary data available in the literature. My extensive research experience in the past 35 years or so as a researcher of Chinese journalism studies and relevant previous publications also greatly helped me in navigating, conceptualizing, and making sense of a huge amount of data and other related research resources.

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CHAPTER 2

Mao’s War on ‘Yellow’ Journalism

2.1   Popular Journalism in Late Qing Dynasty and the ROC The concept and practice of modern journalism (periodical press) was introduced into the late Qing Dynasty in the early nineteenth century by Western missionaries. Unsurprisingly, the first Chinese-language press titles (only about six major ones in the first four decades of the century) were mainly run by Western missionaries, aiming to introduce Christianity as a new, Western religion to Chinese. Due to the Qing government’s strict closed-door policy and banning of Christianity at the time, these early titles were based in nearby Southeast Asia and southern coastal Chinese cities like Macao (Aomen) and Canton (Guangzhou) (Fudan University 1985, pp. 26–32). In the meantime, growing Western interest in Qing China along with Western powers’ global expansion and an increase of Western migrants (officials, businessmen, missionaries, etc.) to China also triggered the need for a foreign-language (mostly English) press. As a result, about 20 such titles were launched during this period (Fudan University 1985, pp. 33–37). Rapid press growth happened after the two Opium Wars (particularly the second one) which occurred during 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 respectively. Losing both wars, the Qing government was forced to sign a

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series of unequal treaties with Western powers and suffered heavy loss of territory and sovereignty. This was the turning point when China was being turned into a semi-colony of Western powers and the start of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. Due to rising demands for news and business information, increased foreign migrants, and an emerging Chinese urban readership on the one hand, and the Qing government’s losing of information control on the other, foreign-owned newspapers in both Chinese and foreign languages, particularly commercial titles, experienced rapid growth in treaty ports in the remaining decades of the century. Particularly, as Shanghai quickly emerged as the center of China’s foreign trade and capitalist economy, it also rose as the country’s heavily Western-influenced cultural and mass media hub. When it came to newspapers, dozens of new titles were launched during this period including the influential English-language North China Daily News (1850–1951) and the Chinese-language Shanghai Xinbao (Chinese Shipping List & Advertiser, 1862–1872), Shen Bao (Shanghai News) (1872–1949), Zilin Hubao (the Chinese version of the North China Daily News, 1882–1899), and the Sin Wan Pao (The News) (1893–1949). Especially, the fierce competition between Chinese-language titles during this period greatly contributed to the professional and commercial development of Chinese journalism at this time (Fudan University 1985, pp.  33–45; Fang et  al. 2005, pp. 51–77). Chinese-owned newspapers also mushroomed during this period. At of the end of the 1890s, there were about 100 such titles. By the eve of the 1911 Republican Revolution that ended the Qing Dynasty, the total number of Chinese-run newspapers had increased dramatically to more than 1000 titles. This was mainly triggered by the country’s rapidly worsening political situation since the mid-1890s marked by two tremendously humiliating and consequential defeats by Western powers. One was Japan’s defeat of Qing’s Northern Fleet in 1895 and the subsequent signing of the unequal Treaty of Shimonoseki (Maguan Tiaoyue) which prompted the rise of the Reformist Movement that aimed to transform Qing into an institutional monarchy. The other was the Eight-Nation Alliance’s invasion and occupation of the capital city Peking (Beijing) in 1900 and the signing of the even harsher Boxer Protocol in the following year that incited the Anti-Qing Revolutionist Movement. Both movements involved massive demand for media propaganda (Fang et  al. 2005, pp.  92, 134–135).

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Far outnumbering those foreign-owned commercial Chinese-language titles, these Chinese-owned press titles were, however, predominantly commentary- and propaganda-oriented and politically influential, as they were primarily instrumentally used to promote their respective political ideas. To a large extent, this powerful elitist and propagandistic journalistic tradition based on the practice of a whole generation of reformist and revolutionary politicians, publishers, and political writers and commentators in late Qing continued in the era of the ROC due to a series of old and new political and social challenges: continuing Western occupation of concessions (despite their slow and gradual dissolving over the years), the turbulent Warlord Era during 1916–1928, the New Culture Enlightenment Movement during 1916–1921, the rise of the Chinese Communist movement from the 1920s and onward, the Northern Expedition during 1925–1927, the Japanese invasion and occupation during World War II, and the civil war between nationalists and communists during 1946–1949 (Fang et  al. 2005; Ding 2005). All of these events made inevitable the intensive instrumental, particularly propagandistic, use of media. However, it is vitally important to note that beyond these two elitist— commercial and political—press traditions, popular journalism also visibly rose as an influential third journalistic genre and press type during late Qing and the ROC. Popular journalism during this period was most typically represented by small/tabloid-sized papers that were commonly referred to as xiaobao (small papers). However, like the elite press, xiaobao in late Qing was hardly popular among the largely illiterate masses. This situation changed from the 1920s onward when the xiaobao press shifted to a more mass appeal strategy (He 2018; Li 2006; Qin 1993; Wang 2012). As He (2018, p. 210) noted, ‘xiaobao in the first two decades of the twentieth century had transformed itself from late-Qing literati-­ newspapermen’s community of self-importance for displaying their tastes of literature and the courtesan into a forum of a wider public for the discussion of a full range of issues’, and this made it a form of popular journalism in a stricter sense. The xiaobao press as a form of tabloid with Chinese characteristics was huge in terms of number of titles, and diverse and dynamic when it came to editorial orientation and content, which were influenced by both Western tabloid culture (characterized primarily by a sensationalization and personalization orientation of coverage of news and other stories) and China’s own traditional popular literature/culture (in the form of covering romantic/erotic poetry, prose, short stories, and serial novels,

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courtesan contests, traditional opera reviews, gossips, rumors, and scandals about celebrities and politicians alike, as well as other interesting/odd ‘trivial’ stories in people’s everyday lives) (Qin 1993; Li 2006; Li and Liu 2022). Though the accurate total number of xiaobao titles remains unknown due to the lack of realizable statistics, it is believed that in Shanghai alone there were at least 1000 titles (e.g., Li 2006; Ma 1996; Qin 1993) during late Qing and the ROC. According to another source, between 1897 and 1952, Shanghai housed 1266 different kinds of tabloid titles, accounting for 70.88 percent of total newspaper titles published in the city during this period (Xi 2017). While most of these tabloids were short-lived and non-­ news oriented, some of them, particularly the Entertainment (youxi bao) in late Qing Shanghai and the so-called four big titles in republican Shanghai (the Crystal or Jin Bao, the Diamond or Jingang Zuan, the Holmes or Fuermosi, and the Robin Hood or Luobinhan), lasted for decades and remained journalistically and culturally influential (Ma 1996; Qin 1993; Xi 2017). Despite this, xiaobao as a press category was deeply discriminated against by mainstream media, media professionals, and media researchers at the time and long after (He 2018; Li 2006; Qin 1993; Wang 2012). In the Chinese journalistic discourse, xiaobao traditionally meant ‘little’ or ‘minor’ papers compared with broadsheet or large-sized papers, both commercial and political, referred to as dabao, which means ‘big’ or ‘important’ papers (Wang 2012, p. 2). Often, it was even simply and simplistically equated to ‘yellow’ journalism (e.g., see Fang et  al. 2005, p. 165). Historically, while such prejudice against xiaobao was by and large a reflection of an elite journalism-centered global journalistic culture, as discussed earlier, compared with its tabloid counterpart in the West, xiaobo in the Chinese context seemingly faced a far more challenging situation. For example, while the debate about tabloid/popular journalism in the Western context and some non-Western contexts was largely around the (commercial) ‘popular’ versus (commercial) ‘serious’ dispute, the Chinese xiaobao press was prejudiced and belittled by both (mainstream) commercial and political broadsheets. During late Qing and the ROC, though the xiaobao community and their supporters fought hard to attempt to defend its ‘legitimacy’ by defending xiaobao’s unique journalistic and social values and challenging dabao’s self-appointed importance and superiority, the deeply rooted discrimination against xiaobao prevailed (Li and Liu 2022), which made many xiaobao people and readers alike feel ashamed (Fan 2020, p. 80; Li and Liu 2022).

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When it comes to academic studies on xiaobao, until recently, the modern Chinese xiaobao press, together with modern Chinese popular culture in general, had remained substantially under-researched (and to a certain extent this is still the case) (Fan 2020; He 2018). As He notably observed in his recently published monograph titled Newspapers and the Journalistic Public in Republican China, for many decades, both Chinese- and English-­ language works on modern Chinese journalism from generations of scholars had ‘tended to build up their narratives along the line of political history in modern China’ and demonstrated their ‘preference of the political over the non-political press’ and ‘insistence on the dichotomy between the political and commercial newspaper and their disdain for xiaobao’ (He 2018, pp. 5, 6). In fact, when it came to the case of xiaobao, it was not only dismissed, but also often largely or completely ignored even in some specific studies on modern Chinese journalism history (e.g., MacKinnon 1997; Weston 2006; Zhao and Sun 2018). According to He, it was not until the ‘past two decades’ that such ‘deep-seated prejudice against non-politics-oriented newspapers’, particularly the xiaobao press, was considerably changed with some newly published works that investigate a plethora of issues, ranging from a Chinese public sphere or “middle realm,” electoral democracy, nationalism, commercialism, intellectuals-­led political participation, cosmopolitanism, state censorship, wartime mobilization during Japan’s invasion (1937–45), the rise of entertainment in the urban milieu, and petty urbanites (xiao shimin). (He 2018, p. 6)

He’s own volume, as mentioned, was an important addition to this more diverse and dynamic recent literature. Elsewhere, He’s case study of a sensational 1928 elopement suggested that popular media coverage of such ‘scandal’ might help explain ‘how otherwise silent women received and applied elite discourses of “new womenhood,” core family, and social reforms to their real-life struggles’ (He 2010, p. 3). More recently, Zhang investigated the coverage of defamation disputes and lawsuits in the Holmes, a leading Chinese-language tabloid in republican-era Shanghai, as referred to earlier, and argued that while such coverage was clearly commercially motivated, it also ‘both facilitated legal knowledge circulation and allowed leisure consumption’ (Zhang 2021, p. 41). Others have suggested that in late Qing (during the late 1890s and the 1900s), xiaobao,

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unlike large papers’ literature supplements, paid close attention to news coverage. This was typically represented by tabloid titles published by Li Boyuan, the mastermind of the modern Chinese xiaobao press (Fan 2020). As Qin observed, during late Qing, ‘news is the mainstay of tabloids which rely on the coverage of news for their existence even though they show their own characteristics both in news and in writings of other types’ (Qin 1993, p. 134, cited in Fan 2020, p. 79). Fan (2020, p. 79) suggested that ‘[a]ll in all, it [xiaobao] made an effort to draw the attention of townspeople by providing them with a means of seeking interest, knowledge, distraction and amusement’. Overall, these studies argued that the xiaobao press played a unique role in its own, popular way in the social, cultural, and political life during late Qing and the ROC, and remained far more popular and influential than its dabao peers among readers at the grass-roots level. As stated by UBS Press, in its introduction to Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897–1911 by Wang (2012), Wang’s book revealed that ‘it was not the dabao, or “important” papers, that proved most influential. Rather it was the xiaobao, the “little” or “minor” papers—with their reputation for frivolity—that captivated and empowered the public’ by ‘giving the public knowledge about previously unspeakable and unprintable ideas’ and thus ‘became the voice of the people’.1 Surely, as He (2018) noted, there were cases of the ‘politicization’ of certain xiaobao and reversely, the popularization of certain broadsheets in certain circumstances. And  broadsheet commercial newspapers’ literature supplements also played a big role in serving popular needs for news and other information. However, xiaobao as a unique press genre and separate press category and its decades of resilient and vibrant existence and fierce competition with dabao clearly suggested its journalistic and social significance. Compared with this vibrant and insightful recent, and largely English-­ language, literature on xiaobao, China’s mainstream (officially supervised) journalism history texts still largely see these modern Chinese popular titles as both journalistically and socially ‘trivial’, and even ‘vulgar’. Despite the adoption of a less biased approach in some more recently published texts, the overall discourse used to construct modern Chinese journalism history in general, and to conceptualize popular journalism in particular, has changed little. In short, modern Chinese journalism history in the official historiography has been largely depicted as one of a Chinese-owned ‘patriotic’ press against a foreign-owned ‘imperialist’ press, propagandistic/political press against ‘greedy’ commercial press, ‘important’ mainstream/elite journalism against ‘trivial’ popular journalism, press

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published by revolutionaries against press run by conservatives, pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘progressive’ press against pro-­Kuomintang ‘reactionary’ press, ‘proletarian’ press against ‘bourgeois’ press, and communist press as the best against all other press. In this highly problematic historiography based on highly politically and ideologically charged categorization of journalistic genres and media types and associated analysis, popular journalism as represented by xiaobao was traditionally often barely mentioned in widely used journalism history texts such as Fang (1981), Fudan University (1985), and Gu and Yu (1987), and is still largely viewed as the least important (if at all) (e.g., Fang et al. 2005). Typically, for example, China Journalistic Communication History (Fang et al. 2005), one of if not the most widely used journalism history texts in journalism schools across the country by China’s leading journalism historians, only scarcely mentioned the practice of popular journalism by Shen Bao, widely seen as the most journalistically influential and commercially successful modern Chinese-language broadsheet, as referred to earlier. The text used less than half a page to discuss the newspaper’s pioneering role in expanding their coverage of ‘social news’ (shehui xinwen, news about everyday social life at the grass-roots level, or simply, soft/popular stories as compared with hard news) with three examples: its series of reports in three years from April 1874 to April 1877 to follow the development of one of the most famous wrongful convictions in Qing history, the case of Yang Nai Wu and Xiao Bai Cai, making it must-read news for ordinary Chinese households; its publication of a satirical story appearing in the newspaper on 19 July 1878 about Qing’s ambassador to Britain Guo Song Tao’s ‘portrait event’ in London; and its experiment with travel journalism during 1876–1877 with the publication of a series of travel diaries that depicted a Shanghai customs officer’s overseas adventures (Fang et al. 2005, p. 65). The first two examples mentioned in the text even lacked reasonable details and clarity. For example, in the case of Yang Nai Wu and Xiao Bai Cai, one who is not familiar with the story would have to search elsewhere to realize the case’s extraordinary significance from a popular journalistic perspective: a young scholar, Yang Nai Wu, was charged for having an affair with a married young woman, Bi Xiugu (nickname Xiao Bai Cai), and both were sentenced to death for the alleged murder of Bi’s husband. However, both were actually framed by the county magistrate, whose son, like Yang (and some others), was also attracted by Bi’s charms. Yang’s wife appealed all the way to the Empress Dowager Ci Xi, who personally intervened and ordered a review of the case. In January 1878, the verdict was

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eventually reversed and both Yang and Bi were cleared. Hundreds of officials who were involved in this extraordinarily unjust case at various levels were punished (Zhang and Lovrich 2016). Shen Bao’s coverage of the case with more than 70 news stories and commentaries and the publication of 19 relevant government documents not only greatly helped boost the still relatively new outlet’s circulation, but also influenced the investigation of the case (Dong 2022). Similarly, regarding Qing’s ambassador to Britain Guo Song Tao’s ‘portrait event’, readers would have better understood the case’s flavor and significance as a ‘social news’ event had the text told them such details: Shen Bao published the story by paraphrasing an excerpt from an article that had first appeared in the English-language North China Daily News (though the original story was published in London even earlier). The small piece was an interview with a British painter including his amusing experiences in painting Gao, in which Guo was said to insist on having both of his ears visible in the painting, otherwise ‘people will think that I have been disgraced and that one has been cut off’ (Wagner 1999, p. 116). In fact, that was not quite the end of Shen Bao’s mocking of Guo. Three weeks after the publication of the story, on 6 August 1878, the newspaper again revealed that Guo invited high officials and noble lords from London’s high society for a Western-style tea party. However, the most eye-catching part of the story was not the party, but that Guo was accompanied by his concubine to meet guests in the drawing room. This story was extraordinary, as it touched on a taboo subject for Chinese readers, as at the time, even officials’ wives, let alone concubines, were not allowed to meet visitors on official occasions. Furthermore, three days later, the newspaper published another article to discuss the different statuses of women in the West and China in social events. An offended Guo later threatened to sue the newspaper for ‘spreading rumors’, though the two sides settled the dispute with the newspaper’s publication of an apology on 10 April 1879 for ‘many inaccuracies’ in those two stories (Jiang 2012). Obviously, for the newspaper’s readers, the meaning and implication of these stories and associated discussion might be interpreted in many ways and go well beyond what ‘sensationalism’ could entirely explain. The text by Fang et al. also mentioned some of Shen Bao’s other popular journalistic initiatives such as its use of news pictures and cartoons, emphasizing and valuing of its popular ‘literature’ supplement, and publication of the influential news and current affairs-oriented Dianshizhai Pictorial (also known as the Illustrated Lithographer) (1884–1898), though again in a highly abstract manner (Fang et al. 2005, pp. 66–67).

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More importantly, the text still took an overly discriminating and negative view on the rise of the so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School (i.e., love-bird literature) and ‘yellow journalism’ as typically represented by xiaobao, two influential popular cultural genres during 1910s–1920s Shanghai. Viewing ‘the popularity of the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School” in mainstream newspapers’ literature supplements’ and ‘the flooding of yellow xiaobao’ during this period from a rigidly conservative cultural-moral perspective, the text accused them of arousing readers’ ‘vulgar interests’ by providing them with coverage relating to ‘prostitution, wuxia [swordmen novels], mysteries and fantasies, crimes, conspiracies, and comicality’. It also labeled some of those writers who had previously promoted revolutionary ideas against the Qing regime but in the post-revolutionary era wrote such ‘vulgar’ stories as ‘losing their revolutionary spirit’, ‘becoming decadent’, and ‘managing to make a living’ by peddling indecent materials (Fang et al. 2005, p. 165). Such conservative comments reflected a profound lack of understanding or recognition of the complex, multidimensional, and unpredictable nature of human life and of individuals’ right to choose (no matter who they were and what they might have done before), particularly in rapidly changing socio-political (as well as potentially personal) circumstances. Overall, the text’s discussion of modern Chinese popular journalism remained overly brief, fragmentary, and biased, and offered little analysis of its value and importance to ordinary people by relating it to such matters as the many dimensions, meanings, and struggles of everyday life, popular identity and citizenship, civic public sphere, urban bourgeois culture, sentiment, love, sex and romance, gender relations, feminism, and subjectivities and individualities. Instead, popular journalism was still seen as a nonessential side show under the long shadow of elite journalism. As He pointed out, historically, conservative intellectuals and ideologues had intended to dismiss popular journalistic practice by xiaobao and mainstream outlets’ literature supplements as ‘not only trivial, but also scandalous’. In other words, they attempted to use their own ‘frustration’ to justify their moral responsibility by ignoring or looking down on readers’ ‘obsession’ with such ‘trivial’ journalism (He 2018, pp. 28–29). As will be discussed further later on, to a considerable extent, this approach to popular journalism in modern China has also more or less impacted the view of many press regulators and certain journalists and media critics alike on popular journalism in contemporary China up until today, and can become emphatic on occasion.

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2.2  The Banning of Popular Journalism Under Mao With the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the historical prejudice against popular journalism as discussed earlier was further increased and radicalized by the new communist regime from the perspective of a narrow and convenient Marxist class analysis and associated ethics. In ‘liberated’ cities (by the People’s Liberation Army) during the late 1940s and the early 1950s, not only the xiaobo press but also all other pre-1949 commercial and non-commercial dabao titles that were deemed as ‘reactionary’ by the regime were effectively demolished in just a few years. According to the influential Chinese journalism history textbook by Fang et al. (2005) mentioned earlier, privately owned newspapers experienced a series of ‘difficulties’ at the time: their ‘unfamiliarity’ with, and ‘incapability’ in fulfilling, media’s new propaganda role under the ‘new situation’; their lack of access to news sources and capacity in attracting commercial advertisements, as ‘in the minds of the readers of new China, Party press organs enjoyed far greater credibility than privately owned titles’; (and as a result) the difficulty for them to keep their staff; and some titles’ coverage of ‘inferior and vulgar materials, even stories that distorted the Party’s policies from time to time’. These drastic political and market changes under the new communist regime led to their inevitable death: in the first 10 months after the founding of the PRC, the total number of privately owned newspapers dropped from 58 in March 1950 (14 of them, including some of the most well-known and influential pre-1949 titles, were based in Shanghai) to 25  in late August 1951, and to none by October 1954. Similarly, Shanghai had 22 privately owned radio stations in early 1950. By September 1953, all of these stations had been nationalized. In comparison, as of 1950, the number of the CCP’s press organs increased to 151 titles, accounting for 60 percent of the total number of newspaper titles. In the following year, the total number of newspaper titles increased to 475, most of them state-owned titles, particularly Party organs. As of October 1954, because of restructuring, the total number of newspaper titles reduced to 248, all of which were state-owned propaganda titles (Fang et al. 2005, pp. 332, 335, 336, 337). Strictly speaking, journalism as an independent profession and industry had by now been buried.

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The tough restrictions and repression against pre-1949 commercial titles were exemplified by several typical cases, as also mentioned in Fang et al. In Peking, the well-known World Daily (Shijie Ribao, 1925–1949) was closed down and taken over by the CCP’s Military Administration Authorities for ‘continuing hold a counterrevolutionary stance by publishing stories from the Kuomintang’s Central News Agency’. Similarly, in Shanghai, the influential Shanghai Evening Post (Damei Wanbao, 1929–1949), owned by an American businessman, was ‘voluntarily’ closed in June 1949 after being warned of ‘spreading lies and misleading the public’ and also due to ‘internal oppositions from its workers’. And also in Shanghai, the prominent English-language North China Daily News referred to earlier was also ‘voluntarily’ shut down in March 1951 after more than a century of operation in the city due to its ‘hostility against Chinese people by often publishing stories and commentaries that harmed the benefits of Chinese people and government and refusing to use newswires of the Xinhua News Agency but that of Western wire services’ (Fang et  al. 2005, p.  336). Decades later, this miserable situation suffered by privately owned media outlets in the early 1950s was described by a newspaperman who worked with one such newspaper based in Shanghai then: ‘“non-partisan” news was gone, “inside stories” was also gone, and “special dispatch from Nanking” and newswires from foreign wire services all disappeared too. Nobody knew how to run the paper anymore’ (quoted in Fang et al. 2005, p. 336). Accordingly, popular journalism as both a media type and a journalistic genre as part of the ‘rotten’ and ‘vulgar’ bourgeoise press culture from the ‘old’ China also logically became the enemy of the regime and needed to be thrown into the ‘rubbish bin of history’. This mission was swiftly completed, marking the closure of the last tabloid title in Shanghai in 1952 (Wu 2018). Internal Party documents’ assessment of xiaobao was that ‘the coverage of xiaobao titles during the period of Chiang Kai-sheck was all but the daily life of the exploiting parasite class including warlords, compradors, bureaucrats, as well as twisted, exaggerated, or fabricated yellow news, and trivial matters about vulgar literati and “foreign settlement talents”’ (Wu 2011, cited in Wu 2018, p. 171). This was the regime’s political and ideological verdict on the xiaobao press. Despite the existence of a dozen state-owned evening newspapers as quasi-popular titles during the 1950s and mid-1960s, even these outlets were forced to close during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Ding and Zhou 1999; Xi 1995, p.  32). In fact, long before the Cultural

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Revolution began, there had been growing hostility toward even ‘harm-­ free’ popular journalistic practice. In this environment, not only would a sensational story like ‘A Poet, A Social Butterfly, and A Masseur’ published in a tabloid in ‘old’ Shanghai (Li 2004) become completely unacceptable, even an ordinary feature story could cause a huge stir. One notable such example occurred in early 1957 with the Shanghai-based Liberation Daily. On March 24 of that year, a feature story on a famous Shaoxing opera actress’ love story entitled ‘My husband, my honeymoon’, which was an invited, self-narrated piece by the actress, appeared in the newspaper. The newspaper received hundreds of letters from conservative, ‘revolutionary’ readers after its publication complaining that the story was ‘bourgeois’, ‘yellow’ journalism that had damaged the newspaper’s reputation as a Party organ. Even more seriously, based on their reading of the story, it was reported that the commanders at the headquarters of the Eastern Fleet of the Chinese navy based in Shanghai even suspected that there might have been an anti-revolutionary incident happening in the newspaper, and prepared to surround its building. Both the actress and her husband were heavily criticized. Her husband, who happened to be a journalist, was suspended from duty and investigated. It was not until Mao was told about the incident and shrugged it off in early April while at a Party conference in nearby Hangzhou that the uproar calmed down (Li 2017). However, this was not the end of story. Mao’s tolerance of the story was largely based on a temporary tactical consideration, rather than any ideological approval. This was demonstrated by the fact that the story was brought back and harshly criticized again later during the Cultural Revolution (Li 2017). The story was published at a critical time during the Hundred Flowers Campaign that Mao had launched 11 months previously for the supposed purpose of offering the public an opportunity to voice their opinions about the new communist regime. However, at the time the story was published, no one, perhaps except Mao himself, knew that in less than a month, the campaign would be dramatically turned into a ruthless Anti-­ Rightist Campaign against the regime’s critics. Compared to the love story, Mao and his regime had greater concerns to deal with in relation to China’s journalism (and the Chinese intelligentsia at large). In journalism academia, the regime’s biggest enemy now was Wang Zhong, then professor and Dean of the Journalism School at Fudan University in Shanghai, who remained active in voicing his reformist journalistic ideas during the Campaign.

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Questioning the CCP’s propagandistic media ideology and policy, Wang advocated bringing back the pre-1949 commercial-professional journalistic mechanism and incorporating it into the new socialist press system. Strongly criticizing the concerning propagandization of China’s journalism, he emphasized the importance of following universally accepted commercial/professional journalistic codes and practice, including the ‘human interest’ value of a news story (Chen 1983; Wang 2004; Xu 2006). In Wang’s own words during 1956–1957, ‘[n]ewspapers must meet readers’ needs and this is a fundamental principle of journalism’. If newspapers saw themselves as ‘solely the Party’s propaganda tools … they would inevitably be disliked by readers’. He also complained that newspapers’ coverage at that time showed that ‘our understanding of social life is all about work without life. […] People’s desire for a good life is the driving force for social progress’ (Wang 2004, pp. 4, 5, 9). Emphasizing the importance of the ‘human interest’ value of news stories, which had been demoralized since 1949, Wang even argued that it was wrong to simplistically reject the famous saying ‘When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news’, for what it really meant, as he saw it, was that newspapers must provide readers with fresh or curious stories (Wang 2004, p. 38). Accordingly, he called for taking a more dialectic approach to the so-called yellow journalism by looking at the broader social, economic, and psychological reasons behind this journalistic phenomenon (Wang 2004, pp. 53–59). Referring to the ‘My husband, my honeymoon’ story as mentioned earlier in a 1957 talk, Wang said that it was odd that nowadays a normal story like this had attracted waves of criticisms. ‘To be honest’, he mocked, ‘when I opened the Liberation Daily that day, I was attracted by this story straightaway and finished my reading of it at one sitting and haven’t been poisoned to death yet’ (Wang 2004, p. 115). Wang went dangerously further to attribute all this to the CCP’s dogmatic ideological worship of Lenin’s (1901) well-known statement that ‘[a] newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer’. He complained that many in the press circles were just sick of the current way of running a newspaper as ‘the collective noticeboard of various government departments’. Drawing people’s attention to the ‘commodity nature’ of newspapers, Wang argued that the journalistic bottom line for a newspaper was to fill their pages with newsworthy stories to make readers feel it was worthwhile to pay five cents RMB (standard price for a copy of four-page daily newspaper at the time) for a copy (Wang 2004, pp. 100–104, 114).

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Being a passionate and outspoken liberal-minded Communist Party member and journalism professor, Wang’s speeches and talks during 1956–1957 showed his deep sympathy for and appreciation of pre-1949 professional journalism. Wang’s view on journalism was simple: historically, modern journalism was a product of capitalism and thus meeting audiences’ needs and remaining popular in the marketplace were common and basic requirements for journalism in any society. In other words, for Wang, journalism must be first and foremost popular (highly readable). This view was hardly new, but rather common journalistic knowledge. However, it made significant sense in the political-journalistic context in China in the 1950s. For Wang, his open questioning and mocking of the CCP’s propagandistic Party press doctrine and call for respecting basic journalistic rules was just what a journalism academic should do, for journalism under Mao had gone well beyond common sense. Wang was, however, very mindful of the potential risks of being frank and outspoken, and often forced himself to try to take an as moderate as possible tone in his speeches and talks during this period. Nevertheless, as it turned out only a few months later, he had already said too much too bluntly, which would guarantee to cause him enough trouble. Wang was labeled a ‘bourgeois’ and ‘anti-Party’ scholar in late 1957, suffered bitter public attacks, and was humiliated for months during an officially orchestrated campaign against him, before being purged as a ‘rightist’ in early 1958. He lost his Chinese Communist Party membership, professorship, and his post as the dean of his school at Fudan. It was not until 1979, more than 20 years after the purge and three years after Mao’s death, that he rehabilitated himself (Wang 2004, p. 3).

2.3  The Ideological Root of Mao’s Problem with (Popular) Journalism What Wang’s ‘unpopular’ view on a more popular (reader-oriented) socialist journalism really challenged was a Maoist Party press doctrine that he deeply detested. Historically, this doctrine can be traced back to the Yan’an Rectification Campaign during 1942–1944 that aimed to further strengthen Mao’s authority as the CCP’s undisputed leader and Marxist theorist against his political rivals within the Party, and more broadly, Yan’an’s liberal intellectuals. As an integral part of this move, Mao mobilized a comprehensive press reform campaign, aiming to

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transform the Party’s media network into one that would be more centrally controlled and propaganda-oriented. The ideological consequence of the campaign was the rise of a Maoist Party press doctrine as a Sinicized Leninist interpretation of a proletarian press (Fudan University 1985; Stranahan 1990; Wang 1992a, 1992b). Being heavily influenced by Lenin’s famous statement about newspapers being the proletariat’s collective propagandist, agitator, and organizer, which was questioned by Wang in 1957 as mentioned earlier, Mao and his followers advanced a proletarian press consisting of several what they called ‘key characters’. They included the ‘class character’ (all media had their class affiliation and proletarian press served the interest of the working class, just like bourgeoise press served the interest of the rich), ‘Party character’ (all media were essentially controlled by certain political parties and proletarian media must accept the Communist Party’s absolute leadership), ‘propaganda character’ (all media served as propaganda tools of certain classes and political parties that represented them and proletarian press must serve as the propaganda tools of the Communist Party), ‘truthfulness character’ (though providing the audiences with truthful news and information was a common journalistic practice, only proletarian press could truly and fully achieve this goal due to the ‘correct’ leadership of the Communist Party as the most advanced political party), ‘mass-line character’ (proletarian press should always keep in close touch with the masses and unite them around the Communist Party), ‘fighting character’ (proletarian press must remain vigorous and vibrant for its revolutionary cause), ‘organizing character’ (proletarian press’s organizational role in guiding and mobilizing the masses to follow the Communist Party’s policies), and ‘educational character’ (proletarian press’s role in politically, ideologically, and morally educating the masses and remolding their thoughts and worldview) (e.g., see Liberation Daily editorial 1942a, 1942b; Liu 1948; Lu 1943; Mao 1942a, 1942b, 1948). Though seemingly diverse and sophisticated, what really mattered among these ‘characters’ were the ‘Party character’, ‘propaganda character’, and ‘class character’. For at the core of this Leninist-Maoist press ideology was a propaganda-oriented Party press doctrine based on a crude and pragmatic Marxist class analysis. And the remaining characters were largely supplementary or spilling-over ones that were essentially defined by, and based on, these three key characters. In other words, the doctrine was fundamentally about the CCP’s absolute control and instrumental, particularly propagandistic, use of the media in the name of the working

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class. As one Liberation Daily (1942b) editorial titled ‘The Party and Party Newspapers’ clearly put it, ‘[n]ewspapers are mouthpieces of the Party’ and ‘the most powerful tools [for the Party] to influence the thoughts of the masses’ and, therefore, the Party’s newspaper workers ‘must act by following the Party’s will and their every word and action and every character and sentence must consider the Party’s interest’. They also ‘must respect the Party’s leading bodies and all work units and behave like a “public servant” with a polite and hardworking attitude’. It was Party newspapers’ responsibility to ‘be loyal to not only the Party’s general line and direction, but also relevant Party headquarters’ will and thinking’. In the meantime, the Party must also take a proactive approach to ‘mobilize the whole Party to be involved in the running of newspapers’. The Maoist Party press doctrine arose in a particular historical context in the early 1940s when the CCP as a revolutionary political party fought for its very survival. Politically, there was an urgent objective need for more conscious and systematic instrumental use of a more centrally controlled, disciplined, and efficient press to strongly support the Party’s struggle with both the ruling Kuomintang and the Japanese (Fudan University 1985; Wang 1992a, 1992b). Moreover, the rise of the doctrine was also an integral part of the creation of Mao’s authoritarian political philosophy that was later called Mao Zedong thought (by the CCP) or Maoism (in the West). The Yan’an period from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s was regarded as the beginning of ‘the real history of Chinese Communism’ because of the Mao-led CCP’s growing independence from Moscow (Leonhard 1974, p.  216). It was also ‘Mao’s most productive period as a Marxist theoretician as well as a revolutionary strategist’ (Meisner 1977, p. 45), as Mao and his close associates began to pragmatically Sinify orthodox Marxism-Leninism to serve the CCP’s revolutionary goals and Mao’s own political power. This resulted in the formation of Maoism by the end of the 1930s, its systematization and consolidation during the 1942–1944 Yan’an Rectification Movement, and its final legal status as the CCP’s official political ideology in 1945 when ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was officially incorporated into the Party’s new constitution (Compton 1952; Meisner 1977; Wylie 1980). Mao’s ‘profoundly voluntarist belief’ (Meisner 1977, p. 41) as a distinctive characteristic of Maoism also played a major role in shaping the profoundly propaganda-oriented Maoist Party press doctrine. According to Schram, ‘voluntarism … is by no means absent from Marx himself. But there is no doubt that it is carried much further in Lenin, and further still

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in Mao Tse-tung, and in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party’ (Schram 1969, p. 135). This ‘extreme voluntarism’ made Mao an ardent believer in media’s power as propaganda tools. In Mao’s (1948, pp. 242, 243) own words, ‘[t]he role and power of newspapers consists in their ability to bring the Party programme, the Party line, the Party’s general and specific policies, its tasks and methods of work before the masses in the quickest and most extensive way’, and ‘[o]nce the masses know the truth and have a common aim … everything becomes easy’. This explained why Mao called for everyone in the Chinese revolutionary ranks to be a propagandist. Mao declared that ‘[n]ot only teachers are propagandists. Newspaper correspondents are propagandists, writers are also propagandists. All our work cadres are propagandists’ (Mao 1942b, p. 44). In other words, what Mao needed was propaganda instead of journalism. In Mao’s communist authoritarian dictionary, there was no such thing as journalism as an independent profession; instead, journalism, like all other cultural forms, must submit to the CCP’s ultimate, grand communication mission of propaganda. And this grand mission must not be directedly challenged by serious, watchdog journalism, nor be distracted and potentially eroded by popular journalism or anything relating to ‘fun’ and ‘love’. Indeed, propaganda was no laughing matter, and more than often essentially boring. As Mao characteristically warned in his influential 1942 ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature’ that would dominate the CCP’s cultural policy for decades to come, in China’s Communist movement there was no room for ‘love’, ‘freedom of speech’, ‘art-for-art’, ‘individualism’, ‘sectarianism’, ‘human nature’, and other ‘bourgeois’, ‘petty-­ bourgeois’, or ‘anti-Communist’ theories or viewpoints. This was because ‘all culture, all art and literature belong to definite classes and follow definite political lines’ (Mao 1942c, pp. 104, 109, 115). Echoing Mao, Lu Dingyi, a leading Maoist media ideologue, openly expressed his deep distrust of Yan’an’s liberal journalists who were seen as coming from the ‘old society’ and being influenced by ‘dishonest’ and ‘unscientific’ ‘old theories of journalism’ which ‘are not only without merit, they are harmful’ (Lu 1943, p. 165). Lu argued that there was no such thing as common interest in journalism, for even ‘interest has a class nature … news of interest to workers … may be of no interest to the exploiting classes’ (Lu 1943, p. 166). Liu Shaoqi, then the second-ranking CCP leader, also called for journalists working with the Party to transform themselves into ‘Communist journalists’ and write from a Marxist perspective by considering the overall interest of the CCP (Liu 1948, p.  403). Similar

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intimidating arguments were also powerfully expressed in other relevant articles and editorials published in the Liberation Daily in the 1940s. These texts were later hailed by China’s journalism historians as ‘important literature’ on Party journalism with great ‘theoretical value’ (Fudan University 1985, pp. 349, 350). What went hand in hand with the rise of Maoist Party press doctrine was Mao’s brutal repression of liberal writers and journalists in Yan’an. Mao knew clearly that consisting primarily of young urban liberal intellectuals coming to Yan’an to join forces with the CCP not for its authoritarian ideology but its war against Japanese invasion, they must be reeducated and remolded. Many of Yan’an’s liberal-minded intellectuals and journalists found themselves victims of intense criticism in a manner similar to that experienced later during the Cultural Revolution (Karnow 1972, p. 48; Stranahan 1990, pp. 8, 35–39, 49–53). After the CCP took power in 1949, this Yan’an Maoist Party press doctrine became the official press ideology of the newly established PRC. In the meantime, the Soviet-style socialist media economics based on state ownership and subsidy and bureaucratic management style as typically exemplified by the Pravda and Tass were also incorporated into the doctrine (Ding 2005, pp. 405–407). This led to numerous complaints and criticisms in the press circles and the media academy, particularly among those scholars and journalists like Wang Zhong who were familiar with commercial journalism before 1949. Remaining largely private initially, such complaints and criticisms eventually surfaced during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.

2.4  The Death of Popular Citizenship Under Radical Maoism Being humiliated and provoked by unexpected criticisms of his regime from liberal-minded intellectuals, a defiant and angary Mao swiftly turned the Hundred Flowers Campaign into a brutal Anti-Rightist Campaign against the regime’s critics in late 1957. As widely noted by scholars of Chinese politics, the campaign was an important turning point of Mao China as Mao’s political ideology became increasingly radical and utopian. This development was further reflected and exemplified soon during the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–1960) which saw millions of deaths due to man-made famine caused by disastrous government policy, and

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later during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) that sent China into a decade-long socio-political, economic, and cultural turmoil. This radical Maoism had several key characteristics and each of them gave popular journalism no chance to survive or revive under Mao. The first of these characteristics was its tendency toward anti-urbanism. This was typically reflected in Mao’s distrust of, and quite often hostility toward, city-centered capitalist-bourgeois, bureaucrat-administrators, professional-intellectuals, and the formal higher education system (Meisner 1982). Mao believed that urbanization threatened to further widen the gap between the generally ‘nonrevolutionary’ urban areas and the economically backward but more revolutionary countryside. Whereas no traditional Marxists had ever recognized that the peasantry were capable of independent revolutionary action, Mao, himself the son of a peasant family, believed that the peasant masses who made up most of the Chinese population could also become an advanced class in both revolutionary and post-revolutionary eras (Meisner 1982; Schram 1969). The second characteristic (this comes from the above) was its anti-­ intellectualism tendency. For Mao, the intellectuals, including ‘journalists’ as identified by Mao (1945, p. 127, 1948, p. 23), were ‘the carriers of class ideologies, and especially bourgeois class ideology, and thus were politically and ideologically suspect’ (Meisner 1977, p.  171). As early as the Yan’an era, Mao repeatedly warned the intellectuals that unless they identified themselves with the masses of the workers and especially peasants rather than the bourgeois, ‘they will accomplish nothing’ (Mao 1939, p. 12). In other words, they must overcome ‘their many ideological and artistic shortcomings’ and ‘make art and literature a component part of the whole revolutionary machine’ (Mao 1948, pp.  107, 76). In Mao’s own words: … intellectuals of petty-bourgeois origin always stubbornly try to express themselves, spread their own opinions, and demand that the Party and the world should be remolded in their image. In these circumstances it is our duty to say to them bluntly: “Comrades! Your stuff won’t do!” The ­proletariat cannot compromise with you; to yield to you is to yield to the big bourgeois and the big landlord class and to risk the destruction of our Party and our country. (Mao 1948, p. 119)

Later, during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao went further to attack his intellectual enemies in a horrifically sensational manner:

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The intellectuals in the past entrusted themselves to feudalism, capitalism and the individual system of production. The intellectuals serve the class from which they come. The classes from which they come have now been destroyed and they are hung up in mid-air with their feet touching not the solid ground. Now they crawl on our body. The workers and peasants, through the Communist Party, allow them to work and to eat. We have to use a dozen of years to wash their brain. (Mao 1957b, p. 160)

Calling the intellectuals ‘bad elements’, Mao pessimistically declared that ‘[t]here will always be contradictions between the professors and students on the one hand and us, and quarrels too’ (Mao 1957a, pp. 28, 26). In his October 1957 speech, Mao even extended his hostility against the intellectuals to their families: ‘The bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectuals, totaling 30 million including their dependents, are a big problem …. The targets of socialist revolution are the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois intellectuals and upper petite bourgeois’ (Mao 1957c, p. 346). Later, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Mao further extended his resentment against the intellectuals to knowledge itself. In a 1964 talk, for example, Mao declared that ‘[w]hen the intellectuals had power, things were in a bad state, the country was in disorder. … [and] read too many books is harmful’ (Mao 1964, p. 204). Such an argument paved the way for the ultra-left slogan during the Cultural Revolution as criticized by Deng Xiaoping (1995, p. 104) later: ‘the more a person knew, the more reactionary he would become’. The third characteristic was its anti-capitalism tendency, as private ownership and market competition and associated entrepreneurship, consumerism, and individualism were all seen as threats to a utopian socialism. While orthodox Marxism was premised on the belief that highly developed capitalism was the essential precondition for socialism, the victory of Russia’s October Revolution in 1917 made Lenin and the Comintern believe that even a backward agrarian country like Russia could also be transformed by communism. Greatly encouraged by Soviet Russia’s ‘success’, Mao further believed that even a much more economically backward agrarian country like China could achieve a similar success (Meisner 1982; Yang 1997). For three decades under Mao’s rule from 1949 to 1976, the People’s Republic not only isolated itself from the advanced capitalist Western world, but also adopted tough policies to comprehensively limit capitalist development and societal and personal freedoms.

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The fourth and final characteristic was its extreme emphasis on class struggle. Again, as early as the Yan’an era, Mao argued that ‘[i]n class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class’ (Mao 1937, p. 296). As Schurmann (1968) noted, while class struggle remained the centerpiece of Marxist, especially Leninist, revolutionary theory, Mao went further to focus on class struggle as the CCP’s prime work not only in the revolutionary period, but also in the post-revolutionary era. For Mao, ‘[r]evolution … is not merely a matter of taking power; it also means using power to transform society’ (Schram 1969, p.  69). Furthermore, Mao and radical Maoists ‘have consistently regarded all conflict, whether internal or external to China, as of class nature’. They also maintained that ‘the arena of class struggle cannot take place abstractly within the class as a whole, but must be fought out within each individual human being’ (Schurmann 1968, pp. 27, 32). The sweeping ideologicalization and politicization of social life in Mao China, particularly in Mao’s last 20 years of rule, inevitably led to the ruin of the basic political-economy and professional-cultural foundations for popular journalism (and indeed, professional journalism at large), which was historically a product of considerable capitalist development and enlightenment (industrialization, urbanization, commercialism, consumerism, individualism, liberty, democracy, intellectualism, and citizenship). This also happened to all other forms of popular culture. While nearly everything relating to pre-1949 modern popular culture—in the form of pop and jazz music, ballroom dance, Shanghai cinema, and love-and-sex related literature—became taboo, nearly all other forms of mass communication, including traditional popular cultural forms like folk music, dance, and opera, were largely instrumentally used for political propaganda and mobilization (Chang 1989; Chu 1978; Latham 2009; Li 2018). The emerging popular citizenship since late Qing had by now been replaced by state-engineered alienation of men and women as communist objects in Mao’s propaganda state.

Note 1. Cited from University of British Columbia Press’s introduction of the book, retrieved from https://www.ubcpress.ca/merry-­laughter-­and-­angry-­curses

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References Chang, W.H. (1989) Mass Media in China: The History and the Future, Ames: Iowa State University Press. Chen, S.Q. (1983) ‘Wang Zhong’s Journalistic Viewpoints in the 1950s and Their Development’, Sichuan University Journal (special issue) 18: 13–24. Chu, G.C. 1978) Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns, the East-West Center by the University Press of Hawaii. Compton, B. (1952) Mao’s China: Party Reform Documents, 1942–44, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Deng, X.P. (1995) Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (Vol. II: 1975–1982), Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Ding, G.N. (ed) (2005) China’s Journalism History, Beijing: Higher Education Press. Ding, F.Z. and Zhou, S.L. (1999) ‘50 Years of China’s Socialist Evening Newspapers,’ News Front 10. Dong, S.D. (2022) ‘A Mysterious Murder Case: The Shen Bao and the Rehabilitation of the Yang Nai Wu and Xiao Bai Cai case’, Beijing Daily, retrieved from: https://news.bjd.com.cn/2022/03/22/10058558.shtml. Fan, B.Q. (2020) A History of Modern Chinese Popular Literature, London: Cambridge University Press (originally published by Peking University Press in 2006). Fang, H.Q. (1981) A History of Modern Chinese Press, Taiyuang: Shanxi People’s Press. Fang, H.Q., Ding, G.L., and Huang, H. (2005) Chinese Journalism Communication History, Beijing: China Renmin University Press. Fudan University (ed) (1985) A Concise Course in China’s Journalism History, Fuzhou: Fujian People’s Publishing. Gu, C.L and Yu, J.Q. (1987) China Journalism History, Beijing: Central Broadcasting University Press. He, Q.L. (2010) ‘Scandal and the New Woman: Identities and Media Culture in 1920s China’, Studies on Asia 4(1): 1–28. He, Q.L. (2018) Newspapers and the Journalistic Public in Republican China: 1917 as a Significant Year of Journalism, London and New York: Routledge. Jiang, M. (2012, June 6) ‘China’s Very First Diplomatic Tea Party: Guo Songtao Hosted it together with His Concubine’, Nanfang Weekend, retrieved from: http://www.71.cn/2012/0606/675719_2.shtml. Karnow, S. (1972) Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution, New  York: The Viking Press. Latham, K. (2009), Pop Culture China!, Santa Barbara, Denver, and oxford: ABC-CLIO Inc.

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Lenin, V. (1901) ‘Where to Begin?’, in Lenin Collected Works (Vol 5), Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House: 13–24. Leonhard, W. (1974) Three Faces of Marxism: The Political Concepts of Soviet Ideology, Maoism, and Humanist Marxism, translated by Ewald Osers, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Li, J.N. (2017, February 17) ‘Fang Ruijuan Died: The Saga of a ‘Yellow Journalism’ Case 60 Years Ago’, Shanghai Observer, retrieved from: https://www.jfdaily. com/news/detail?id=45027. Li, M. (2018) A History of Jazz in China: from Yellow Music to a Jazz Revival in Beijing (unpublished Master’s thesis, Kent State University]. Ohio LINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, retrieved from: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1532518802970811. Li, N. (2004) ‘Tabloids and Culturati in Late Qing and Republic of China’, Shanghai Archive Network, retrieved from: http://www.archives.sh.cn/shjy/ scbq/201203/t20120313_6033.html. Li, N. (2006) Tabloids in Shanghai in Late Qing and Republic of China, Beijing: Renmin Literature Publishing. Li, S.X and Liu, M.X. (2022) ‘Constructing the Legitimacy: Modern Shanghai Tabloids and Society’, Global Press Circles 6. Liberation Daily editorial (1942a, April 1) ‘To Readers’, Liberation Daily. Liberation Daily editorial (1942b, September 22) ‘The Party and Party Organs’, Liberation Daily. Liu, S.Q. (1948) ‘A Talk to the North China Press Corps’, in S.Q. Liu (1981) Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi (Vol. I), Beijing: Foreign Languages Press: 393–404. Lu, D.Y. (1943) ‘Our Basic Viewpoints on Journalism’, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, XVIII (3/4): 164–173. Ma, G.R. (ed) (1996) Shanghai Journalism History (1850–1949), Shanghai: Fudan University Press. MacKinnon, S.R. (1997) ‘Toward a History of the Chinese Press in the Republican Period’, Modern China 23(1): 3–32. Mao, Z.D. (1937) ‘On Practice’, in Z.D. Mao (1961) Selected Works of Mao Tse-­ tung (Vol. I). Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 295–309. Mao, Z.D. (1939) ‘The May 4 Movement’, Z.D. Mao (1960) Mao Tse-tung on Art and Literature, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press: 10–13. Mao, Z.D. (1942a), ‘Reform in Learning, the Party, and Literature’, in B. Compton (ed) (1952) Mao’s China: Party Reform Documents, 1942–44, Seattle: University of Washington Press: 9–32. Mao, Z.D. (1942b), ‘In Opposition to Party Formalism’, in B.  Compton (ed) (1952) Mao’s China: Party Reform Documents, 1942–44, Seattle: University of Washington Press: 33–53.

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Mao, Z.D. (1942c) ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature’, in Z.D. Mao (1960) Mao Tse-tung on Art and Literature, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press: 75–122. Mao, Z.D. (1945) ‘Questions of Culture, Education and the Intellectuals’, in Z.D.  Mao (1960) Mao Tse-tung on Art and Literature, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press: 127–129. Mao, Z.D. (1948) ‘A Talk to the Editorial Staff of the Shansi-Suiyuan Daily’, in Z.D.  Mao (1961) Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Vol. IV), Peking: Foreign Languages Press: 241–245. Mao, Z.D. (1957a) ‘Sporadic Comments Made at Conference of Provincial and Municipal Party Committee Secretaries’, in Union Research Institute (ed), Unselected Works of Mao Tse-tung 1957, Hong Kong: Union Press Limited: 25–34. Mao, Z.D. (1957b) ‘Talk at the Hangchou Conference of the Shanghai Bureau’, in Union Research Institute (ed), Unselected Works of Mao Tse-tung 1957, Hong Kong: Union Press Limited: 159–169. Mao, Z.D. (1957c) ‘Talk at the 3rd Plenary Session of the CCP 8th Congress’, in Union Research Institute (ed), Unselected Works of Mao Tse-tung 1957, Hong Kong: Union Press Limited: 343–348. Mao, Z.D. (1964) ‘Remarks at the Spring Festival’, in S.R. Schram (ed) (1969) The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, New York: Praeger: 197–211. Meisner, M. (1977) Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic, New York: The Free Press. Meisner, M. (1982) Marxism Maoism and Utopianism, The University of Wisconsin Press. Qin, S.D. (1993) Modern Shanghai Press History, Shanghai: Fudan University Press. Schram, S.R. (1969) The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (enlarged and revised edition), New York: Praeger. Schurmann, F. (1968) Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Berkeley: University of California Press. Stranahan, P. (1990) Molding the Medium: The Chinese Communist Party and the Liberation Daily, New York, London, and England: Sharpe. Wagner, R.G. (1999) ‘The Shenbao in Crisis: The International Environment and the Conflict between Guo Songtao and the Shenbao’, Late Imperial China 20(1): 107–138. Wang, J. (1992a) ‘Journalism Practice and Theory of Lu Dingyi’, Journalism Research Materials 56: 72–112. Wang, J. (1992b) ‘The First Media Reform in the History of Party Organs’, Journalism Research Materials 57: 132–154. Wang, J. (2012) Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897–1911, UBC Press. Wang, Z. (2004) Collected Works of Wang Zhong, Shanghai: Fudan University Press.

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Weston, T.B. (2006) ‘Minding the Newspaper Business: The Theory and Practice of Journalism in 1920s China’, Twenty-Century China 31(2): 4–31. Wu, J. (2018) ‘The Dilemma of Remoulding: The Short-lived Prosperity and Demise of Shanghai’s Last Tabloid Title (1949–1952)’, Journalism Bimonthly 5: 28–35. Wu, X.L. (2011) ‘Internal Party Review Reports on Xiaobao in Shanghai around 1949’, Historical Materials of New Literature 2: 191–198. Wylie, R. (1980) The Emergence of Maoism: Mao Tse-tung, Ch’en Po-ta, and the Search for Chinese Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Xi, P. (2017) Shanghai: Untold Stories, Shanghai: Shanghai Social Sciences Academy Press. Xi, W.J. (1995) ‘New Thinking of New Evening Newspapers’, Press Circles (5): 31–33. Xu, P.D. (2006) An Academic History of Chinese journalism, Chongqing: Chongqing Press. Yang, K.S. (1997) ‘Why Mao Gave up the Theory of “New Democracy”’, Xinhua Digest 10: 72–83. Zhang, J. (2021), ‘Creating Entertaining Lawsuits: Defamation and Tabloid Publicity in 1920s Shanghai’, Twentieth-Century China 46(1): 41–61. Zhang, Y. and Lovrich, N. (2016) ‘Portrait of Justice: The Spirit of Chinese Law as Depicted in Historical and Contemporary Drama’, Global Media and China 1(4): 372–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436416678220 Zhao, Y.Z. and Sun, P. (2018) A History of Journalism and Communication in China, London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Popular Journalism in China’s Early Reform Era

3.1   The Debate on News and Propaganda For popular journalism to flourish and grow in the early years of the post-­ Mao era, the very first and a fundamental question to ask was how the term ‘news’, and indeed more broadly, ‘journalism’ at large, might be redefined by conceptually separating it from ‘propaganda’. As previously discussed, as early as the Yan’an era in the 1940s, the commonly accepted ‘old’ definition of news as truthful and newsworthy reports based on facts was abandoned by Chinese communists. Instead, the term was radically redefined from a ‘Marxist’ perspective as reports that must comply with the so-called Party principle of journalism and promote and serve Party policies. This ‘new’ definition continued to serve as the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official interpretation of the term to rule the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) journalism in the Mao era, which had inevitably led to the propagandization of Mao China’s journalism. However, with Mao’s death in 1976 and the introduction of the reform and opening policy in 1978, reformist media scholars and journalists lost no time in calling for reversing this Maoist definition of news back to the common professional understanding of it. Unsurprisingly, such a move immediately met with strong opposition from the conservative faction of China’s political-journalistic elite. This was reflected in a series of fierce debates between the reformist and conservative camps regarding the relationship between news and propaganda. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Huang, Popular Journalism in Contemporary China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40530-3_3

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One key figure who fought on the forefront of the debate was Wang Zhong, then journalism professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, as noted in the previous chapter. After being purged as an anti-Party ‘rightist’ scholar for 20 years, Wang returned to the teaching and research front at Fudan in 1979 and published several influential articles in the early 1980s in which he reinforced and further developed the journalistic thoughts he advanced in the 1950s. In particular, he once again expressed his profound disagreement with the Maoist equivalating of news to propaganda. For Wang, such a view was not only conceptually wrong but more importantly would inevitably cause disastrous consequences for journalistic practice as China’s journalism exactly experienced and suffered during the Mao era. He thus saw that the debate was one that China’s journalism could not afford to lose. Wang argued that news was reports based on newsworthy facts that aimed to inform the public, while propaganda was views with a preset agenda that aimed to persuade, influence, and even brainwash the masses. While admitting that certain news reports might sometimes contain propagandistic elements, Wang fiercely argued that this should not be used as an excuse for one to conceptually mix up the two terms. And in the meantime, experienced/educated readers would have little problem to distinguish news from propaganda in a certain news story. Wang did not abstractly reject propaganda in journalism altogether, but believed that there was ‘good’ and ‘bad’ propaganda and ‘good’ propagandistic reports were those that would at least promote their ideas based on certain facts and be highly readable (otherwise they would be useless). He also greatly appreciated the established Western definition of ‘news values’ (prominence, proximity, timeliness, consequence, and human interest) and emphasized its usefulness for Chinese media and journalists in their daily news selection practice (Wang 2004, pp. 219–324). Emphasizing the importance of meeting readers’ needs and appreciating ‘human interest’ in journalistic practice, Wang argued that ‘“news values” were advanced to help assess which facts [news events] would be more attractive to readers; as to the question of which facts might serve someone’s [political] interest, that is a totally different matter’. Mocking some of his conservative ‘comrades’ who were always nervously worried about the political ‘meaning’ of a news story while caring little about readers’ needs and tastes, Wang wrote that ‘some of our comrades never stop nagging class politics and policies as if what all they can do is to eat dumplings and would feel comfortable only when every mouthful has politics in

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it’ (Wang 2004, p. 282). Shaped by Wang’s journalistic viewpoints, a 1986 journalism theory textbook published by a group of his colleagues at Fudan, for the first time in the CCP’s and the PRC’s journalism history, declared that media should not just be used for propaganda, for they also had many other important social functions, such as providing the public with ‘news and other information’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘entertainments’, expressing public opinions, criticizing wrongdoings of the government and officials, and making profits (Fudan University 1985, pp. 138–143, 224–39). Conservative scholars and journalists, on the other hand, continued to insist on the ‘scientificness’ of the CCP’s propagandistic press tradition, and warned that Party journalism’s powerful propaganda function was critical for promoting the CCP’s new reform and opening policy and helping to make it a success. Typically, Gan Xifen, then journalism professor at Beijing’s China Renmin University, directly challenged Wang’s viewpoints and passionately defended the Maoist Party press doctrine. According to Gan himself, he became a journalism academic at Beijing University after working for several Party media for a decade in the early 1950s. As the university’s journalism program was originally transferred from Yenching University, a popular American church university established in Peking (Beijing) in 1919 and operational until 1952, the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department decided to send some cadres from the Party’s news media to the program to end its American tradition of journalism education. Gan was one of those cadres placed into the program, and his primary task was to teach Marxist journalism theory (Gan 2005, pp. 4–5). Gan emerged as a controversial conservative voice during Mao’s Anti-­ Rightist Campaign against liberal-minded intellectuals in 1957, particularly for his vocal attacks on Wang Zhong (e.g., see Gan, 1957a, 1957b). However, it was not until the early 1980s that Gan began to rise as an influential Marxist journalism scholar marked by the publication of his extremely conservative and controversial 1982 text titled Theoretical Foundation of Journalism, which, together with some of his other later publications, won him fame as the founder and authority of China’s Marxist journalism studies (e.g., see Baidupedia 2016; Liu 2006; Xinhua 2016). The key points made by Gan as discussed in the text and summarized by himself later (Gan 2007, pp.  188–213) were fourfold. First was his emphasis on the ‘class character’ of journalism based on a rather simplistic understanding of Marxist class analysis. Arguing that ‘modern

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journalism…is ultimately only an instrument used by a certain class to influence public opinions’ (Gan 1982, p. 4), Gan saw that every item covered by every media outlet was a result of political selection based on class interest and thus became ultimately a piece of propaganda (Gan 1982, p. 40). Gan argued further that as all news media content as well as journalism studies in any society essentially served the interest of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, there was no such thing as press freedom, editorial independence, journalistic objectivity, and readers’ common interest above class interest (Gan 1982, pp.  32–47, 68–69, 240–241). While Gan admitted that capitalist and socialist journalism did share certain common principles such as providing the masses with newsworthy and truthful information in a timely manner, he argued that these principles were simply means used by news media to ultimately serve the interests of the respective classes they represented (Gan 1982, pp. 18–19, 79–83). Second, there was his view on the ‘truthful character’ of journalism. Gan claimed that though providing the public with truthful information was a common journalistic requirement for any news media in any society, only news media in a socialist country like China could achieve this goal effectively due to the Communist Party’s ‘correct’ leadership in journalism. In contrast, ‘many bourgeois newspapers and reactionary newspapers often create false news’. Particularly, ‘when class struggles become acute, or international diplomatic struggles were intense’, ‘lying becomes routine’ for many newspapers in the West (Gan 1982, pp. 114, 115). Third, there was his discussion of the so-called ‘people character’ of journalism. Gan argued that though both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’ journalism paid close attention to getting support from the masses, only proletarian journalism under the leadership of a Marxist political party could, ‘as the social practice of humankind in the past 100 years or so has demonstrated’, best represent the interest of the people (Gan 1982, p. 141). Finally, there was Gan’s stress on the ‘Party character’ of journalism. Gan particularly emphasized that for ‘proletarian’ journalism like China’s, this point was ‘the most crucial’ one among the four (Gan 1982, p. 169). This was because only the Communist Party that ‘has no other interest except serving the people’ was able to maintain the proletarian nature of journalism and ensure its truthfulness and correctness against various ‘wrong’ journalistic viewpoints (Gan 1982, pp.  141–143). While he claimed that the ‘Party character’ and the ‘people character’ were unitary, he argued that the former should certainly be put above the latter—not

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vice versa—because the essence of the ‘Party character’ was to serve the interests of the people (Gan 1982, p. 143). He elaborated this point further later by arguing that ‘the Party comes from the people, but the Party, being equipped with Marxism-Leninism, stands higher and sees farther than the masses and thus has the full credential to be their leader’. For this reason, ‘there can be only one conclusion: the Party comes from the people, but the Party principle is above the people principle’ and ‘the masses should follow the leadership of the Party and carefully read Party newspapers’ (Gan 2007, pp. 207, 208). There was hardly anything new in Gan’s points even from a media propaganda perspective, as they were little more than a replication of what Mao and Maoist media ideologues argued during the Yan’an era in the 1940s, as discussed in Chap. 2. However, Gan’s reemphasis on them as a Marxist journalism professor was important and useful for conservatives in the Party and the media. For them, the text—despite its countless basic logical loopholes and excessive politically and ideologically biased statements—might at least add some ‘academic’ flavor to the Maoist Party press doctrine, which was facing mounting criticism from reformist critics like Wang. Like Gan, other conservative critics also argued that news and propaganda should not be conceptually separated, nor were they separable. One critic, for example, argued that ‘all news is propagandistic though not all propaganda is necessarily newsworthy’ (Lu 1982, p. 43). A leading journalist of the official Xinhua News Agency also argued that the aim of media reforms was not to refute China’s propagandistic journalism tradition but to improve the news media’s propaganda skills (Li 1984). Gan later even warned that ‘[i]t seems to me that the argument that news and propaganda should be separated has been supported by many people in recent years. The background of such a phenomenon deserves to be carefully examined’ (Gan 2007, p. 485). The conservatives also attempted to defend their argument by claiming that Western journalism was essentially propagandistic too. However, they intended to treat Western journalism as a homogeneous and monolithic body that ultimately served the interests of capitalists against those of the proletariat while completely ignoring the legally protected press freedom that Western media enjoyed, their watchdog role, and a set of established professional principles and protocols that they shared and appreciated. In the meantime, they often cheerfully glorified China’s allegedly superior socialist press system but remained deadly silent about the rigid state control and repression of the media and journalists. As a result, even though

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their radical critique of Western journalism was not entirely without critical merits, they ended up drawing highly abstract and profoundly ideologically biased, black-and-white conclusions: all media were propagandistic, and the only difference was ‘good’ proletarian media propaganda against ‘evil’ Western/bourgeois media propaganda. This ultimately made their entire argument fall apart, and also inevitably made the theoretically bankrupt Maoist Party press doctrine look even more ridiculous in the era of reform. The renewed debate and clashes between conservative and reformist media scholars and journalists in the early and mid-1980s once again highlighted the essential difference between two major journalistic approaches among China’s political-journalistic elites since the 1950s. For the conservative camp represented by Gan, there was nothing inherently wrong with the propaganda-oriented Maoist Party press doctrine that emphasized rigid Party control and state ownership of media. They instead argued that what really went wrong was radical Maoists’ manipulation of this sound press theory during the period of Cultural Revolution. And thus, the ultimate goal of media reforms in the post-Mao era was to simply bring this good theory back to its glorious original version as practiced in the ‘good’ old days before the Cultural Revolution (which was completely untrue, as discussed in the previous chapter). As Gan declared, ‘our job now is to restore the good [journalistic] tradition in the past [the pre-Cultural Revolution era], stick to the Party principle, avoid factionalism, and strictly follow the Party’s disciplines’ (Gan 1982, p. 195). In contrast, the reformist school that Wang represented had long lost their confidence in the Maoist Party press doctrine and emphasized the necessity of bringing professional-commercial journalistic principles back to China’s socialist journalism and allowing the media and journalists to do their job without direct and rude political interference from individual Party committees or Party secretaries. While conservatives like Gan called for following propagandistic ‘special laws of proletarian journalism’ and ‘draw[ing] a clear line’ between ‘our’ and ‘their’ (liberal/Western/commercial) journalism (Gan 1982, p. 240), reformists like Wang called for China’s journalism to learn more from universally applied common journalistic laws based on Western and China’s own (before 1949) practice of commercial-professional journalism (though they stopped short of openly calling for completely abandoning the Maoist Party press doctrine).1 By the mid- and late 1980s, with Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic market-­ oriented economic reforms and similar (though relatively smaller and

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slower) reforms in journalism taking shape and gaining ground, as well as the mounting pressure from China’s  liberal intellectuals who called for Western-style democracy and press freedom, the Maoist Party press doctrine became increasingly unpopular and  irrelevant to China’s changing social and journalistic reality. Consequently, even Gan as arguably the most conservative scholar at the time started to make some major adjustments to his previous views. Instead of insisting that China’s ‘proletarian’ journalism would necessarily be more truthful than its ‘bourgeois’ counterpart in the West, Gan started to worry about the crisis of credibility of China’s journalism due to continued state control and an emerging money-driven journalistic culture (e.g., Gan 2005, pp. 225–233, 234–249). Instead of completely refuting such Western ideas as journalistic ‘independence’, ‘objectivity’, ‘fairness’, and ‘freedom’ as he had before, Gan now suggested that China’s journalism should also try to ‘borrow’ some of these ideas (Gan 1988, p. 559). He also critiqued Chinese journalism’s lack of structural diversity (all newspapers were Party or quasi-­Party outlets) and editorial autonomy (all newspapers were supervised by relevant CCP committees) (Gan 1988, pp.  559–564). Gan’s adjustments were historically significant, symbolizing the Maoist Party press doctrine’s loss of ground even among its once most faithful believers and ardent defenders. Though the debate on the relationship between news and propaganda between reformists and conservatives remained officially inconclusive for its ideological sensitiveness, the reformist camp was obviously the more popular and influential side, having a visible impact on journalistic practice (e.g., see Cheek 1989; Luter and Richstad 1983; Robinson 1981). In particular, and significantly, they opened the door for the practice of ‘fun’ journalism beyond official media propaganda, as a more reader-oriented press approach was gaining momentum. For example, the early 1980s witnessed significant expansion in the function of the news media. Taking the newspaper sector as an example, while propaganda continued to dominate daily coverage, more space was given to general news, human interest stories, reports on disasters, accidents, crime, sports, entertainment features, and so on. Different specialized subsidiary sections or columns such as ‘science and life’, ‘film and drama’, and ‘foreign cultures’ also appeared in newspapers. Commercial advertisements also came back to newspaper coverage and increased rapidly from the late 1970s after being banned for a decade during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Luter and Richstad 1983, p.  179). In October 1979, the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the CCP Central Committee, even launched a biweekly newspaper, the

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Market, to help ‘promote consumerism’ (Robinson 1981, p.  66). The news media industry’s total advertising turnover increased more than threefold during 1983 (107.62 million RMB) and 1985 (333.52 million RMB).2 Even stories that criticized the daily workings of the Party/government and the wrongdoing of officials were encouraged by reformist leaders in Beijing now. In summer 1980, for example, major national news media exposed a November 1979 offshore oil rig accident which led to the minister of the Department of Oil Industry being removed (People’s Daily 1980). Importantly, this approach also by and large changed the way media propaganda was practiced in the era of reform, as media outlets were under growing pressure to generate more readable, rather than grossly tedious (as was the case for decades under Mao), media propaganda to help promote such new grand media narratives as ‘reform’, ‘opening’, ‘productivity’, ‘work efficiency’, ‘anti-bureaucratism’, and ‘modernization’.

3.2   The ‘Evening Newspaper Effect’ and Its Limitations According to Xiang (2002), the evening newspaper as a specific press category emerged in late nineteenth-century Qing China, and as of the end the 1930s, there were about 200 evening paper titles, most of which were popular/tabloid outlets. On the eve of the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949, there were still 194 evening paper titles. However, most of these titles were discontinued in the early 1950s. Only four titles survived during that decade: the Xinmin Evening News (Shanghai), Tonight’s News (Tianjin), the Yangcheng Evening News (Guangzhou), and the Beijing Evening News (Beijing). The total number of evening papers increased to 17 by the mid-1960s but most of these, like their morning Party organs, served as official organs of relevant CCP Party committees. As a result, their ‘evening paper’ identity (soft news-, service information-, and entertainment-oriented editorial policy) also faded away due to growing political uncertainties. Even these titles were all subsequently banned during the Cultural Revolution. With the end of the Mao era in the late 1970s, evening papers re-­ emerged. As many previous titles resumed their publication, many more new titles were launched. In 1982, the total number of evening papers was 14, which then jumped to 39 in 1991 and 78 in 1992.3 Despite this, however, it was not until the mid-1990s that the growth of the evening

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newspaper sector peaked, with more than 100 new titles launched in the first half of that decade due to the CCP’s new ‘socialist market economy’ policy introduced in 1992.4 The 1980s and early 1990s had already witnessed the sector’s strong market performance which imposed growing pressure on the morning Party organ sector as the dominant force of the newspaper industry. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, circulation of most evening paper titles had been well above most of their same-city morning Party organs. As of 1993, for example, the daily circulation of the Xinmin Evening News was 1.72  million, followed by the Yangcheng Evening News’s 1.2  million, the Beijing Evening News’s 850,000, the Yangtze Evening News’s 578,000, Tonight’s News’s 400,000, the Qianjiang Evening News’s 350,000, and the Chengdu Evening News’s 300,000. There were another 27 titles whose daily circulation ranged from 150,000 to 290,000 (Xiang 2002). It is noteworthy that while circulation of Party press organs mainly relied on compulsory government office subscription using taxpayers’ money, retail sales and private subscription shared a high percentage in evening newspapers’ circulations, demonstrating their popularity among ordinary urban residents. For example, a 1985 media survey conducted in Shanghai revealed that among Shanghai’s three major daily newspapers, the Xinmen Evening News was the most popular one, and shared 69 percent of Shanghai residents’ total newspaper subscriptions, while the Liberation Daily and the Wenhui Daily (both morning Party organs) only managed to share 16 percent and nine percent respectively (Zhu 1989, pp. 265–266). Similarly, according to two 1986 media surveys conducted in Beijing, while only 7.9 percent of the total subscriptions of the Beijing Daily (mouthpiece of the Party Committee of Beijing) came from private subscribers (China Renmin University 1989a, p. 429), the share of private subscriptions and street sales in the Beijing Evening News’s total circulation was as high as 77.8 percent (China Renmin University 1989b, p. 445). Importantly, unlike evening newspapers during the Mao era, these titles in the 1980s and the early 1990s identified themselves more consciously as a different press category from Party press organs. In 1983, evening papers across the country had their first national conference to exchange experience and information and discuss relevant professional matters, and also decided to meet annually in future. Two years later, the National Evening Newspapers Journalists Association was launched and started its annual conference program as well (Xiang 2002). Compared with morning Party press organs whose coverage was packed with straightforward

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official propaganda and government work-oriented reports, though evening papers were also required to propagate official aims, they often did this from a more readers’/personal perspective. More importantly, they used more space to cover soft news, feature stories, sports, entertainment, and applied information for households, as well as ordinary people’s experience and feelings in their daily life. Still, because articles in evening papers were more compact and informative, they often offered their readers more stories within a given number of pages than did their morning Party organ counterparts. The pages of the Shanghai-based popular Xinmin Evening News, for example, were tightly packed with short articles, mostly just a couple of column inches long, providing its readers with a wide range of soft news stories and applied information daily. The evening paper sector’s surging popularity among ordinary readers in the 1980s and early 1990s happened in a time when the Party press organ sector as the perceived superior, mainstream division of China’s print journalism still enjoyed considerable popularity due to their recent reforms after decades of chaotic and traumatic experience under Mao. In addition, the mid- and late 1980s also witnessed the discussion and practice of a Western-style watchdog journalism by a small number of liberal-­ minded journalists, scholars, and press outlets, as will be discussed shortly. Compared with these two high-profile and often self-congratulatory elite press approaches (Party journalism and liberal journalism), evening papers that took a popular journalistic approach as the ‘third voice/force’ remained relatively low-key though far more popular among ordinary urban readers. The overall theoretical thinking behind the rapid development of evening papers during this period was, however, both insightful and limited, being shaped by the interplay of historical-cultural, political-institutional, and market factors. Those hidden limitations at the time, as discussed below, would later greatly contribute to the evening paper sector’s fall in the late 1990s and the early 2000s when media commercialization went full-fledged, as will be discussed in the next chapter. At the time, the most influential ideas on the ‘should be’ role of evening papers came from Zhao Chaogou, then editor-in-chief of the Xinmin Evening News. Zhao’s key point was that evening papers should become ‘the supplement of morning dailies’ (ribao de buchong) by providing ordinary urban residents with soft news, entertainment, and applied information. In Zhao’s own words, reading an evening title should be like ‘a pastime after meal and tea’ (chayu

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fanhou de xiaoqian). And this role required evening papers to publish ‘shorter, broader, and softer’ stories and articles that were ‘newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and readable’ to meet ordinary urban residents’ information needs (Ding 2007). While Zhao clearly defined evening newspaper as a different press genre/category from morning Party organs by highlighting their pro-­ urban resident popular journalistic nature, particularly in the era of reform and opening,  he seemingly still by and large saw popular journalism as represented by evening papers then as a somewhat inferior, non-­mainstream journalistic genre compared with propaganda-oriented Party journalism as typically represented by China’s morning dailies. This was partly due to the influence of the traditional elitist prejudice against popular journalism even before 1949 (during late Qing and Republic of China), as discussed in the previous chapter, and partly to the Party-journalism dominated media environment in the PRC both under Mao and in the 1980s. Regarding the historical-cultural factor, it was typically reflected in Zhao’s point that reading an evening newspaper title was like ‘a pastime after meal and tea’, which was nearly exactly what Li Boyuan, a mastermind of tabloid journalism and popular literature in late Qing, said about his influential tabloid title the Leisure Times. In his words, he hoped that his readers ‘can enjoy it over a cup of tea or after their lunch’ (cited in Fan 2022, p.  73). This suggested the continued influence of the elitist historical-­ cultural prejudice against popular journalism. Such prejudice had not only been exploited by the state to limit the development of popular journalism (including a ban on it during the Mao era), but also used by some conservative officials, scholars, and journalists to continue to trivialize popular evening newspapers as xaiobao (Bai 2001). All these had seemingly also by and large psychologically affected the evening press sector’s (more serious and deeper) thinking about its ‘real’ or should-be identity and role in China’s journalism, and imagining of its potential of doing far more, journalistically, and socially. It was not until the mid-1990s that some pioneering ‘popular’ journalists and press outlets started to question Zhao’s ideas both theoretically and practically (e.g., Xi 1995, 1996). Despite this, debate on the ‘should be’ role and historical status of evening papers and popular journalism at large in the PRC’s journalism history is still ongoing (e.g., Bai 2021; Meng 2002). This is an important matter which will be discussed further later.

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3.3   The Short-Lived Liberal-Minded Press Approach Compared with reformist journalists and scholars who called for reforming and improving China’s journalism as well as the CCP’s media work, China’s liberal intellectuals and journalists during the mid- and late 1980s chose to directly challenge the very ideological foundation of the CCP’s Party journalism tradition by calling for either substantially liberalizing it from a humanist Marxist perspective or completely replacing it with a Western-style free press. The significance and impact of this movement to/on China’s journalism was mixed. On the one hand, its outcry for political democratization and, as part of it, press freedom was undoubtedly important for China’s transition to ‘real’ modernity. On the other hand, its elitist and, to a certain extent, utopian tendency made it somewhat idealistic and out of touch with common people’s everyday life. When it came to journalism, this tendency intentionally, or unintentionally, reinforced China’s elitist journalistic tradition against the emerging popular journalistic practice. The rising political and socio-economic discontent in the mid- and late 1980s in the face of growing corruption, high inflation, and continued political and media control triggered further debate on the direction of China’s political and media reforms. In the meantime, the debate was further fueled by Gorbachev’s glasnost which started in 1986. Adopting a more radical approach than their liberal-minded humanist-Marxist peers, China’s liberals insisted that a ‘wholesale Westernization’ approach was the only path for China to be fully and truly modernized. Fang Lizhi, a prominent dissident scientist, for example, spoke to a group of students at Shanghai’s Tongji University and stated that ‘I am here to tell you that the socialist movement, from Marx and Lenin to Stalin and Mao Zedong, has been a failure. I think that complete Westernization is the only way to modernize’.5 In journalism, Liu Binyan, a prominent liberal-minded journalist who served the People’s Daily in the 1980s, for example, also often sharply criticized China’s politics in his investigative reportage and essays (e.g., Liu 1990). Comparatively, humanist Marxist scholars and journalists were more moderate and generally intended to avoid completely refuting Marxist ideology and directly challenging China’s one-party political system, though some of them became increasingly impatient and more radically liberal oriented in the late 1980s. Being theoretically inspired by

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neo-­Marxist thinking in Europe, China’s reformist Marxist writers called for a ‘real’ Marxism rooted in Marxist humanism rather than totalitarian Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism (e.g., Su 1992; Wang 1986). Strategically, they seemingly believed that in the current Chinese context, reforming China’s political-media systems from a humanist Marxist perspective would be a more sensible option than the liberal call for completely burying them. In journalism, they called for a new press system under the CCP’s continued leadership but ultimately ruled by law to ensure a high degree of journalistic autonomy (e.g., Hu 1989; Liu 1990; Sun 1986). Typically, Sun Xupei of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences suggested a ‘multi-tiered press structure’ scheme in which ‘the Party organs will form the core, official newspapers from government departments and other [minor and power-limited] political parties will remain dominant, and in the meantime civilian newspapers should also be allowed’ (Sun 1986, p. 49). To make this media structural change happen, Sun argued that an enlightened media law was urgently needed to clearly redefine the state–press relationship and diversify China’s currently state-monopolized media ownership structure. On the other hand, Hu Jiwei, then editor-in-­ chief of the People’s Daily, questioned the CCP’s long-time argument that any form of media autonomy would inevitably cause social division and chaos and thus ultimately harm the modernization project as the country’s grand national goal. Instead, Hu argued, social instability was often and essentially caused by bureaucracy, corruption, and autocracy. He saw that ‘stability and unity’ without press freedom were just a ‘false illusion’ at a very high social cost which might ‘contain even greater risks’ and therefore, he concluded, ‘there will be no genuine stability without press freedom’ (Hu 1989). Sun’s ‘multi-tiered press structure’ scheme as mentioned above was seen as ‘arguably the most eloquent theoretical work on journalism in China: a theory of socialist press freedom’ (Lee 2000, p. 566). However, Sun’s call for a ‘free’ socialist press would hardly be achieved unless the CCP was willing, or forced, to limit its power through democratic constitutional reforms, which were, and still are, the hardest part of China’s transition to modernity. Moreover, Sun’s scheme was still heavily constrained by the traditional socialist media economics, as it not only excluded the possibility of having any privately owned media outlets, but also warned that even non-privately owned civilian press outlets ‘should not be allowed to chase surplus value’ or challenge ‘the state-ownership of print factories or the state’s monopoly of newsprint supply’ (Sun 1986,

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p. 47). Finally, the omission of the role of the market in Sun’s social democratic media institutional reform suggestion made it a largely top-down and elitist idea and thus risked losing greater support from the media and the public. Despite Sun’s acceptance of the idea of commercializing China’s state-owned press many years later, his distrust in private media ownership remained, as he was seemingly overwhelmed by his belief that private media outlets would inevitably become ‘overly money-driven’. He thus suggested that China should borrow the Western public broadcasting idea and introduce ‘public newspapers’ (Cai and Wang 2004). While Sun’s concern about private media ownership was understandable, he failed to realize that by the early 2000s China’s own commercialized state-owned media outlets had become no less profit-driven than many of their privately owned Western counterparts (e.g., see Zhao 1998). As to the idea of public media, Sun could have paid more attention to the fact that while they might not be profit-driven, they were certainly not value-free, nor were they cheap, and few countries could financially afford a large public journalism sector.6 More broadly, many liberal and liberal-minded humanist Marxist critics and journalists believed that in China, democracy could be realized without adequate development of market economy, and press freedom could be achieved before political democratization. They instead insisted that media reforms should become the forerunner and breach of substantial political reforms. Though such arguments seemed both theoretically unconvincing and historically problematic, many critics appeared to still consciously, or unconsciously, believe that the media could and should play a central role in turning an authoritarian country like China into a democracy. Such arguments were quite popular at the height of the pro-­ democracy movements during the mid- and late 1980s. Sun Xupei, for example, argued that press freedom was not only a basic human right but also the foundation of any other freedoms (Sun 1986, pp. 6–18). Similarly, based on their interviews with some public and media influencers in Beijing, a group of researchers at China Renmin University concluded that ‘[j]ournalism reform should become the forerunner of political reform and social reform, and the opportunity for a comprehensive and profound journalism reform has come into being’ (China Renmin University 1989c, p.  112). A representative from the National People’s Consultant Committee went even further. For him, press freedom was almost everything and superior to anything:

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No press freedom means no freedom of speech. No freedom of speech means no freedom of thinking. No freedom of thinking means no liberation of human beings. And if there is no liberation of human beings there is no liberation of productive forces, the prosperity, and progress of the society. (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Beijing Journalism Association 1989, p. 99)

In February 1988, the Shanghai-based World Economic Herald, mouthpiece of China’s reformist elites in the 1980s, declared that if China did not carry out bold socio-political reforms, the country would be in danger of being ‘excluded from global citizenship’ (Wang 1989; see also Hsiao and Yang 1990). Interestingly and somewhat ironically, while liberal and humanist Marxist media critics intended to challenge the elitist Maoist Party press doctrine, their own philosophical understanding of the media’s core social function was seemingly essentially similar to that of the advocates of the doctrine. Like those advocates, they also called for instrumentally using media to educate, influence, and remold the masses’ worldview through persuasion and propaganda (though for a supposedly different and ‘good’ end purpose). While this approach made sense in its own right, it was ultimately elitist, top-down, and self-important. It gave little room to, nor showed much appreciation of, people-oriented popular journalism represented by xiaobao historically, and evening papers currently, particularly its role and value in informing, entertaining, and empowering the public in its own way(s). And this could, if not would, ultimately, though it might often take a discursive form, help achieve liberals’ dream of democracy and press freedom both on a daily basis and in the long term.

3.4   Popular Journalism in the Broader Context of Popular Culture The development of popular journalism as one form of popular culture in the 1980s happened in the context of greater developments in many other popular cultural areas such as music, film, literature, and even underground sex publications and pornographic materials during this period. All of these collectively helped create a much larger space and stronger cultural environment that would further boost China’s popular cultural, including popular journalistic, development later. In this section, I shall briefly discuss some of the major changes in some other popular cultural areas in the 1980s for the purpose of providing a

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broader popular social-cultural context for a better understanding of the re-emergence of popular journalism during the same period as discussed above. My approach to this discussion is to use a significant recent Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies special issue (Issue 2, Volume 23) with the theme ‘Popular Culture in China’s Early Reform Era, 1978–1989’ as the starting point to draw readers’ attention to the research literature on this area (as a detailed discussion of this literature is beyond the scope of this book), while also offering some relevant personal experience from the perspective of myself as first a young university student and later a university academic in the 1980s. Following the very useful introduction piece from the guest editor of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies special issue were eight insightful research articles covering a range of interesting and important popular cultural changes in the early years of the post-Mao era in such areas as music, fashion, radio, television, film, and popular cultural exchanges between China and the West and among the Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (interestingly, popular journalism was however not included). As a young journalism student at Shanghai’s Fudan University and then a lecturer with Sichuan University in Chengdu in the 1980s myself, I often could not help but relate relevant discussion in some of the articles included in the special issue (and beyond) to my personal experience and observations at the time. Tao, for example, discussed how the songs of the Taiwanese super pop singer Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) penetrated into the Mainland’s unofficial (semi-underground) music market in the late 1970s and the early 1980s through Taiwan and Hong Kong-based ‘enemy’ radio stations and smuggled music tapes. The author argued that ‘Teresa Teng’s songs revived the private and emotional worlds stymied by revolutionary mass culture, and thereby played a pivotal role in rebuilding an authentic public culture and public sphere in post-Mao China’, which also invited a critical rethinking of ‘the meaning and significance of “cultural smuggling” of that period’ and ‘the viability of the Frankfurt School’s cultural criticism when studying a non-capitalist example’ (Tao 2022, pp. 269, 271, 272). Tao’s analysis (and those from some other scholars as cited in his study) of the Teresa Teng fever was truly insightful, though I somehow found that it was those ‘spiritual’ as well as ‘sexual’ factors (among others) involved in recipients’ experience of the fever as cited in the study (p. 276) that echoed my memory most. I still clearly remember that once one of my roommates brought in a big color poster of Teng and stuck it on the back of the door of our small

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dorm room packed with four bunk beds for seven roommates. At the time, Teng was obviously not only just a pop singer with a sweet voice whispering love lyrics accompanied by a romantic melody but also a sex symbol for many young people, particularly young males, who had increasing but still extremely limited access to ‘anti-socialist’, ‘yellow’ materials in the early 1980s. The decision to stick the poster on the back of the door was for two good reasons. One was largely technical as the bunk beds with mosquito nets blocked all useful wall space. The other reason was largely political and thus more serious: our ‘logic’ was that whenever our political instructor came to our room on his regular ‘inspection tour’, the door would be wide open and thus help safely hide our ‘top secret’. However, we quickly discovered that this strategy could go wrong in a disastrously unexpected fashion, but meanwhile we also surprisingly found that we had probably been a little overcautious and underestimated our political instructor’s ‘political’ conscience. Once he came to us again on a windy day, and the door somehow suddenly shut with a bang due to a strong wind seemingly from nowhere, after he walked into our room. As he reflexively turned his head back, the ‘sexy’ Teng poster was exposed completely before his eyes. Everyone in the room was shocked and embarrassedly pretended to look aside, except our political instructor himself: he had a look at the poster, and then at us, before walking away without saying a word but with a cunning smile on his face. The poster, however, quickly became less popular as new sources for sexual imagination became available, primarily movie magazines with photos of attractive actresses (and actors). Another roommate went even further later as he brought in and shared with the rest of us a literally brick-thick photo album with numerous nude Western male and female models. Everyone got excited with screams and laughs as one can probably imagine. Soon, a piece of ‘secret’ news also started to spread among us that the Chinese translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron had become available in Fudan library’s special onsite reading section. The advice from those who had seized a chance to read it was that there was lots of ‘fun’ in it, though the challenge was that one would have literally to be among the first in the queue once the reading room opened in the early evening, but, they added, it was absolutely worth doing that. For me as a country boy from a conservative and ‘backward’ one-street small town in the inland Sichuan Province, all of this was wild and fascinating.

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By the mid-1980s, due to market competition in the publishing sector, semi-illegal publications including sex- and crime-related materials went even wilder, being marked by the extraordinary publication of the Chinese translation of D.  H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by the Hunan Press in 1986, as well documented and examined in Chen (1992). Among other things, the dramatic process of its publication itself was literately a thriller story of a cat and rat game between the publisher and state censors (Chen 1992, pp. 571–574), which might be worth being developed into a novel or movie (or at least a documentary film). At the time I was a lecturer at Sichuan University. There were numerous street bookstalls surrounding the campus run by private booksellers, selling popular academic and fiction titles as well as a range of underground publications (illegally printed and distributed books and newspapers relating to sex, violence, crime, and other sensational topics), including Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The rise of popular culture in the 1980s was also reflected in the relative development and availability (though still limited) of popular communication technologies particularly in the form of the cassette player/recorder and television set. Among other things, this development made possible mass participation in Western dancing and watching of live telecasts of major sports events and such popular television drama series as Huo Yuanjia, Shanghai Beach, and Garrison’s Gorillas on university campuses (and beyond) (Ma 2022; Tao 2022). Back to my university years at Fudan, as we were all required to live in on-campus residences during our study at the time, Fudan’s weekend dancing parties where cassette players and pirated music tapes did their work were always packed. So did the rooms and halls with a TV set whenever a popular television program or sports event was on. It would be difficult for anyone to escape from the extraordinary atmosphere of joy and excitement generated by a popular cultural liberation after decades of thought control and repression under Mao. We all knew this ‘liberation’ was still limited, particularly after the setbacks after the ‘anti-spiritual pollution’ campaign during 1983 and 1984 (and later the ‘anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign’ during 1986 and 1987), but we also knew that things had changed and changed forever. The pressure imposed by these ‘swift and profound’ (Tao 2022, p. 175) broader popular cultural changes on journalism was obvious. As reformist journalists and journalism scholars called for conceptually separating Party propaganda from journalism and paying more attention to readers’ needs

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and readability as discussed earlier, one question (among many others) that we as journalism students could not help but ask was: Why at a time when students wearing bell-bottom pants with long hair could enjoy themselves by dancing to loud Western disco music was most newspapers’ coverage still full of boring official propaganda and ‘news’ on routine government work? After all, like any other mass cultural genre and product, journalism should first and foremost be interesting, attractive, and useful from the readers’ perspective. The point I attempt to make here is that the masses’ need for popular culture including popular journalism, just like their need for air and water, was based on human nature and thus historically irrepressible. Although this need might be sometimes constrained by the state, the undercurrent of popular culture will keep running in one way or another. Popular culture including popular journalism will always be around somewhere even with extremely limited ‘water’ and ‘air’. As Johnson’s study on cultural governance in the Mao era before the Cultural Revolution found, despite the establishment of a state-driven nationwide official cultural distribution system, ‘unsanctioned, unofficial culture was never fully excluded from everyday life’. The existence of this unofficial culture was partly because of its strong appeal for ordinary people, and partly ‘because grassroots Communist Party members themselves were beneficiaries of the informal and illegal cultural marketplace’ (Johnson 2015, pp. 200, 201, cited in Ma 2022, p. 178). Similarly, this was also by and large the situation in relation to sex and sexuality in the Mao era (Honig 2003; Larson 1999). Comparing Johnson’s finding above with the rerise of popular culture in the 1980s, Ma argued that: In this regard, the development of the cultural marketplace in the reform era marks another episode of state retreat or involution at the grassroots. Many officials paid lip service to the orders and directives given to them from above, but in their local world and daily work, they saw themselves not so much as socialist cultural regulators or ideological watchdogs but as those who could and should entertain people’s various cultural needs, especially when those needs could generate profit or tax revenue. (Ma 2022, p. 178)

This was also by and large the story of the development of popular journalism in the 1980s as discussed in this chapter, and certainly in the 1990s and onward, as will be examined in coming chapters.

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Notes 1. It is not this author’s intention to present a black and white comparison of Gan’s and Wang’s journalistic viewpoints here. Like Gan’s, Wang’s journalistic approach had its own limitations. A detailed, systematic examination of this matter is, however, beyond the scope of this book. 2. ‘Advertising income of China’s main news media in 1995, 1996, and 1997’, unpublished data, collected during my visit to the Information Department, China Advertising Association, Beijing, 29 October 1998. 3. China Journalism Yearbook 1992, p. 467. 4. China Journalism Yearbook 1997. 5. Quoted in Baum (1994, p. 189). 6. For more about humanist Marxism and humanist Marxist journalism from a historical perspective, see Leonhard (1974) and Robinson (1977).

References Bai, Z.C. (2001) ‘“Regrets” in Contemporary Chinese Journalism History Studies’, Shanghai Journalism Review (9): 22–25. Baidupedia (2016) ‘Gan Xifen’, retrieved from https://baike.baidu.com/item/ %E7%94%98%E6%83%9C%E5%88%86. Baum, R. (1994) Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cai, W. and Wang, Y.L. (2004, February 11) ‘On Journalistic Reforms: An Interview with Sun Xupei’, People’s Daily online, retrieved from: http://www. people.com.cn/GB/14677/22114/31734/31735/2332306.html. Cheek, T. (1989) ‘Redefining Propaganda: Debates on the Role of Journalism in post-Mao Mainland China’, Issues & Studies XXV(2): 47–75. Chen, Y. (1992) ‘Publishing in China in the Post-Mao Era: The Case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Asian Survey 32(6): 568–582. d ­oi:https://doi. org/10.2307/2645161. China Renmin University (1989a) ‘A Survey of Readers of the Beijing Daily’, in C.S. Chen and X.L. Er (eds) A Study of Media Communication Effects in China, Shenyang: Shenyang Press: 428–441. China Renmin University (1989b) ‘A Survey of Readers of the Beijing Evening News’, in C.S. Chen and X.L. Er (eds) A Study of Media Communication Effects in China, Shenyang: Shenyang Press: 442–448. China Renmin University (1989c) ‘Looking Forward to the Year of Dragon: Interviews with Distinguished Pekiners’, in C.S.  Chen and X.L.  Er (eds) A Study on Communication Effect in China. Shenyang: Shenyang Press: 103–121. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Beijing Journalism Association (1989) ‘Hopes and Expectations from the People’, in C.S. Chen and X.L. Er (eds) A Study on Communication Effect in China. Shenyang: Shenyang Press: 29–102.

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Lu, M. (1982) ‘Differences and Similarities between News and Propaganda’, Bulletin of Journalism Association (8). Reprinted in Journalism Department of Fudan University (ed) Reference Materials for Journalism Theory Research (Vol. V) (internal publication): 36–45. Luter, J. and Richstad, J. (1983) ‘Asia and the Pacific’, in J.C. Merrill (ed) Global Journalism: Survey of the World’s Mass Media, White Plains and New  York: Longman: 116–189. Ma, Z. (2022) ‘Revisiting Popular Culture in China’s Early Reform Era, 1978–1989: A Historical Overview’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 23(2): 175–184. Meng, Q.H. (2002) ‘On the Matter of Evening Papers in Contemporary Chinese Journalism History Studies: A Response to Bai Zichao’, Shanghai Journalism Review (1): 55–57. People’s Daily (1980, August 26) ‘State Council Was Serious about the “Bohai Sea II” Oil Rig Accident’, home edition: 1. Robinson, D.C. (1981) ‘Changing Functions of Mass Media in the People’s Republic of China’, Journal of Communication 31(4): 59–73. Robinson, G.J. (1977) Tito’s Maverick Media: The Politics of Mass Communication in Yugoslavia, Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press. Su, S.Z. (1992) New treatise on Marxism, Taipei: China Times Press. Sun, X.P. (1986) ‘On Socialist Press Freedom’, Journalism Law Bulletin (supplement issue), Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Tao, D.F. (2022) ‘Teresa Teng and the Spread of Pop Songs in Mainland China in the Early Reform Era’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 23(2): 269–287. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2022.2064617. Wang, J.P. (1989). ‘The Alarm Bell Will Continue Echoing: Journalist Lu Yi and the World Economic Herald’s Debate on China’s “Earth Membership”’, Shanghai Journalism Review (2): 31–33. Wang, R.S. (1986) Defending Humanism, Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company. Wang, Z. (2004) Collected Works of Wang Zhong, Shanghai: Fudan University Press. Xi, W.J. (1995) ‘New Thinking of New Evening Newspapers’, Press Circles (5): 31–33. Xi, W.J. (1996) ‘Open a New Era for Provincial Evening Newspapers’, Press Circles (5): 8–10. Xiang, C.W. (2002) ‘100 Years of Chinese Evening Newspapers’, Journal of Southeast University for Minority Nationalities 23(12): 251–259. Xinhua (2016) ‘Gan Xifen: I Am only a Dedicated Explorer of Journalistic Laws’, retrieved from: http://cul.qq.com/a/20160111/023489.htm. Zhu, J.H. (1989) ‘Survey on Shanghai’s News Media Audience’, in C.S. Chen and X.L. Er (eds) A Preliminary Study of Media Communication Effects in China, Shenyang: Shenyang Press: 262–278. Zhao, Y.Z. (1998). Media, market, and democracy in China. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 4

Popular Journalism Comes to the Center Stage

4.1   Media Commercialization Under ‘Socialist Market Economy’ 4.1.1   Toward a Market-Oriented New Media Economics Though market-oriented media reforms gradually started from the early 1980s, it was not until the mid-1980s that news media, particularly the print media, for the first time, felt the power of the market as a double-­ edged sword that could bring the industry both opportunities and challenges. From late 1986 to 1988, the Chinese economy suffered a crisis due to sharply rising goods prices and high inflation. Within less than two years, by early 1988, the price of newsprint rocketed from 800 RMB per ton to 2400 RMB per ton. This heavily impacted print media’s operation. For example, while the China Youth Daily, an influential national newspaper based in Beijing, was sold at five cents RMB per copy (which used one broad sheet of blank newsprint), the same size of newsprint cost six cents RMB per sheet (Wang 1988, p. 2). The rise of circulation fees was another problem. Under the traditional planned economy, distribution of all print publications in China was monopolized by state-run post offices with fixed prices. However, when the post office industry went commercial and sharply raised distributing fees during 1986 and 1988, newspaper publishers had

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no way to avoid the price spike. More importantly, the ongoing marketoriented economic reforms also meant that the government that traditionally took full financial responsibility for the news media was now becoming increasingly stingy in subsidizing the media. For the Chinese authorities, the news media were now not only their propaganda tools, but also an industry that must be gradually run under market mechanisms. Because of all this, as of 1987, ‘most Chinese newspapers have fallen into financial crisis’ (Qin 1988). For example, it was reported that the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), lost six million RMB in revenue in that year (Qin 1989). In 1985, financial deficit of the Henan Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP Committee of Henan Province, was 900,000 RMB. By 1986, it had skyrocketed to 1.36 million RMB. For a time, there was only 2000 RMB on the newspaper’s account. As a result, it had to borrow money nationally to ease the crisis (Han 1988). The financial crisis across the country’s press industry in the mid- to late 1980s forced both China’s media policy makers and the industry itself to seriously rethink Chinese journalism’s funding model. For the industry, it was clear that their days of financially completely depending on government subsidies were numbered. For media policy makers, the crisis seemingly further convinced them that the industry’s current funding model based on the traditional planned economy must change. The turning point of China’s market-oriented media reforms happened after Deng Xiaoping’s call for further reform and opening in early 1992 during his inspection tour to south China that aimed to revive the country from its post-Tiananmen political and economic recession. Responding to Party conservatives’ concerns about China’s socialist color due to capitalist development, Deng (1992) warned that to define ‘socialism’ one must check ‘whether or not something was advantageous to the development of socialist productive forces, advantageous to increasing the comprehensive strength of a socialist nation, and advantageous to raising the people’s living standards’, and socialism might become a reality only by learning from and assimilating ‘all achievements of all human civilizations’ (Fewsmith 1997, pp. 372, 373). Essentially, Deng’s ‘three advantages’ doctrine here was just a ‘one advantage’ formula, that is, whatever served China’s socio-­ economic development was ‘socialism’. Under Deng’s supervision, the CCP held its 14th National Congress in October of the same year, which went down in history for its official adoption of a ‘socialist market

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economy’. Wu Jinglian, China’s leading liberal economist, suggested that by the Party’s 14th National Congress, ‘the debate on planned economy vs. market economy which had lasted for more than 10 years was at last over’ (Xie 1998, p. 49). Internationally, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the political-economic turmoil in post-democratization Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s also seemingly coincidentally ‘supported’ Deng’s neo-authoritarian market-socialism notion (economic liberalization without political democratization). It should be noted that even before this macroeconomic policy change, the media industry had already taken the initiative to experiment with some quite bold and creative commercial strategies to try to survive the looming political and economic challenges after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. This was typically reflected in major daily newspaper titles’ expansion of their page number and, accordingly, increased coverage of popular stories, the move to a more attractive page layout style, and introduction of popular weekend editions with feature stories about all sorts of trendy topics and issues as well as other entertainment- and service-­ oriented information and materials (e.g., see Huang 1992; Yu 1994). Now, with the significant policy change adopted by the CCP’s 14th Party Congress, China’s media policy makers wasted no time in quickly responding to it with a nationwide powerful media commercialization campaign. On 21 October 1992, three days after the closing of the Congress, Liang Heng, director of the Newspaper Management Department of the National Press and Publication Bureau under the State Council, warned that all newspapers including Party organs would be eventually run on a financially self-sufficient basis (Liang 1992, cited in Zhao 1998, p. 50). Consequently, the year 1993 witnessed the adoption of a radical ‘weaning plan’ by both the central and relevant local governments, aiming to sharply reduce and in many cases end government subsidies to newspapers (Cheng 1997, p.  41). By the mid- to late 1990s, a market-oriented new media economics had largely replaced the traditional one based on the planned economy. Instead of regarding the news media as pure ‘ideological institutes’, top media policy makers now began to openly talk about news media’s ‘commodity nature’ (e.g., Chan 1993; Liu 1998), the very term used by Professor Wang Zhong in 1956 but was quickly labeled as a reactionary ‘bourgeois’ view of journalism, as previously discussed. Liu Bo, then director of the National Press and Publication Bureau (NPPB), reaffirmed later that one of the ‘most obvious characteristics’ of China’s

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newspapers in the era of reform was their ‘commodity nature’. He emphasized that ‘[a] newspaper must be aware of its political orientation, but in the meantime, it must pay close attention to its financial performance as well’ (Liu 1998, pp. 5, 6). 4.1.2   Manifestations of Media Commercialization The formation of the emerging new media economics based on market competition in the 1990s was a result of constant negotiations between media organizations and the government’s media regulatory bodies. While the government intended to push the media to jump into the sea of the market to ease its financial burden of subsidizing the media industry, the latter saw both opportunities and challenges associated with this big change. On the one hand, this change might give them greater bargaining power for greater editorial and financial autonomy, but on the other, it could also cause them serious financial difficulties. For this reason, the industry had to find ways to survive and develop themselves under the new market-oriented media economics. Some commonly used strategies adopted by the industry, particularly the newspaper sector, included the following. The ‘page expansion fever’. During the 40-year period from 1949 to the early 1990s, most Chinese newspapers published only four pages per issue. This meant that for major newspaper titles, particularly morning Party organs, even in the first decade or so of the post-Mao era, after fulfilling their compulsory propaganda obligation, space left for popular stories, entertainment, and advertisements was extremely limited. Though as early as 1991 some newspapers began to expand their page number, 1992 was the year that saw the start of a ‘page expansion fever’. On 1 July 1992, the Shanghai-based Xinmen Evening News doubled its page number from eight to 16. Soon after this, taking the lead among daily morning Party organs, the Guangzhou Daily, official organ of the Party Committee of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, expanded its page number from eight to 12. The Liberation Daily, mouthpiece of the Party Committee of Shanghai, followed suit and increased its page number from eight to 12 too. However, the Guangzhou Daily quickly regained its leading position by increasing its pages from 12 to 16  in the following year (Yu 1994, pp. 28–29). On New Year’s Day of 1993, ‘hundreds of Chinese newspapers’ declared their page expansion plans. The press community was obviously

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excited by this move. As the Xinhua Daily, mouthpiece of the Party Committee of Jiangshu Province, put it in its New Year’s Day editorial: ‘From today, this newspaper takes a breakthrough step since its establishment 54 years ago—to publish eight pages every day!’ (Zhu 1993, p. 7). As of the end of 1993, all national newspapers and two-thirds of morning Party organs had expanded to at least eight pages to accommodate more diverse news coverage and other soft materials. As newspapers became bigger in size, their content also became far more diverse than it used to be, with visible increase of coverage of economic news, soft news, features, crime stories, sports news, and service-oriented news and information, as well as commercial advertisements. The ‘weekend edition fever’. The ‘weekend edition fever’—the rush for publishing a fatter and special weekend edition or in the form of a separate, supplementary weekend edition attached to a newspaper’s normal weekend edition by major newspaper titles—occurred slightly earlier than the page expansion campaign. Initiated by the Beijing-based China Youth Daily in 1991 and followed by the Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily and Beijing-based Farmer’s Daily, other newspapers quickly followed suit (Yu 1994, pp. 29–30). As of the end of 1991, there were more than 300 newspapers that published a weekend edition, or in some cases, an end-of-­ month edition (Chinese Journalism Association 1993, p. 3). The number of weekend editions published by major newspaper titles continued to grow in 1992 and onward (until the mid-1990s). Being regarded as a ‘special zone’ of major newspaper titles due to their sensational page layout, contents, and writing style, many newspapers’ weekend editions appeared almost an alien addition to their parent newspapers (Yu 1994, pp. 29–30; Zhao 1998, pp. 133–138). Traditionally, for newspapers, just like for other Chinese government departments, weekends and public holidays were only a time for rest, not business. As a result, their weekend editions often had even less news and were even more boring than weekday editions. However, the profitable weekend news market was now becoming a major competition battlefield for major press titles. The evening newspaper sector’s strong growth. As discussed in the previous chapter, the evening paper sector was already the fastest growing newspaper category in the 1980s. In the early and mid- 1990s, the sector took advantage of the new ‘socialist market economy’ and enjoyed an accelerated growth described by some as the ‘evening newspaper fever’ (Ai 1996b). While the total number of evening newspaper titles grew from 14

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to 39 during 1981 and 1991, the number rocketed to 144 in 1996 (Xiang 2002). In 1995, there were three evening titles whose average daily circulation was over one million. As to advertising revenue, in the same year, two evening titles passed the 300 million RMB mark, three achieved more than 100 million RMB, and another six delivered more than 40 million RMB. In comparison, daily circulation of most provincial morning Party organs ranged from 200,000 to 400,000, while their advertising revenue was between 20 and 40 million RMB (Ai 1996b). As of the end of 1997, with an average daily circulation of more than one million copies, advertising revenue of both the Shanghai-based Xinmin Evening News and the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News reached 500  million RMB, ranking first and third respectively in the newspaper industry nationwide. In addition, advertising revenue of both Tianjin’s Tonight’s News and Nanjing’s Yangtze Evening News reached 220  million RMB, ranking eighth and ninth respectively.1 However, as will be discussed shortly, despite its great market success, the evening paper sector would soon face some grave challenges due to the rise of the tabloid press sector from the mid-1990s. The emergence of semi-independent popular media. From the mid-1980s and particularly the early 1990s, instead of imposing a homogeneous and monolithic regulation policy on China’s enormous news media industry, the government started to apply different regulatory strategies to different categories of media. When it came to the newspaper sector, for example, the government largely focused its control on Party organs while considerably relaxing its regulation of non-Party organ titles (Chan 1993; Chu 1994; Yu 1994; Wu 1997; Zhao 1998). Due to this change, some semi-­ independent Chinese press outlets started to emerge. Though the development of such outlets always faced some uncertainties given the CCP’s fear of any suggestion of media privatization and liberalization, their emergence and zigzagging development presented a prominent feature of China’s socialist journalism. During the 1990s and 2000s, a ‘semi-independent’ media outlet (or company), as I have discussed elsewhere (Huang 2000, 2007a), normally took one of these four forms: (1) Contracted out from the license-holder (chengbao zhi). Contractual media outlets, which were predominantly newspaper and magazine titles, were those which were officially registered in the name of, and supervised by, relevant government departments (or their sub-units) or semi-official organizations such as workers’ unions and professional associations but

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which in reality were contracted out to certain individuals or groups. Typically, the contractor would pay the license-holder a fixed sum regularly for authorization to publish a newspaper under its name but ‘is held responsible for the editing, printing, distribution, taxation, and all other expenses’ (Chan 1993, p.  9). Except for Party press organs that were directly controlled by the CCP’s propaganda departments at various levels, all other smaller and less politically important Chinese newspapers (and magazines) were normally under the control of relevant responsible government departments as license-holders. However, under the new ‘socialist market economy’, many responsible departments saw that publishing a newspaper was more like running a business than propaganda work for the Party. They were politically qualified to obtain a license but had little, if any, knowledge of journalism. Potential contractors thus saw the opportunity of hatching their ‘eggs’ (money/career) by borrowing a ‘hen’ (license) and, in nearly all cases, transforming the existing title (sometimes renaming it as well) into a reader-oriented popular outlet.2 (2) Commercialized subsidiary outlets of major Party organs. Though experiments with the ‘one main outlet many subsidiary media’ practice started as early as the mid-1980s, it was not until the early and mid-1990s that the practice became universal and more dynamic across the media industry. When it came to the newspaper sector, by the mid- to late 1990s, nearly all major newspaper titles, particularly Party press organs, had established their popular subsidiary press portfolios (Liu 1998). For example, by the end of 1998, the Beijing-based Economic Daily, an influential government organ, had expanded as a quasi-press group with one principal newspaper (Economic Daily), three subsidiary newspapers (Top Brands, Fashion Times, and China Flowers & Plants News), and three magazines (China Managers, National New Products, and Chinese Economic Information), as well as one publishing company (the Economic Daily Publishing House) and one correspondence university (Beijing Economic Correspondence University).3 A diversified media structure was of particular importance to morning Party press organs like the Economic Daily. Differing from largely propaganda-oriented and more strictly controlled Party press organs themselves as general newspapers, their market-­oriented and normally specialized subsidiary outlets enjoyed considerable autonomy in editorial, personnel, and financial matters.4 Similarly, many radio and television stations based in major cities also diversified their structure and expanded their programming by launching commercialized and specialized new, subsidiary stations/channels. In many cases, popular

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subsidiary outlets were often internally contracted out to teams headed by adventurous senior staff from their parent outlets, arming to encourage some sort of entrepreneurship in a still conservative and apathetic media organizational culture on the one hand, and to create a regime of responsibility and accountability on the other (Chan 1993; Zhao 1998). (3) Joint-venture outlets. For four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the Chinese state remained the only legal owner and investor of the news media industry. No private or foreign ownership was permitted, nor were private or foreign funds allowed to enter the industry. The early 1990s, however, witnessed the emergence of some joint media ventures run by relevant Chinese and overseas media organizations (Chan 1993; Yu 1994). However, even under the CCP’s pragmatic ‘socialist market economy’, foreign ownership of Chinese media, particularly news media, remained one of the most politically sensitive issues in China. In late 1994, the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP circulated a ban on joint-­ venture media (Zhao 1998, p. 176). With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, however, this practice was reintroduced as the government faced mounting pressure from domestic and foreign investors. In October 2001, for example, just weeks before China’s formal entry into the WTO, Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television (co-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Star Group and Chinese capital) was granted permission to directly broadcast non-news programs to cable television viewers in Guangdong Province. This marked China’s first steps to opening to foreign satellite television after a decade’s resistance (Space Daily 2001). Less than two weeks after the Phoenix deal, Hong Kong-based China Entertainment Television (CETV) also gained permission to provide non-­ news Mandarin programs to Guangdong’s cable television channels. However, the deal was conditional. In return for ‘landing rights’ in Guangdong, CETV’s parent company, AOL Times Warner, agreed to distribute the official China Central Television’s (CCTV) English-language Channel-9 by cable to three American cities (Landler 2001, quoted in Lee 2003, p. 9). Similarly, in December 2001, one week after China’s formal entry into the WTO, Rupert Murdoch’s Star Group signed a deal with CCTV, China International Television Corp, and Guangdong Cable TV Network. According to relevant agreements, Star would distribute its new Mandarin-language general entertainment channel to cable systems in Guangdong from early 2002, and in return, News Corp’s Fox Cable Networks agreed to distribute CCTV-9 to its US market. This was the first

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time that China had granted a new foreign channel cable carriage right in the mainland (People’s Daily 2004). Following this were a series of post-­ WTO deals (for more detail, see Huang 2000). (4) Industry-involved media. Also starting from the mid- to late 1990s, some domestic and overseas non-media industries (this was where this practice differed from joint-venture media as discussed above) began to test their luck by investing in certain Chinese print media outlets. Typical examples included the Guangzhou-based medicine company Triple Nine Group’s investment in the New Bulletin magazine based in the same city in 1997; the international medicine company Chengcheng Group’s investment in Hope magazine and Singapore’s Fuguo Group’s investments in Personal Computer (magazine), Scientific and Technological New Times (magazine), and Computer Weekly (newspaper), all of which were based in Guangzhou, in 1998; and in Beijing, the computer company Lianxiang Group’s purchasing of China Scientific News owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Yang 1998). Like the case of ‘joint-venture media’, the practice of industry-involved media was initially a gray area under China’s media regulation. It was not until early 2004, after an experimental period of more than two years, that the government released a carefully worded document to formally recognize domestic private investors’ right to invest in and partly own a media company, and to indirectly recognize foreign investors’ same right (Ansfield 2004; People’s Daily 2004). However, this green light from the government came with a carefully crafted ‘dual track’ policy to ensure the political safety of this big move. This policy was designed to separate media organizations’ editorial and business operations. According to this policy, the editorial sectors of media organizations had to remain state-monopolized, and no overseas or private investors would be allowed to be invovled. The operational sectors, however, could be split off from the editorial sectors and restructured into commercial companies. And these companies were allowed to be open to private and foreign investors, though relevant state media organizations must remain as controlling shareholders (China Business Infocenter 2004a, 2004b; News Front 2002). However, with regard to (non-­ political) magazine publishers, they might compete for government permission to license their brand names and content for publication on the Chinese mainland (BusinessWeek Magazine 2003). The rise of China’s ‘socialist tabloids’. I once described the sharp rise of a new tabloid press sector from the mid-1990s and its replacement of the Party organ sector as the new dominant force in the daily newspaper

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market by the early 2000s as ‘arguably the most significant structural changes in China’s newspaper industry in the era of reform’ (Huang 2016, p. 654). In the remainder of this chapter, I shall focus my discussion on this extraordinary journalistic development.

4.2  The Rise of a Tabloid Journalism with Chinese Characteristics 4.2.1   Commercialization as Popularization The discussion of China’s market-oriented media reforms during the mid-­1980s and mid-1990s above highlighted some great efforts from both media policy makers and particularly the media industry (despite their competing interests and varying views on how far the reforms should go and in which ways) to structurally diversify and financially vitalize the inefficient industry, particularly the huge and loss-making Party press organ sector. Journalistically, those reforms were essentially centered around how China’s state-owned and subsidized boring traditional socialist news media outlets might be popularized and thus become more salable in the marketplace under the new ‘socialist market economy’. In other words, journalistic reforms during this period were essentially about revisiting and revitalizing popular journalism as an important journalistic genre. However, it was not until the rise of a new tabloid sector from the mid-1990s that popular journalism came to the center stage of post-Mao China’s press reforms. Traditionally, during the ‘good’ old days when the government took sole responsibility for newspapers’ financial management under the planned economy (whether profit or loss), a rigid press control policy would have little if any financial consequence for a particular newspaper title or the pockets of its staff. However, as discussed, by the early and mid-1990s, this old funding model had been greatly depreciated and, in many cases abandoned. This drastic change was particularly tough for the morning Party press organs that had long been grumbling noisily about their disadvantageous position under the CCP’s traditional media regulations in comparison to the Party-led municipal evening newspapers. This explained why most of the early market-oriented journalistic and business initiatives discussed above were primarily pioneered by the morning Party press organ sector. However, by the mid-1990s, many Party organ titles

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disappointedly found that despite all those early initiatives, they were still unable to compete with municipal evening newspapers as their market rivals. This was due to two main reasons: (1) they simply did not have the privilege to monopolize those initiatives and nearly all of them were in reality also taken up by their evening paper components, and (2) more importantly, those reform strategies might have slightly softened, yet by no means changed, their set role as Party propaganda tools (while the evening newspapers were basically defined as popular official newspapers with more reader-oriented coverage). In other words, under the CCP’s existing press policy, these morning Party organs faced an awkward and ironic dilemma: on the one hand, the market logic now dictated that even as Party organs they must sooner or later become financially self-sufficient; on the other hand, as the backbone of the CCP’s propaganda machine, they must continue to serve the Party’s propaganda aims and were not allowed to transform themselves into commercialized popular titles. Particularly, in many provincial capital cities, facing a direct challenge from their same-city evening paper rivals, many morning Party organs even faced a market survival crisis due to heavy loss of advertising revenue. It became quite a common phenomenon that in many capital cities, while advertisers had to wait for days and in some cases even a few weeks to publish their advertisements in evening papers, morning Party organs had to hunt desperately for advertisers (Chen and Huang 1997; Tang 1997). As Xi Wenju, then deputy editor-in-chief of the Sichuan Daily (mouthpiece of CCP Committee of Sichuan Province) and editor-in-chief of the PRC’s first tabloid title, as will be discussed shortly, lamented: ‘Along with the development of the market economy, provincial morning Party press organs have been terribly left out in the cold by advertisers’ (Xi 1996, p. 9). Thus, for provincial morning Party organs, if they were to survive in a life-and-death competition with evening papers, launching one or even a few non-daily and specialized commercialized subsidiary outlets, as they had tried, would not provide them with a substantial competitive edge. Instead, they would have little choice but to launch their own commercialized general-interest daily titles. Consequently, in the mid-1990s, four and a half decades after the founding of the PRC and 15 years into the era of reform, provincial Party organ publishers were finally given permission by China’s top media policy-decision bodies—the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP and the Press and Publication Bureau of the State Council—to publish a commercialized popular daily newspaper title, paralleling their existing propaganda organ title.5

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Initiated by the publication of the Sichuan Daily’s West China Metro News in 1995, by late 1998, in a little more than three years, about 20, or two-thirds of, provincial Party organ publishers had launched their commercialized daily titles (News Front 1999). These included the aforementioned West China City News, the Shanxiang Metro News established by the Hunan Daily, the Shanqing Metro News owned by the Shannxi Daily, the Southern Metro News founded by the Southern Daily, the Yanzhao Metro News operated by the Hebei Daily, the Chutian Metro News run by the Hubei Daily, the Dahe Cultural News belonging to the Henan Daily, the Jiangnan Metro News of the Jiangxi Daily, the Guizhou Metro News published by the Guizhou Daily, and the Fujian Daily’s Straits Metro News (Lan 1997; Wu 1998). Significantly, nearly all of these titles appeared in those provincial capitals with existing municipal evening papers (Li and Jia 1999). By the early 2000s, the ‘metro paper’ model had become a universal practice across the Party organ sector and most national, provincial, and municipal Party organ publishers had launched at least one metro paper title (Huang 2007b). Named after a commonly used family name (in most cases) dushi bao (metro paper), these new titles brought China’s journalism a range of greatly innovative and sometimes controversial  journalistic and business initiatives. Because of their very different theoretical approach and practice from both their parent Party organs and their rival evening papers and great market success as discussed below, they were widely regarded by critics as a separate press category. 4.2.2   The ‘Metro Paper Phenomenon’: Tabloids with Chinese Characteristics Most early metro papers were evening papers. This was mainly due to a long-time journalistic tradition in the PRC. As mentioned earlier, historically, as the two main sectors of the Party press, the morning Party organs were generally defined as propaganda oriented while the evening papers were largely designed to be more reader oriented. Consequently, it became an unspoken rule or conventional thinking in the press community that any commercialized general newspaper should naturally be an evening paper while the morning press market must be spared for more politically important Party organs. This was exactly the situation that the first metro titles faced. However, according to existing press policy, a city could only have one newspaper titled ‘… Evening News’ (wanbao). Therefore,

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relevant morning Party organs had to publish their new commercialized dailies in the evening but give them a new ‘family’ name (dushi bao) (Lan 1997). However, ‘these’ evening papers were not ‘those’ (traditional) evening papers. In October 1995, being newly appointed as editor-in-chief of the country’s very first metro paper the West China Metra News, Xi Wenju, as referred to earlier, significantly identified these new evening titles as ‘new evening papers’, claiming they had their own distinctive characteristics from ‘traditional’ evening papers. As discussed in the previous chapter, in China’s press circles, before the emergence of these ‘new’ evening papers, the traditional understanding of the role of evening papers was that they should become ‘the supplement of morning dailies’ by providing ordinary urban residents with soft news, entertainment, and applied information. Arguing that this traditional thesis advanced by Zhao Chaogou, editor-in-­chief of Shanghai-based influential Xinmen Evening News, in the 1980s (Ding 2007) had become ‘outmoded’, Xi saw that metro papers like his own title had two distinctive characteristics compared with these traditional evening papers. First, taking a non-elite approach, metro papers covered far more diverse and comprehensive service-oriented news and information that well served the needs of ordinary urban households in their everyday lives. Xi made it clear that the target readership of his newspaper was ‘middle and lower-middle classes urban residents’. Xi argued that if newspaper articles and columns were welcomed by an elite readership but unable to attract grassroots readers, then ‘your newspaper will stay in the printing factory forever’. Xi was very mindful that his title must serve its ‘God’, meaning the local ordinary urban readers, ‘heart and soul’ (Xi 1995, p. 32). He argued that a great deal of service-oriented news/information (such as change of bus timetable) might not have much ‘news value’ but very high ‘use value’ for readers. Second, Xi argued, in contrast to traditional evening newspapers that defined themselves as ‘the supplement of morning dailies’ (which were predominantly Party organs) with something ‘trivial’ consumed by readers ‘after meal and tea’, metro papers defined themselves as modern metropolitan outlets that aimed to provide urban readers with comprehensive news and information relating to every aspect of their daily life. In short, Xi concluded that ‘[e]mphasis on applied news and information and making their news stories more informative and more interesting have been the main features of “new evening newspapers”’ (Xi 1995, p. 32). Xi’s arguments here were important. However, they were far from the whole story behind the market success of these new metro titles. Another of their crucial collective characteristics, which Xi had seemingly deliberately

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though understandably (in a still largely elitist and culturally conservative political-journalistic environment) avoided mentioning, was a huge amount of coverage of fun and sensational stories. Being ‘invented’ and spearheaded by Xi himself, his own West China Metro News was the pioneer and arguably the best ‘perpetrator’ in this regard. In his paper, readers would have little difficulty in finding stories about crime, violence, and sex. For a while the paper went so far that one reader even sent a letter to its editorial office to complain about the ‘strong smell of blood and gunpowder’ in some of its stories. The same reader claimed that according to his research, during 12–18 October 1998, stories relating to ‘murder, robbery, rape, sex, and violence’ in the newspaper represented about 50 percent of the total number of stories in its main news pages. On another occasion, a reader questioned the ethics and legitimization of a particularly unpleasant headline: ‘Lost Deposit While Getting No Pay: She Wants to Skin Him Alive’.6 Moreover, metro papers not only hunted for hot stories but also often ‘bought in’ such stories or ‘devised’ (cehua) campaigns on sensational topics by exploiting the media’s agenda-setting function. Again, Xi’s West China Metro News, for example, openly stated that it would pay a good price for ‘good’ leads or stories from reliable sources. According to one source, the newspaper once spent 400,000 RMB to launch a series of investigative reports on missing children.7 Another series of investigative stories ‘organized’ by the newspaper was about how police were rescuing young prostitutes from the hands of criminals. That series alone, it was reported, boosted the paper’s circulation by 10,000 during the eight-day campaign (Ai 1996b). It was reported that from 1995 to 1996, within just over one year, the newspaper published 15 influential investigative report series alongside numerous smaller ones. Some of these were reprinted or transmitted by dozens of other media outlets across the country. Influential national news media such as China Central Television, the Xinhua News Agency, the Shanghai-based Wenhui Daily, and the Beijing-based Guangrning Daily even once took part in the newspaper’s investigative reports. The paper thus became quickly well known nationwide. As Ai wrote: Investigative reports have virtually never been absent from the newspaper’s daily coverage since its publication on New Year’s Day 1995. Sometimes the paper even published several investigative reports within one edition. These stories, just like scene after scene of a soap, have attracted urban readers’ interest to the utmost. (Ai 1996b, p. 17)

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As Xi Wenju, and his senior adviser Ai Feng, frankly admitted, two ‘secrets’ of the newspaper’s success were ‘targeting ordinary urban citizens rather than an elite readership’ (Xi 1995, p.  32) and ‘launching investigative report series’ focusing on ‘small’ social problems with high common interest but not ‘big’ concerns relating to sensitive political and policy issues (Ai 1996b). Though Xi’s new, and sometimes controversial,  popular journalistic philosophy and practice caused fervent debates in China’s press circles and journalistic academia, and some critics even likened his paper to the American penny press of the nineteenth century,8 most readers thoroughly enjoyed his paper, and other metro titles almost immediately followed suit.9 Most early metro titles were broadsheet-sized; however, by the early 2000s, nearly all of these early titles were downsized to tabloids (in the form of a typical ‘compact’ or hybrid ‘Berliner’ size). In the meantime, most newly established metro papers in the 2000s adopted tabloid size from the very beginning of their launch. By now, they had become truly ‘China’s state-run tabloids’ (Huang 2000) in terms of both content and style. However, it would be completely wrong to assume that metro papers had no interest in covering important political, economic, social, and international issues. The only difference was that, unlike Party organs, they reported these issues by shortening and softening/sensationalizing relevant stories and in a playful presentation and writing style, including using oral language and local dialect, from the angle of common townspeople (Huang et al. 2002). Still, it is important to note that all metro papers introduced highly competitive operational mechanisms into their newsrooms which had little to do with China’s traditional ‘socialist’ newsroom culture. They differed from both their parent Party organs and the traditional evening papers in many aspects of their organizational structure and everyday operation: personnel policy, administrative structure, salary system, distribution strategy, and the role of editors and reporters in news production. Regarding their personnel policy, for example, except for a few senior personnel who were appointed by their parent papers, all other staff members were recruited by external advertisements and on a contractual basis (Lan 1997). If they worked hard and well, they could be paid twice or even triple what a university lecturer could earn. On the other hand, they could be ruthlessly fired when failing to perform effectively. Nearly all metro titles from the very beginning had to run their businesses on a financially self-sufficient basis. In many cases, start-up capital

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was either derived from bank loans or borrowed from their parent papers. A start-up capital of over 30  million RMB for the Henan Daily’s Dahe Cultural News, for example, was funded by a bank loan (Zhu 1997). Moreover, as mentioned earlier, before the emergence of metro papers in the mid-1990s, China already had more than 100 evening newspapers and nearly all metro papers were launched in those provincial capital cities with existing evening newspaper titles (Li and Jia 1999). Therefore, from day one, these metro titles were under huge financial and market pressure and had to adopt bold journalistic and business strategies to survive. It is also important to note that by early 1998, nearly all metro papers had changed their publication time from afternoon to morning (Wu 1998), while all later launched metro titles from the very beginning were published as morning newspapers. This marked metro papers’ final separation from the ‘evening paper’ concept and became a different and separate newspaper category from both their parent Party organs and traditional evening newspapers. This was soon ‘officially’ recognized. In late 1998, editors-in-chief of metro newspapers across the country gathered for a conference in Chengdu, Sichuan. A story on the conference published in the News Front, a leading Chinese journalists’ trade journal published by the People’s Daily, declared that metro papers had become a ‘very competitive and vigorous new press category’ with a ‘good future’ (News Front 1999). This recognition was apparently based on the sector’s remarkable journalistic and market performance. For example, in the first year of its publication, the West China Metro News earned profits of more than 600,000 RMB (Ai 1996b). By the end of 1998, within fewer than four years since its launch, the young paper had achieved an average daily circulation of 500,000 copies mainly through street sales and private subscriptions and an advertising income of 130 million RMB.10

4.3  Impact and Implications of Popular Journalistic Practices I once summarized my analysis of the impact of metro papers on China’s journalism as ‘three versus’: metro papers vs. traditional evening papers; metro papers vs. Party organs; and professional journalism vs. Party journalism (Huang 2001). While I noted the journalistic significance of these

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magnificently creative and vibrant new tabloid titles, I was also mindful of their institutional limitations: though market-oriented city newspapers are not independent operations but additional offerings of Party organs  and therefore have little to do with the concept of press freedom, their emergence and rapid development significantly illustrate that the heyday of propaganda-oriented Party and government organs in China is apparently over, even though they still formally remain the authoritative voice of the ruling power. (Huang 2001, p. 435)

Two decades on, much has changed in the metro paper sector and China’s journalism at large, as will be discussed in the next two chapters. Yet, I believe that my abovementioned analysis of the impact of the metro press on China’s journalism and its limitations as a press model still largely holds true. Below, I shall examine this matter further by reviewing some of my previous ideas while also adding some new thoughts. I shall discuss the ‘impact’ aspect first here, and then ‘limitations’ a little later in 4.4. Metro papers as ‘true’ popular titles. Traditional evening newspapers’ efforts to meet common urban residents’ news and information needs and major Party organs-pioneered page expansion fever, weekend edition fever, and experiment with market-oriented specialized subsidiary titles, as discussed earlier, were all important developments collectively toward a more popular journalism in the era of reform. It was, however, the tabloid metro titles that reached the point of being the PRC’s first ‘real’ popular (non-elite and non-orthodox) general-interest daily newspaper titles for their commitment to serving an ordinary urban readership in an unprecedented serious and systematic manner. This may be best viewed by comparing them with the traditional evening papers. In Chengdu, for example, the rise of the West China Metro News (and some other commercialized newspapers in the city, particularly the Chengdu Business News) in the mid-1990s greatly contributed to the rapid decline of the once local market leader Chengdu Evening News. Before the publication of the West China Metro News in 1995, the Chengdu Evening News as the sole evening newspaper title in Chengdu had monopolized the local popular paper market since the mid-1980s. Consequently, for over a decade, it put serious pressure on the Sichuan Daily. For example, in 1995, whereas the Sichuan Daily, as a provincial paper, had a daily circulation of 380,000 and an advertising revenue of 40  million RMB, the Chengdu

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Evening News, a municipal paper, generated a daily circulation of 280,000 but its advertising revenue was 137 million RMB, or 3.4 times that of the former and ranking tenth nationally.11 However, with the rise of the West China Metro News (among other highly market-oriented titles) from the mid-1990s, within less than four years, the average daily circulation of the Chengdu Evening News dropped dramatically by more than 30 percent to only 180,000–190,000 (in  1998). Similarly, during the same period, its advertising revenue was down to 80–90  million RMB.12 According to another source, in a local industry meeting in 1998, local authorities declared that the paper had been heavily in debt, in excess of 300 million RMB. Visible evidence of this was when construction of a 20-storey complex in the heart of Chengdu, financed by the newspaper, had been halted halfway through for several years due to financial difficulties.13 Significantly, this was far from being an isolated case, and similar stories also appeared in many other capital cities (Wu 1998). It should be noted that evening papers as a group had by now never completely cut off their ties with the traditional planned economy. This was typically reflected in the fact that some evening newspapers including the Chengdu Evening News remained the official organs of relevant municipal Party committees and therefore they continued to use this ‘advantage’ to promote their circulation by relying on Party/government administrative powers (Xi 1995). More importantly, historically, evening papers had identified themselves as the supplement of morning Party organs with more soft news and softened official materials. This historical weakness was exacerbated by their long-time monopoly of China’s evening paper market under the ‘one city, one evening paper’ model. In other words, strictly speaking, they may be described as quasi-popular titles and their ‘success’ as a group from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s was largely a ‘victory’ without rivals. Consequently, when metro papers as ‘real’ popular titles suddenly emerged, the once hidden weaknesses of evening papers were exposed. By the early 2000s with more and more new metro paper titles entering the popular daily newspaper market, the evening paper sector slipped even further and faced a crisis of legitimacy. As a result, the sector was forced to undergo a collective defection to the wonderland of metro papers with its adoption of the latter’s sensational journalistic approach and highly market-­driven capitalist business model and even, quite ironically, change in publication time from afternoon to morning while still keeping their ‘… Evening News’ paper names. This development suggested the obvious convergence of the two previously quite different newspaper categories, which was also later officially accepted by the newspaper industry itself,

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media researchers, as well as China’s media regulatory bodies (e.g., see Jin 2005; Wang 2005). Party organs’ journalistic legitimacy crisis in the era of metro papers. Despite its considerable market success in the pre-metro paper era as discussed earlier, journalistically, the traditional evening paper sector’s impact on the morning Party organ sector was limited due to its set role as ‘the supplement of morning dailies’. In other words, it had always cautiously lived under the long shadow of the morning Party organs as undisputable heavyweights of Chinese journalism. However, metro papers deliberately chose not to follow the path of traditional evening papers in this regard but defined themselves as full-fledged reader-oriented tabloid titles. Ironically, however, for their parent Party organ titles, this creative and vibrant new popular journalistic approach adopted by their own new ‘babies’ soon proved a great challenge to themselves. Among other things (such as jealousy and tensions caused by metro paper titles’ flexible salary policy and thus their staff’s higher income level than those who worked with their parent titles), one unexpected and undesirable (as far as some conservative Party officials and journalists were concerned) major by-­ product of the rise of metro titles was that their great journalistic and market success inevitably put a serious question mark on Party organs’ journalistic legitimacy. This was like an revolution from within. This was again typically reflected in the case of the West China Metro News and its parent paper, the Sichuan Daily. For example, the daily circulation of the West China Metro News jumped five-fold from about 100,000 to more than 500,000 during 1996 and 1998, while its advertising revenue grew more than 16-fold, from 8 million RMB to 130 million RMB.  However, during the same period, the daily circulation of the Sichuan Daily dropped nearly 16 percent from 380,000 to 320,000, while its advertising revenue suffered a disastrous freefall, down by as much as 50 percent, from 40 million to 20 million RMB.14 More significantly, the circulation of the Sichuan Daily, like most other Party organs, relied predominantly on compulsory subscription from government departments using taxpayers’ money. There were virtually no private subscribers to it, and it would be news itself if one could find the newspaper on display at any newsstand in Chengdu. In contrast, circulation of the West China Metro News was achieved primarily by street sales and private subscription. Though the data mentioned here (and earlier when I compared circulation and advertising income of the West China Metro News and the Chengdu Evening News) are provisional or estimated from personal interviews with local industrial insiders, in view of China’s

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lack of an independent auditor then,15 they by and large reflect a general trend of the development of the two newspapers which was also consistently supported by data in relevant subsequent official survey reports on the newspaper industry as well as relevant research papers (as cited in this and other relevant chapters). Such an irony existed between nearly all other metro titles and their parent Party organs (Yang 1999). According to NPPB, while an additional 113 new metro titles were published during 2000 and 2006, by the mid-2000s, the rapid expansion period of the newspaper industry driven predominantly by the strong growth of the metro paper sector since the mid-1990s peaked (NPPB 2007b, 2007c). The competition among three major players in the daily newspaper market—metro papers, evening papers, and Party organs— since the mid-1990s had by now largely drawn to a close with the triumph of an expanded popular press sector consisting of mainly metro papers and evening papers against the Party organ sector. By the end of 2005, the popular press sector had held obvious supremacy against the Party organ sector in the marketplace, as shown clearly in relevant NPPB survey reports. For example, in 2005, the popular press sector had 287 titles in total, compared with the Party organ sector’s 438 titles (a 151-title difference). However, in the same year, the former accounted for more than 40 percent of total copies of newspapers printed (compared with the latter’s share of 22.1%) and more than 60 percent of total sheets of newsprint used (compared with the latter’s share of 18.1%) nationwide. In terms of its financial performance, the popular press sector accounted for nearly 47 percent of the newspaper industry’s overall revenue and 50 percent of the industry’s total pre-tax income (compared with the Party organ sector’s share of 32% in both categories) (NPPB 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2007d). Among the 19 newspapers whose turnover passed the 500 million RMB mark in 2005, 14 were popular titles (NPPB 2007d, pp. 94–95). In the same year, there were 25 popular press titles whose average printed copies per issue passed the 500,000 mark (NPPB 2007b, pp. 53, 56), proving themselves truly the readers’ choice. Such comparisons are even more significant when considering the Party organ sector’s reliance on forced office subscription. In this context, the two sectors were virtually incomparable. Journalistically, the biggest challenge of the Party organ sector was that by now it had had nearly nothing to do with the general public’s everyday information needs as it had been completely driven out of the private subscription and retail sale market. This had literally  declared the sector’s journalistic and market death, despite its symbolic existence as one important part of the Party-state’s authoritarian political-ideological fabric.

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A lesson to elite journalism. The rise and reign of the popular metro press sector also sent a message to elite journalism advocates from both the conservative and reformist camps of Chinese journalism. For conservatives who had believed in the so-called ‘scientific’ Party press doctrine that originated in Yan’an, they would need to take a deep breath and think about their view again. It could not have been clearer by now that from a popular journalistic perspective, there was absolutely no point in having a large Party organ sector whose anti-journalistic and anti-market logic existence was simply a waste of resources. For those liberal-minded journalists, media scholars, and critics who had believed in the myth that fighting for a liberal elite journalism was all about China’s journalistic reforms, they might also need to rethink their view on ‘trivial’ popular journalism. The 1990s witnessed the rise of a new generation of everyday journalists who were making a living and, for some, a career too by providing their everyday country men and women with interesting news, sensational stories, useful information, and from time-to-time critical reports as well. Most of them as unknown ordinary journalists were the unsung heroes behind the success of their papers. This new, popular professional identity was very different from that of their ‘elite’ peers who saw their role as journalists as primarily to educate/enlighten their audience. This development was historically significant, considering the long history of ideological and moral discrimination and even political repression (under Mao) against popular journalism. The emergence of a professional journalistic culture. Journalistic professionalism (or professionalization)—a set of shared philosophical belief and work norms and protocols by news media organizations and journalists— may be defined and practiced in different ways in different political and cultural contexts. In the case of China, relevant discussion has been largely centered around the ‘universal vs cultural’ debate. The ‘universal’ approach sees the common value of the dominant understanding of journalistic professionalism based on modern Western commercial journalistic practices as the supposed general or ideal benchmark. This understanding is typically reflected in the ten should-be or ought-to-be principles of journalism as discussed in Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007, pp.  5–6): ‘1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. 2. Its first loyalty is to citizens. 3. Its essence is a discipline of verification. 4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. 5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power. 6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. 7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. 8. It must keep the news comprehensive and in proportion. 9. Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their

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personal conscience. 10. Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news.’16 Influenced by this model, most studies on the issue of journalistic professionalism (and indeed, journalism in general) in post-Mao China have focused primarily, and sometimes nearly exclusively, on the political aspect of the matter, namely: the degree of freedom that Chinese media/journalists may have to fulfill their watchdog role as supposedly their first and foremost professional responsibility (e.g., Chol 2014; Hassid 2018; Lee 1994; Svensson 2014, 2017; Tong 2011, 2019). Yu, for example, while noting some positive professional changes in China’s journalism emerging from media commercialization in the early 1990s, warned that ‘if a free press is the hallmark of journalistic professionalization, then China still has a long way to go’ (Yu 1994, pp. 35, 36). However, some others have argued about a ‘cultural’ approach which may help to paint a richer and more meaningful picture of the diverse and discursive practice of journalistic professionalism in China’s specific and changing socio-political and socio-cultural context (e.g., Liu 2017; Pan and Lu 2003; Simons et al. 2017). Liu (2017), for example, even chose ‘journalistic culture’ rather than ‘journalistic professionalism’ as the analytical framework of her study of a group of metro paper journalists. Like Pan and Lu (2003) and Simons et al. (2017), her study focused on the question of ‘the meaning of doing journalism, rather than professionalism’, a term which, as Liu  saw it, ‘is more or less nominal, expressing mostly the aspiration part of the entire puzzle’ and also ‘intends to compare journalism and journalists with their Western counterparts’ in a by and large abstract way (Liu 2017, pp. 17, 18). Liu argued that: the essence of Western-style professionalism is to enable journalists to tell objective truth, which is precisely what Chinese journalists cannot do. They cannot remain objective, because there is simply too much social injustice, driving them to side with the disadvantaged. They have even less capacity to tell the truth because there are various forces in China preventing them from revealing truth. (Liu 2017, p. 97)

Thus, those journalists she interviewed nearly inevitably experienced an ‘aspiration-frustration-reconciliation’ process. Despite the insights of the ‘cultural’ approach as reflected in the three empirical studies cited above, it seems to me that the ‘universal’ approach’s value for Chinese journalism/journalists remains. Interestingly, for example, in each of these three studies, the Western model of journalistic professionalism, which was no stranger to most Chinese journalists, seemingly served as

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the visible or invisible reference for relevant practices in the Chinese context. Without this framework as a general  (even seemingly somewhat idealistic and Westerncentric) benchmark or reference as such, a Chinese  ‘cultural’ approach may become both theoretically and practically limited, if not sometimes even directionless. In other words, the fact that some of those sampled media outlets and journalists in those studies were unable or chose not to follow this model due to complex political, institutional, commercial, and/ or personal reasons does not necessarily deny its ‘universal’ theoretical value. At least, this ideal model and specific practices in the Chinese context may inform and enrich each other. I really did not see much, if any, theoretical contradiction between the ‘universal’ and ‘cultural’ approaches. Journalistic professionalism in contemporary China should be understood as essentially a matter of the interaction (a complex process of clashing and hybridizing) between the changing Chinese ‘local’ (culture) and the Western ‘global’ (norms). One does not have to choose between the ‘universal’ approach and a ‘cultural’ perspective. Otherwise, we may lose the ‘big picture’ about the matter of journalistic professionalism in the Chinese context. For example, an issue in the current debate, as mentioned above, is that some liberal-oriented critics and journalists seem to often narrowly approach the ‘universal’ (Western) perspective of journalistic professionalism. They primarily, and sometimes solely, view it as a matter of individual media outlets’ and journalists’ commitment to, if not obligation for, practicing watchdog/investigative journalism. Relevant discussions have often con­ sciously or unconsciously led to a rigid understanding of ‘professionalism’ limited to ‘watchdog journalism’. As a result, there appears a lack of clearer or fuller realization and recognition of the often silent and invisible yet truly meaningful and important contribution of ‘ordinary’ outlets and journal­ ists, particularly those from popular outlets, to contemporary China’s pro­ fessional journalistic development. This is most prominently seen in the case of metro papers and their journalists who fulfilled their daily routine work during the heroic years of media commercialization in the 1990s and 2000s, as discussed in this chapter. As Sparks has insightfully noted: According to one, as yet unpublished, estimate there are around 300 investigative journalists in China, who have been the focus of numerous books and articles. There are, in total, perhaps 200,000 journalists in China. They and their symbolic activities are at least as much part of what constitutes Chinese journalism as their more visible fellows. So far, at least, what they do and what sense their audiences makes of their products, is seriously underexplored. (Sparks 2012, p. 65)

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In short, my point here is that in the Chinese context, where a Western-style serious media sector remains absent and the practice of watchdog journalism is difficult and limited, the contribution of market/audience-oriented popular journalism’s everyday journalistic practice to journalistic professionalism—as typically illustrated in the case of metro papers during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as more recent and more diverse popular journalistic practices in the digital era, as will be discussed in the next two chapters— should by no means be underestimated. To put it another, and somewhat radical, way, I would argue that in the current Chinese context, any journalistic idea and practice that may, in one way or another, help challenge the norms of grossly propaganda-oriented traditional Party journalism and foster public-oriented new or alternative journalistic discourses and possibilities including relevant ‘non-professional’ (not unprofessional) citizen journalistic practices can be generally placed under the domain of ‘professionalism’.

4.4  Limitations of the Metro Paper Model The limitations of the metro paper model can be viewed from several perspectives. First and foremost, institutionally, the sector was not an independent entity (despite its enjoying of a considerable degree of autonomy in editorial, financial, and personnel matters) but remained essentially state owned and controlled through its parent Party organ groups. Second, the impact of the metro paper sector on the Party press organ sector’s propagandistic journalistic legitimacy as discussed would inevitably make the CCP feel politically and ideological uneasy. It would be hard to imagine that the Party would ever allow popular tabloids and, indeed, popular journalism at large, to threaten the very existence of the Party press organ sector. This explained why, as will become clear,  when the newspaper industry was not doing well due to drastic political,  technological, and market changes later, the government, while reintroducing or increasing its subsidy to Party organ titles, chose to ruthlessly let popular titles struggle or even drown in the stormy sea. Third, the metro paper sector’s commitment to its ‘popular’ identify was not as rock-solid as it appeared to be. This was later clearly reflected in the sector’s strange and highly problematic ‘towards a mainstream press’ campaign that started in the mid-2000s that aimed to transform all metro titles as non-mainstream ‘small’ (trivial) newspapers into mainstream ‘large’ (serious) newspapers. While this move resulted from complex internal and external factors, the sector’s lack of deeper and more conscious

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philosophical belief in, and journalistic-cultural appreciation of, popular journalism did play a key role. Fourth and finally, until recently (from the early and mid-2010s), the sector’s ‘go online’ shift was late, reluctant, and incomprehensive, lacking serious and strategic thinking and planning. Despite its more recent catch­up efforts,  the sector’s online operations still face enormous challenges in  competing with more technologically savvy  and financially powerful major privately-owned  commercial online news portals, news search engines, and social media-based news apps. These limitations will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter and partially Chap. 6 as well.

Notes 1. ‘Advertising income of China’s main news media in 1995, 1996, and 1997’, unpublished data, collected during my visit to the Information Department, China Advertising Association, Beijing, 29 October 1998. 2. The influential World Economic Herald, as mentioned in the previous chapter, was probably the only exception. While most contractual media were pre-existing outlets and then transformed into reader-oriented popular outlets by their contractors, in the case of the Herald, it was the supposed contractor who had taken the initiative to persuade the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the World Economists Association to become a publisher on their behalf (Chan 1993) and used it to experiment with a liberal-­ oriented political journalism. 3. Personal interview with Zhan Guoshu, deputy editor-in-chief of the Economic Daily, Beijing, 28 October 1998. 4. Multiple confidential interviews with Chinese media officials, journalists, and journalism educators during my research trips to Beijing and Chengdu, October–November 1998. 5. For details, see relevant articles in relation to this matter published in News Front (a leading journalism trade journal published by the People’s Daily), issues 2, 4, and 6, 1999. 6. See Voices of Readers, an internal publication containing feedback from readers collected and edited  by the General Editing Office of the West China Metro News (No. 15, 25 October 1998). The headline referred to a malpractice prevalent among employers in China then. Because of high unemployment in the countryside, poor farmers were pouring into the cities to look for jobs. But they often became the victims of unscrupulous businesspeople. They were often required to give a certain sum to their employers as a ‘deposit’. If they failed to come up to their employers’ tough

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and often unlawful ‘standards’, they would be sacked and get no pay. Even worse, they quite often lost their deposit as well. And this often led to violence between employee and employer—as indicated in the story here. 7. Personal interview with Huang Xiaozhong, associate professor at the School of Journalism at Sichuan University, Chengdu, 3 November 1998. 8. Personal interview with Huang Xiaozhong, associate professor at the School of Journalism at Sichuan University, Chengdu, 3 November 1998. 9. For details of debates regarding the issue, see Ai (1996a, 1997), Liu (1997), Peng (1997), Zhang (1997), and Zhu (1997). 10. Personal interview with Ai Feng, former senior political correspondent of Sichuan Daily, currently editor of the Press Circles and senior advisor to the West China Metro News, Chengdu, 17–18 November 1998. 11. (1) Confidential interview, Chengdu, 18 November 1998. (2) ‘Advertising Income of China’s Main News Media in 1995’. 12. Confidential interview, Chengdu, 18 November 1998. 13. Confidential interviews, Chengdu, 10, 15–18 November 1998. 14. Confidential interviews, Chengdu, 10, 15–18 November 1998. 15. It was reported that circulation figures for the Chinese press were generally based on reports from relevant newspapers themselves. This led to some newspapers cheating advertisers by exaggerating their circulation figures. Aiming at preventing this unprofessional practice, the Chinese Newspaper Association established an independent bureau to audit Chinese newspaper circulation later. 16. For some, this may be a highly Western-centric and somewhat idealistic model which is difficult to achieve in full in practice even in established Western democracies. This is, however, not the right place to engage in the debate in detail on the merits and limitations of this model. Sylvie’s (2001) critical review of the book provides some insightful comments on this matter.

References Ai, F. (1996a) ‘Directive News and Popular News’, Press Circles (3): 7–9. Ai, F. (1996b) ‘Successful Experiment with Critical Reports in the West China Metro News’, Press Circles (4): 17–18, and 20. Ai, F. (1997) ‘Agenda-Setting and News Reform’, The Press Circles (2): 12–14. Ansfield, J. (2004, 10 February) ‘China to Let Private Investors Take Media Stakes’, Reuters, retrieved from: forbes.com/home_europe/newswire/2004/02/10/rtr1253221.html. BusinessWeek Magazine (2003, November 5) ‘Foreign Magazines Facing China’s Newsstand Fever’, retrieved from: www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/ doc/2003–11/05/content_278774.htm. Chan, J.M. (1993) ‘Commercialization without Independence: Trends and Tensions of Media Development in China’, in J.Y.S. Cheng and M. Brosseau

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(eds) China Review 1993, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press of Hong Kong: 1–21. Chen, H.L. and Huang, Y. (1997) ‘The Uneven Development of Chinese Newspapers’ Commercialisation,’ in J.M. Chan, L.L. Chu and Z.D. Pan (eds) Mass Communication and Market Economy, Hong Kong: Lo Fung Learned Society: 251–266. Cheng, S.T. (1997) ‘The Relationship of Chinese News Media and Chinese Enterprises’, in J.M. Chan, L.L. Chu and Z.D. Pan (eds) Mass Communication and Market Economy, Hong Kong: Lo Fung Learned Society: 237–250. China Business Infocenter (2004a, March 25) ‘Media Market Open, Competition Steams up’, retrieved from: www.cbiz.cn/news/showarticle.asp?id=2062. China Business Infocenter (2004b, February 12) ‘Media Moves towards Privatisation’, retrieved from: www.cbiz.cn/NEWS/showarticle.asp?id=2034. Chinese Journalism Association (1993) China Journalism Yearbook 1992, Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press. Chol, L.F. (2014) ‘The Development of Investigative Reporting and Journalistic Professionalism in Southern Weekend’, in E.S.  Marina Svensson (ed) Chinese Investigative Journalists’ Dreams: Autonomy, Agency and Voice, Lanham, MA: Lexington: 181–198. Chu, L.L. (1994) ‘Continuity and Change in China’s Media Reform’, Journal of Communication 44(3): 4–21. Deng, X.P. (1992) ‘Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai’, in X.P. Deng (1994) Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (Vol. III) (1982–1992), Beijing: Foreign Languages Press: 370–383. Ding, F.Z. (2007). ‘Care about Our Readers like Zhao Did’, in Association of Chinese Evening Paper Journalists (ed) Flying into Ordinary Households: Collection of Winning Works of the First Zhao Chaogou Evening Newspaper Awards, Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Press: 1–6. Fewsmith, J. (1997) ‘Reaction, Resurgence, and Succession: Chinese Politics since Tiananmen’, in R. MacFarquhar (ed) The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, Cambridge University Press: 472–532. Han, Y.F. (1988, January 2) ‘Find a Way out through Diverse Business Ventures’, Press and Publication Review. Hassid, J. (2018) China’s Unruly Journalists: How Committed Professionals Are Changing the People’s Republic, London and New York: Routledge. Huang, C. J. (1992) ‘The Major Trends of Chinese Newspaper Industry in the 1990s’, Press Circles, 1: 6–9; 2: 4–7. Huang, C.J. (2000) ‘The Development of a Semi-Independent Press in Post-Mao China: An Overview and a Case Study of Chengdu Business News’, Journalism Studies 1(4): 649–664. Huang, C.J. (2001) ‘China’s State-Run Tabloids: The Rise of “City Newspapers”’, International Communication Gazette 63(5): 435–450.

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Huang, C.J. (2007a) ‘From Control to Negotiation: Chinese Media in the 2000s’, International Communication Gazette 69(5): 402–412. Huang, C.J. (2007b) ‘Trace the Stones in Crossing the River: Media Structural Changes in Post-WTO China’, International Communication Gazette 69(5): 413–430. Huang, C.J. (2016). ‘Towards a Broadloid Press Approach: The Transformation of China’s Newspaper Industry since the 2000s’, Journalism 17(5): 652–667. Huang, C.J., Knight, A., and Davies, C.L. (2002) ‘Beyond Party Propaganda: A Case Study of China’s Rising Commercialized Press’, Ejournalist (ejournalist. au.com) 2(1): 1–21. Jin, B. (2005) ‘An Analysis of China’s top 20 Evening and Metro Papers in 2005’, China Newspaper Industry (8), retrieved from: http://wenku.baidu.com/ view/836cd836a32d7375a4178048.html. Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2007). The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Three Rivers Press. Lan, H.W. (1997) ‘The Rise of the Dahe Cultural News and the ‘Metro Newspaper Phenomenon’, Press Circles (2): 21–23. Landler, M. (2001, October 29) ‘AOL Gains Cable Rights in China by Omitting News, Sex, and Violence’, New York Times. Lee, C.C. (1994) ‘Ambiguities and Contradiction: Issues in China’s Changing Political Communication’, International Communication Gazette 53(1): 7–21. Lee, C.C. (ed) (2003) Chinese Media, Global Contexts, London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Li, B.Y. and Jia, Y.H. (1999) ‘My Market near Your Door: The Rise of Metro Newspapers’, News Front (2), retrieved from: www.peopledaily.com.cn/newsline/199902/990201011040.html. Liang, H. (1992) ‘Newspaper Management under the Socialist Market Economy’, Chinese Journalists (12): 4–5. Liu, B. (1998) ‘Chinese Newspaper Industry in the Era of Reform and Opening’, Press Circles (6): 5–7. Liu, W.S. (1997) ‘“News Directing” and Making News,’ Press Circles (1): 16. Liu, Z.X. (2017) Metro Newspaper Journalists in China: The Aspiration-­ Frustration-­Reconciliation Framework, London and New York: Routledge. NPPB (2007a) ‘Key Data on Newspaper Industry Changed Little’, in J. Lin and Y.M. Feng (eds) 2007 Chinese Newspaper Industry Development Report, Beijing, China: Social Sciences Publishing: 23–42. NPPB (2007b) ‘Progress Achieved across Different Sectors of the Newspaper Industry’, in J.  Lin and Y.M.  Feng (eds) 2007 Chinese Newspaper Industry Development Report, Beijing, China: Social Sciences Publishing: 43–86. NPPB (2007c) ‘The Development of Newspaper Industry Remains Stabile’, in J.  Lin and Y.M.  Feng (eds) 2007 Chinese Newspaper Industry Development Report, Beijing, China: Social Sciences Publishing: 4–22.

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CHAPTER 5

The Fall of Tabloids and Party Organs’ Dubious Resurgence

5.1   How the Metro Paper Sector Ran Into a Rock Wall 5.1.1   The Decade of Stagnation In a recently published piece, I divided the development of the tabloid metro press sector into three stages: the golden decade from the mid-­1990s to the mid-2000s; its stagnation in the following ten years; and its subsequent journalistic and financial fall, and literal death by the mid-2010s (Huang 2021). After the discussion of the sector’s rapid growth decade in Chap. 4, I shall now examine what had contributed to its subsequent stagnation below, and more recent fall a little later. It should be noted that as early as the early and mid-2000s when the sector was still rapidly expanding, concerns about its long-term journalistic and financial sustainability started to emerge. The strong growth of China’s tabloid-dominated daily newspaper sector’s circulation, readership penetration, and particularly advertising revenue peaked in, and started slowing down from, the mid-2000s (NPPB 2007). At the time, nearly 300 metro titles were following an almost identical journalistic approach and business model initiated by the West China Metro News, namely, relying for their ‘success’ on advertising income based on high

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circulation by playing, among other strategies, the sensationalism card. Due to the sector’s excessive expansion and a high degree of mimetic-­ isomorphism as such, it was not uncommon that in many capital cities, several metro titles were locked in fierce market competition and this often led to damaging circulation and advertising price wars. Having been in a comfortable position in the marketplace for years, the metro paper sector was also gradually losing its creative edge and reformist spirit. Moreover, by the mid-2000s, the ‘metro paper model’ had largely become a universal practice by all kinds of market-oriented popular press, being no longer a unique journalistic practice and business model monopolized by metro papers only (Huang, 2016; Tong 2005; Sun 2004). In the meantime, the fast-growing new media sector, being capable of providing audiences with not only much quicker and more up-to-date hard and soft news but also all sorts of other ‘fun’ materials, was also imposing growing pressure on the print media sector. In the context of the unfolding technological revolution, a new media-savvy younger generation with major purchasing power increasingly lost their interest in print media. And unsurprisingly, so did many advertisers. In response, metro paper titles joined the ‘go online’ campaign, establishing their very basic version of web platforms that, while offering some simple online news stories, offered free online PDF copies of their print editions. While this practice opened potential new opportunities online for them, it did more harm than good to their printed titles’ circulation. Furthermore, compared with China’s privately owned leading commercial web portals such as Sina (https://www.sina.com.cn/), NetEase (https://www.163. com/), Sohu (https://www.sohu.com/), and Tencent (https://www. qq.com/)—all of which were launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as news aggregators and providers of all other sorts of popular content, metro papers’ websites were not only lunched much later (mostly in the 2000s) but were also too simple and boring, showing the sector’s strategic failure in their half-hearted efforts in going online (Huang 2021). However, relevant institutional and political reasons behind the stagnation (and final fall later) of the metro paper sector were proved to be far more damaging. Institutionally, metro papers were still ultimately administrated by relevant Party press groups and had only limited editorial autonomy. In the early stage of metro papers’ development when they were desperately needed by their parent Party press groups as their market spearheads to compete with traditional evening newspapers, ‘full’ support from the groups was promised and often realized. However, when metro

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titles’ journalistic fame and revenues started soaring, the tensions between relevant metro titles and their staff as the ‘winners’ and those previously self-claimed ‘important’ Party organ titles and their staff as ‘losers’ also mounted. To respond to such tensions, many press groups intended to conveniently put their old ‘socialist’ thinking over the market logic by placing more pressure on metro papers for even higher circulation and greater revenue income with little policy and resources support on the one hand, and reducing the income ‘gap’ between staff within the groups on the other. In the meantime, certain Party organ titles themselves attempted to compete with their own metro paper titles by playing the ‘popular’ card, causing further shortage of resources and a certain degree of internal mimetic-isomorphism (Tong 2005). Politically, by the early 2000s, the Party-state, while excitedly seeing the previously heavily state-subsided and loss-making press industry’s now strong market performance and financial viability, was also worried about the impact of media commercialization on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) deeply rooted (though at times technically or temporarily retreated) propagandistic press ideology and the associated media censorship regime. It was in this context that the Central Propaganda Department of the Party launched a ‘Marxist view of journalism’ (makesi zhuyi xinwen guan) educational campaign in October 2003, soon after the Hu Jintao-led new CCP leadership was sworn in, aiming to ensure the journalism industry’s more ‘scientific’, ‘professional’, and ‘ethical’ development (Guangming Daily 2003). Before this, for nearly a decade, the metro paper sector’s practice of promoting circulation and advertising income by selling sensational stories was tacitly approved by the authorities that were keen to chase a high GDP growth rate and, accordingly, see a more self-sufficient press industry. However, this tabloid journalistic ‘freedom’ that had never been institutionally guaranteed was now under stricter ideological-moral scrutiny. Though the circular mentioned above did not openly name the ‘wild’ metro paper sector, there was little doubt that the sector was indeed targeted. This was due to the sector’s dominant position in the daily newspaper market on the one hand, and on the other, the widespread existence of rampant journalistic corruption, particularly in the form of paid journalism and fake news, in the sector (and beyond) (Yu 1994; Zhao 1998). However, when it came to such ethical/professional concerns, the CCP yet again dodged away from seriously tackling their institutional

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roots—the authoritarian political system and state monopoly of news media resources—and instead simply treated them as ideological-moral issues. The Party thus believed or pretended that so long as it retightened its ideological control over the media and the journalistic workforce through a ‘Marxist’ thought educational campaign, all problems would be automatically solved. Evidently, without defining what the term ‘Marxist view of journalism’ exactly meant, the circular, however, unmistakably made the ‘Party principle’ of journalism its core value. As the circular stated, ‘applying the Marxist view of journalism to guide journalistic work means [media organizations] must always stick to the Party principle of journalism and correctly guide public opinions’. It also declared that ‘journalistic professionalism is the specific manifestation of Marxist view of journalism’ and thus ‘being loyal to the Party and the people and insisting in the Party principle’ was an integral part of the ‘core’ values of journalistic professionalism (Guangming Daily 2003). Soon after this, this campaign was incorporated into a larger and high-­ profile ‘Marxist Theory Research and Construction Project’ launched by the CCP in March 2004 (Sina 2004). In April of the same year, a work meeting on the project decided to set up 24 research groups across major social sciences disciplines and areas including media and journalism and urged the achievement of relevant research outcomes published in a timely manner (Wenming.cn 2009). China’s state-affiliated establishment Marxist media scholarship quickly responded to this move from ‘above’. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, with the publication of a number of officially supervised and/or funded research projects, edited volumes, and textbooks and numerous academic and trade journal articles on the subject, China’s Marxist media scholars had been able to declare the establishment of a Marxist view of journalism theoretical system (e.g., Chen 2006, 2010, 2011; Lin 2005; Zheng 2005, 2011, 2018; Zhu 2010). However, for those with a deeper knowledge of Chinese politics and how to read between the lines of China’s often confusing and self-contradictory political texts, the notion was not at all as complex and ‘scientific’ as the Party’s ideologues and China’s official Marxist scholarship had attempted or pretended to demonstrate through relevant Party and government documents, conferences, journalism professional training sessions, and numerous publications. In essence, the notion was little more than a new jargon based on the very same old propagandistic Party press doctrine originated in Yan’an, as discussed in Chap. 2, being deployed to wishfully justify a conservative press policy change (Huang 2022b).

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The impact of the campaign on the metro paper sector was obvious though by and large taking a relatively gradualist path during the Hu era (2003–2012). Being hardly a coincidence, for example, the metro paper sector even started to somewhat self-doubt its ‘tabloid’ identity under both political and market pressures. Typically, what went hand in hand with this campaign was a high-profile sector-wide campaign under the banner of ‘toward a mainstream serious press’ (zouxiang zhuliu baozhi) that aimed to transform metro papers as non-mainstream xiaobao (or ‘small’ papers) into supposedly superior mainstream (elite) dabao (or ‘big’ papers). This was an utterly extraordinary backward move after the sector’s more than a decade of great journalistic and market success exactly due to its xiaobao or popular/tabloid identity. Somewhat strangely and ironically, even leading figures of the sector, including Xi Wenju, the influential editor-in-chief of China’s very first metro paper title the West China Metro News who was dubbed the ‘godfather’ of the ‘metro paper model’ as discussed in the previous chapter, were now nearly collectively starting to emphasize metro papers’ ‘social value’, ‘social responsibility and influence’, ‘spirit of humanity’, and role as ‘leaders of public opinions’ and in ‘keep[ing] social stability’, and the importance of ‘chasing Chinese newspaper people’s glory and dream’ (of running ‘real’, ‘big’ newspapers) (Luo 2004; Sun 2004). Some metro titles even claimed that they would discipline themselves by transforming their papers from ‘street papers’ (shijing bao) for residents (shimin) to true ‘metro papers’ for workers and professionals (shangban zu), and redefining ‘social news’ by avoiding ‘vulgar’, ‘three-colors’ stories (stories relating to ‘red’ or violence, ‘yellow’ or sex, and ‘gray’ or ‘negative’ view of life) in their news coverage (Leng 2006; Luo 2004). Xi’s West China Metro News even ‘proudly’ reduced the ratio of its coverage of hard to soft news from 1:4, to 1:2, or a 50 percent decrease (Sun 2004). Though the details of the inside stories of these dramatic changes were and still are unknown, the political pressure behind them was nearly obvious. Typically, as the editor-in-chief of the Chongqing Morning News admitted, in the context of promoting ‘socialist’ and ‘harmonious’ culture and ‘scientific development’, the approach of metro papers selling ‘negative news’ for profits had become an ‘inharmonious’ noise which was untenable (Jia 2007). This being said, the ghost of China’s historically rooted elite-political journalism-centered ideological and moral prejudice against xiaobao (tabloids), and popular journalism in general, as discussed in previous chapters, particular Chap. 2, seemingly also cast a long shadow

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on China’s press circles, including the metro paper sector itself. Political pressure was one (big) thing, but the metro sector should have certainly avoided shaming and belittling itself. Its self-doubt about its ‘popular’ journalistic identity and business model and unrealistic ambition for a transition to a ‘serious’ press model arguably made it even more vulnerable under the uncertain political and market environment. Suddenly, nearly all metro titles were declaring that they were transforming themselves into mainstream serious papers. Meanwhile, some newly established popular titles (e.g., the Xin Jing Bao launched in 2003) from the very beginning of their publication claimed that they were mainstream ‘big’ papers rather than ‘trivial’ tabloids. By the end of the 2000s, most metro titles had declared that they had successfully transformed themselves into an advanced and superior ‘mainstream’ press model. In other words, they were now, as they called themselves, ‘mainstream’, serious large papers instead of non-mainstream, low-quality tabloids. The term ‘mainstream newspaper’ remained a trendy topic in Chinese journalism in the early and mid-2000s. While in Western journalism, the term— often used in comparison with independent or alternative newspapers—had been conventionally used to refer to both broadsheets and tabloids that served a large readership (e.g., see Kenix 2011), Chinese journalists and critics intended to define ‘mainstream’ newspapers as mainstream quality papers such as the New York Times in the United States only (e.g., Fang 2006; Qi 2011; Yu 2013; Zhao 2006).1 In other words, based on conventional Western standards, China’s widely circulated tabloid metro titles were indeed mainstream papers already. On the other hand, based on their own definition, these now supposedly serious mainstream Chinese metro papers had seemingly little to do with the Western-style quality press model. Instead, they were more like a modified version of tabloids that aimed to serve a broader readership with comparatively more general, and less sensational and critical, coverage. In other words, they were tabloids with considerably reduced ‘fun’ and critical edge. Chinese journalists’ dream for a serious/watchdog press was in and of itself completely legitimate and the ‘right’ thing to do. However, overstating such press’ so-called superiority to the popular press and calling for a wholesale transformation of the tabloid metro press sector into a serious press model was both utterly elitist and nearly hopelessly utopian in the Chinese context, and frankly, anywhere. It would be naïve to ignore the diverse interests and needs of China’s vast news consumer market. Historically, the significance of the rise of the tabloid metro paper sector

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since the mid-1990s lay exactly in its determined and effective breaking away from the powerful and often propaganda-oriented elitist tradition of modern Chinese journalism, as previously discussed. Chinese journalists and media critics should think twice before imagining a rosy prospect for a large serious press sector for an elitist readership. Financially, as experienced by South Korea (e.g., see Lee 1997), Taiwan (e.g., see Rawnsley and Rawnsley 2004), and many Eastern European countries (e.g., see Wyka 2008), even in a post-democratized context there would likely be little room for such a press sector to survive in the ruthless marketplace. In fact, even in established democracies with a long and powerful serious press tradition, as discussed in Chap. 1, the broadsheet press sector has been under growing market pressure and more and more broadsheets have been seemingly forced to undergo a ‘tabloidization’ or broadloidization process. In short, elite journalism and popular journalism are better seen as two equally important and valuable (in their respective own right) journalistic genres that will play their respective role in contributing a more diverse and balanced journalistic sphere. It is worth noting that despite the ‘toward a mainstream serious press’ campaign (as a response to the CCP’s ‘Marxist view of journalism’ educational campaign), the metro paper sector was still able to by and large play the sensationalism card through a muddling through strategy in the 2000s under Hu. This was partly due to the Hu administration’s intention of taking a relatively moderate approach to using the ‘Marxist view of journalism’ notion to tactically deal with the challenges resulting from media commercialization in the previous decade. In other words, the administration appeared to attempt to use the notion to emphasize the responsibility of the metro paper sector (and China’s journalism at large) to help maintain social stability in a more general sense rather than kill it. As a result, under Hu, there was still considerable room for mass-appeal popular journalism and even critical journalism (e.g., see Svensson 2017; Yu 2006). It was also partly because a sudden death like policy brake could cause unnecessary political backlash which would contradict the administration’s ‘harmonious’ political appeal anyway. The only difference was that sensationalism, once having been often exploited in a rather crude and aggressive way, was now strategically demystified and formalized and practiced in a more moderate manner by the sector. It might now take such forms as a dramatic (in terms of page layout) and sensational (in terms of content preference) front page followed by more normal inside pages, a normal story with a sensational heading and

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playful writing style, and increased coverage of general and softened hard news. In the meantime, very few metro titles would miss the opportunity of sensationalizing major breaking news events, both domestic and international, from natural disasters to crime stories. For example, on 15 August 2012, a most-wanted serial killer suspect named Zhou Kehua was shot dead by police in Chongqing. Astonishingly, nearly the whole metro paper community was hyped by this major crime news and responded with swift and sensational coverage. A big bold heading, ‘Ferocious Bandit Zhou Kehua Was Shot Dead’, accompanied by a photo of Zhou’s body lying prone on the blood-bathed floor of the scene, for example, occupied the whole upper quarter of the front page of the Guangzhou-based Southern Metro News the following day. 5.1.2   Tabloids Became History (Again) After Making History Based on relevant industrial survey reports, the overall market performance of the popular metro press sector, together with the newspaper industry as a whole, started quickly losing ground from the early 2010s after years of struggle and lack of effective strategic planning and action. For example, in 2012, the newspaper industry’s overall circulation dropped 3.09 percent (Tian et al. 2013, p. 92), while its advertising income was down by 7.5 percent, its worst performance in 30 years (Yao 2013, p. 84). In the same year, the industry was also the only sector across all categories of mass media in China that experienced negative growth in advertising income (Yao 2013, p. 82). Accordingly, the popular press sector’s circulation and advertising income also tumbled (Tang and Zhuo 2013, p. 76; Tian et al. 2013, p. 93). With the rise of online and social media and the availability of free PDF versions of their printed editions on their websites, major metro titles’ private subscription market shrank rapidly, and this subsequently inevitably greatly impacted their advertising revenue as their primary income source. By the early 2010s, the metro paper as a specific press category and long-time favorite of major advertisers had been ruthlessly removed from their ‘priority/core media’ list (Cui 2013, p. 9). For the first time since its rise in the mid-1990s, due to advancing digital communication technologies, significant changes in demographics and news consumption patterns, and the newspaper industry’s increasingly fluctuating and fluid readership and funding model, the once extremely popular metro press sector was now facing a fundamental question about its journalistic and financial viability.

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Unlike in a democratic capitalist society, these by and large universal challenges facing the newspaper industry worldwide were further complicated by reinforced political and media control under the Xi administration since 2013. Post-Mao China has remained a one-party state despite the reform and opening policy since 1978. However, the degree of media censorship under the same political system has varied depending on the CCP’s top leadership’s ideological mindset. Arguably the two best periods for journalism in post-Mao China were the mid-1980s when media reforms focused on the issue of press freedom, and the 1990s that witnessed the rapid growth of popular journalism due to media commercialization. Despite some ups and downs during both periods, Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic political ideology prevailed. Starting from the era of Hu Jintao but particularly since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the regime has become, to an increasing extent, politically and ideologically more conservative. A new quasi-Yan’an Rectification Movement based on thought molding, order, and punishment under Xi has worried many China observers (Cheek and Ownby 2018; Lam 2015; So 2019). This shift has inevitably negatively impacted journalism. The conservative ‘Marxist view of journalism’ educational campaign that started in the Hu era was carried on and further strengthened by the  Xi  administration. In 2003, the ‘Marxist view of journalism’ was included in the Journalists’ Training Textbook (Liu and Jiang 2013), the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) first official textbook for the nationwide journalistic continuing-education program. In the same year, about 25,000 journalists across the country were, for the first time, required to pass a professional test that included questions on the ‘Marxist view of journalism’ to be eligible to renew their press cards (People.cn 2013). In his inspection tour of China’s top official media outlets in 2016, Xi declared that China’s state-run media were the Party’s ‘propaganda fronts’ that ‘must have the party as their family name’ and ‘love the party, protect the party, and closely align themselves with the party leadership in thought, politics and action’ (Associated Press 2016). These and other similar speeches on the instrumental use of media for Party propaganda were later collected in Lectures on Xi Jinping’s Journalistic Philosophy (The Writing Group 2018), which were soon celebrated by China’s establishment Marxist media scholars as the ‘newest development’ of the ‘Marxist view of journalism’ (People’s Daily 2018). Xi’s ‘journalistic’ philosophy, however, had nothing to do with journalism and offered nothing new, even from a media propaganda perspective, as it merely reemphasized the same

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familiar propaganda-oriented Maoist press discourse. Such Maoist media rhetoric and associated media policy have not only silenced Chinese investigative journalism (Gao 2018; Hernández 2019; see also Svensson 2017; Tong 2019), but also negatively impacted the ideologically not ‘red’ enough and morally ‘yellowish’ metro paper sector. Since the mid-2010s, the crisis of the sector has become more evident than ever before, experiencing a free-fall decline in circulation and advertising income. This has forced metro paper titles to shift resources further away from their print editions. Despite this, few of them have managed to become online journalism leaders. According to a recent survey report on China’s media development, the tabloid-dominated newspaper industry’s annual circulation income and advertising income peaked in 2011 (26.7  billion RMB and 45  billion RMB, respectively), but has since declined sharply. By 2018, the industry’s circulation income had declined to 10.2 RMB  billion, down 62 percent from 2011, and its advertising income declined to 7.6 billion RMB, a staggering 83 percent drop from 2011 (Cui et al. 2019). Only three years later, by the end of 2021, the industry’s advertising income dropped to a new low of 3.9 billion RBM or 52 percent down from 2018. After 10 years of consecutive decreases, the advertising value of the metro press sector was quickly running out (Chen and Zhang 2022). Data from similar surveys also show the collapse of China’s newspaper circulation. In 2015, newspaper circulation through retail sales dropped 46.5 percent overall, and 50.8 percent when it came to the metro paper sector compared to the previous year. In the same year, subscriptions for metro paper titles fell 40 percent from 2014, and in the meantime, the newspaper readership penetration rate decreased from 65.7 percent in 2011 to 38.4 percent in 2015 (Chen 2017). During their ‘golden age’ from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, major metro paper titles commonly published 40 to 50 pages per issue with substantial news coverage, a variety of specialized sections, and abundant commercial advertisements. A typical metro title nowadays has only about 10 to 20 pages per issue, filled with rather ordinary and often boring stories and extremely limited and sometimes no advertisements, suggesting the sector’s rapidly fading popularity among readers and advertisers alike. It seems that their real market ‘value’ now is to merely remind people of their past glory or tactically keep a physical face of relevant titles. Dozens of loss-making tabloid titles have closed their doors in recent years (e.g., see Chen 2020; Zhang 2017). Among other cases, the discontinuance of the Beijing Times in

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2016 sent a shockwave across the sector. Established in May 2001, it was once a creative and influential tabloid title that dominated Beijing’s morning newspaper market and was among the world’s 100 most circulated newspapers in 2010 (Zhang 2017). Hand in hand with the commercial decline of the sector has been the severe degeneration of its journalism in recent years. We now see a Chinese tabloid press sector largely in name or form only, as one can read little tabloid journalism, or any form of journalism with reasonable quality, in leading metro papers’ daily coverage. When I say the journalistic ‘degeneration’ of the sector, I mean the loss of the strong popular/sensational journalistic spirit and considerable critical edge that the sector was once extremely proud of and most of its readership endorsed. This sad loss of core tabloid journalistic characters has made it little more than a dead man walking. One does not have to be a journalism expert to read the sector’s mood of frustration, sadness, powerlessness, and, indeed, giving up from its coverage. This mood was also unmistakably demonstrated in my talks with many metro paper journalists and industry insiders over the years. The journalistic rise (during the 1990s and 2000s) and death (by the mid- to late 2010s) of the metro paper sector was clearly illustrated in two case studies of the West China Metro News, the very first tabloid title published in post-Mao China, as discussed in the previous chapter. The first study was published in 2002 at the height of the title’s glory as part of my doctorial research (Huang et  al. 2002), and the other just came out in 2022 (Huang 2022a) when the newspaper had become completely journalistically irrelevant, literally a junk title. As previously discussed, the once heroic and influential newspaper was hailed as a creative and respected leader of China’s tabloid journalism due to its journalistic excellence and market performance. Its daily news coverage was full of all sorts of human-­ interest stories, ‘man-bites-dog’ news, scandals, and other soft materials. The 2002 case study’s analysis of one week of the newspaper between 13 and 19 November 1998 found that the newspaper published about 2000 news stories, editorials, articles, pictures, and advertisements during the sampled week. There were 262 news stories that might be categorized as popular/sensational stories. They related to robbery, kidnapping, juvenile crime, people trafficking, domestic violence, murder, car and other accidents, food poisoning, underage marriage, bikini shows, and political and business corruption. At the time, the newspaper enjoyed a superstar status due to its stunning journalistic and commercial success. The study attributed its success

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to six major strategies adopted by the newspaper, all of which related to popular journalistic ideas: (1) sensational/soft news as its trump card for success; (2) extensive coverage of sports news and entertainment stories and materials; (3) adoption of a popular style of writing and layout (e.g., short, simple, and informative stories written in a witty fashion and the usage of oral language and local dialect); (4) localizing (change in geographical focus of media content) and decentralizing (change in media content on the ‘center–edge’ or ‘power–society’ relationship); (5) attracting commercial advertisements by boosting circulation (average daily coverage of advertisements occupied about 50 percent of its total space in its normally 20-page weekday editions and 12-page weekend editions during the sampled week); and (6) experimenting with a ‘beat the flies and leave the tigers’ strategy of critical reporting (Huang et al. 2002). However, as my recent case study of the title has shown (Huang 2022a), the newspaper had by now been merely a disappointing mediocre title with nearly all abovementioned features disappearing. The study compared the title with a Melbourne-based leading Australian broadloid title The Age, drawing on data collected from the two titles during the week from 29 August to 4 September 2021. The study found (Huang 2022a, pp. 89–93): (1) the average numbers of pages and stories per issue of The Age during the sampled week were 2.5 and 1.5 times that of the West China Metro News (WCMN) respectively (The Age published 40.6 pages and 32 news reports per issue by average, compared with the WCMN’s 16 pages and 21.6 reports). (2) The Age published 35 (or five per issue by average) critical and in-­ depth/investigative reports in its domestic news section. In comparison, the WCMN’s domestic reporting took an absolutely ‘objective’ (non-­ critical) approach and was predominated by rather ordinary and often dull general news (with low or almost no news value) as well as a high percentage of propagandistic reports covering tedious bureaucratic routines of central and local governments from the official perspective. (3) Compared with The Age’s considerably diverse coverage of international news, the WCMN’s international news coverage during the week was extremely limited and fragmentary, focusing largely on ‘problems’ in relation to the United States. (4) The Age published 38 commentaries and 219 letters to the editor, or 5.4 commentaries (including one editorial daily) and 31.3 letters per issue on average during the week, all of which critically engaged in the debate on

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a wide range of important issues facing the community, the nation, and beyond. By contrast, the WCMN published no editorials and letters to the editor and no commentaries from its own or independent commentators. The only two commentaries published were from the official Xinhua News Agency: one criticized the US government’s ‘conspiracy’ theory around the coronavirus origins issue against China, and another called for tightening regulation against ‘dodgy’ television programs. (5) The Age’s coverage of other issues during the week was also far more comprehensive and diverse than that of the WCMN across all categories including business and sports. (6) The Age published nine displays, nearly two pages of classifieds, four full-page ads, and seven pages of inserts/flyers per issue during the week (plus a considerable number of advertisements in its two inserted weekly magazines), and it also charged readers for both of its print and digital editions as well as full access to its online content. In comparison, the WCMN published only scant advertisements and offered free access to its digital edition and online content. (7) Finally, the WCMN semi-regularly published lengthy (often full-­ page) promotional articles (in the form of a news report) for local governments’ or businesses’ relevant development/commercial programs (cultural-tourism projects, automobile show events, and even lottery promotions), a practice which is hardly ethical in journalistic terms. This was a rather chilling situation for the WCMN compared with its own glorious past and a typical international counterpart (even though The Age had their own challenges). Like most other metro titles in current China, being politically ‘correct’, ideologically ‘red’, and morally ‘appropriate’ with little surprise and excitement, the WCMN now serves as merely a very basic and ordinary information bulletin board with little journalistic and commercial value. It is worth noting that the web platforms of most metro titles do not feature much journalism either, also reflected on the WCMN’s website (http://www.huaxi100.com/). With the death of the passionate, dynamic, and exciting newsroom culture for journalistic excellence from a popular journalistic perspective that the metro press sector once proudly upheld and cherished, the significant difference between metro titles and their parent Party organs has largely disappeared as well. Most of today’s metro papers have nothing to do with tabloid/popular journalism or journalism in any sense, but are boring and often propagandistic junk papers well below common-sense professional standards.

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5.2  The Myth of Party Organs’ ‘Resurgence’ and ‘(Re-)Popularization’ 5.2.1   ‘Popular Official Media’ as a New Press Category? As the popular metro paper sector experienced a miserable downturn trend, some have discovered the Party/official press sector’s surprise comeback. One argument was about the emergence of a so-called popular official media as a potential new press category, as suggested in a case study of the China Youth Daily (CYD), mouthpiece of the Communist Youth League of China, by Wang et  al. (2018). The study found that despite its coverage of considerable propagandistic materials, the CYD, as an ‘official’ title, placed more emphasis on watchdog journalism than did more orthodox official titles such as the People’s Daily (PD), the official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the CCP, as well as on infotainment than did both the PD and the Southern Metropolis Daily (or Southern Metro News as otherwise translated) (SMD), a leading popular metro title. The authors thus concluded that ‘the frequent claim [in the literature] that there is a contradiction between popular journalism responding to audience tastes and official journalism constrained by the propaganda needs of the party is mistaken’, as the case of the CYD suggested the potential existence of a new, third category of press in China which they called ‘popular official’ media (Wang et al. 2018, p. 1203). My concern about this suggestion is mainly threefold. First, it should be noted that ‘youth newspapers’ (qing nian bao) as a particular type of official newspapers or, to put it another way, quasi-Party organs, while being normally more controlled than metro paper titles, were, and still are, also relatively less censored and propagandistic than formal Party organs (as mouthpieces of respective Communist Party committees at various levels serving as the backbone of the Party-state’s propaganda machine). Indeed, like many other youth newspapers in China, the CYD had long been a wellknown non- or less orthodox official title (e.g., see Huang 1992). Some youth papers like the Beijing Youth Daily might even be well categorized as popular/tabloid metro titles (Zhao 1997; Zhang 2014). In this context, the PD and the CYD are arguably not particularly comparable. Second, while proactively engaged in infotainment, the SMD, like its sister title the Southern Weekly, was also  well known for its critical and investigative reports as most typically reflected in its pioneering and brave coverage of the Sun Zhigang incident in 2003 that eventually led to the abolition of China’s extremely controversial custody and repatriation

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system later in the same year. It may be best described as a politically active tabloid title rather than a relatively ‘apolitical’ normal tabloid outlet. For this, choosing the SMD as a supposed typical popular title to compare with the CYD might not be particularly representative. Third and last, China’s media landscape has changed a lot since the publication of the said study and become highly digitized and web- and app-based. With the death of the metro press sector as a meaningful journalistic existence, rather than being dominated by a particular ‘popular’ media category, popular journalistic practice, as I shall discuss further in the next chapter, has nowadays been widely spread (and often remains fragmentary) across a wide range of digital platforms and practiced by both professional media/journalists and self-media/citizen journalists. In this context, it can be a hugely challenging, if possible at all, task for one to clearly identify even a particular Chinese ‘popular’, let alone an arguably more slippery ‘popular official’, media cluster. Indeed, as I discussed in some detail in Chap. 1, I would use the term ‘popular journalism’, rather than ‘popular media’, to conceptualize current China’s digitized and discursive popular journalistic practice by all types of individuals and organizations including ‘official’ media. In other words, while nearly all types of media may play the game of popular journalism, not all of them can be deemed as popular media. In this context, commercialized/popularized Party/official media may be seen as simply part of a broadly defined popular journalistic trend or movement across the Chinese media spectrum. As will be discussed further shortly, I believe popular journalism versus Party (propagandistic) journalism, Party organs themselves versus their popularized subsidiary outlets and, increasingly, digital platforms, and propaganda versus (popular) news in/on any given media outlet or platform  are arguably better frameworks to understand current China’s (popular) journalism landscape. In addition, it is noteworthy that, historically, the phenomenon of certain official media’s practice of popular journalism in some special circumstances is hardly new. For example, the so-called Guangzhou Daily phenomenon in the 1990s is a typical such case. Traditionally, the massive and inefficient Party press organ sector had always remained the hardest part of China’s journalism reforms. The rise of the Guangzhou Daily (mouthpiece of the CCP Committee of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province) in the 1990s was widely viewed as the most successful reform story in this regard. Starting from the late 1980s, the newspaper adopted a series of market-oriented reform strategies that brought it significant changes. Regarding its content, differing from most other Party press organs whose news coverage was

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dominated by propaganda-oriented and bureaucratic routines-related stories, the Guangzhou Daily covered a wide range of reader-oriented general and popular news and other information (Xie 1997, pp.  268–269). Significantly, the newspaper was financially independent, receiving no government subsidy or compulsory office subscription (Liang 1999). The newspaper had a daily circulation of 800,000 copies as of 1998, and 1.2 million copies as of 1999 (News Front reporter 2000). The Guangzhou Daily experience, however, could be hardly copied to other Party organs. Guangzhou was the capital of China’s most capitalist and economically advanced southern province Guangdong and enjoyed considerable special policy support for bolder and more creative socio-­ economic and sociocultural reforms from both the central and local authorities as an important ‘experimental field’ of Deng’s reform and opening program. Furthermore, the newspaper had faced strong competition pressure from its major market rivals both within and beyond Guangzhou, which included the influential Yangcheng Evening News, the Southern Daily (mouthpiece of the CCP Committee of Guangdong Province), and its independent and extremely popular weekend edition the Southern Weekend (all of which were based in the same city) and, very importantly, the neighboring Hong Kong news media. In short, reforms in the Guangzhou Daily may be best described as a special case of transforming a Party organ into a metro paper like popular title (even though it was not until the mid-1990s that the ‘metro paper’ as a press type was invented) in a unique geopolitical and journalistic locality. In 2006, the newspaper ranked number one nationwide in terms of both total revenue and tax contribution. Noting this outstanding performance achieved by the newspaper, an official 2007 newspaper survey report supervised by the National Press and Publication Bureau (NPPB) highlighted that, though the newspaper was officially listed under the domain of Party organs, ‘it had long held the features of metro papers in terms of its target readership and related content preference’ (NPPB 2017, p. 95). 5.2.2   Has the Market Failed the Popular Press Sector (This Time)? I once argued the journalistic death of the propaganda-oriented Party press organ sector by the mid-2000s due to ordinary readers’ and advertisers’ collective shifting away from it to the popular metro paper sector in the daily newspaper market (Huang 2016). Some recent official media

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surveys, however, surprisingly reported the Party organ sector’s, particularly Party press organs’, improvement in both subscription and advertising revenues since the mid-2010s. Some of these reports as well as some research papers, however, discovered the ‘devil’ in the detail. The reported improvement had relied primarily on the sector’s privilege (for its political-­ ideological importance to the CCP) as the exclusive recipient of resumed/ continued state subsidy and compulsory office subscription using government budget. In addition, it was also due to its controversial (if ethical at all) practice of exploiting its special political status and dominance of media resources to cut deals with relevant Party and government bodies by offering them ‘positive’ coverage of their work, promotional feature stories about their administrative areas, and other ‘tailored’ media services in exchange for their spending of their ‘propaganda’ budget in relevant Party organs. In contrast, the struggling metro paper sector that had heavily relied on private subscription and advertising revenues had now been largely left bleeding (Chen 2016, 2017, 2020; Chen and Zhang 2022; Wang and Sparks 2019). Drawing on data from interviews with 104 respondents from six provincial press groups, Wang and Sparks (2019) timely captured and critically analyzed these developments from a political-economy perspective, focusing on the impact of digital media on the media–state relationship in a rapidly changing and ruthless marketplace. From a popular journalistic perspective, I would like to echo some of the two authors’ analysis while also adding some critical comments here. First, ‘the resurgence of Party press’ (Wang and Sparks 2019, p. 94) should not be mistakenly understood as either the Party press sector’s financial reviving based on market logic or its journalistic reorientation (its nature as the Party-state propaganda apparatus has remained intact) as Wang and Sparks rightly pointed out. As more clearly shown in the most recent official survey report on the newspaper industry, as of 2021, the average daily circulation of 366 surveyed Party organs was 108,000 copies based predominantly on office subscriptions (the report however offered no clue about how many Party cadres, government officials, and public servants might actually read those officially subscribed copies) (Chen and Zhang 2022, p. 90). Without state subsidy and official subscription, most of them would have long gone bankrupt. The demand ‘market’ for Party organs was created by and for power, rather than popular consumer needs. In other words, their ‘resurgence’ was against both basic journalistic and market logics, ultimately relying on government protection and support.

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Second, as ordinary readers barely care about Party organs’ existence, the latter’s ‘resurgence’ is thus arguably completely meaningless to them. How can Party organs then ‘guide’ public opinions to support official propaganda as the CCP expects them, and they have always boasted they are able, to do? Although the Chinese public may have no power to end such (and many other similar) loss-making and hardly ethical ‘businesses’, they can at least vote by turning away from reading Party organs. In this context, while it is true that ‘the cumulative effect of these changes [in Party organs] has been to strengthen the position of the party press, to increase the dependence of the whole industry on one form or other of government support, and to increase pressure on journalists’ (Wang and Sparks 2019, p. 111), its actual, if any, impact on China’s public opinions remains unknown. Third and last, the authors of the study criticized the market (advertisers and readers) for its ‘opposite effect’ against the efforts of ‘broaden[ing] the range of journalism in China’ as it failed to act as a ‘counterweight’ against the Chinese authorities’ tightening control of the media and instead, behaved ‘as an auxiliary force, pushing newspapers and journalists to conform to the CPC’s demands for neutered journalism’ (Wang and Sparks 2019, p. 113). This seems to me a dubious criticism based on an assumed ‘should be’ role that the market should play in journalism. As Wang and Sparks (2019, p. 113) themselves correctly pointed out, ‘[t]he market has no necessary function pushing towards a more open media system’ and the relationship between the state and the market ‘varies according to technological, economic, and political factors’. It is not entirely clear that the authors aimed to use their study to echo and reinforce the latter argument as noted in the literature (e.g., Boyce et al. 1970; Merrill 2000; Siebert et al. 1956), or to question some previous studies that had been somewhat overly optimistic about the market’s role in bringing about a more open journalism in China which had also been noted by some scholars (e.g., Chan 1993; Yu 1994; Zhao 1998). Furthermore, the market’s ‘support’ for online journalism, including online citizen journalism and print news media’s digital platforms online and on social media (as will be discussed in the next chapter), which has already helped broaden the range of China’s journalism as argued in many studies in this area, should not be ignored. The market has shifting interests and priorities in changing circumstances, and this is how the market logic works. Strictly speaking, the collapse of the metro press sector was more like a case of its failure to more swiftly and strategically respond to the rapidly changing media market in the digital media era rather than one of being failed by the market.

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5.2.3   Is ‘Cute’ Propaganda Winning the Digital Popular Journalism War? Echoing the finding of Wang and Sparks (2019) about the ‘resurgence’ of Party press organs in the digital media era, as mentioned above, some related recent studies have expanded on this topic by suggesting a broader success of ‘Party media’ in utilizing digital technologies to create softened Party propaganda and promote it through online and social media platforms (e.g., Fang 2022; Long and Shao 2021; Xin 2022; Zhang et  al. 2023; Zhu and Fu 2023; Zou 2021). A couple of these studies have gone even further:  unlike Wang and Sparks who viewed the ‘resurgence’ of Party press as a dubious and concerned trend, they saw the assumed success of ‘Party media’ as their ‘regaining’ of ‘popularity’, ‘credibility’, and ‘influence’ among audiences as they (allegedly) once enjoyed during the Mao era  (e.g., see Fang 2022; Xin 2022). These studies seemingly not only gave people the impression that the Party organ sector is winning the digital  popular journalism war against their rival popular/commercial media sector, but also saw this proclaimed tendency as a positive and congratulating journalistic development. Typically, for example, Fang (2022), drawing on mainly a content analysis of the People’s Daily’s (PD) and China Central Television News’s (CCTV News) WeChat accounts and interviews with editors of the two outlets’ accounts on Weibo and WeChat (Weixin) (two extremely popular social media platforms in China), conceptualized his findings as ‘the tabloidization of Party media’ as highlighted in the title of the article.2 The study also attempted to paint a big picture of Party media’s rising ‘popularity’ and ‘influence’ based on some ambiguous and shallow data: The People’s Daily’s sub-accounts [on Weibo] “Xuexi Xiaozu” (literally meaning “The Group to Study Xi Jinping”) and “Xiake Dao” (literally meaning ‘Knight’s Island’) are the most popular and influential ones [among the newspaper’s sub-accounts] (Wong 2015). It should be noted that the print versions of the Party newspapers and magazines rely largely on mandatory subscription, but following their social media accounts is purely on a voluntary basis. Considering this difference, the popularity of their Weibo and WeChat accounts becomes even more striking. As of late September 2021, The People’s Daily had more than 140 million followers on Weibo, and CCTV News had more than 120 million, far more than any of their commercial counterparts. Their WeChat public accounts are also hugely popular—almost every article they publish[ed] has been viewed more than 100,000 times. The huge amounts of followers, views,

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shares, and likes Party media have received on social media indicate that they are regaining popularity and credibility they once enjoyed during the Mao era. (Fang 2022, pp. 48, 50)

These observations (among other similar ones in the study) are concerning in several respects. First, ‘Party media’ or ‘Party mouthpieces’ (another term often used in Fang’s study) is a very broad term that refers to numerous Party organ outlets across various media types and platforms nationwide. The PD and CCTV News as a specific newspaper title and television news channel themselves, their WeChat/Weibo accounts, their sub-WeChat/Weibo accounts, their overall online media operations, and the newspaper and the TV network as two giant Party media conglomerates, and the whole Party media system in China are very different entities. However, the study seemingly intended to use its specific findings about these two Party organs’ two sub-WeChat/Weibo accounts, together with some very limited and loose secondary data (more discussion of this below), to reflect their operations across the board and even the entire Party media cluster. Such concerned generalization was reflected in not only the two quoted paragraphs above but also some other similar statements in the article, such as ‘the tabloidization of Party media’, the ‘resurgence of Party media in the era of social media’, and ‘the popularity of Communist Party mouthpieces on China’s social media platforms’ (Fang 2022, pp. 48, 57). Second, it is noteworthy that the only reference cited by the study to suggest the high popularity and influence of ‘The Group to Study Xi Jinping’ and ‘Knight’s Island’ (a news and current affairs commentary program), ‘Wong 2015’, was just a loose news report from the Global Times, a nationalistic tabloid published by the PD itself. And the report itself failed to provide any details to back up the claimed ‘popularity’ and ‘influence’ of those two Weibo sub-accounts of the PD. In addition, the study provided no detail or reference to clarify and elaborate the claim that the number of followers of the Weibo accounts of both the PD and CCTV News were ‘far more than any of their commercial counterparts’, or who exactly their ‘commercial counterparts’ were. Despite having limited first-­ hand and secondary data as such, the study went further to suggest that the ‘popularity’ and ‘influence’ of Party media ‘has reversed the trend during the last three to four decades when Party mouthpieces were losing ground to commercial outlets’ (Fang 2022, p. 57). Suggesting that ‘Party mouthpieces’ were winning digital competition against ‘commercial

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outlets’ (both terms were undefined in the study) was a far too broad statement well beyond what the data of the study could possibly support. To the best of my knowledge, there had (and still has) been no solid and systematic evidence to support such a claim. If ‘Party mouthpieces’ and ‘commercial outlets’ were used to refer to relevant media outlets across media types and platforms, the statement would understandably become even more problematic in the absence of corresponding evidence. But even if they were only used to refer to Party press organs and metro papers respectively, it was still a concern. This was not only because of the lack of evidence to suggest a general success of the former, but also because the latter had already gone down to its collective fall as a sector for some time when data used for analysis in Fang’s study was collected in 2018 (as discussed earlier in this chapter). As these two sectors had become nearly incomparable, the Party press organ sector’s assumed ‘win’, which was far from being well justified, without a (real) rival, was hardly a victory. Third, common sense about Chinese politics also suggests that unless it were backed up with solid evidence, it is highly doubtful that following an account like ‘The Group to Study Xi Jinping’ would be ‘purely on a voluntary basis’. My interviews with relevant sources suggest the exact opposite: organized collective ‘following’, ‘viewing’, and ‘liking’ of such an account by Party officials, government cadres, public servants, CCP members, and teachers/lecturers and high school and university students as part of their regular, and often compulsory, political learning and/or patriotic educational activities and/or annual work appraisals are by no means an uncommon political practice in current China. We should not completely rule out the ‘50-cents party’ (nickname of state-backed Internet commenters who would receive 0.50 RMB reward paid by the government for per ‘positive’ post) effect in such case as well.  More broadly, as China’s official media surveys revealed, nearly all officially promoted publications in China would normally achieve phenomenal circulation (print) numbers. For example, according to the NPPB’s 2017 survey report on the print media industry, most of the top 10 most circulated books and newspapers in 2016 were ‘books about officially recommended topics and mainstream [Party] newspapers’, particularly those books on the priority list recommended by the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP. Unsurprisingly or surprisingly (depending on how one interprets this extraordinary phenomenon), books about ‘Xi thought’ were among the titles with highest circulation. More than 3.2 million copies of Thirty Lectures on Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

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for a New Era were printed and more than 6 million copies of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China (Volume I and II) were printed respectively (NPPB 2017). However, the survey offered no information about how many copies of both books might have eventually reached the hands of which readers, who would pay the costs, and how many people might have actually read them and what they might have learnt (if anything) from the books. Fourth, as to ‘Knight’s Island’, my critical reading of it (and some other similar news/political commentary programs of relevant Party organs such as ‘Niu Tan Qing’, ‘Bu Yi Dao’, and ‘Changan Jie Zhishi’) suggests that on the one hand, its non-orthodox approach is indeed different from those clumsy and boring raw propaganda-loaded traditional commentaries of Party organs and may be attractive to certain readers. On the other hand, its playing of the ‘popular’ game is still fundamentally state, rather than public, oriented, being delicately crafted not to offend the Party-state or contradict its major domestic and foreign policies. In other words, its commentaries may be popular in style but are politically normative in terms of their viewpoints. As Long and Shao (2021) found, despite the efforts of ‘Knight’s Island’ in seeking ‘the balance between the political mission and audience demand’, ‘propaganda still dominates the production process’, and ‘[b]eing firmly subordinate to the CCP, the editors will continue to accomplish their propaganda mission more subtly and softly in cyberspace’. It should be noted that even such permitted practice of popular propaganda has been limited to a handful of ‘trusted’ heavyweight national Party media outlets, typically the ‘big three’—the PD, the CCTV, and the Xinhua News Agency. It is doubtful that popularized news and current affairs commentaries under censorship can be truly creative and remain popular in the long term, particularly at times when the country’s domestic political-economy challenges pile up which is precisely what the country is experiencing at present. Fifth, there may also be a need not to conveniently mix ‘popularity’  (readability), ‘credibility’  (trustworthiness), and ‘influence’  (effect/ impact) all together. They are very different matters in nature. It should be noted that certain isolated statistics, such as ‘more than 140 million’ and ‘more than 120 million’ followers that the PD’s and the CCTV News’s Weibo accounts had respectively at certain point of time, and ‘more than 100000 times’ of viewing of ‘almost every article’ published on their WeChat accounts, as quoted above, are insufficient on their own to demonstrate their perceived huge popularity, let alone credibility and

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influence. For instance, the potential significance of these large numbers may be substantially compromised by the possibility that there might be little vibrant discussion of, and debate on, issues in relevant stories, or that responses might have been overwhelmed by members of the ‘50-cents party’ and/or other organized, compulsory viewers. Moreover, the perceived huge popularity of the two outlets’ Weibo and WeChat accounts should certainly not have been further generalized as ‘[t]he huge amounts of followers, views, shares, and likes Party media have received on social media’, as also quoted above. As mentioned earlier, ‘Party media’ is a far broader term compared with two individual Party organs’ social media accounts. Most Party media outlets, as typically reflected in the case of the PD and its Web platform (www.peopledaily.com.cn), still remain plainly and profoundly propaganda-oriented and tedious as they have always been. I am also a little concerned about the claim that Party media ‘are regaining popularity and credibility they once enjoyed during the Mao era’ (Fang 2022, p. 50). It can be argued that if media in the Mao era, particularly during his last two decades of rule, can be defined as ‘popular’ and ‘credible’ at all, it was ultimately a result of a systematic brainwashing through top-down mass propaganda campaigns supported by rigid political-­ideological control and repression. It would be a hugely disturbing and alarming, instead of a welcome and congratulating, development if Party media in current China are indeed regaining such deeply concerning ‘popularity’ and ‘credibility’—though I seriously doubt this is (with the absence of any solid evidence), or would ever be (as I personally believe), the case. In any sense, the ‘success’ of Mao’s media was a tragedy for Chinese journalism, and the society at large. As Lenard L. Chu, a retired prominent and highly respected Chinese media studies scholar, insightfully noted, despite Maoist propagandists’ effectiveness in achieving their goals, the fact was ‘[t]he more effective the measure, the more destructive it was. As such, had [Mao’s] China been less effective in terms of her communication policies and strategies, today she would be much better off economically’ (and politically, socially, and culturally as well, as this writer would add) (Chu 1986, p. 14). Sixth, historically, certain Party organs’ practice of popularizing some of their news content in relevant online and social media platforms is hardly new, or surprising. In a certain sense, it may be seen as part of their overall commercialized/popular subsidiary operations portfolio in the digital media era, just like those metro titles published by relevant Party press organs

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during the 1990s and 2000s. Some Party organs have also launched their commercialized news portals (different from their normal and often shallow and boring websites) to try to compete with privately owned commercial news aggregators, as will be detailed in the next chapter. Finally, we also need to be more careful about not mixing propaganda with journalism, a key issue in Chinese journalism (and indeed, journalism anywhere) as previous discussed. Propaganda is propaganda (which aims ultimately at manipulating the audience for whatever purposes), regardless of whether it takes an orthodox or popular form. While it is possible that certain softened individual propaganda stories on some digital platforms of certain Party organs can be fun in style, the hidden agenda of manipulation is not amusing. In other words, even though Party organs can also practice popular journalism and even do a good job by offering their audiences some politically ‘unharmful’ funny stories from time to time, this gives one no excuse to conceptually mix popularized propaganda with ordinary people-oriented popular journalism which is supposed to inform, entertain, and empower the public. As Xin’s case study of one Xinhua online program’s efforts in attempting to popularize certain official propaganda, including ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, suggested, such efforts ‘have not changed the nature of the journalism that is practiced by Xinhua on a daily basis’, for its ‘ideological function’ as a traditional Party organ remained (Xin 2022, p.  45). As a senior editor of the program revealed, the main strategy they adopted was ‘brainwashing + acting cute’ (Qian and Li 2016, cited in Xin 2022, p. 42). Interestingly, however, despite this insight, Xin still used a potentially problematic ‘popular’ title—‘(Re-)Popularizing Party Journalism in China’—to conceptualize her study. Like Fang’s study, Xin’s use of ‘(re-) popularizing’ to refer to Xinhua’s efforts in reviving the more ‘effective’ Yan’an style of Party press in the 1940s (Xin 2022, p. 36) without a critique of it is somewhat confusing and concerning.

5.3  Tabloids Down and Party Organs Up: Implications and Lessons To conclude my discussion of the ‘tabloids down and Party organs up’ phenomenon as happened in China’s (mainly) newspaper industry since the 2010s above, I direct my thoughts toward the implications and lessons of this development in order.

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First, while the fall of the tabloid metro paper sector was first and foremost a result of tightening political restriction of the sector and lack of government support in the sector’s fight against circulation and advertising revenue downfalls in the digital age, the sector’s own lack of a clear(er) understanding of, and firm(er) commitment to, popular journalism and problematic digital transition strategy (notably, metro titles’ initial half-­ hearted engagement in the news digital technologies and later, ‘giving-up’ strategy toward their printed editions while lacking competitive web-based digital editions/portals) also significantly contributed to its collapse. While it may be argued that the metro press sector, like print journalism in most advanced and many developing markets, may be doomed to shrink in the digital media era regardless of specific circumstances, the nearly collective collapse of the whole metro press sector is, by any standard, extraordinary. Unfortunately, as I discussed earlier in this chapter (see also Huang 2022a), unlike in a democratic advanced economy, in the Chinese context, the market logic was simply not allowed to do its work to give the industry a fair opportunity to rationalize itself in a normal way. It can be argued that even in the digital media era, given the huge population base of China as an aging society, it is not entirely impossible for a print/online tabloid press sector to find a place that belongs to it in the marketplace. Second, unlike established Western newspaper titles that are extremely proud of, and cherish, their history and brand value, many, if not most, of China’s once proud major metro titles have seemingly treated their journalistic tradition and brands as used shoes when they faced political and market headwinds (Huang 2022a). Without (more) careful research and strategic thinking, simply declaring ‘it is time to completely abandon the metro paper model’ (Chen 2016) can be misleading. Third, the Party press organ sector’s dubious ‘resurgence’ against the metro press sector was essentially a result of Party organ press groups’ reprioritizing of their now largely government-subsidized media resources in favor of Party press organ titles at the cost of their metro titles as their once popular but now no longer profitable fallen ‘stars’ in the wake of rapid political, technological, and market changes. Fourth, there is a profound lack of evidence to support the so-called popularity, credibility, and influence of ‘Party media’ in the digital media era as some have assumed. The Party organ sector’s inherent nature as the Chinese Party-state’s mass propaganda apparatus remains intact.

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Fifth, my discussion above also suggests the continuing usefulness of the ‘popular journalism vs. Party journalism’ framework in making sense of China’s mediascape even in the digital media era (e.g., Huang 2001). The framework per se does not suggest, nor should it be necessarily seen and used as, a ‘bi-polar’ (Wang et  al. 2018, p.  1203) statement. I can hardly see that it has been predominantly used this way in the literature either. In the Chinese context, it is almost common sense that certain overlap in content and style between popular journalism and Party journalism is nearly inevitable due to certain political constraints facing the former and market considerations of the latter. Finally, the journalistic death of the metro press sector may have marked the end of post-Mao China’s printed tabloid journalism as once the most typical and most important form of popular journalism (despite tabloid newspapers’  resilient existence in many other places in the world). However, the death of printed tabloid newspapers should not be misread as the end of popular/tabloid journalism as a journalistic genre in China. Instead, it has been virally spreading over China’s digital media universe in many other forms, particularly in terms of countless netizen journalists’ proactive participation in the game.

Notes 1. Most of these Chinese critics attempted to back up their understanding of the term by referring exclusively to Noam Chomsky’s (1997) ‘What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream’. Interestingly, although Chomsky did imply ‘mainstream’ media as ‘elite’ media in his essay, he provided no justification for his suggestion, nor did he clearly define the term. Moreover, while these Chinese critics conveniently treat the essay as the original and authoritative reference to ‘mainstream media’, it is in fact just a free-style reflective piece and a radical critique of American elite media such as the New York Times (and other hegemonic powers in the American society)— exactly the type of media these Chinese critics envy. 2. It seems that Fang’s article used the overseas used version ‘WeChat’ to refer to the domestically used original version ‘Weixin’ of the same app which could potentially lead to confusion, though for the convenience of discussion and precaution, I follow the suit to use WeChat rather than Weixin here.

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CHAPTER 6

China’s Popular Journalism in the Digital Media Era

6.1   Popular Journalism in Xi’s Paradox ‘New Era’ Current China as a conservative post-communist state-capitalist society is full of tensions and contradictions. The country may be the second largest economy after the United States and may even potentially overtake the latter by the middle of this century (as far as some optimistic China observers are concerned); however, politically it remains firmly a one-party state based on rule of man. In fact, it has been increasingly ruled by one man since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and started a conservative ‘new era’ of post-Mao Chinese politics. Decades after Mao’s death, Xi now called for the whole nation, particularly the younger generation, to carry on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) revolutionary ‘red genes’. Despite numerous rounds of anti-corruption and thought-molding educational campaigns in the recent decade, institutionally inherited rampant official and business corruption and moral decay in Chinese society at large continue. The country’s poor human rights record has been a persistent concern of critics at home and abroad, despite the government’s denial of any such concern. The socialist market economy may have helped produce a group of Chinese billionaires and a growing (but also increasingly unhappy) middle class, but millions of Chinese, particularly those who live in remote rural areas, are still struggling to meet their daily basic

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needs. As state power advances, the private sector has been facing growing restrictions and forced to retreat, which has severely damaged business confidence at home and abroad and triggered concerns about China’s market-oriented reform and opening policy that started more than 40 years ago. There has been a growing fear that the country’s declining birth rate and working-age population, shrinking private sector and foreign investments, and stagnated job market may lead it to fall into the ‘middle income trap’. Though political control has been increasingly tightened in recent years, social stability remains the primary concern of the Party-state. While the US-led Western powers are accused of attempting to impose their Eurocentric libertarian values on socialist China and contain its rise to a potential superpower status, China’s rich elite- and middle-class families continue to send their children overseas to receive Western education. The regime uses fear to rule the country but also lives in fear—not only because of a potential color revolution allegedly mobilized by the US-led West, but also because of numerous small and big protests and riots at home over the years, including those now worldwide known ‘White Paper Protests’ (as dubbed by the media)  in late 2022 against the government’s inhumane zero-case policy against the Covid-19 pandemic. When it comes to journalism, with the decline of traditional news media, particularly newspapers, and the rise of digital media since the 2010s, web- and social media-based digital journalism has become the new mainstream mode of delivery of news and other information. This trend of digitization and platformation of China’s journalism has largely resulted in news consumers, particularly young people, shifting away from  traditional, particularly print, media to online media. And accordingly, commercial advertisers have also strategically moved online. For example, according to relevant survey data included in Blue Book of China’s Media (2019), in 2018, China’s total online advertising revenue increased 12.6 percent over the previous year, reaching 382.87  billion RMB.  In comparison, the radio and television broadcasting sector’s total advertising revenue was 153.85 billion RMB or a 1.3 percent increase over the previous year, while total advertising revenue of the newspaper sector fell sharply to 7.67 billion RMB, an astonishing 30 percent decrease from the previous year’s 11.01 billion RMB. The survey report concluded that this demonstrated that ‘online advertising still remains the powerhouse of the development of China’s advertising industry’ (Cui et al. 2019, p. 3).

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The country, particularly its urban areas, may be deemed as digitally modern measured by Internet and networked smartphone penetration rates. According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC), as of the end of June 2022, 1.05 billion Chinese or 74.4 percent of the country’s total population were Internet users. Among them, 99.6 percent or 1.04 billion were smartphone Internet users and 75 percent or 788 million were online news services users (CINIC 2022). Despite this, digital freedom and freedom of speech at large remain profoundly limited. In the meantime, online state and nationalistic propaganda has been operating at full capacity in the era of Xi Jinping. While media outlets are allowed to ‘freely’ (by aligning with China’s foreign policy) and often conveniently comment on international issues and criticize the ‘arrogant’ and ‘aggressive’ American hegemony, openly commenting on and criticizing China’s domestic politics and major government policies remains strictly censored online and offline in the name of maintaining social stability and countering foreign influence and interference. Similarly, while the government complains about restrictions on Chinese media outlets in many Western countries, foreign/Western media in China are far more tightly restricted under a dubious legal system. As far as the CCP is concerned, only such a conservative iron-fist political-media approach would guarantee the realization of Xi’s ‘China dream’, or in other words China’s superpower status in the world, by the mid-twenty-first century as projected by the Party. These are just some of the extraordinary tensions and paradoxes facing current China as widely observed by China critics. While such tensions and paradoxes in and of themselves are often amusing in nature and may objectively provide a bonanza for ‘fun’ journalism in the digital media era, digital popular journalism in China has been considerably constrained, particularly when it comes to certain not-so-funny ‘sensitive’ issues in the eyes of the authorities. This being said, the censorship regime has its own limits due to the business logic of China’s digital journalism and the way how the Internet and digital technologies at large work. The authorities face a sticky dilemma here: as the Xi administration has become increasingly politically and ideologically conservative in recent years, the country has seen an unprecedented economic downturn which is still unfolding due to exactly this conservative move as well as turbulent Sino-Western relations and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this context, digital popular journalism becomes vitally commercially important for the country’s financially stressed media organizations. More broadly, in such a stressful political-economy situation, participating in digital popular journalism

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also serves as an important way for individual journalists and netizens alike to make sense of the society and their everyday life. And the accelerated digital revolution in China since the 2010s, which has happened to take place in the era of Xi, has made this technologically possible. The growing tension between the rigid media censorship regime and continued massive official media propaganda and the objective public need for popular news has forced the political logic and the business logic to constantly renegotiate their positions to achieve some kind of subtle balance. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall pinpoint a big picture of China’s digital popular journalism landscape by examining its structural form, operational configuration, citizen participation dimension, and (briefly) transnational features.

6.2  Structural Features of China’s Digital Popular Journalism China’s digital popular journalism landscape is complex and diverse, and its structural features may be seen through the matrix in Table 6.1, which shows to what extent popular journalism is practiced by different players. Official websites of Party press organ titles are the most controlled section in China’s digital journalistic practice with little autonomy to run ‘fun’ journalism. As the online extension of their traditional print editions, they are first and foremost the CCP’s propaganda instruments. The Party press organ sector also remains heavily financially state-subsidized, which has also negatively contributed to its bureaucratic work style and lack of competitive spirit and creativity. Though these websites may occasionally offer fun stories, they are by no means meaningful players in the popular journalism game. However, in comparison, collectively, major Party press organs’ social media accounts and these organs’ commercialized (subsidiary) news portals and their apps and accounts in/on major commercial news portals and social media play an important role in popular news content creation. Most of these accounts and portals as well as their apps have also increasingly become news aggregators themselves. Similarly, official broadcasters and news agencies as Party organs, such as China Central Television (CCTV News) and the Xinhua News Agency, have by and large followed a similar practice (Fang 2022; Xin 2022; Zou 2021), though broadcasting media/journalism is beyond this book’s research scope.

Little to none

Popular journalism on websites of major Party press organ titles Popular journalism on major Party press organs’ social media accounts — Popular journalism in major Party press organs’ commercialized news portals and their apps and accounts in/ on major commercial news portals and social media

Popular journalism in major privately owned commercial news aggregator portals, search engines, and apps

High

Degree of regulation/ control

Typical example

(continued)

People’s Daily online (http://www.people.com. cn/) Minimal to moderate; People’s Daily Weibo (https://weibo.com/rmrb) collectively playing an and Prowler’s Daily Weixin (https://www. important role in popular news weixinyidu.com/a_1294) content creation; relevant — accounts’ and portals’ as well as Jiemian News (www.jiemian.com), The Paper their apps’ increasing practice of (https://www.thepaper.cn/), Jimu News news aggregation (https://www.ctdsb.net/), The Cover (https:// www.thecover.cn/), Shangyou (https://www. cqcb.com/), Hongxin (http://news.chengdu. cn/), Shanghai Observer (https://www.jfdaily. com/staticsg/home), Xin Jing Bao (https://www. bjnews.com.cn/) High; serving as dominant Tennent (https://www.qq.com/), Sina (https:// popular journalism aggregators www.sina.com.cn/), Sohu (https://www.sohu. and sites for popular citizen com/), and NetEase (https://m.163.com/), journalism Toutiao (https://www.toutiao.com/), Huxiu (https://www.huxiu.com/), Baidu News (https://news.baidu.com/), Weibo (https://m. weibo.cn/), Weixin (https://wx.qq.com/), Douyin (https://www.douyin.com/), (as well as their apps and/or accounts in/on social media and/or each other’s portals/apps)

Degree/way of practice

Type of media/practice

Table 6.1  An overview of China’s digital popular journalism landscape

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Low

High; increasingly important role in popular news content creation; highly proliferating; vibrant and can be very critical and rebellious High; via diverse digital platforms, vibrant/critical, transnational

Citizen digital popular journalism

Digital popular journalism in global China

Degree/way of practice

Type of media/practice

Table 6.1 (continued)

Overseas popular Chinese-­language news portals, WeChat, TikTok, other China-related digital platforms

Individual amateur/semi-­professional popular news creators and/or commentators via diverse digital platforms

Typical example

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Covering a range of short and visually attractive fun or practically useful (for people’s daily life) news as well as softened hard news or official propaganda, the Weibo and Weixin accounts of the People’s Daily, official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the CCP, for example, are believed to be highly popular among many of their viewers as some studies have suggested (despite the lack of support of more solid and systematic data as discussed in the previous chapter). The majority of commercialized news portals of relevant Party press organ groups are mainly run by their respective metro newspaper titles, as they made their digital transition in a more determined manner since the mid-2010s due to deadly completion pressure from privately owned commercial news aggregators, social media news aggregators, and algorithmic news search engines/aggregators. However, with rare exceptions, these portals have deliberately underplayed their (somewhat embarrassing) connection to their once popular but now collapsed respective printed metro titles and their boring websites by running their news portals with brand new names. For example, in 2014, Shanghai-based Orient Morning News (dongfang zaobao) started its online news portal Pengpai News (pengpai xinwen). In Chongqing, the Chongqing Morning News established its online news portal Shangyiu News (shangyiu xinwen) in 2015. Launched in 2016, Chengdu-based The Page (fengmian xinwen) is the name of the news portal run by the West China Metro News, while its same city rival the Chengdu Business News kicked off its own online news portal Hongxing News (hongxing xinwen) in 2018. More recently, in 2021, Wuhan-based Chutian Metro News launched its online news portal Jimu News (jimu xinwen). Shanghai Observer, which was formally launched in 2016, is a slightly different case as it serves as both the Liberation Daily’s (official mouthpiece of the CCP Shanghai Committee) official website and news portal. On the other hand, the Xin Jing Bao in Beijing has used the same name for its (combined) website and news portal. In comparison, Jiemian News, which was launched in 2014 by the powerful official Shanghai United Media Group that also published Pengpai News in the same year as mentioned above, was largely a brand new finance and business-focused news portal that started from scratch. The extent of these news portals’ practice of popular journalism varies from case to case, though most of them are insignificant players. Some of them, however, have a rather substantial popular journalistic presence, particularly in the form of short-video news. For example, The Page’s prize-giving ‘Video-Blogger’ (paike) channel contains numerous popular

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short-video news clips from citizen journalism lovers, while popular (and general) short-video stories from its own reporters are uploaded to its ‘30 Seconds’ channel. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, some other portals like Shangyiu News, Hongxing News, and Huxiu News also have popular news sections, in the form of audio/video clips or articles, to attract their regular and potential new viewers, particularly young people through their smartphone apps. In comparison, popular stories from many other news portals of relevant Party press organs largely focus on soft/entertaining stories under certain similarly named sections such as ‘celebrealities’, ‘movie’, ‘fashion’, ‘travel’, ‘lifestyle’, and ‘culture’, which are far less journalism (news and current affairs) oriented. More recently, due to increasingly dire completion pressure from privately owned commercial online news aggregators, many of these news portals also started their own news aggregation by sharing each other’s popular stories. The dominant and most influential organizational digital popular journalism players are those privately owned and more technologically and financially powerful commercial news aggregator portals, search engines, and apps. Until recently, they were typically represented by the big four online news and information services portals, Tennent (https://www. qq.com/), Sina (https://www.sina.com.cn/), Sohu (https://www.sohu. com/), and NetEase (https://m.163.com/), all of which were launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, tabloid metro papers as powerhouses of popular news creation and dominant platforms of delivery were in their ‘golden decade’ (Huang 2021, p. 187) and barely saw these emerging commercial online portals as news aggregators as a threat. Nor did these portals themselves. In fact, they were quite unhappy with being unfairly treated and belittled by both media regulators and state-­ owned traditional media organizations. Not being recognized as formal news organizations (no private news media were/are allowed in China), they were prohibited from collecting and publishing original news, particularly political/hard news, by themselves, except for reprinting news published by state media already (for free!). Many state media including metro paper titles were seemingly quite happy about such ‘free’ promotion of their stories which could potentially help stimulate their circulation and thus advertising revenue. On the other hand, the state also seemingly saw this as good practice which could help promote official propaganda while ensuring that these private media companies would make no political trouble. Despite these commercial portals’ coverage of certain soft/entertaining news and information, they were still

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far from being able to compete with the tabloid metro sector. In the meantime, the Internet in China at the time still remained substantially underdeveloped. For example, as of the end of 2004, only 94 million or 7.3 percent of Chinese were Internet users. And as late as the end of 2007, only 163  million or 12.6 percent of the country’s total population had access to broadband Internet services, while the number of smartphone Internet users just passed the 50 million mark (CINIC 2008, pp. 10, 11, 12). This situation also objectively led to the metro press sector’s hesitation to adopt a sooner and more determined digital transition strategy, which they would soon deeply regret. By the early 2010s, with the explosive development of China’s telecommunication infrastructure, the widespread availability of broadband Internet access and, accordingly, the phenomenal growth of the number of Internet and smartphones users, the metro papers started to feel the real pressure and pain caused by the rapid digitization of China’s journalism. For example, as of the end of 2012, China’s Internet penetration rate jumped to 42.1 percent (564 million total) and 74.5 percent of users were networked smartphone users (CINIC 2013, p. 5). By now, the once seemingly rather disadvantageous identity of commercial online news portals as news aggregators had suddenly become their great, accidental strength as they were comfortably and arguably legally (as there was no available law or policy to clearly regulate this gray area of digital media practice) ‘stealing’ stories from metro papers (and other state media). As they constantly attracted more and more users, advertisers also started shifting away from metro titles to online news portals. In this context, many metro papers started their digital transition in a more determined and strategic manner by launching their own online news portals as discussed earlier, though for most of them it was too late to catch up and compete with those commercial portals. It is also noteworthy that those commercial portals were/are not only comprehensive/aggressive news aggregators, but also providers of a wide range of non-news information services. The popular digital news market became even more competitive later with the rise of algorithmic news search engines, and the practice of social media as news aggregators and, more broadly, cross-platform news delivery and aggregation. This wild new wave of digital news revolution was largely sparked by the launch of Jinri Toutiao or simply Toutiao (or literally ‘Top Stories’, https://www.toutiao.com/), China’s first and arguably most successful and influential algorithmically powered news search engine/aggregator, in 2012 by the Beijing-based IT company ByteDance

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(www.bytedance.com). Its instant great success in China’s digital news market profoundly impacted the country’s news-consuming culture. It used algorithmic technology to provide its viewers with personalized news service based on their  using habits by constantly aggregating available news information, which almost turned China’s whole news market, including those traditional commercial news portals’ business model as discussed above, upside down. Unsurprisingly, this made both traditional media outlets and traditional online commercial news aggregators (though the latter had tremendously hurt the former in a similar way before) angry and led to heated debates on its ‘unethical’ practice, and several high-profile copyright disputes against the news search engine (which were similar to relevant copyright disputes and court cases raised/launched by certain legacy news media against such powerful search engines and social media apps as Google and Facebook in the West). Most disputes were, however, settled through negotiations and/or signing copyright agreements between Toutiao and other relevant outlets, as all parties seemingly realized that bringing disputes to court would not only be financially costly but also more or less damage everyone’s business interests (Kesoview 2017; Kuai et al. 2022; Wang 2014; Yan 2014). Furthermore, because Toutiao was a news search engine, it also put pressure on other search engines launched before it, notably, for example, Baidu (https://news.baidu.com/, launched in 2000), the Chinese version of Google, and Zhihu (https://www.zhihu.com/signin?next=%2F, launched in 2011), the Chinese version of Quora. Its business ambition did not stop here, however. Its proactive approach to nurturing and investing in popular citizen journalism by inviting, supporting, and awarding citizen journalists as news creators in the form of opening their Toutiao accounts to upload or broadcast news stories produced by themselves also almost instantly proved a great success. This again placed pressure on other web platforms and social media apps that had started similar practice before it, typically Sina’s microblogging platform/app Weibo (lunched in 2009) and Tennent’s popular instant messaging app Weixin (started in 2011 and later its overseas version WeChat). Still, in 2016, Toutiao launched its own video-sharing social media brand (app) Douyin (and later its international version TikTok), which also soon became extremely popular. In other words, Toutiao as an extremely creative and maverick new digital media/news player started a digital war on nearly all fronts with nearly all types of traditional and new media. Despite all sorts of criticisms of, controversies around, and disputes with, it, ‘the market has chosen

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Jinri Toutiao’, as one media critic declared in a blog published on the sixth anniversary of its launch (Wang 2018). Another critic half seriously and half sarcastically commented that while commercial online news aggregators had largely ruined the business of traditional media, Toutiao had by now demolished the business of these commercial portals. And all other digital news media could do now was to take the path of ‘Toutiaonization’ (Kesoview 2017). Though recent changes in China’s digital media/journalism were hardly a case of ‘Toutiaonization’, Toutiao’s market success has indeed triggered a fiercer digital media completion and more digital media/journalism innovations. To various extents, nearly all types of major digital platforms in China, private or state owned, are nowadays multi-function and cross-platform players in terms of their application of algorithmic news distribution technology, proactive approach to attracting citizen journalists to contributing to their popular news business, and practice of news aggregation. This is a truly ‘warring states period’ of China’s digital media and journalism. While these significant developments in the space of digital news platforms are not all about popular journalism, popular journalism does play a crucial role in current China’s digital news communication and social life in general. This is not only because practicing serious journalism has become extremely difficult in the era of Xi, but also because of the objective need for popular journalism from the masses. Such a need may become particularly psychologically and socially important for people in the kinds of challenging times the country has been facing in the recent decade. For many, particularly China’s critical netizens, participating in digital popular journalism is also an important alternative form of protesting against the repressive and corrupt regime. Commercially, digital popular journalism in the current political situation also holds a high stake for relevant media companies, as the fun news market is almost the only spotlight of their news business. Citizen journalists’ proactive and widespread participation in digital popular journalism as viewers, content creators, and/or commentators forms an important dimension of current China’s popular journalism landscape. Such participation is not only commercially important for relevant digital media portals and apps, but also journalistically and socially significant, particularly from the perspective of popular journalism as a kind of journalism about the people, for the people, and nowadays increasingly by the people due to their access to digital technologies and resources. China’s popular journalism in the digital age has also become increasingly transnational in the context of global China. These two matters will be discussed further in Sect. 6.4.

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6.3  The Art of Politics and Business of Playing the Fun Game Although China’s privately owned commercial and, to a lesser extent, state-owned Party organ groups’ commercialized digital media (online and social media-based news portals/apps/accounts) may have collectively dominated the country’s digital popular journalism market, there are certain political rules that they must follow. In other words, they must show their political ‘loyalty’ and ‘correctness’ before being allowed to have fun in the wonderland of popular journalism in an ‘acceptable’ manner in the eyes of the state censors. Specifically, this practice takes three major forms. First, whenever required or expected by the authorities, particularly during certain politically important events, all these major digital media news platforms must, like nearly all other major  online and offline media outlets nationwide, place a striking red banner at the top of their main pages to highlight some important propaganda information (such as Xi quotes, trendy propaganda slogans, or updates regarding major official conferences, and government work), and even turn the background color of their main pages to red. Second, their first few ‘top stories’ on their main pages must always be ‘important’ official propaganda and bureaucratic news. This has become a fixed, permanent practice across major digital platforms under Xi. Unsurprisingly, such ‘top stories’ are more often than not identical, and one can expect that one or more such stories will certainly be about Xi’s ‘extremely important’ speeches, talks, instructions, and/or activities. Some of them also provide highlighted hyperlinks to similar archived stories/information and related political educational materials. Third, like all other Chinese media both online and offline, they must also always take an ‘objective’ (non-critical) approach to their coverage of important domestic and international news. Typically, for example, when I was writing these lines in early March 2023, China’s rubber-stamp parliament (the National People’s Congress) and political advisory body (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference) were meeting in full sessions in Beijing to ‘elect’ Xi for his third term as Chinese president and a new government under his reign. Unsurprisingly, all these major digital news media platforms and other Chinese media outlets online and offline became visibly much ‘redder’ than they normally were in terms of both page layout and content.

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However, beside, under, and/or behind such propagandistic arrangements on their main pages, one could quite easily find or navigate a wide range of popular stories and materials on most of these major digital news media platforms, particularly privately owned commercial ones. Beside those ‘top stories’ on the main page of a typical such platform, for example, one can immediately spot some attractive photos of female celebrities and hyperlinked associated stories. Further scrolling down the main page or searching a bit more, one might easily find more fun and sensational stories from relevant sections/channels such as ‘Blog’, ‘Society’, ‘Military’, ‘Fashion and Lifestyle’, ‘Culture’, ‘Art’, ‘Women’, ‘Movies’, ‘Stars’, ‘Health’, and ‘Sports’ and very importantly, a possible, if not likely, short-­ video news section. Such channels often cover a wide range of topics and issues: gossip and rumors about celebrities, sex/corruption scandals, all kinds of fun and human-interest stories, popularized military news, and so on. One can access any popular stories that have just happened in China and overseas except those criticizing China’s political system and major government policies and mocking the country’s top leadership. For example, and typically, from Sohu’s ‘Video News’ channel (https:// tv.sohu.com/news/), one will easily find endless popular short-video stories produced by Sohu itself and numerous partner media and citizen journalists under eight major categories and more than 40 subcategories. For example, ‘Hot Social News’ contains three subcategories: ‘Disasters and Accidents’, ‘Crimes’, and ‘Hot Issues and Breaking News’. Its ‘Military’ category, for example again, collects numerous videos about, among many other things, the Russian-Ukrainian war from both Ukraine and particularly Russian perspectives/sources. Short video-news clips are predominantly popular stories. This is because, for both relevant news portals/ apps and individual video bloggers, popular stories, compared with serious news, are not only much less politically risky but also much easier to make and more likely to attract a mass audience. With the start of commercialization of the 5G network in China from 2019, online and app-based short-video news and news broadcasting have become more and more popular (e.g., see Zhou 2022). Even the ‘Video-Blogger’ channel (https://www.thecover.cn/channel_3889) of The Page, a commercialized news portal of the official Sichuan Daily press group which was launched in early 2019 and soon partnered with Tennent, has become extremely popular. Compared with Sohu, its page layout style is neater and thus far easier for viewers to navigate. Within three years of its launch, by May 2022, the channel had

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received 118,744 short-video news submissions from citizen video-­ bloggers and among them 21,013 clips were accepted and uploaded on the channel (The Page 2022). As to the content of those news clips, one may get a sense of it from the headlines of sampled stories uploaded on the channel in the first weeks of February, March, and April 2023 as listed in Tables 6.2, 6.3, and 6.4. These headlines show that they were predominantly human interest and fun stories happening in ordinary citizen bloggers’ everyday lives which may appear ‘trivial’ to some but socially, morally, and psychologically meaningful and important to these bloggers and the wider community. Made by ordinary bloggers using mobile phones, these video news stories are short, simple, funny, authentic, and often tell a story in a casual local dialect, a truly neighborhood journalism which is socially and journalistically significant from a popular journalistic perspective. Table 6.2  The Page’s short-video news headlines (first week of Feb. 2023) Showing the first 20 stories only (45 total). Times of viewing (x10,000) by 9:35 am April 5, Beijing time   1.  Volunteer retired police helped unblock traffic to give way to ambulance (3.5)   2.  Rumors about university underground super electromagnetic guns were fake (3.7)   3.  Uncle made big wooden toy slipper for boy (3.5)   4.  Disabled man with a knife confronting with police was shot 10 times in USA (3.5)   5. Chief director Yang Lei: The Three-Body Problem meant to be a sci-fi film belonging to Chinese (3.4)   6.  Sky lantern caught by drone (3.5)   7. Daughter asked mom ‘Can I never get married or have children for the rest of my life’ and received a warm response (3.6)   8.  Woman rescued five chicks from garbage bin (3.6)   9. Young parents left their naughty little child sprinkle and roll on zoo walking-path to compromise (3.7) 10.  Failure of sewage treatment facility caused mine waste water overflowing (3.7) 11.  A young student committed suicide (4.7) 12. Dangerous: Two little girls found unattended and played with water by deep river (3.4) 13.  Two audio clips of suicided young student recovered (3.6) 14.  A small zoo tiger drowned (3.6) 15.  Woman suspected of suicide rescued by a man (3.5) 16.  20-year-old jobless man killed a neighbor’s baby (6.0) 17.  Hong Kong is to distribute 500,000 free air tickets to passengers (4.0) 18.  Police: Parents helping boy catch seagull educated (3.5) 19.  Crazy man set off fireworks in his apartment (3.8) 20. No good: Staff helped pick up visitor’s dropped phone off the cliff against safety protocol (3.4)

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Table 6.3  The Page’s short-video news headlines (1st week of March 2023) Showing the first 20 stories only (44 total). Times of viewing (x10,000) by 7:36 am April 5 Beijing time   1.  Cat lovers who beaten and detained a cat abuser investigated by police (4.3)   2.  KTV fire extinguished and no casualties (4.2)   3.  Family complained 73-year-old father abused by nursing home nurses (3.6)   4.  Merchant filmed selling pickles dropped on ground (3.6)   5. Man committing suicide due to failing to get excavator license time and again rescued by police (3.7)   6.  Man acts as ‘tool man’ to allow nurse girlfriend to practice needle piercing (3.6)   7. On her birthday, mom ran into her son riding a bike on street laden with gifts prepared for her: his appearance made the whole street romantic (3.7)   8. Giant pandas in Russian zoo: Soaring in weight but remaining super active like ‘battle pandas’ (3.8)   9. Daughter happened to see mom helping a strange old man undergo a CT exam in hospital: Role model for us young people (4.1) 10. Police used passerby’s electric car to chase suspect and staged a realistic version of ‘crazy chasing’ (title of a popular 2023 Chinese movie)! (4.3) 11. Shanghai: The rumor that an old man’s veg yard was forced to be cleaned up untrue (3.6) 12. ‘5 days of training and 4 days of drinking’: 24 officials including county mayor were punished (3.9) 13. Truck driver gave a load of recyclable empty drink bottles for free to an old garbage-collector and helped him to pack them onto his car (3.7) 14. Athletes personally experienced the daily life of Tai Mountain porters and felt exhausted (3.7) 15. A parent of a long-time member paid 10 million RMB to buy a bankrupt basketball club: I want my son to play with a familiar coach and teammates (3.5) 16.  Dodgy food store overcharging customers ordered to close down (4.2) 17. Tesla humanoid robots ‘build themselves’, says Musk: Humanoid robots may outnumber humans in future (4.3) 18.  Kindergarten teacher rushed to rescue little boy accidentally caught by door (4.3) 19. Young sister threw herself into arms of elder brother just discharged from the army as she surprisingly found him coming with mom to pick her up from school (3.6) 20.  Police: Man and woman arguing on the road and hurt their daughter (3.8)

Like the tabloid metro press sector experienced before, China’s digital popular journalism has also faced certain ethical concerns. Such concerns may not only come from media censors and the conservative section of the society, but sometimes also from relevant rival digital media outlets themselves when competition wars between/among them intensify. Toutiao, for example, was charged by many traditional media (particularly metro press titles) and commercial news portals alike for its ‘low’ practice of

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Table 6.4  The Page’s short-video news headlines (1st week of April 2023) Showing the first 20 stories only (33 total). Times of viewing (x10,000) by 8:07 am April 8, Beijing time 1. Police: Man’s motorcycle deliberately damaged by a takeaway delivery man and repairing would cost 3000 RMB (4.6) 2. Couple took their shoes off and scratched toes on train: Behave yourself in public space (4.8) 3. 2023 Paris Marathon: Ethiopian and Kenyan runners won men’s and women’s championships (4.1) 4. Passengers made room for boy writing homework in subway car during rush hour (3.5) 5. Witness: Rider suspected of being scraped over by kite line was taken to hospital (3.5) 6. Dangerous: Children rushing to a landing scenic spot helicopter (4.8) 7. Sprinkler truck sprayed water to street vendors: Investigation underway (3.7) 8. Bus driver playing with mobile phone on highway when driving: Investigation underway (3.6) 9. Improved council work: Manhole covers opened with warning sign before heavy rain (4.5) 10. Woman dressed in red being stopped entering the martyr’s cemetery even though it was not due to the color of her dress (6.2) 11. 5-year-old boy hid a wad of ‘hell money’ for friends after praying at grandma’s grave (3.4) 12. Doctor played chess on mobile phone throughout the whole process of seeing a child patient: Investigation underway (3.5) 13. Large fish found from Sanya Beach: Sailfish, non-protected species (3.5) 14. Tourists driving on Sichuan-Tibet State Route captured thrilling images of an avalanche through dashcam (4.0) 15. Salesman selling sweet cones while repeatedly ‘digging’ boogers: Really disgusting (3.6) 16.Woman’s dropped smartphone taken away by a zoo monkey that even answered a call (4.0) 17. Woman surprisingly appeared in front of her online-dating boyfriend who was stunned and cried (3.5) 18. Woman slept without taking off earrings and woke up to find earlobe split into two parts (3.5) 19. Siblings trapped in mud while picking up shells and rescued by man using excavator (3.8) 20. Rumor about university dormitory struck by lightning untrue (3.5)

algorithmically recommending sex-related news and soft materials to its viewers, even though many of those traditional media outlets and online news portals themselves had also been by and large playing the ‘sex’ card

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to help stimulate their circulation, rating, and/or number of daily active users. In April 2018, China’s media authorities ordered Toutiao to close five controversial channels: ‘Quotations’ (sentimental short messages uploaded and shared by users), and ‘Jokes’, ‘Interesting Images’, ‘Nice Photos’, and ‘Beautiful Women’ for their failure to promote ‘healthy’ socialist values (Sun 2018). Similar channels in other news portals were also forced to shut down shortly. Despite this, if one uses Toutiao to search ‘scandals’ now (early April 2023), one will still easily get a long list of relevant past and present stories ranging from the Clinton-Lewinski affair in 1998 to a widely reported recent case about China’s former top table-tennis player and multiple world championship winner Zhang Jike. As to the latter case, Zhang allegedly deliberately leaked a few sensual video clips of his former star actress girlfriend to a man to whom he owed a huge gambling debt, and the man attempted to use the images to blackmail the actress. It seems that to get the balance right between holding high ethical standards (which is in itself a complex and slippery matter) and meeting the public’s right to know fun and sensational stories (together with ‘serious’ news) is always a challenging task, even in socialist China. When it comes to context, popular news stories on China’s major digital media platforms, as illustrated by the cases of Sohu’s and The Page’s short-video news sections as discussed above, remain predominantly fun news oriented, lacking popular critical and investigative content to reflect a richer and more dynamic everyday social life in current China as a complex and paradoxical post-communist transitional society, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Interestingly, and ironically, within the ‘International information’ section of Sohu’s ‘Video News’ channel, there is a sub-­ category specifically devoted to ‘Foreign Political Scandals’, which gives people an impression  that Chinese politics is like a scandal-free utopia despite widely acknowledged political controversies and corruption in the country. In fact, even fun stories are principally required to abide by ‘socialist’ moral standards (which are again slippery and shifting depending on specific political-economy circumstances over time), though relevant digital platforms may also play hide-and-seek with the authorities in this regard. Meanwhile, and often  in contrast,  as discussed below, individual netizens often play a more active, creative, and significant role in the critical digital popular journalism space based on their daily routine practice of engaging with  the discussions of news discourse online and on social media.

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6.4  Commentary Critical Citizen Popular Journalism One important form of citizen digital popular journalistic practice in current China, as discussed above, is citizen bloggers’ proactive participation in uploading short video-news clips shot by themselves on major digital platforms as both a social-journalistic practice and in some cases a (small) business. Of course, citizen digital popular journalistic practice in China, like elsewhere, also takes many other forms (like discussion of, and debate on, popular news and current affairs in countless relevant BBSs and groups on all sorts of online and app-based digital platforms) and can be profoundly critical. In this section, I shall focus on one particular form of critical citizen digital popular journalistic practice in China which I call ‘commentary critical citizen popular journalism’. It refers to critical Chinese netizens’ proactive use of the online ‘comment’ area to mock and criticize relevant online propaganda news (hard or softened) and associated issues regarding China’s political system, major government policies, and official wrongdoings and corruption. Compared with practicing formal/professional watchdog journalism to directly criticize and confront the Chinese Party-state, brief and often casual critical comments (most of which are just one to two sentences long, often using oral and sometimes even offensive language) serve as an alternative way to highlight a range of political and social concerns in current China. It should be noted that this alternative way does not necessarily or always end up with criticizing relevant specific matters only. Instead, it can sometimes, if not often, become unexpectedly bold and sharp by pushing the boundaries of the official censorship to touch sensitive political and policy issues and have real impact. Taking a close look at this practice may allow us to have a sense of what kind of online popular criticisms may be tolerated, if at all, by the authorities. Whether to keep the ‘comment’ area open below relevant online stories on major digital news platforms is a dilemma for the government. Switching off the ‘comment’ function would not only give the public an impression of the government’s lack of confidence, but also result in losing the opportunity for it to harvest possible positive comments and ‘likes’ from certain netizens, particularly members of  the ‘50-cents party’ as referred to in the previous chapter. Furthermore, disabling the ‘comment’ function would also mean the government’s loss of an important channel to monitor public opinions on its policies and performance. On the other

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hand, keeping the ‘comment’ function available would mean the inevitability of criticisms from netizens, including potentially harsh and radical ones. Some studies have argued that there is still room for constructive public criticisms of the government in China, partly because the government has little choice but to more patiently and carefully listen to its people and try to improve its work given all sorts of internal and external challenges that it faces, and partly because the government may worry much less about individual criticisms than collective actions (e.g., see King et al. 2013). It might be due to these considerations that netizens’ practice of mocking official propaganda and scandals has seemingly been, in a highly general sense, considerably tolerated by the authorities to date despite the highly fragile and unpredictable nature of such tolerance. Below, I shall use three typical examples to illustrate this interesting practice. In China, people commonly describe the awkward situation when an outwitted (artificially or hypocritically softened) official propaganda story unexpectedly attracts overwhelming critical and sarcastic comments (qunchao) as a ‘big comment-box screw up’ (pinglunqu da fanche). One typical recent such embarrassing ‘big screw-up’ case happened with regard to a story published on www.people.com.cn, the official website of the People’s Daily. On the morning of 9 February 2023, the said story titled ‘Work Hard, Life will Become Sweeter and Sweeter’ appeared on the website (Dou 2023). The story drew on interviews with a couple who ran a small business in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, and another worker working in a factory in another city in the same province (all of whom were migrant workers from Henan Province), apparently aiming to use these two well-­ crafted isolated examples to suggest China’s economy was recovering and thriving again after three years’ harsh lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and a bright future ahead for China’s millions of struggling working class. Though the story itself became unsearchable later in the website’s ‘comment’ section called Strong Nation Forum (qiangguo luntan), it had been widely forwarded/reposted online and on social media apps and attracted waves of critical and satirical comments. A post from one blogger nicknamed ‘Some Stories’ uploaded on NetEase on 13 February titled ‘What Are the Problems of “Work Hard, Life will Become Sweeter and Sweeter?”’, for example, attracted 150 follow-­up posts and 3369 participants in less than 13 hours (interestingly, all those comments together with the ‘comment’ area remained available online by the time I was writing this line: 14:54, 9 April 2023, Beijing

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time). While the original blog criticized the story as being overly ‘simplistic’, completely ‘out of touch’ with ordinary working people, and utterly propagandistically counterproductive (Some Stories 2023), those follow­up posts, as shown in the typical examples summarized in Table 6.5, were also overwhelmingly critical and full of biting jokes and ruthless satire which also harvested thousands of ‘liking’ thumbs. The second example used for analysis here is about another recent ‘big comment-box screw up’ case that happened to the official Beijing Radio and Television Broadcasting’s Weibo account ‘Beijing Vision’ at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in major Chinese cities including Beijing. On Table 6.5  Examples of critical comments on ‘Work Hard, Life will Become Sweeter and Sweeter’ (https://www.163.com/dy/article/HTN9ED6S0552YH0X.html) • Draw cakes, that’s the problem • We work harder, and their life will become sweeter and sweeter • During one speech to the workers, Brezhnev said that our days will get better and better! The workers asked: What about us? • Russian workers were pretty intelligent: at least they were able to distinguish between you and me • That was how the USSR collapsed • It is never sweet without freedom, and it is never free without being yourself • Does it mean life is not sweet now? • Work hard till 65 to retire • Retire at 65? There is even no guarantee they would allow you to work till 65 as you may become jobless at 35. Understand? Simple, right? • If you guys keep complaining, they would extend your retirement age to 70 • Working hard, being obedient, there will be buns to eat • What have you seen in recent years? It’s hopeless • F**king bullshit, working for 20 years and I have nothing good except severe anxiety and depression • As one among those who are old, weak, sick, and disabled, I cannot do anything but lie down and wait for death, those who want to work hard just do it! • Bitter days are coming • Arise, Ye who refuse … [to be slaves!]* (* The first line of the lyrics of China’s national anthem; added by the author of this book) • Sweet and sour only oneself would know. F**k, it probably won’t be getting any better • What are the problems? Words from the lips of the liars • The liar’s deception is decided by the fool, and when the fool awakes, the cheater can do little • [The People’s Daily is] Worthy of being the biological child of the CCP • Hahaha, I’ve just been sweetened to faint, what’s happened? • Having been working so hard already, dare to ask when will my life become sweet? • Just like what a landlord would say to peasants

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12 December 2022, a video story titled ‘#Reporter: Personal Story after Contracting Coronavirus#’ appeared on the account’s webpage. It was an upbeat interview with a Covid-19-positive young female reporter of the broadcaster conducted in her suite at the Xiaotangshan Cabin Hospital by her colleagues, apparently aiming to convey a badly needed ‘positive energy’ (zheng nengliang) message (a popular official propaganda slogan in China) to the suffering community by demonstrating that even if one contracted the virus it was manageable as in the case of the reporter (Beijing Vision 2022). However, what most viewers saw and were angary about, as shown in the typical comments summarized in Table 6.6, was the ‘real’ face of China’s ‘official’ journalists (and official media at large) like the said reporter as part of the country’s privileged and corrupt elite class. This was a significant criticism, reflecting mounting class tension and Table 6.6  Examples of popular critical comments on ‘#Reporter: Personal Story after Contracting Coronavirus#’, based on limited data available at https://weibo. com/6351705477/Mj8SIbx6V#repost • A young journalist stays in a cabin suite drinking a hard-to-find bottle of ibuprofen suspension for children that parents in Beijing are struggling to secure even one bottle of; what a bizarre promotional video about privilege! • Xiaotangshan Cabin Hospital is not the kind of temporary cabin, it is a real hospital, for critically ill patients. To be honest, imagine if there are critically ill people at their homes now, like old people or children with a fever of 40 degrees, call Xiaotangshan and ask: if you can give me Xiao Lu’s [name of the reporter] bed, or can you reserve a bed for me? How may the hospital respond? … • Just read some comments and thought this is a typical ‘screw-up’ story that is out of touch with the masses. Also just realized that we have such nice cabin hospital: is this young lady 80 years old, living in such a nice suite? … • A giant ‘screw-up’ accident site, relevant parties were seriously out of touch with the masses • What else can be said... • Shameful doctors cut deals with shameful media and wasted our resources • Even didn’t know how to do propaganda: can’t you at least find an old lady • With so many infected people in Beijing, how many people can be admitted to a cabin hospital? If this journalist didn’t have a [propaganda] mission, I’m afraid she wouldn’t have been there, right? • During lockdown rejecting the idea of cabin hospital, after lockdown was lifted supporting the idea, and when infected straightaway getting a cabin suite, whom you great journalists have been trying to cheat on? … • Stupid (loads of nonsense) • Beijing emergency 120 calls are now 18,000 more than usual, and any of these 18,000 people need the cabin more than her. • [This story is] out of touch with the sea of ordinary people packed in hospitals

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discontent of the working masses in current Chinese society. As I was writing this line (17:00, 9 April 2023, Beijing time), times of view of the video had reached 6.5 million, and it had been forwarded/reposed 21,000 times and attracted 3805 comments. The third and last example used for my discussion of ‘commentary critical citizen popular journalism’ relates to an extraordinary recent political sex scandal case,  arguably the  most explosive one in China in recent years. Unsurprisingly, it immediately became an ideal topic for citizen digital popular journalism. The case is about  former Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli’s alleged extramarital affair with top Chinese female tennis player Peng Shuai. Peng publicly accused Zhang of sexual assault in a blog posted on China’s social media site Weibo in early November 2021 (Davidson 2021). Due to the fact that Peng’s original Weibo post was quickly censored and all relevant comments were blocked by China’s cyber police, it becomes impractical to retrieve Mainland  Chinese netizens’ comments on this scandal. However, overseas Chinese-language news portals are beyond the reach of China’s Great Firewall regime, and it would be interesting to have a look at overseas Chinese netizens’ reactions to this case. In fact, the transnational nature of China’s popular journalism in the digital era has become an important dimension of contemporary Chinese popular journalism (and journalism at large). With widespread citizen participation in popular journalism across increasingly growing overseas Chinese communities around the world, and along with growing interest in China-related issues from the boarder international community, contemporary China’s digital (popular) journalism has become increasingly transnational. Many sensitive stories, like the alleged Zhang sexual assault scandal, that have been censored within China but are still widely available on relevant overseas websites, may penetrate back to China through diverse digital platforms, which could pose an unprecedented challenge to China’s state censors. Back to the scandal, a popular transnational Chinese-language news portal Liuyuan Net (https://www.6park.com/au.shtml), for example, reposted a BBC (Chinese-language edition) news story about  it titled ‘Peng Shuai Accused Zhang Gaoli #MeToo’ (Ye 2021) on its website on 4 November 2021. The story attracted 85 comments (with numerous deleted posts by the portal due to inappropriate language) in 16  hours (note: ‘Comment’ box was unavailable on the page of the original BBC story). Table  6.7 is a summary of some typical comments on the story from viewers (certain posts were slightly edited by this author due to ethical concerns about the language used).

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Table 6.7  Examples of popular critical comments on ‘Peng Shuai Accused Zhang Gaoli #MeToo’ (https://www.6parknews.com/newspark/view.php?app= news&act=view&nid=515602) • High-ranking officials had affairs with female movie stars, female singers, female supermodels, female dancers, and female media anchors, and now female sports stars. • Good girl, a moral example of exposing official corruption … try to live overseas for the rest of your life • [Peng] Said a bunch of words but no proof. Who won’t be able to make a story like this? • There is no cure for China • Who granted the CCP the power to always engage in hypercritical discussions about morality: Male celebrities lacking masculinity are questioned and criticized, China Central TV hosts are not allowed to host local TV stations’ variety shows, and celebrities who were involved in minor sex scandals were immediately banned. Imagine if a similar case happened to a celebrity this time, he would have been surely arrested. Did Zhang raped Peng, or Peng defamed Zhang? Come on, who might come out to file a case for investigation? When checking ordinary people, it is efficient. But how about the government? • [When you] have time to concern about a retired vice premier of China, why don’t you concern about your prince’s [Prince Andrew] affairs with a young girl • Let the bullet fly for a while [let the matter unfold] • A flower with an ugly man • This is also called news? It’s not interesting, not as good as Trump’s affairs with prostitutes • If it’s true, this old man’s taste is really strange • Peng Shuai might have been controlled by foreign forces to fabricate rumors to slander a high-ranking Chinese official. But she deliberately included some flaws in the rumors to let people debunk the them … • This man is really like a ‘high-quality human’ • This Peng Shuai is really not afraid of death

Most of the critical comments summarized in Tables 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7 regarding the three respective stories/issues above obviously did not end up just focusing on relevant stories or issues themselves but went further to question some deeply institutionally rooted political and social problems in China. Such outspoken and often bitterly satirical popular criticisms from ordinary netizens, particularly domestic viewers, are significant, illustrating the dynamics, and growingly translational nature, of China’s citizen popular journalism in the digital media era. Compared with the traditional ‘letters to the editor’ practice, this commentary critical citizen popular journalistic practice has much wider popular participation, better (direct) access to media resources, much higher proliferating power, and arguably greater potential influence and impact, serving as a proactive and important form of alternative public sphere in contemporary China.

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References Beijing Vision (2022) ‘Reporter: Personal Story after Contracting Covid-19 Virus’, Weibo, retrieved from: https://weibo.com/6351705477/ Mj8SIbx6V#repost. CINIC (2008) ‘Report of the 21st Survey on China’s Internet Development’, China Internet Network Information Canter, retrieved from: http://download.xinhuanet.com/it/document/cnnic21.pdf. CINIC (2013) ‘Report of the 31st Survey on China’s Internet Development’, China Internet Network Information Canter, retrieved from: http://download.sina.com.cn/2013/pdf/31report0115.pdf. CINIC (2022) ‘Report of the 50th Survey on China’s Internet Development’, China Internet Network Information Canter, retrieved from: https://www.cnnic.cn/ NMediaFile/2022/0926/MAIN1664183425619U2MS433V3V.pdf. Cui, B.G., Xu, L.J. and Ding, M. (eds) (2019) 2019 Chinese Media Industry Development Report, Beijing: Social Sciences Publishing, retrieved from: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/79737687. Davidson, H. (2021 November 26) ‘Zhang Gaoli: Official Accused by Peng Shuai Remains out of Public Eye’, The Guardian, retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/26/where-­is-­zhang-­gaoli-­official-­accused-­ by-­peng-­shuai-­remains-­out-­of-­public-­eye. Dou, H.X. (2023, February 9) ‘Work Hard, Life will Become Sweeter and Sweeter’, peopledaily.com.cn, Retrieved from: http://society.people.com.cn/ n1/2023/0209/c1008-­32620272.html. Fang, K.C. (2022) ‘The Tabloidization of Party Media: How the People’s Daily and CCTV Adapt to Social Media’, in S.I. Zhang (ed) Digital Journalism in China, Routledge: 48–60. Huang, C.J. (2021) ‘The Rise and Fall of Tabloid Journalism in post-Mao China: Ideology, the Market, and the New Media Revolution’, in M.  Conboy and S.A.  Eldridge II (eds) Global Tabloid: Culture and Technology, UK: Routledge: 183–197. Kesoview (2017, October 16) ‘Jinro Toutiao may Have Defeated Online Portals, but how about News?’, online blog, Ifanr, retrieved from: https://www.ifanr. com/923941. King, G., Pan, J., and Roberts, M.E. (2013) ‘How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression’, American Political Science Review 107(2): 1–18. Kuai, J., Lin, B.B., Karlsson, M., and Lewis, S.C. (2022) ‘From Wild East to Forbidden City: Mapping Algorithmic News Distribution in China through a Case Study of Jinri Toutiao’, Digital Journalism, published online on 30 Sep 2022. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2022.2121932.

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Some Stories (2023) ‘What Are the Problems of “Work Hard, Life will Become Sweeter and Sweeter”?’, NetEase, retrieved from: https://www.163.com/dy/ article/HTN9ED6S0552YH0X.html. Sun, Q.R. (2018, April 12) ‘Internal rectification: Jinri Toutiao closing five channels today’, Beijing Daily, retrieved from http://it.people.com.cn/ n1/2018/0412/c1009-­29920849.html. The Page (2022, May 6) ‘Global Celebration of The Page’s Six Year Anniversary’, Tennent, retrieved from: https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20220506A083JZ00. Wang, S.S. (2014, June 9) ‘The Media Industry Felt the Pains Caused by Jinri Toutaio’, New  York Tines (Chinese edition), retrieved from: https://cn. nytimes.com/technology/20140609/tc09toutiao/. Wang, Y.W. (2018, March 12) ‘Six Years on, the Market Has Chosen Jinri Toutiao’, online blog, Interface News, retrieved from: https://www.jiemian.com/article/1985055.html. Xin, X (2022) ‘(Re-)Popularizing Party Journalism in China: A Qualitative Study of Xinhua News Agency’s Online Media Content’, in S.I. Zhang (ed) Digital Journalism in China, Routledge: 36–47. doi:https://doi.org/10.432 4/9781003247579-­4. Yan, S. (2014) ‘Jinri Toutiao’s Role as “News mover” Is Questioned: They Are Exactly Who’s News’, People’s Daily online, retrieved from: http://media. people.com.cn/n/2014/0606/c120837-­25111642.html. Ye, S.L. (2021, November 4)‘Peng Shuai Accused Zhang Gaoli #MeToo: Some Scholars Believe that We Should Not Focus Only on the Political Dimension’, BBC (Chinese edition), retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/ simp/chinese-­news-­59161194. Zhou, K. (2022) ‘2021 China Online Video Industry Development Report’, in B.G. Cui, M. Zhao, M. Ding, and M. Hang (eds) Report on Development of China’s Media Industry (2022), Beijing: Social Sciences Publishing: 144–155. Zou, S. (2021) ‘Restyling Propaganda: Popularized Party Press and the Making of Soft Propaganda in China’, Information, Communication & Society, online first. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1942954.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: The Ongoing Business of Making Fun and Trouble

Four major macro forces stood out from this book’s investigation of the development of popular journalism in contemporary China: politics, market, culture, and technology. The dynamic and complex interplay of these forces in shifting context profoundly shaped the country’s changing popular journalism landscape. In the meantime, regardless of how these mega factors might have changed over time, popular journalism’s nature of making fun in and of life, and making trouble to elite powers in China, like elsewhere, has remained. In a one-party state like China, politics has unsurprisingly been the single most powerful force in shaping popular journalism. As discussed in relevant chapters of this book, whenever the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) followed an ideologically conservative and politically repressive path, popular journalism was likely to be attacked as a ‘yellow’, ‘vulgar’, ‘low’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘non-socialist’, or ‘non-Marxist’ journalistic genre and thus constrained. However, even in extremely rigidly controlled Mao China, such policy was questioned by brave reformist scholars and journalists and the popular journalism spirit remained alive in people’s minds. This was also well demonstrated by the powerful comeback of popular journalism in the post-Mao era. Conversely, whenever the CCP became more politically and ideologically flexible and confident and pro-market, popular journalism would enjoy considerable development and even thrive.

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The market also played an important role in shaping China’s popular journalism. While the market force might at times cause serious difficulties for certain popular media types and outlets in certain circumstances, its overall positive contribution to the development of popular journalism as a form of popular culture deeply rooted in capitalist consumer culture is undeniable. Media commercialization and competition not only help stimulate the development of popular journalism, but also objectively serve as a counter-force against state monopoly of media resources and official media propaganda. The market has forced the Chinese Party-state to accept popular journalism as a particular journalistic genre which is essentially different from its propaganda-oriented elite Party journalism. As a result, we have seen a continued dual-track media policy that allows the co-existence of Party/serious journalistic practice and popular journalistic practice in China. Previously, this policy was largely reflected in the co-existence of Party press organs and tabloid metro papers (Huang 2001). In comparison, in the digital media era (roughly since the 2010s), while traditional Party organs’ role as official propaganda tools remains, the privately owned commercial media sector, Party organs’ commercialized online and social media operations, and a large number of netizens have all been involved in the popular journalistic practice/business. The important role of China’s journalistic culture or historical tradition in shaping its contemporary popular journalism must not be ignored either. Historically, modern Chinese journalism had a powerful elitist and propagandistic tradition based on the practice of a whole generation of reformist and revolutionary politicians, publishers, and political writers and commentators in late Qing and the era of the Republic of China due to a series of internal and external political and social challenges. Despite considerable development of popular journalism during this period, the dominance of the elite and propagandistic media tradition remained and was later greatly reinforced and exploited by Chinese communists under Mao. While this tradition was considerably, if not seriously, challenged and compromised in the post-Mao era, its legacy and lingering influence still exists and should not be underestimated. China’s officially supervised major history books, while having paid only scant attention to the history of popular journalism in late Qing and the Republic of China, have not given much space to China’s contemporary popular journalism either. Many ‘officials, professors, and experts’ in China, as one critic noted, were still trapped in the traditional thinking of popular papers as xiaobao (trivial papers) and intended to see China’s

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contemporary journalism history as ‘simply a history of media propaganda or Party organs’ (Bai 2001). In the meantime, some liberal-minded Chinese journalists bravely continue to fight for a Western-style free press which would allow them to practice watchdog journalism and enlighten China’s mass society. This elite watchdog journalism dream is in and of itself completely understandable, legitimate, and admirable, though it must also not be seen as an opposite or necessarily superior journalism to popular journalism. Undoubtedly, it would be ideal to have both serious/watchdog and popular journalism simultaneously in China, as is the case in established democratic societies. However, before that happens in China one day (if ever), popular journalism is right here, and will surely remain here, to continue to play its own legitimate and meaningful journalistic, social, and political (public-sphere) roles in its own way. Furthermore, even if that time does come one day, there will be no guarantee that the ordinary masses will necessarily be willing to be, or interested in being, ‘educated’ or ‘guided’ by their elite friends. As Brook, writes in his review of Juan Wang’s Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897-1911 (2012), the book showed us that at the end of the Qing dynasty, ‘not everyone was swept up in the romance of reform. While a few were striking heroic poses and claiming to change the world, others were laughing at the absurdity of life, the folly of ambition, and the vanity and deceit of politicians. The 1911 Revolution has never looked less revolutionary, or more real’.1 Last but certainly not least, both traditional and particularly the new digital communication technologies have profoundly influenced China’s popular journalism development. The first three decades of post-Mao China’s popular journalism practice were largely dominated by print newspapers, particularly  the widely circulated metro titles as truly people’s papers during the 1990s and 2000s. Since the 2010s, popular journalism has largely become the wonderland of digital media. Nearly all major Chinese news media outlets, platforms, and apps are nowadays, by and large, and in one way or another, digital popular journalism players. From a technological, as well as popular cultural, perspective, another, if not more, significant development in contemporary China’s popular journalism is millions of ordinary Chinese netizens’ active participation in the ‘fun’ and ‘trouble’ making game of this particular genre of journalism due to the widespread availability of digital technologies. There are also some issues/concerns in relation to China’s popular journalism development at the micro level. First, as previously discussed,

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popular journalism practice in China remains predominantly fun-oriented, lacking critical and investigative stories and commentary pieces from a popular perspective from both professional media outlets and self-media to reflect a richer and more dynamic everyday social life in current China as a complex and in many ways paradoxical post-communist transitional society. This is typically reflected in short video-news clips on both official and commercial digital platforms made by those media themselves as well as citizen bloggers. Critical popular journalistic practice has largely taken the forms of brief critical comments on relevant news stories by viewers and more private or even ‘secret’ discussion and debate in relevant online BBSs (Bulletin Board System) and groups on social media. While such practices are important and significant, there is more to do across the board. Second, the universal practice of news, particularly popular news, aggregation across major Chinese digital media platforms, has inevitably led to a high degree of mimetic-isomorphism in terms of both content and style, which is seemingly even worse than a similar situation the metro paper sector faced in the 2000s. Popular news coverage on these platforms often gives people an impression of ‘abundance with little uniqueness/ originality’ due to the high degree of mimetic-isomorphism. This becomes particularly so when comparing major Chinese media outlets’ digital platforms with many of their Western counterparts. Third and last, the collapse of the metro press sector has led to the absence of specific popular/tabloid news portals and apps run by legacy popular/tabloid newspapers. There is no Chinese equivalent of a typical Western news portal like, for example, The Mirror online (https://www. mirror.co.uk/) run by the influential British tabloid the Daily Mirror, or The Guardian online (https://www.theguardian.com/uk?INTCMP=CE_ UK) run by the prestigious The Guardian as a British broadloid. In comparison, popular journalism practice in China sprawls across major news portals and apps and is often sidelined by non-critical general, and propagandistic, stories, being seemingly everywhere and nowhere. This has made it difficult to get a sense of a Chinese popular journalism community. I am hoping that this book has offered a reasonable amount of knowledge about where contemporary Chinese popular journalism has come from. It is, however, difficult to predict where it may be heading to. This is a challenging question for all students of this research area, which I am afraid that only time can answer.

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Note 1. Timothy Brook’s review of Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897–1911 (Juan Wan, University of British Columbia Press, 2012), retrieved from https://www.ubcpress.ca/merry-­laughter-­ and-­angry-­curses.

References Bai, Z.C. (2001) ‘“Regrets” in Contemporary Chinese Journalism History Studies’, Shanghai Journalism Review (9): 22–25. Huang, C.J. (2001) ‘China’s State-Run Tabloids: The Rise of “City Newspapers”’, International Communication Gazette 63(5): 435–450. Wang, J. (2012) Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897–1911, UBC Press.

Index1

A Age, The, 130, 131 Ai, F., 93, 94, 102–104 Allan, S., 16 Animated news, 6 Ansfield, J., 97 Anti-capitalism, 60 Anti-intellectualism, 59 Anti-Rightist Campaign, 52, 58, 59, 69 Anti-urbanism, 59 Associated Press, 127 B Bachmann, I., 6 Bai, Z.C., 77, 179 Baidupedia, 69 Beentjes, J., 6 Beijing Journalism Association, 81 Beijing Vision, 170, 171

Big comment-box screw up, 169, 170 Bingham, A., 3, 4, 14–16, 18 Bird, S.E., 9, 18 Biressi, A., 1, 9 Bokhorst-Heng, W.D., 22 Boyce, G., 13 Broadloid, viii, 6, 130, 180 Brook, T., 179 Buiten, D., 19 BusinessWeek Magazine, 97 C Cai, W., 80 Cai, Z.P., 126 Chama, B., 19 Chan, J.M., 27, 28, 91, 95, 96, 113n2 Chang, W.H., 61 Cheek, T., 73, 127 Chen, G.Q., 128, 135, 143 Chen, H.L., 99

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Chen, L.D., 122 Chen, S.Q., 53 Chen, Y., 84 Cheng, B.K.L., 6 Cheng, S.T., 91 China Business Infocenter, 97 China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC), 153, 159 China Renmin University, 75, 80 China Youth Daily, the, 89, 93, 132, 133 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 79, 81 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 23, 27, 30, 47, 50, 51, 53–58, 61, 67, 69, 73–75, 78, 79, 90, 91, 94–96, 98, 99, 112, 121, 122, 125, 127, 132–136, 139, 140, 151, 153, 154, 157, 170, 173, 177 Chinese journalism, xi, 26, 42, 45, 46, 50, 73, 90, 107, 109–111, 124, 125, 141, 142, 178 Cho, L. F., 27, 110 Chomsky, N., 144n1 Chu, G.C., 61 Chu, L.L., xi, 26, 141 Citizen journalism, 15, 17, 18, 136, 158, 160 Citizen journalist(s), x, 5, 23, 133, 160, 161, 163 Citizen popular journalism, xi, 168–173 Class struggle, 61, 70 Commentary critical popular citizen journalism, 168–173 Commercialized (state) media, 27, 80, 133 Commercial media, 137, 178 Compton, B., 56 Compulsory office subscription China, 107

Party newspapers, 75, 134 Party organs, 75, 107 Conboy, M., ix, xii, 1, 3, 4, 14–16, 18 Connell, I, 18 Cui, B.G., 126, 128, 152 Cui, J.H., 126 Cultural Revolution, the, 51–52, 58–60, 72–74, 85 Curran, J., 13, 136 Cute propaganda, 137–142 D Dabao, 44, 46, 50, 123 Dahlgren, P., 1, 10, 14, 15, 18 Daily Mirror, The, 4, 180 Davidson, H., 172 Davies, C.L., 24–26, 103, 129, 130 Decameron, The, 83 Chinese translation, 83 Delaney, T., 14 Deng, X.P., 60, 72, 90, 91, 127, 134 Deuze, M., 2, 12, 13 Diasporic popular news, 6 Digital media, x, 6, 14, 16, 23, 25, 29, 135, 141, 143, 144, 151–173, 178–180 See also Internet; Social media Digital media era, 6, 141, 143, 144, 151–173, 178 Digital popular journalism, xi, 30, 137–142, 153–162, 165, 167, 172, 179 Digital revolution, 154 Digital transition, 143, 157, 159 Ding, F.Z., 51, 77 Ding, G.N., 43 Ding, M., 128, 152 Dong, S.D., 48 Dou, H.X., 169 Dushi bao, 100, 101 See also Metro papers

 INDEX 

E Eldridge II, S.A., vii, ix, 3 Elite journalism, 46, 49, 109, 125 Er, R.Y.G., 22 Evening newspapers, 51, 74, 75, 77, 93, 98, 99, 101, 104–106, 120 Evening newspaper sector, 75, 93 F Fan, B.Q., 44–46, 77 Fang, H.Q., 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51 Fang, K.C., 25, 29, 137–139, 141, 142, 154 Fang, Y.F., 124 Fewsmith, J., 90 Fiske, J., 9 Fourie, L., 19 Franklin, B., 6, 9 Fraser, N., 11 Froneman, J.D., 19 Fu, K.W., 25 Fudan University, xi, 41, 42, 47, 52, 55, 56, 58, 68, 69, 82 Fürsich, E, 6 G Gan, X.F., 69–73, 86n1 Gao, H., 48, 128 Garnham, N., 11 Gong, Q., 21 Great Leap Forward, the, 58 Gripsrud, J., 1–4, 6, 10, 17, 18 Gu, C.L., 47 Guangming Daily, The, 121, 122 Guangzhou Daily, the, 92, 133, 134 Guardian, The, 180 Gulyás, A., 20 Guo, S.T., 47, 48

185

H Hafez, K., 22 Hallin, D.C., 2, 20 Han, Y.F., 90 Hao, X., 22 Hartley, J., 1, 3, 4, 14, 15 Hassid, J., 110 Hayashi, K., 4, 6 He, Q.L., 43–45, 49 Hendrischke, H., 25 Hermes, J., 10 Hernández, J.C., 128 Hester, A., 23 Hioe, B., 21 Hong, S.C., 22 Honig, E., 85 Hu, J.W., 79 Huang, C.J., 6, 24–29, 91, 94, 97, 98, 100, 103–105, 119–122, 129, 130, 132, 134, 143, 144, 158, 178 Huang, Y., 27, 99 Human interest, 53, 68, 73, 129, 163, 164 Hume, E., 4 Hundred Flower Campaign, The, 52, 58 I Infotainment, 4, 17, 132 Instrumental use media, 43, 55, 127 press, 56 Internet, 5, 12, 153, 159 Investigative journalism, 128 Irwin, W., 14 J Jia, Q., 123 Jia, Y.H., 100, 104 Jiang, J.G., 127

186 

INDEX

Jiang, M., 48 Jin, B., 107 Johansson, S., 1, 8, 11, 12 Johnson, M., 85 Joint-venture outlets, 96 Jönsson, A.M., 7, 11, 12 Journalism, vii–xi, 1–30, 41–61, 67–85, 89–113, 121–125, 127–129, 131–133, 136–144, 151–173, 177–180 Journalism in China, vii–xi, 19, 27, 29, 67–85, 136, 153 Journalistic professionalism, 109–111, 122 K Karlsson, M., 160 Karnow, S., 58 Kavoori, A.P., 6 Kenix, L.J., 124 Kenyon, A.T., 22 Kesoview, 160, 161 Knight, A., 137, 138, 140 Kovach, B., 109 Kuai, J., 160 Kwak, K.T., 22 L Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 84 Chinese translation, 84 Lam, W.W.L., 127 Lan, H.W., 100, 101, 103 Landler, M., 96 Langer, J., 1, 6 Larson, W., 85 Latham, K., 61 Lee, C.C., 27, 28, 79, 96, 110 Lee, J.K., 125 Lee, S.W., 22 Leng, M., 123

Lenin, V., 53, 55, 56, 60, 78 Leonhard, W., 56 Lewis, S.C., 160 Li, H.Z., 142 Li, J.N., 52 Li, M., 61 Li, N., 43, 44, 52 Li, P., 71 Li, S.X., 44 Li, X.G., 27 Li, Z., 25, 26 Liang, H., 91, 134 Liberation Daily editorial, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 75, 92, 157 Lifestyle/travel journalism, 6, 158 Lin, F., 122 Lin, B.B., 160 Liu, B., 91, 92, 95 Liu, B.J., 127 Liu, B.Y., 78, 79 Liu, J.M., 69 Liu, M.X., 44 Liu, Q., 28 Liu, S.Q., 55, 57 Liu, Z.X., 24, 110 Lo, W.H., 6 Long, Q., 25, 140 Lu, D.Y., 55, 57 Lu, M., 71 Lu, Y., 27, 110 Lugo-Ocando, J., 20 Luo, J.H., 123 Luter, J., 73 M Ma, G.R., 44 Ma, Z., 85 Mabweazara, H.M., 19 MacKinnon, S.R., 45 Mainstream newspaper(s), 22, 49, 124 Mainstream press, 112, 124

 INDEX 

Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School, 49 Mano, W., 6, 19 Mao, Z.D., x, xi, 23, 41–61, 67–69, 71, 74–78, 84, 85, 109, 137, 138, 141, 151, 177, 178 Maoist Party press doctrine, 54–56, 58, 69, 71–73, 81 Mare, A., 19 Marjoribanks, T, 22 Market-oriented media (press), xi, 89, 90, 92, 98 Marxist view of journalism, 121, 122, 125, 127 Mass satires, 169 Matheson, D., 1 McCormick, B., 28 Mchakulu, J.E.J., 19 Media, vii, 1, 42, 67, 89–98, 120, 151–173, 178 Media commercialization, xi, 24, 26–29, 76, 89–98, 110, 121, 125, 127, 178 Media industry, ix, 74, 91, 92, 94–96, 98, 139 Meijer, I.C., 1, 6, 11 Meisner, M., 56, 59, 60 Melodramatic news, 6 Meng, Q.H., 77 Merrill, J.C., 13 Metro paper phenomenon, 24, 100–104 Metro papers, 24, 25, 100–108, 110, 112–113, 119–132, 134, 135, 139, 143, 158, 159, 178, 180 See also Dushi bao Metro press, 25, 105, 109, 111, 119, 124, 126, 128, 131, 133, 143, 144, 159, 165, 180 Mujica, C., 6

187

Mutalib, H., 22 My husband my honeymoon, the case of, 52, 53 N Naidoo, K., 19 National Press and Publication Bureau (NPPB), 91, 108, 119, 139, 140 Netizen(s), 5, 6, 16, 25, 28, 144, 154, 161, 167–169, 172, 173, 178, 179 News aggregation, 158, 161 News aggregator portals, 158 News aggregator(s), 21, 120, 142, 154, 157–161 News and propaganda, 67–74 News Front, 104, 113n5 News Front reporter, 134 Newspaper(s), ix, 2, 42, 70, 89, 119, 152 News portals, 22, 113, 142, 154, 157–160, 162, 163, 165–167, 172, 180 News search engine, 113, 157, 159, 160 Nice, L., 6 Nolan, D., 27, 110 Non-elite, 5, 6, 9, 16, 101, 105 Non-orthodox, 5, 6, 16, 105, 140 Nuitjen, K., 6 Nunn, H., 1, 9 O Official media, 29, 73, 127, 132–134, 139, 154, 171, 178 Ogunyemi, O., 6, 19 Online media, 138, 152 Örnebring, H., 7, 11, 12 Ownby, D., 127

188 

INDEX

P Page expansion fever, 92, 105 Page, The, 157, 163–166 Paletz, D.L., 3 Pan, J., 169 Pan, Z., 27, 110 Party journalism, 26, 27, 29, 58, 69, 76–78, 104, 112, 144, 178 Party media, 25, 69, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143 Party newspaper(s), 56, 71, 137, 139 Party organ(s), 25, 27, 29, 50, 52, 74–77, 79, 91–95, 97–101, 103, 104, 106–109, 112, 119–144, 154, 162, 178, 179 Party organ sector, 25, 75, 97, 100, 107–109, 135, 137, 143 Party principle (character), 67, 71, 72, 122 journalism, 67, 122 Party propaganda, 84, 99, 127 Pei, M.X., 26 Peng, S., 172, 173 People.cn, 127 People’s Daily, The, 73, 74, 78, 79, 90, 97, 104, 113n5, 127, 132, 137, 138, 140, 157, 169, 170 People’s Republic of China (PRC), ix, 50, 58, 67, 69, 77, 99, 100, 105, 127 Phiri, I., 19 Platforms, x, 4–6, 14, 17, 23, 120, 131, 133, 136–139, 141, 142, 160–163, 167, 168, 172, 179, 180 Popovic, P., 7 Popovic, V., 7 Popular, vii–xi, 1–30, 41–61, 67–85, 89–113, 120, 121, 123–126, 129–144, 151–173, 177–180 Popular citizen journalism, 160 Popular citizenship, 29, 58–61

Popular culture, x, 1, 4, 6, 14–16, 20, 26, 29, 45, 61, 81–85, 178 Popularization, 3, 5, 17, 25, 98–100, 132–142 Popular journalism Africa, 19 Asia, 20, 21 China, vii–xi, 19, 23–29, 41–49, 67–85, 98, 109, 133, 144, 151–173, 177–180 definition, vii, x, 1–6, 14, 26, 30 digital media era, 6, 144, 151–173 Europe, 16 late Qing China, x, 41, 74 Latin America, 20 Mao era, 67, 68, 74, 75, 77, 85, 138, 141 post-Mao era, viii, x, 67, 72, 82, 177, 178 PRC, ix, 50, 67, 69, 77, 99, 100, 105 ROC, x, 29, 41–49, 77, 178 UK, 48 US, 96 Popular media, 2, 4–6, 10, 17, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 45, 94, 133, 178 Popular press, 4, 5, 16, 108, 120, 124, 126, 134–136 Portrait event, the case of Guo Song Tao, 47, 48 Price, L.T., 20, 21 Printed newspaper(s), 84, 108, 144 Print media, 89, 120, 139 Print newspaper(s), 23, 137 Professionalism, 27, 28, 109–112, 122 Professional journalism, 10, 18, 22, 26, 27, 54, 61, 104 Propaganda, 20, 27, 42, 50, 53, 55, 57, 61, 67–74, 76, 81, 84, 85, 90, 92, 95, 99, 100, 127, 132, 135–143, 153, 154, 157, 158, 162, 168, 169, 171, 178, 179

 INDEX 

Propagandistic Party media, 54, 122 Provincial Party organs, 99, 100 Public sphere alternative, 9, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 173 popular, 9, 11, 14, 26 Q Qi, A.J, 124 Qian, T., 142 Qin, J., 90 Qin, S.D., 43, 44, 46 R Rahmitasari, D.H., 22 Ramírez, E.G., 20 Rap news, 6 Rawnsley, G.D., 21, 125 Rawnsley. M.T., 125 Reform and opening, 23, 67, 69, 90, 127, 134, 152 Ren, J.T., 27 Republic of China (ROC), x, 29, 41–49, 77, 178 Resurgence of Party organs, xi, 25, 119–144 Richstad, J., 73 Roberts, M.E., 169 Robinson, D.C., 73, 74 Rosenstiel, T, 109 S Schoenbach, K., 4 Schram, S.R., 56, 57, 59, 61 Schurmann, F., 61 Seligman, L., 14 Semi-independent popular press, 94 Sensationalism, 3–5, 15, 20, 21, 48, 120, 125

189

Serious journalism, 3, 7–9, 12, 13, 15–18, 21, 22, 161 Serious newspaper(s), 112 Serious press, 4, 9, 10, 123–125 Shao, H.L., 25 Shao, L., 25, 140 Shen Bao, The, 42, 47, 48 Simons, M., 27, 110 Sina, 120, 122, 158, 160 Singer, J.B., 6, 10 Smith, A., 19 So, A.Y, 127 Socialist market economy, xi, 23, 27, 75, 89–98, 151 Socialist tabloid(s), 97 Social media, 5, 17, 126, 136–138, 141, 154, 157, 159, 160, 169, 172, 178, 180 Social media accounts, 137, 154 Social media platforms, 137, 138, 141 Soft propaganda, 99, 140, 157 Sohu, 120, 158, 163 Some Stories, 169, 170 Southern Metropolis Daily, the, 132, 133 Soviet-style socialist media economics, 58 Space Daily, 96 Sparks, C., 1–4, 8, 9, 18, 29, 111, 135–137 Splichal, S., 18 State subsidy, 135 Steenveld, L., 19 Stranahan, P., 55, 58 Strelitz, L., 19 Su, S.Z., 79 Sun, P., 45 Sun, Q.R., 167 Sun, W., 120, 123 Sun, X.P., 79, 80 Svensson, E.S.M., 110, 125, 128 Sylvie, G., 114n16

190 

INDEX

T Tabloidization, 3–5, 9, 17–20, 25, 26, 125, 137, 138 Tabloid journalism, vii, ix, x, 1–14, 16, 19–23, 77, 98–104, 127, 129, 144 Tabloid journalism with Chinese characteristics, 98–104 Tabloid(s) China, vii, ix, x, 25, 103, 119, 123, 128, 129, 142–144, 165 death, xi, 129, 144 fall, xi, 119–144 Global, ix rise, xi, 8, 18, 24, 94, 97–104, 124 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature, 57 Tang, S.T., 99 Tang, X.J., 126 Tao, D.F., 82, 84 Technological revolution, 120 Technology, xi, 6, 17, 24, 84, 126, 143, 160, 161, 177, 179 Teng, T., 82, 83 Thussu, D.K., 9, 18 Tian, K., 126 Tong, B., 120, 121 Tong, J., 110, 128 Toutiao, 159–161, 165, 167 Traditional media, 5, 23, 98, 158, 160, 161, 165, 166 Trivial journalism, 8, 49 Tulloch, J., 1, 9, 17, 18 Tuoi Tre News, 6

W Wagner, R.G., 48 Wang, A., 89 Wang, G.Q., 107 Wang, H.Y., 25, 26, 29, 135–137, 144 Wang, J., 43, 44, 46, 55, 56, 179 Wang, R.S., 79 Wang, S.S., 160 Wang, Y.L., 80 Wang, Y.W., 132, 161 Wang, Z., 52–54, 68, 69, 71, 72, 86n1, 91 Wasserman, H., 19 Watchdog journalism, 20, 57, 76, 132, 168, 179 WeChat/Weixin, 137, 138, 157, 160 Weekend edition fever, 93, 105 Weibo, 137, 138, 157, 160, 170, 172 Wenming.cn, 122 West China Metro News, the, 100, 102, 104–107, 113n6, 114n10, 119, 123, 130, 131, 157 Weston, T.B., 45 White Paper Protests, 152 William, R., 1 Wingate, P., 13, 136 Wong, C., 137, 138 World Trade Organization (WTO), 23, 96 Wright, S., 27, 110 The Writing Group, 127 Wu, J., 51 Wu, X.L., 51 Wu, Y.Z., 100, 104, 106 Wyka, A.W., 125 Wylie, R., 56

V Vettehen, P.H., 6 Video bloggers, 157, 163, 164 Video news, 5, 164, 180

X Xi, J.P., xi, 127, 151–154, 161, 162 Xi, P., 44 Xi, W.J., 77, 99, 101–103, 106

 INDEX 

Xiang, C.W., 74, 75, 94 Xiaobao, 43–47, 49, 51, 81, 123, 178 Xie, C.T., 91 Xie, J., 134 Xin, Xin, 25, 142, 154 Xinhua, 69, 142 Xinhua News Agency, xii, 51, 71, 102, 131, 140, 154 Xu, L.J., 128, 152 Xu, P.D., 53 Y Yan, S., 160 Yan’an, 54, 56–59, 61, 67, 71, 109, 122, 142 Yan’an Rectification Campaign, 54 Yang Nai Wu and Xiao Bai Cai, the case of, 47 Yang, K.S., 60 Yang, W.P., 108 Yang, X.J., 97 Yao, L., 126 Ye, S.L., 172 Yellow journalism, 41–61 Yellow news, 51 Youth newspapers, 132 Yu, G.M, 124 Yu, H.Q., 125 Yu, J.Q., 47

191

Yu, X., 24, 27, 28, 91–93, 96, 110, 121 Z Zakaria, F., 22 Zhang, C., 25 Zhang, D., 25 Zhang, J., 45 Zhang, S., 114n9 Zhang, S.X., 24, 132 Zhang, Y., 128, 135 Zhang, Z.P., 128, 129 Zhao, C.G., 76, 77, 101 Zhao, K.Q., 124 Zhao, Y.Z., 24, 25, 27, 45, 80, 91, 93, 96, 121, 132 Zheng, B.W., 122 Zhou, K., 163 Zhou, S., 6 Zhou, S.L, 51 Zhu, G.S., 122 Zhu, J.H., 75 Zhu, L., 25 Zhu, Y.E., 25 Zhu, Y.G., 104 Zhu, Y.L., 93 Zhuo, H.Y., 126 Zoonen, L. van, 2 Zou, S., 25, 154