Increasingly, scholars acknowledge that the study of non-Western media systems via Western concepts like democracy, the “public sphere,” or “press freedom” is inappropriate. This is especially the case for a place like China, whose media history and traditions veer so widely from those of the Western world. Media Transparency in China is a contribution to a growing literature that is trying to make sense of Chinese journalism on its own terms. Like others, Xie begins his study by noting that most Chinese media companies now operate in the market, free from explicit state control. Moreover, it is the official policy of the Chinese government to encourage accountability and investigative journalism. According to a Western narrative about journalism, these conditions should greatly enhance press freedom, and, as Xie acknowledges, to some extent, they have. As he writes, “never before have the Chinese people been able to gain access to as much information as they have today” (p. 1). Yet, overall state control over the Chinese media system is as strong today as it has ever been. Commercialization of the news has not led to greater press freedom in China. Instead, state control has merely morphed into new forms. How and why this has happened, Xie argues, is not easily explained within a Western narrative that pits market forces against state control.

To explain the current situation of Chinese journalism, Xie turns to the concept of “media transparency.” An extension of Heald's notion of governmental transparency, Xie defines media transparency in three dimensions (p. 33): transparency of the laws, regulations, policies and guidelines with respect to media; transparency as to media business structures, operating policies and corporate responsibilities; and transparency as to content production and delivery.

In seven chapters, Xie investigates these dimensions as they play out in contemporary Chinese journalism using a combination of comparative historical and conceptual analysis. His conceptual analysis consists of a discussion of the term “transparency” and what it might mean in the context of Chinese journalism. His historical analysis is based primarily on data from the secondary literature. Overall, Xie shows that Chinese media exhibit little transparency. Instead, he finds that the Chinese media system is marked by great ambiguity. For instance, in a chapter on the nature of censorship in the modern Chinese media system, he demonstrates that while censorship practices no longer exist in the rule of law, they persist in the form of oral messages disseminated from state officials to media chieftains (p. 57). The resulting ambiguity allows officials to promote transparency, deny that censorship exists, and yet intensify state control over the press. In another chapter, Xie argue that the journalist's status in Chinese public life remains murky. Journalists enjoy no formal protections from interference in their work, and every day they are beset by market and political forces. These forces may take the form of everything from demands by their editors to cover one story rather than another to outright payments from corporate and political officials. As a result, the profession is left without an “operative ethical ground to accommodate … ideals of truth and objectivity” (p. 98). A final example involves the practice of media activism in China. Today, many individual journalists speak out against censorship and the prevailing power structure. Yet, in Xie's estimation, this activity is less effective than at any time in the last 50 years. For one thing, it is disorganized; for another, it tends to focus on individual instances of malfeasance, and therefore sheds little light on the “tacit state–media agreement on keeping silence and secrecy regarding censorship, self-censorship, and counter-censorship” (p. 125). Xie concludes that media activists were more influential in prior periods when, ironically enough, media censorship was more overt.

In sum, Xie argues that censorship in China persists through a confluence of market and state forces. There is so much money to be made in commercial media that its chieftains develop a strong preference for the status quo. Moreover, the state is able to set the terms of market competition – by, for instance, forcing regional media companies to conglomerate – to such an extent that formerly legal and political censorship now takes the form of “market logic.” In these conditions, the state has managed to maintain control over the media system without the need for formal censorship rules or practices. Crucially, Xie concludes, media transparency is sacrificed: “Given the consensus between the Party-state and the media and their realigned relationship, transparency becomes more important than press freedom…” because it is transparency that “aims to expose all factors that may hinder the freedom of information…” (p. 161).

Xie is not the first to observe the powerful confluence of state and market in the Chinese media system, or that censorship in China today often takes the form of market logic. However, his book nicely demonstrates how these forces work together at various levels of the media system, from the business practices of large media conglomerates to the decision-making processes of individual journalists. In this reviewer's opinion, the major weakness of the study lies in the fact that it is based on little to no significant primary research. A study based on the secondary literature has its uses, and Xie expertly mines the existing literature for data nuggets to illustrate his points. A chapter on “meta-censorship” is particularly deft at providing examples of censorship in Chinese media today, all practised while state officials vocally advocate transparency, and media elites campaign for greater openness. Still, the lack of primary data makes the book feel a bit distant from its object of study, sapping it of the energy and urgency contained in much of the best recent work on the subject. This observation, however, does not overly detract from Xie's accomplishment, which is to harness the existing literature to the concept of media transparency in a way that offers a compelling assessment of Chinese journalism.