In a work of substantive breadth, theoretical depth, rich empirical detail, and provocative analysis, Chinese Canadian scholar Yuezhi Zhao provides one observation that, for this reviewer, stands out as particularly insightful, important, and applicable across the disciplinary perspectives from which scholars study contemporary China.
The point, simply put, is that mainland China's socialist legacy has enduring implications, both philosophical and practical, for human attitudes and actions unfolding in the postsocialist period. More specifically, China's twentieth-century history of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolution and socialist inculcation and experimentation ensures that market-driven development in the twenty-first century will not unfold without significant challenges from both concerned elites and disenfranchised groups.
As Zhao sees it, as the benefits and costs of economic growth have spread differentially across different strata of China's citizenry, enriching and empowering some while marginalizing others, the resulting contradictions and dislocations are “subjectively experienced by a population that has been educated in the socialist ideology of equality, social justice, and the rightness, if not the liberal legal right, of rebellion” (p. 9). Furthermore, the fact that socialism remains the nation's legitimizing—albeit anachronistic—ideology endows both popular and academic critics with the moral authority to remonstrate against the unbridled capitalist ethos of China's current development strategy. Zhao doubtless recognizes that she herself—a child of the New China, a member of the educated elite who is conscious of her own privilege and appalled by the predation, inequities, and injustices of her own society—has intellectual proclivities that are shaped by that socialist heritage.
Communication—not only in its ideological and political dimensions, but as an integral part of social relations, an economic sector in its own right and a key aspect of China's participation in a broader global context—is the prism through which Zhao examines the complex ramifications of this argument. In a series of densely theoretical chapters tracing the evolving political economy of China's mass media and what she views as the inherent destructiveness of commercialization, followed by two case studies and a discussion of ideological debates over China's reforms, she identifies key trends in domestic media configurations as well as global interactions that add up to a profoundly pessimistic view of China's development trajectory—but one tempered by Zhao's evident faith in the progressive possibilities of both academic critique and popular resistance.
Among her causes for gloom are the growing sophistication of the ruling Communist Party and state apparatus as it restructures and manages communication even while advancing privatization; the emergence of a new national media elite with an urban, middle-class orientation and vested interest in promoting leisure culture and mass entertainment; and the growing integration of Chinese media institutions, production, and products into the global economy, with consequent strengthening of a “transnational capitalist class” closely intertwined with the Chinese state. Zhao is dubious of what might look like struggles for an “autonomous” if not entirely independent media playing out among the national bourgeoisie, seeing China's political and business powers as inextricably allied, and the collaboration between domestic enterprise and the state sector as increasingly enmeshed in transnational capitalism.
She finds reason for hope, on the other hand, in evidence that even the most hypercommercialized communication outlets may become channels for social mobilization and expression. As illustrations, she offers case studies of controversies unleashed through popular market media outlets and amplified via the Internet—including both academic debates, notably a discussion of property rights reform that halted the corruption-riddled process of state management buyouts, and broader commotions conveying public outrage over issues such as police brutality and the rights of migrant workers. Such cases, according to Zhao, reveal fractures within the party-state itself over consequential policy issues that open up two avenues of contestation—expanding the space for intellectual critics to challenge the establishment, and providing room for subordinate groups to interject political and moral appeals and material claims in their own interests.
In some respects, this book may be seen as a sequel to Zhao's precocious first book, Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), a comprehensive analysis of mass media developments in the initial post-Mao period based on Zhao's doctoral dissertation at Simon Fraser University, where she has since returned as a faculty member. In other respects, this later work represents Zhao's evolution as an expatriate scholar of decided political commitment, affiliated with leftist critiques of China's postsocialist development strategy and its consequences—and specifically, with the “New Left” among critical intellectuals. From this vantage point, China's “Old Left” suffers from unrealistic nostalgia and paternalistic tendencies, while the Western-inflected “neoliberals” hold excessive faith in the marketplace.
For those who are familiar with the occasional convergences and sometimes bitter differences among these schools, Communication in China's final chapter provides a kind of recapitulation of Chinese intellectual fractiousness—and for this reason alone, the entire book is a must-read for scholars. For those who are unfamiliar with the debates, the context and nuances of Zhao's critique may be elusive; and for the theoretically uninitiated, the book as a whole will be exceedingly rough going. For teaching advanced undergraduates and graduate students, however, the case study chapters could serve as engrossing readings for contemporary China classes or international and comparative mass communication courses.
