This lively and painstakingly assembled oral history of China Central Television (CCTV) from the beginning of the post-Mao era to the present makes a significant contribution to English-language scholarship on the inner dynamics of China's largest media network. Author Ying Zhu, already an established expert on contemporary Chinese-language film and television, has in recent years garnered a considerable mainstream audience as an interpreter of cultural politics in the People's Republic of China. Two Billion Eyes marks an accessible step forward in Zhu's coverage of the contemporary PRC media scene by featuring gripping interviews with CCTV's past and present leaders, producers, personalities, and reporters. The book's main objective is to elucidate CCTV's relationship to a triumvirate of external institutions—state, market, and the international media community—through these personal narratives. In the process, Zhu describes with remarkable candor and precision the genesis of China's authoritarian “state capitalism” from a media perspective.
The argument of Two Billion Eyes is likewise threefold. First, Zhu shows that, throughout CCTV's history, the broadcaster's dominant ethos has been one of service to the Chinese Communist Party and to the nation. Second, CCTV “practitioners” also consider themselves beholden to the highest international standards for journalistic objectivity and media production, and frequently chafe against the limits imposed on their pursuits by state censorship and propaganda diktat. Finally, CCTV is a market-oriented institution, though the particularities of domestic media regulation and the opaque economics of China's international “going out” policy make it difficult for outside observers to assess the real significance of CCTV's claims for high ratings and market share.
The heart of the book consists of two chapters: chapter 3, “Making the News,” and chapter 4, “Delivering the News: Profiles of Three News Anchors.” Here, Zhu and a cast of high-profile interviewees build a compelling case that the dominant ideology of China's news media institutions is best expressed by the concept of “enlightenment.” This term, as Zhu shows, still enjoys considerable prestige among establishment intellectuals—a group that includes CCTV managers, producers, anchors, and investigative reporters. Embellished with rich associations drawn from China's early twentieth-century May Fourth and New Culture movements, it legitimates the production of news that serves the national interest by shaping popular attitudes. In the eyes of its employees, CCTV is an agent of enlightenment, or “equilibrium” (p. 59), rather than a tool of the Communist Party or state per se. Imbued with a strong sense of national and culture-bearing mission, CCTV media practitioners position themselves as adjudicators between the competing demands of social order, objectivity, and popularity. Rather than being caught between the party line and the bottom line, they strive toward the enrichment of CCTV as an institution because they believe that this institution has an important role to play in China's “rise” toward a more advanced state of national and social development.
Thus, while CCTV is no mere creature of the central Propaganda Department, an inside perspective on its operations confirms that those who have thrived within CCTV are those who have best and most creatively actualized its enlightenment mandate. On this score Zhu has several other important points to make concerning internal CCTV mistrust of market forces and new media; competition from provincial and international broadcasters; and the burnout and disillusionment experienced by past and present CCTV employees whose values have not more fully accorded with the institution's internalized sense of stability-oriented, paternalistic, and not infrequently jingoistic professional identity. These more subtle contributions are often buried by the breezier oral history and ethnographic writing style that dominates Two Billion Eyes, a style that, it should also be noted, contributes in very positive ways to the readability of the book and the accessibility of its subject matter. For informed readers, though, they represent some of the most significant contributions of the book. One reading of Zhu's main argument would be that “state reporting” (p. 249) and state capitalism are two aspects of the same truth—namely, that contemporary China is above all a statist society. Indeed, her concluding discussion of neo-authoritarianism and the call for a “new gentry class” emanating from “Chinese Strauss followers” (p. 260) suggests that CCTV professionals, whose ranks include several highly visible public intellectuals, may be leading the charge on behalf of a state-sanctioned, neo-traditional nationalist movement.
The question then becomes: to what extent is CCTV a reliable window on, or microcosm of, Chinese society today? Here Zhu and her interviewees are less forthcoming concerning CCTV's actual impact on public opinion, the nature of its viewership, and its overall popularity. As a story of CCTV, the book is most convincing when describing what successful CCTV professionals view as the reasons for their success, but less authoritative on issues beyond this highly subjective middle ground. Nonetheless, Two Billion Eyes is (to slightly amend one of the many and well-deserved endorsements appearing on the dust jacket) a definitive work on television news media in the PRC, and an essential addition to any collection on contemporary China, professional journalism, or the comparative political economy of global media.
