LCM Journal. Vol 5, No 2 (2018). Emerging Chinese Theory and Practice of Media

AA. VV., Hugo De Burgh, Emma Lupano, Bettina Mottura

• Editore: LED Edizioni Universitarie
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9788879169028
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Communication Studies

TABLE of CONTENTS: Emerging Chinese Theory and Practice of Media, Hugo de Burgh, Emma Lupano, Bettina Mottura - Dual Identity and Multiple Tasks: Contemporary Chinese Party Media's Involvement in Political Communication, Jing Xu, Dengfeng Wang - Comparing Chinese and EU Soft Power: The Credibility Factor, Olivier Arifon - News and Views: Definitions and Characteristics of Genres in Chinese Journalism, Emma Lupano - From "Propaganda" to "Guided Communication". Animating Political Communication in Digital China, Lei Qin - Online Chinese Nationalism and the Discursive Construction of a Nationalist Hero: The Case of Jin Jing, Yiben Ma - The Study of a Journalism Which Is almost 99% Fake, Jing Su, Xiguang Li, Lianfeng Wang - The Chinese Press and the Constitution, Bettina Mottura -Authors

CHINESE MEDIA PRACTICE AND PRODUCTS

From “Propaganda” to “Guided Communication” Animating Political Communication in Digital China

Qin Lei*

Dol: http://dx.doi.org/10.7358/1cm-2018-002-ginl

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the recent boom in the use of animated cartoons for political communication in China which began in late 2013. A series of political cartoons are examined against the background of a comprehensive media revolution designed by top-following the Chinese Communist Party’s (hereafter CCP) new understanding of the role of media and public opinion. 1 argue, by looking closely at the creative use of political cartoons, that the CCP has adjusted its views on the role of media in the digital age - from propaganda mouthpiece, to guiding opinion unifier for popularizing the Party’s rule. Their efforts and success in stimulating a significant number of responses through the use of animated cartoons has given rise to a new communication model of mixing top-down and bottom-up flow of message. Behind the new model was the CCP’s changing understanding of the public: from “target audience of propaganda” to guided audience, and then to central players in popularizing the Party. The major media reform since Xi took office in early 2013 has laid institutional, managerial and editorial foundations to sustain this conceptual change in practice. The boom in political cartoons is the most conspicuous result of that.

Keywords: cartoon; China; media reform; new media; political communication; propaganda; public opinion; Xi Jinping.

From its earliest days, the internet has been regarded as a “dictator’s dilemma”, i.e., it is very difficult to garner the benefits of the internet (e.g., social development and economic growth) without paying the potential political cost of destabilizing the rule (Dickson 2016). Ever since the burgeoning studies of the internet in the early 1990s, technooptimism has featured strongly in Western scholarly debates on the role of internet in society. With his 1995 bestseller, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte, the former MIT media lab director, has paved the way for a future generation of techno-optimists. The book demonstrates his unapologetic optimism for the future of the internet on account of its capacity to break down national and linguistic barriers and bring the world together, as is evidenced from the title of the book’s epilogue, “An Age of Optimism”. The internet, as has been argued, is built as a robust decentralized communication system that is by its nature resilient to control.

Students of the internet in China have likewise been preoccupied with the Internet’s potential political impact, which leads to a dichotomous theoretical framework of control vs. resistance, top-down vs. bottom-up, and mainstream vs. dissidence. The underlying implication of such studies is the potential impact that the internet has on the oneparty state system.

In 1998, Yuezhi Zhao prepared the ground for the study of media commercialization from a politico-economic perspective. Her nuanced study of the history of the commercialization of the print media in China from the 1920s to the 1990s underlines the love-hate relationship of the Chinese government with media marketization, as well as the care that newspapers have to take to tread safely between the “Party line and the bottom line” (Zhao 1998). In his book, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), Guobin Yang has also provided a pioneering study of China’s cyberspace as a place of synthesis between creative energy, conflict, community and control. Xiaoling Zhang’s The Transformation of Political Communication in China (2001) goes one step further in examining the intricate relationship between media and politics as China emerges as a global superpower. Zhang investigates how discourses, ideologies and contentions negotiate with each other to give rise to what he calls “resilient authoritarianism”, i.e., how the Party has to allow a certain degree of contention in the media in order to improve governance while limiting the contention within controllable limits and maintain the stability of its rule. In a similar vein, Maria Repnikova (2017) argues for a more deep-seated connection between the Chinese media and political power. By examining the bureaucratic and personal links and the intricate power relations between the central authorities and critical journalists, who are conventionally viewed as daring dissidents against authoritarian rule, Repnikova highlights the “fluid, state-dominated partnership characterized by continuous improvisation” (ibid., 10) in Chinese critical journalism.

These monographs are among a long list of studies with wide-ranging themes, which include media control, especially internet control, e.g., Schambaugh (2007) and Tsui (2003); the development or deficiency of the “public sphere” and “civil society”, e.g., Luo (2014), Negro (2017), Tai (2006), Lei (2018), Herald (2011); and the synergy of Party ideology and market rationality, e.g., Shi (2008), Stockmann (2013), and Zhao (2000). The cohort of studies on China’s new media either focuses on its boom from a technological viewpoint or adopts a conventional analytical line in investigating new media’s relationship with the Party-state and the potential for social democratization, e.g., Lu, Chu and Shen (2016), Lee and Chan (2016) and so on. Discussions on the technological, economic and political significance of new media in China have underlined a similar problem, as to whether digital media lead to “convergence [with] or divergence [from]” the central political power, these being the actual words used in the titles of several articles on new media, such as that by Lun Zhang (2017).

Against the research paradigm of control vs. resistance, little has been said about how the internet and new media have changed the model of communication in China and the Party’s role in facilitating such a change. Brian McNair, in his textbook on political communication (2003), presents the twenty-first century as acceleration and deepening of the practice of politics in all its forms before a global audience. The internet and new media have turned McLuhan’s metaphor of the planet as a shrinking “global village” into a truism (1994). Hence, scholars like Brian McNair, Philippe Maarek and Gadi Wolfsfeld have called for a closer examination of the rising level of professionalization in political communication, i.e., the role of the agent between political organizations and the media (McNair 2003). Instead of inquiring about the effect of the new technology on political communication, it is better to ask, “Who is using the new technology, in what ways, within what social and political context, and with what effect?” (Maarek and Wolfsfeld 2003, 6). The essay asks precisely these questions with regard to the context of China under President Xi Jinping.

This essay examines the recent boom in political animated cartoons arising in China since late 2013. The most prominent was the “Thirteen What”, a three-minute English music video featuring an animated image of Xi Jinping promoting China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, referred to by The Wall Street Journal as “the psychedelic music video” (Dou 2015). The exploration of this phenomenon is followed by an investigation into the process of professionalization in political communication in Xi’s China. The essay situates the rise of political animation against the top-designed media revolution and the Chinese Communist Party’s new deployment of the media’s role. I argue, by looking closely at the creative use of political cartoons, that the CCP has been well aware of the internet’s “dilemma”, and has proactively adjusted the media’s role to thrive in new patterns of communication in the new media age. A review of media policies from Mao to Xi allows us to map the shifting understanding of the media: first, as the Party’s propaganda mouthpiece, then as a means of promoting social development, and now as an agent for popularizing the Party and its leader. The new role expected of the media matches the CCP’s changing understanding of the public: first, as the “target of propaganda”, then as guided recipients, and now as voluntary advocates for the Party. The wild spread of animated ap...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• EDITORIAL: Emerging Chinese Theory and Practice of Media
• DISCOURSES ON THE CHINESE MEDIA
• CHINESE MEDIA PRACTICE AND PRODUCTS
• Authors