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Chapter 1. Introduction
In hand with the economic reforms of the 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was forced to “secularize” the media sector and therefore loosen its grip on the absolute control over the media. As a consequence, China’s media departed from the rigid, totalitarian control characteristics of the Cultural Revolution.
Triggered by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms since the 1980s the Chinese state gradually shifted from an ideologically-driven dictatorship to a market-orientated autocracy (Lee, 1994).
Media in the People’s Republic of China was once an unquestionable part of the Communist political structure and served solely as a tool of political control. In this sense, journalists, regarded as “cadres”, were obliged to share the perspective and practices of the Soviet ideological model of the press, i.e. journalists equaled Party propagandists.
Beginning with the year 1986, journalists in China have begun to advocate for freedom of the press more forthright than ever before. They strived for a separation of the Party press and a non-party press. Subsequently, Chinese press began to experience tremendous structural changes. At that time, the Party proved to be too inflexible and dogmatic to provide functional policies. As a result the economic bureaucracies started to strive for self-reliance in information services. This marked the beginning of a new branch in Chinese media, the market-oriented press. The separation also led to the break-down of the monopoly of the Party-state over the media (Zhang, 1993).
During the propagandist post-reform period in the early 1990s, investigative journalism or any kind of critical reporting of the process of marketization would have been considered to be political suicide and a threat to the new pro-market agenda.
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國立 政 治 大 學
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With the entrenchment of market relations and the consolidation of Jiang Zemin’s pragmatic leadership by the mid-1990s ideological conflicts at the Party core were temporarily resolved, while left- and right-sided intellectuals were both marginalized.
As a result of the settlement of the inner-party struggle for power, a new space for investigative journalists and their profession of focusing on specific issues and concrete problems was created. During the 1990s, the press system in the PRC began a revolutionary transformation process. The former pure propaganda tool of the orthodox Party-state was exposed to the forces of marketization and commercialization. The new market forces merged with the propagandistic ideas and formed a ground-breaking new hybrid. The vast diversification of media from a simple Party mouthpiece to a complex marketized medium offered newspapers a unique position. These new information-gathering systems entitled their journalists to initiate investigations and serve as the central leadership’s eyes and ears on local situations. The problem of inadequate and unreliable communication within the state bureaucracy and now, with a commercial logic rooted outside the government bureaucracy itself, media-originated exposure sometimes helps to shape the terms of public discourse and led to the formation of specific reform policies. Nowadays, the reformed and commercialized news media are playing an increasingly crucial surveillance role, brining certain issues to the public arena.
Although, nowadays the Party still is ambitious and also has the power to exercise control over the media, the economical reforms in China have nevertheless created some space for operational and financial autonomy (Pan & Chan, 2003).
This thesis will shed light on a particular practice of investigative journalism in China, the practice of disclosing social tensions, i.e. crimes of Party officials or businessmen against ordinary, less well-off citizens that are mostly located in the less
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developed areas of China. The CCP itself pays close attention to this phenomenon of social tensions due to its unpredictable capability to disrupt social order. In this sense, the CCP is tremendously ambitious to fight corruption in society. According to the White Paper issued in December 2010 by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China the Chinese government has always antagonized corruption in the country.
In the past the CCP has already established programs to fight corruption and political power abuse. These organs and measures are elaborated in the first section of State Council’s White Paper:
The “State Prosecutorial Apparatus”, the “Government Supervision Organ”
and the “CCP Discipline Inspection Office”. The government, moreover, issued the “People’s Constitution”, the “People’s Corruption Punishment Regulations” and other “anti-corruption” regulations. In order to maintain the pureness of the People’s political state, the Chinese government launched the three-campaign: corruption, squandering and anti-bureaucratization, and the five-anti-campaign, anti- tax fraud, anti-state property fraud, anti-inferior construction corruption and anti-economic espionage. The CCP attempts to eliminate corrupt behavior, punish corrupt elements in society, shape a healthy climate in society without corruption and to remarkably improve the overall situation. (p. 2)
Social tensions are mainly considered to be the result of corruption or corruption-related crimes. As elaborated in the Chinese White Paper, the Party is absolutely aware of the problem and considers corruption to be a crucial threat to its legitimacy. Since social tensions are often traced back to corrupt local cadres, public anger tends to target the authorities in general. Thus, the CCP perceives this issue as a
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serious threat to the harmonious society (hexie shehui) and to social stability (Qing, 2007). According to the Party’s rationale, social tensions lead to social disorder and social disorder leads to scrutinizing the Party’s legitimacy for leadership. This phenomenon is also referred as the “social volcano”. Journalists frequently discuss various issues of instability in rural and urban China, e.g. rural protests, labor protests, urban community mobilizations, housing demolition disputes, and assaults against public officials. Most of those social tensions have originated from the rapidly changing system of “social stratification in China” (Whyte, 2010).
It is for this very reason why investigative journalism and social tensions in China present the focus of this thesis. The present research consists of two theoretical parts that deal with investigative journalism and Chinese investigative journalism, a methodology section, and an analysis-finding part.
As post-reform Chinese journalists have found inspiration from both Western and Chinese journalistic practices, this thesis will begin with a brief discussion of these two traditions by addressing their respective, yet often similar values and principles. First, the author will present and discuss the concept of investigative journalism from a Western perspective. In this regard, several definitions of investigative journalism will provide a theoretical framework for later discussions.
Pertaining to the content of that first section, journalistic paradigms, roles of the journalists and the connection between the reporter and the source will be explained in order to present a cohesive introduction to the topic and to provide the theoretical background for this thesis.
The second part will present the concept of Chinese investigative journalism and form the theoretical core of this thesis. In this regard this paper distinguishes between two different journalistic paradigms in China and therefore explains the
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duality of investigative reporting in China. This second part delivers also a basic definition of the concept of Chinese investigative journalism in order to emphasize the limitation of the scope for this piece of research. In addition, this thesis will first deal with five aspects of the phenomenon of investigative journalism in China as a basis for conducting the discourse analysis.
First the author will focus on the historical background and the appearance of the market-oriented press in particular.
Secondly, since the Chinese media system tremendously differs from any of its Western counterparts, it is necessary to emphasize the difference of the Chinese addressee of media. Compared to the West, the Chinese receiver of media has not been referred to the term “audience” from the very beginning. The term audience has evolved with the end of the Mao-era and nearly successfully replaced its original predecessor, the masses.
As to the third aspect, the author will elaborate the different roles that investigative journalists in China assume. In addition, one of the most unique and most controversial phenomena of Chinese investigative journalism, i.e. internal reporting, will also be analyzed. As a consequence of assuming all the roles explained in this part, investigative journalists are not only confronted with possible retaliation coming from the central-party authority, they also have to face the even more sophisticated and rather unpredictable threat of local media control.
The fourth aspect pertains to the question what kind of strategies journalists in China employ and how they defend themselves against punishment. Aside of the strategic and theoretical background of investigative journalism in China, the author attempts to elaborate how Chinese muckrakers deal with day-to-day issues vis-à-vis the state apparatus of the PRC.
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Fifthly, observing the issues of Chinese investigative journalism in China from a Western perspective, this paper’s attempt is to find an appropriate answer to the question whether it should be understood as the Party’s adversaries or mouthpiece. In this regard, it is important to review the Chinese term of “yulun jiandu” that overlaps with its Western counterpart “watchdog journalism” in theory, yet, is still different due to its overall Party allegiance. As post-reform Chinese journalists have found inspiration form both, Western and Chinese journalistic practices, this thesis will also reveal the often similar values and purposes of journalism either cultural sphere.
With regard to the methodological part of this thesis, discourse analysis will be applied to hardcopy editions and internet-based editions of the investigative newspaper Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo) in the time-frame of the years 2007 to 2010.
The overall research- aim is to illustrate the complex situation of investigative journalism in China and how it attempts to disclose social tensions.
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