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I. Introduction
This thesis compares Chinese and Czech official print media during the protests of 1989 in People’s Republic of China and in Czechoslovakia. The thesis has its focus on regimes’
control over the media institutions, the role of journalists in the protests and on the media discourses before, during and after the protests. The analysis presents and debates key factors that influenced domestic media coverage of China’s Tianamen Square protests and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, which both happened in the year of 1989,by comparing their impact on the outcomes of the protests.
The findings should provide valuable feedback for existing accounts on media role in the democratization process and on the role of journalists as pro-democracy actors. In fact, the findings suggest that although media and journalists indeed played significant roles, these roles might not always be interpreted as beneficial for the democratization in general or for the outcome of pro-democratic protests in China and Czechoslovakia in particular.
The two selected cases - Tiananmen Square protests and Velvet Revolution - allow us to analyze conditions under which the journalists, who originally operated within the regime-controlled Communist media systems, decided to disregard media control mechanisms when many of them came to a conclusion – as Marx and Engels would have probably said – that they have nothing to lose but their chains.
The comparison of the two cases should point out their similarities and differences and help to evaluate relative importance of media and journalists among various other explanatory factors for the failure of democratization in the case of Beijing protests and its success in the case of Velvet Revolution. Basically, there are theories of transitions to democracy on one hand and accounts on the role of the media in the democratization process on the other hand, and they both focus on different factors in order to explain the same results.
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In the end, as O’Neil observes,1 although the mainstream accounts on transitions from Communism to democracy usually maintain that media performance was an important factor in the regime transition, these accounts fail to elaborate the nature of this importance. On the other hand, accounts that primarily focus on media performance during the protests usually do not link their "media factor" with the general transition theories. Thus we can follow Goldman’s claim that media "played a pivotal role" in the Tiananmen Square protests2 and similar claims about the role of the media in Czechoslovakia,3 but we need to place the accounts about the media in a more general framework of transitologist literature.
As the evidence suggests, the ways in which the media were controlled in China and Czechoslovakia were basically the same. Only official institutions were allowed to publish a newspaper, both countries had special party-state organs responsible for keeping the media in line and there was a system implicitly encouraging self-censorship. Under normal circumstances, journalists were very careful regarding what to publish and well aware of their position within the system and the mechanism of media control worked to the party-state satisfaction while there was no crisis.
However, a closer look reveals that some media organizations were actually at least partially "shielded" from the party-state control mechanisms. Moreover, while the party central organs – People’s Daily in China and Rude Pravo [Red Justice] in Czechoslovakia – were led by high party officials and their journalists had to be party members, some of them wanted to serve their party - and their readers - by covering events as they were: in words of
1 P. O’Neil, Communicating Democracy: The Media and Political Transitions. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998, p. 3.
2 M. Goldman, "The Role of the Press in Post-Mao Political Struggles," in Lee Chinchuan, Ed. China’s Media, Media’s China. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994, p. 28.
3 M. Smid. (2013.) "Ceska media a jejich role v procesu politicke zmeny roku 1989." [Czech Media and their Role in the Process of Political Change in 1989."] [Online] Louc.cz Available:
http://www.louc.cz/pril01/listopad.pdf [2013-10-15]
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China's leading muckraking journalist at the time, Liu Binyan, this was for them "a higher kind of loyalty".4 And there were also other media organizations and other journalists who would rather prefer professional (in the Western sense of journalistic professionalism) over party criteria for the evaluation of their reporting and who would prefer political reform if not an outright change of the regime. Therefore, in addition to party organs, it is important to also examine such "shielded" media which were also involved in shifting the discourse away from the official line, e.g. media such as World Economic Herald in China or Svobodne Slovo [Free Word] in Czechoslovakia. Finally, it is necessary to look in closer detail on how and to which extent this "shielding" worked.
The interesting thing which the thesis will illustrate is that initially, the outcome of the protests seemed more promising in China than in Czechoslovakia, and the discourse in the official media also reflected that. In China, the reformist World Economic Herald was writing about such things as neo-authoritarianism and press freedom before the protests took place, and even the regime's mouthpiece People's Daily dared to publish penetrating investigative reports. In Czechoslovakia, Svobodne Slovo could shift the discourse only after the protests took place, since there were no powerful reformists in the Party or in the government to protect them, while the regime's mouthpiece Rude Pravo maintained the hard line as long as it could.
In order to understand the role of the key "discourse-shifting" media better, it is important to compare them with the official party dailies. The bigger picture is again somewhat surprising, given the widely popular theories of the Communist press5 or the final
4 Liu Binyang, A Higher Kind of Loyalty: A Memoir by China's Foremost Journalist. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
5 e.g. F.S. Siebert, T. Peterson and W. Schramm, Four Theories of the Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956. Also see K. Jakubowicz, "Media as Agents of Change," in Glasnost and After. Media and Change in Central and Eastern Europe. D. Paletz, K. Jakubovicz and Novosel, Eds. Creskill: Hampton Press, 1995, pp.
19-48.
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results of the protests. For example: while it is true that People’s Daily published the notorious April 26, 1989 editorial, based on Deng Xiaoping’s speech and condemning the protests with very harsh words, it is also true that its journalists joined the protests and for some time provided sympathetic coverage (which lasted until their resistance was quelled and their editors replaced). In Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, the Communist Party’s organ played its assigned role and initially downplayed the protests. Only after the demonstrations became too widespread and the reporting by other media too fearless, the Rude Pravo’s discourse collapsed; later, its journalists themselves voted to replace their party-appointed chief editor with his deputy (who later kicked out the most compromised hard-line staff and privatized the daily for himself).
The central argument of this thesis regarding the similarities and differences between the cases is following: In both China and Czechoslovakia, the journalists wanted to cover the protests, but the media control mechanisms prevented them from doing so during earlier occasions. There had been a conflict between journalistic professionalism and the party line, and until the 1989 protests, the party line always prevailed. But while in Czechoslovakia the media joined the protests very quickly, in China they were much slower and instead of directly mobilizing the population for the support of the protests (as Svobodne Slovo did in Czechoslovakia), they provided only sympathetic coverage instead of the so called "call to action".
Another finding of the thesis is that this overcoming of the control mechanisms (in both China and Czechoslovakia) on the part of the journalists was possible only due to a paralysis of the party decision-making mechanism. However, the nature of this paralysis was very different. In China, the paralysis was caused by a conflict between hardliners and reformers, e.g. elites vs. elites, and after the resolution in favor of the hardliners, a crackdown followed.
In Czechoslovakia, the paralysis was caused by the hardline leadership realizing the scope of the massive defection of party cells once the protests were on their way. The leaders felt
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isolated and decided not to shoot. Their passivity caused their regime to collapse.
Further, as the evidence presented in the thesis shows, while in China the protesting people (and journalists) wanted basically to improve the system by the means of talks with the regime, in Czechoslovakia they wanted to replace the system by forcing the regime to leave completely.
As for the explanations of the events, the initial part of this thesis notes that most of the accounts focus either on the structure of the situation and on the rational motivation of the actors, or on cultural context. The authors often mention various factors (or their combinations) responsible for the different outcomes in Czechoslovakia and China, such as party legitimacy, party divisions, economic situation, social modernization, leadership qualities of party and protest leaders, role of intellectuals, opposition strategies, looming cultural crisis etc. An alternative, culture-based explanations imply that while the Velvet Revolution has been essentially based on Czech nationalism and the conflict ran between the [Czech] nation and [Communist] state, the Tiananmen has been decidedly an elitist affair with many signs of divide between the protesters [aspiring elites criticizing the incumbent elites] and the rest of the Chinese population [passive, not expected to get involved]. While the Czech nationalism behind the Velvet Revolution united all strata of the population and mobilized them into the conflict against the regime which, from the nationalist point of view, has been imposed from the outside and therefore lacked the legitimacy, the Chinese elitism – best illustrated by the "new authoritarianism" debate – had inhibiting effects on the protests and effectively prevented a possible popular mobilization against the regime.
Almost twenty years ago, the pioneer Chinese media scholar Chin-Chuan Lee observed that "hindsight has provided us with a finer vantage point to reflect on the media changes that have resurged after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Commentators have paid inadequate attention to the media impact of global developments on China, just as their role in helping undo the Soviet empire and autocratic regimes in Eastern Europe as well as easing
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democratic transitions elsewhere (including Taiwan) has largely been overlooked".6 Although several important works appeared since then, Lee's statement still seems to be true.
This thesis is therefore an attempt to provide a new impulse to the debate and to bridge a gap created by parochialism of individual disciplines. The media in China and Czechoslovakia during the 1989 protests have not yet been compared; comparative accounts on Eastern Europe's transitions and China's 1989 non-transition to democracy are also very rare; the mainstream transitology does not pay much attention to media and accounts on media's role in 1989 events do not pay much attention to transitology.
Due to the time, space and language barriers, the thesis limits itself on using mostly published secondary sources in English and Czech languages. This is partly compensated by the fact that the existing literature in English about Chinese media and about Tiananmen Square events of 1989 is rather extensive, and translations of key documents and media texts are also available in English. On the other hand, the literature about Velvet Revolution and Czechoslovakia's media is very limited, especially in English. The samples of the Czech media texts have been translated by the author of this thesis.
In summary, the primary aim of the thesis is to provide an analysis of framework of the media control in the context of political situation of China and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s and of the role of the Chinese and Czech journalists from the official media in the protests, focusing on the questions (1) what factors led the journalist to step beyond that framework in order to cover the protests? and (2) what was their role in the success or failure of those protests? The secondary aim is to illustrate and support this analysis by exploring key instances of the media discourse.
In order to provide an overview of key factors behind the media performance during the student protests in Czechoslovakia and China, the thesis first explains the logic of comparing
6 Lee Chinchuan, China’s Media, Media’s China. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, p. 3.
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these two cases and provides context of the two events, based on the key accounts explaining regime change in Czechoslovakia and regime survival in China in 1989. Then the thesis will focus on the role of media, as they were reflecting the reality and also influencing it by their reflections, and especially on the underlying antagonism between the logic of media control on one hand and journalist professionalism on the other hand. In the next part, the thesis will analyze the mechanisms of the China’s and Czechoslovakia’s systems of media control which were designed to prevent reflections of inconvenient topics and perspectives, but which failed in the key moments and allowed sympathetic (or at least neutral) coverage of the protests. In order to illustrate the struggle on the pages of the press, the determination of the Chinese leadership to deal with the protest with force and the collapse of Czechoslovak leadership facing the protests, several key instances of media discourses will be analyzed.
Finally, the findings will be discussed in order to suggest a more general explanation for the functioning of media control mechanisms and for the role of journalists in anti-regime pro-democratic protests.
The choice of China and Czechoslovakia in 1989 for comparison has several reasons:
both countries shared similarities in the structure of their Communist political systems, but their Stalinist or Maoist eras were long past. Both experienced economic problems before the protests that took place in 1989. These protests, taking place in the same year, not only profoundly challenged the regime, but were also remarkable for the important role of dissatisfied students and intellectuals at their helm. There are also similarities in the ways the regimes had controlled their presses: in both countries, the media were generally regarded as mouthpieces of their parent political organizations and the desired goal was to create an appearance of "united front" where all the media speak with one official voice. However, in both countries, due to varying degrees of proximity or distance from the centre of power, the regime’s grip of the mass media had not been as monolithic as before, and during the protests, the official voice lost both its monopoly and its former coherence.
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There are also important differences, among them the population, the social structure and the level of development of the two countries. In 1989, China’s population was already over one billion (most of them ethnically Han), compared with Czechoslovakia’s mere 15 millions (divided between 10 millions of Czechs and 5 millions of Slovaks). Despite significant progress, the illiteracy and semi-illiteracy in China was still around 16 percent according to 1990 census, down from 22 percent in 1982,7 compared with fully literate population of Czechoslovakia, and 0.2 percent of university students in Chinese population in 1989 also do not compare favorably with Czechoslovakia's 7.2 percent share of university graduates in the population. Despite its rapid urbanization especially in the coastal areas, China was still a rural country while Czechoslovakia was a leading industrial country already in the early 20th century with only about 10 percent of the population in agriculture as of the late 1980s. The GDP per capita was 400 USD per year in China and 3800 USD per year in Czechoslovakia. Finally, China's land area was about 9.6 millions square kilometers and Czechoslovakia's only 128 thousands. In other words, while Czechoslovakia in 1989 was a middle-sized developed European country, China in the same year was Asia's biggest, but poor and still only developing country.
Even more important differences can be seen when we compare the countries' political leadership. In China, many of the ruling leaders were still the members of founding generation of the People's Republic who established the regime after the victorious civil war.
On the other hand, the regime in Czechoslovakia had always been a Soviet satellite. The well-known 1968 invasion of Warsaw Pact troops terminated not only the reformist Prague Spring with its peculiar form of "socialism with a human face", but also widespread legitimacy of the Communism as a political system, even among most of the remaining Party
7 Han Xiaoxing, "Democratic Transition in China: A Comparative Examination of a Deified Idea," in Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989: Chinese and American Reflections. R. V. DesForges et al., Eds. New York:
State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 224.
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members. This was more serious than the damage inflicted by Mao's Cultural Revolution in China's "lost decade" of 1966-76. It was Deng Xiaoping's political rehabilitation and launch of reforms that had restored the Party's legitimacy.
Most importantly, the protests had different results. the Chinese reforms in the 1980s were bold and the media were less controlled, but the protracted protests on the Tiananmen Square and elsewhere were ultimately crushed. It was only in the reform-shy and tightly controlled Czechoslovakia where the protests succeeded, with the regime collapsing surprisingly quickly. Why then, despite all these differences, compare these two cases?
The answer is precisely because of the particular mix of similarities and differences.
The structure of the political systems in China and Czechoslovakia was very similar and so were the ways how the regimes maintained the "united front" appearance in the mass media.
When the protests took place, journalists in both countries were facing the same dilemmas:
should they follow the official line and be hostile towards the protests? Should they cover the protests with professional neutrality? Should they become a voice of the protests, or even personally join the protestors? In other words: the intensity of the conflict between the regime and its opponents, the journalists' position very close to the centre of the conflict, and their often close links with both the regime and its opponents placed them in a situation in which they had to take sides. They had an opportunity to abandon the party line, and the structure of this opportunity was the same in both China and Czechoslovakia due to the similar mechanisms of media control. The Chinese and Czech journalists behaved differently, and in the end, the protests resulted differently. It is legitimate to explore and compare the ways in which the journalists and the media might have influenced the outcomes of both events.
Comparing media during the 1989 protests in China and Czechoslovakia has also
Comparing media during the 1989 protests in China and Czechoslovakia has also