1、Communication in China07-764_01_Front.qxd 12/12/07 7:17 AM Page iSTATE AND SOCIETY IN EAST ASIASeries Editor: Elizabeth J. PerryState and Society in the PhilippinesBy Patricio Abinales and Donna J. AmorosoRevolution in the Highlands: Chinas Jinggangshan Base AreaBy Stephen AverillMarxism in the Chin
2、ese RevolutionBy Arif DirlikSovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian ModernBy Prasenjit DuaraA Chinese Economic Revolution: Rural Entrepreneurship in the Twentieth Cen-turyBy Linda GroveThe Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of CultureBy Richard KrausWebs of Smoke: Smugg
3、lers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the InternationalDrug TradeBy Kathryn Meyer and Terry ParssinenPatrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship, and the Modern ChineseStateBy Elizabeth J. PerryOf Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels against Modernity in Late Im-perial ChinaBy
4、Roxann PrazniakUnderground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival,19271937By Patricia Stranahan07-764_01_Front.qxd 12/12/07 7:17 AM Page iiCommunication in ChinaPolitical Economy, Power, andConflictYuezhi ZhaoROWMAN Zhangs wife had already operated a lucrativelottery ticket booth
5、 nearby the district government office. Since then, Feng has sustained a protracted struggle to continue hermakeshift newsstand operation on that very street corner. She occupiedthe new booth for eight days and nights in freezing Beijing winterweather when it was first put up. When her cart was once
6、 again turnedupside down by a member of the Zhang family, she mustered all her en-ergy to smash a brick into the Zhang family booth behind her, breaking aglass window. She appealed to the Beijing municipal and Chaoyang Dis-trict handicapped peoples associations. She went to the Chaoyang Dis-trict mu
7、nicipal office, kneeling in front of officials for a resolution of theconflict. Chaoyang municipal officials predictably sent her case back tothe Chaowai Neighborhood Office, the very jurisdiction in which the2 Introduction07-764_02_Introduction.qxd 12/11/07 9:24 AM Page 2Zhang family has its power
8、base, or in the words of Feng, “back to ZhangLaikuans household.” She also sought justice through the local media. The power of the Zhang family and their ability to retain the state-owned booth in the face of Fengs repeated appeals is obvious. However,Fengs ability to sustain her resistance and to
9、continue to operate hermakeshift newsstand in apparent violation of local administrative ordersis also remarkable. Driving Fengs determined resistance is her normativeexpectations about what a socialist system should be and her outrage atthe injustice of the current system. As she stated in an appea
10、l letter ad-dressed to “concerned responsible persons”: Zhang Laikuan abused the power of his office. He colluded with the news-paper retailing company and the district government offices and bullied or-dinary folks like us. Where is justice? A socialist country of ours should nottolerate this kind
11、of rotten officials. . . . I demand that justice be returned to ahandicapped person, so that my family can continue to survive.2Apart from her inner sense of economic and social justice, Feng hasalso drawn her strength from the solidarity of ordinary people on thestreet. In her letter, she described
12、 how, when her newsstand was turnedupside down and newspapers scattered all over, people on the streetshelped to collect the papers. In fact, I first met Feng in the summer of2001 when I bought a newspaper from her and saw a tearful Feng beingcomforted by two customers after her newsstand operating
13、license,which had been taken away by officials for an “annual check,” was notreturned to her on time, making her worried that it might be revoked for-ever. Since then, I would visit her every time I went to Beijing. During a2002 trip, a middle-aged woman recounted how she had supported Fengby boycot
14、ting the Zhang family booth. In June 2004, I witnessed a mid-dle-aged, male, laid-off worker helping Feng to sell newspapers. When Ireturned in January 2005, an old lady had come to lend a hand to Fengbecause the laid-off worker had become sick and could no longer come.The old lady said that she liv
15、ed in the neighborhood as a well-off retiree,and she found her companionship to Feng meaningful. When I visitedagain on July 1, 2007, two retired women, as well as the male laid-offworker I had encountered before, came to lend a hand at different times.Meanwhile, McDonalds, which has an outlet just
16、a few steps away fromFengs newsstand, had mounted its bright protective umbrellas for her. IfMcDonalds has turned Fengs newsstand into a space for advertisementand the promotion of transnational corporate benevolence, to the localcommunity in this highly mobile and seemingly impersonal street cor-ne
17、r, Feng and her newsstand have become of a symbol of defiance and asite of local solidarity. This street scene signifies a whole range of broad issues. It is about themutual constitution between a particular configuration of state and Introduction 307-764_02_Introduction.qxd 12/11/07 9:24 AM Page 3m
18、arket power and the Chinese citizenry in the era of globalization. It isabout new developments in Chinas three decades of market reforms andthe displacement of owner-operators such as Feng in the ongoing worldhistorical processes of capitalist “accumulation by dispossession.”3It isabout contradictio
19、ns between the promises of “socialism with Chinesecharacteristics” and the actual practices of political economic power in thesystem. It is also about resistance and social contestation. The nature ofdomination and resistance at the present, however, is more multifacetedthan that of the 1989 era, wh
20、ich was symbolized by the famous man-ver-sus-tank Beijing street scene.4In place of the anonymous young and edu-cated urban malethe perfect signifier of a political and civil subject inthe liberal democratic discoursewe have Feng, a poor and handicappedold woman from the ranks of Chinas subaltern cl
21、asses. In the place of thetank, an unambiguous symbol of the repressive and singular force of theChinese state, we have the modern newspaper booth and the localizedweb of political and economic power relations it carries, as well as Fengsmultifaceted relationship with the state, manifested in her no
22、rmative ex-pectations from and legitimate claims over the state, and her relationshipswith local state offices and agents. It is about the social dimensions andthe human faces of the grand narratives of Chinese modernization,“Chinas rising,” Chinas democratization, and Chinas global reintegra-tion.
23、More specifically, it is about the necessity and importance of rein-serting a social analysis in grasping Chinas spectacular emergence as aglobal economic power, because the story about contemporary China isalso the story of the reconstitution of class relations in China, and as Dut-ton has put it,
24、it is the story of “not just the new mercantile class that hasgrown rich with reform, but also of the subaltern classes that have not”5and, I should add, those in between or who considered themselves to bein between. Finally, it is about the dynamics of Chinese society, the re-silience of subalterns
25、 like Feng in Chinas relentless march toward mod-ernization and global reintegration. It is about her relationships with hercustomers, ordinary pedestrians, her supporters, and their search formeaning and community. This is a relationship of solidarity, and yet it isalso one of ambivalence, tension,
26、 and even division, as manifested inFengs uneasy encounter with the hired attendee inside the Zhang fam-ilys booth, a rural migrant whose precarious presence in the urban spaceis predicated upon Fengs potential displacement in that very space.THE BOOKS TOPIC AND CONTEXTThis book, a sequel to my 1998
27、 book, can be seen as an extended version ofthe above story: about the mutual constitution between the communica-4 Introduction07-764_02_Introduction.qxd 12/11/07 9:24 AM Page 4tion system, the party-state, and Chinese society in the context of acceler-ated market reforms and global reintegration, m
28、arked, among other mile-stones, by Chinas accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in2001 and Beijings successful bid to stage the 2008 Olympics. In my 1998book, I analyzed how the struggle for the democratization of the Chinesemedia system in the initial reform era culminated in 1989 and how
29、 the vi-olent repression that year was followed by a process of rapid commercial-ization after Deng called for accelerated market reforms in 1992, resultingin a fusion of political control and the market imperative in the media. Inthis book, I situate the Chinese communication system in the evolving
30、state-society nexus in post-1989 China and analyze the dynamics of com-munication, the formation of class and other forms of power relations, andsocial contestation during a period of deepening market reforms. The broad context for this analysis is “the neoliberal revolution” andthe forging of the “
31、market state”6in the global political economy since thelate 1970s and the Chinese states attempt, as a result, to construct a “so-cialism market economy”although David Harvey, emphasizing how re-form-era Chinese political economy “increasingly incorporates neoliberalelements interdigitated with auth
32、oritarian centralized control,” has calledit “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.”7Within this context, ne-oliberalism is not “just a reincarnation of laissez-fair sentiment or a sim-ple neo-classical attachment to the idea of the inherent efficiency of mar-kets.”8Nor is it merely the econom
33、ic policies of market liberalization,deregulation, privatization, and fiscal austerity associated with the“Washington Consensus” and the “shock therapy” and “structural ad-justment programs” applied to Russia and other transitional economies,to which China is seen as an exception.9Rather, neoliberal
34、ism has beenunderstood in contemporary social theory as a governmentality that “re-lies on market knowledge and calculations for a politics of subjection andsubject-making”10and “a concept of a larger social and political agendafor revolutionary change” that “aimed at nothing less than extending the
35、values and relations of markets into a model for the broader organizationof politics and society.”11As a response to the crisis of accumulation inWestern capitalism in the 1970s and a potential antidote to threats to thecapitalist social order posed by the “embedded liberalism” of thepostWorld World
36、 II period and the radical social movements of the late1960s and early 1970s, neoliberalism is “nothing less than a definingmovement of our age”12and “a political project to re-establish the condi-tions for capital accumulation” and restoring capitalist class power.13Moreover, as analysts such as Ha
37、rvey and Robison agree, there are incon-sistencies and tensions between neoliberalism as a political economic the-ory and the actual practices of neoliberalization in various countries. Con-sequently, the theoretical utopianism of the neoliberal argument hasIntroduction 507-764_02_Introduction.qxd 1
38、2/11/07 9:24 AM Page 5worked primarily either as “a system of justification and legitimation forwhatever needed to be done”14to restore or newly create the power of aneconomic elite or as a means for the more general “instrumental harness-ing of the market state to serve various institutional or pri
39、vate interests.”15To be sure, China is not an openly committed neoliberal capitalist socialformation. Nor did the post-Mao leadership launch the economic reformswith an ideological commitment to neoliberalism.16The socialist legaciesand promises of the Chinese state must be taken seriously, and it w
40、ouldbe a mistake to simply equate the Chinese state with neoliberal market au-thoritarian states elsewhere in the world.17Nevertheless, neoliberal ideashave been influential in China as the post-Mao leadership addressed thespecific crises of state socialism and searched for new ways to develop theco
41、untry while ensuring its own grip on power.18In particular, the defin-ing characteristics of neoliberal governmentality, that is, the infiltration ofmarket-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics, have inmany ways characterized Chinas post-1989 accelerated transition from aplanned
42、 economy to a market economy. Specifically, the Chinese state hasbeen pragmatically deploying what Aihwa Ong has identified as the twinmodalities of the neoliberal governmentality“neoliberalism as excep-tion” and “exceptions to neoliberalism”in its attempt to build a “social-ist market economy.”19Wh
43、ile “neoliberalism as exception” is deployed tosubject certain populations, places, and socioeconomic domains to ne-oliberal calculations to maximize entrepreneurial dynamism and facilitateinteractions with global markets, “exceptions to neoliberalism” are in-voked in political decisions to “exclude
44、 populations and places from ne-oliberal calculations and choices” to either protect social safety nets or tostrip away all forms of political protection.20To apply Ongs concepts tothe Chinese media system, the establishment of a market-oriented urbansubsidiary newspaper by a party organ can be seen
45、 as the application of“neoliberalism as exception.” On the other hand, the ban on the estab-lishment of a newspaper as an independent market entity can be seen asan “exception to neoliberalism.” This book not only offers an analysis of both the institutional and dis-cursive dimensions of the Chinese
46、 communication system under the in-fluence of neoliberalism beginning in the early 1990s under the JiangZemin leadership, but also provides a portrayal of the broader Chinesepolitical economy and the changing dynamics of Chinese society throughthe prism of communication. In particular, I foreground
47、the fact that theChinese party-state has not only embraced the market rationality andcommitted to the unleashing of individual entrepreneurial freedoms andother new sources of private power and interests, but also set in motioneither directly sanctioned or indirectly failed to constraina whole range
48、of neoliberal and predatory practices involving “accumulation by dispos-6 Introduction07-764_02_Introduction.qxd 12/11/07 9:24 AM Page 6session,” from the privatization of state-owned enterprises to the seizureof farmlands, and from the commodification of a wide range of culturalforms to the destruc
49、tion of the environmental commons. The resultant“new society,”21one of the most inequitable in the world (ranked 90th of131 countries by the United Nations in a 2005 report),22has been charac-terized by a fractured structure, acute divisions along class, rural/urban,ethnic, and regional cleavages, and heightened conflicts. The Hu Jintaoleadership, recognizing that social instability had reached the “red line”after it came to power in late 2002 and assumed full control of the Chinesestate in late 2004 (when Hu assumed control of the Chinese military), hasint
