From Blind Spot to Media Spotlight: Propaganda Policy, Media Activism and the Emergence of Protest Events in the Chinese Public Sphere

Abstract

In recent years, popular protest in China has emerged from a state of near-invisibility. Drawing on a diachronic analysis of news media coverage, this paper traces how a number of major protest events gradually entered the Chinese media’s spotlight and came to be portrayed in an increasingly protester-sympathising fashion over the course of the Hu-Wen administration. It argues that these changes were triggered by structural transformations of the Chinese public sphere, but underlines that deliberate policy choices by the political leadership served as a crucial agent of change. Facing proliferating unrest and an increasingly unimpeded flow of information, the central authorities have gradually shifted propaganda policy from a suppressive to a more proactive approach. They have thereby created critical opportunities for Internet users and investigative journalists to push the envelope further towards protester-sympathising accounts. The development is significant as there are good reasons to surmise that increased media coverage has exacerbated the dynamics of popular contention. Theoretically, it deserves to be noted that non-inevitable choices by an authoritarian leadership have led to an outcome in which media coverage of citizens who challenge the state on the streets has become substantially more frequent and positive than before.

Keywords:

• China
• popular protest
• contentious politics
• censorship
• propaganda
• public sphere
• media
• Internet

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jonathan Benney, Peter Marolt, Günter Schucher, Qi Dongtao, the ASR editors, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on previous drafts. For writing time, I would like thank Li Lianjiang and the Department of Government and Public Administration, The Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as Zheng Yongnian and the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. Initial research for this paper was conducted under a Fulbright Scholarship in the RGC-Fulbright Hong Kong Dissertation Research Programme.

Notes

1. According to official statistics, the annual number of so-called “mass incidents” surged from 8,700 in 1993 to 40,000 in 2000 and 87,000 in 2005 (Chung et al., 2006). Circulated figures that are neither officially confirmed nor denied suggest a continued increase to 180,000 such incidents in 2010 (Tanner, 2013).

2. Note that the terms (political, central, Chinese) leadership, (Party) Centre and central government/authorities are used interchangeably in this study.

3. I excluded episodes revolving around religious, ethnic and nationalistic claims. The media representation of these types of protest is considerably different from that of the more livelihood-centred protests that, by all that is known, constitute the overwhelming majority of protests in post-Tian’anmen China (on prevalent forms of protest in contemporary China see, for example, Cai, 2010). The beginning of this investigation in 2001 is determined by the unavailability of large-scale digitalised news media content for previous years.

4. Violence, here, refers to major clashes between the police and protesters or between protesters and third parties (such as hired thugs), or to vandalism of private or public property.

5. The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/site/hcsteinhardt/home (author's personal webpage).

6. Hence, I use the term public sphere in an analytical manner. This is not the place to debate the application of the much more normatively inclined idea of a public sphere in Habermas’ sense to China. This has been done elsewhere (see, for example, Herold and Marolt, 2011, pp. 10–11, pp. 59–61).

7. In the Chinese context there are additional reasons to put the empirical focus on professionally produced coverage in the traditional news media. First, the most authoritative official statements on protest events are published in the state media. Second, although journalists in the commercialised media often take leads from the Internet, netizens rarely have the resources to conduct substantial investigations on the ground. Thus, depictions of contentious events that can compete with official accounts are predominantly those produced by professional journalists publishing in commercialised outlets. Third, a major objective of this research is to provide more systematic evidence of changes in the representation of protest over time. Due to the censored nature of the Internet in China, it is methodologically almost impossible to gather such evidence from online discourse.

8. For an overview of studies of media effects on protest policing see Della Porta and Filieule (2004).

9. Some research suggests that the likelihood of coverage did not change a great deal in Western democracies between the late 1960s and early 1990s (Barranco and Wisler, 1999; McCarthy et al., 1996).

10. Two more prominent examples of such a way of depicting protests are the denunciations of demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square in 1976 and 1989 (Renmin Ribao, 1976; 1989).

11. Examples of such reports are an investigation of several rural protests in the magazine Yuhua (Chen, 1994), and a report on the violent repression of rural resistance against official misconduct published in the magazine Minzhu Yu Fazhi (Lian, 1999). I thank Thomas P. Bernstein for kindly sharing a copy of the Yuhua report with me.

12. Additional searches on the Internet and on an electronic media database that covers a very broad selection of local and national Chinese news outlets (Wisenews, 2012) suggest that the pre-2005 events in Figure 1 that were not reported in the employed news media sample were indeed thoroughly censored from the Chinese media.

13. Scholarly research documented how one of the pieces had been carefully toned down by the editors to avoid trouble with the propaganda authorities (Tong, 2011, pp. 154–91).

14. A Chinese media expert conveyed to me that he believes problems caused by renewed information suppression after mid-2005 convinced the leadership to adopt more proactive tactics by 2007 (Author’s interview, June 2010).

15. NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard.

16. See the blog ESWN (Soong, 2008b) for a collection of the pictures that were circulated.