China's Media Industry Development Direction And Strategy Choice

The contemporary world now is in changes of globalization. As one of the basic conditions of globalization and the world's most important driving forces, modern media industry is changing and the changes will go on and on.Culture Industry Promotion Plan, enacted in 2009, raises China's cultural industry as a strategic industry with unprecedented attention. As a core area of cultural industry, China's media industry now stands on a new starting point.The statistics show that the media industry nowadays is one of today's most important industries in the world. For examples, U.S.copyright industry's growth rate is much higher than America's GDP over the same years for many years, while in China, the output value in 2008 media industry has reached more than 400 billion RMB,accounting for 2.1% of the total GDP.However, for many years, the government, the public and even the media industry itself has nothing but vague understanding of the media industry's business property. Sibert, Peterson and Schramm's theory provides a regular basis in studying the model of the media industry, which assumes that the country's politics shape the media system.Later, a large number of scholars follow this approach in further study. They all attempt to combine media and politics together, and tend to deem the mass media as a kind of tool for information exchange and political discourse.It is the time that mass media have been almost integrated into the global capital economy. No matter what kind of the form of government, the global media groups exist almost anywhere in the world; No matter legal or not, information can spread everywhere.So as a matter of this fact, two famous experts full of innovativeness completely replace the theory that mentioned before with the commercialization of the media—which they think that can identify more accurately about the situation of the mass media in contemporary political and economical world.In China, the media economics study started from the late 70's of the 20th century and has already made great progress after 30 years hard working by many scholars. And now the trend tends to re-exam, re-interpret and re-project the framework and the mode of China's media industry. However, these studies usually are limited to a perspective of journalism and communication, or prior to make China's media industry's industrial property and product attributes as some self-evident things and no more have issue on it. The premise's absence relates to the lack of the necessity and practicality when study the direction and strategy selection of China's media industry. Even if some research is based on the perspective of economics, it still lacks of the concrete works on the basis of the establishment of the western media industry, while that is what this paper pursuits for.The author believes that the government's control and intervention is the most important variable mutation influencing the development of the mass media industry. The historic changes in industry policy show the trend of overall reform from top to down. Researchers need to further develop and expand from a view of industrial economics on the media industry by revealing the necessity and the corresponding strategies of the necessity and feasibility of China's media industry's reform.With the rapid development of China's economy, the media industry is also changing enormously especially in the use of new technologies and the new way of capital operation. But objectively speaking, in comparison with the foreign media industry, there is a big gap between them. Because in China, the position of the media industry is still vague;the government's management system can not meet the requirements of the development of modern media industry and the market system is poor. It can be viewed from the microcosmical side that the modern enterprise system has not been established yet resulting in low level internal management and be short of standardabilization. This means that it is necessary to find out the problems and the problems'reasons in the development of media industry. That also means that the reform can not be done if this work is missing.Meanwhile, studying the development of the Western media industry is also very important. That's because the Western media industries have more than one hundred years'history and have already accumulated rich development experience, which can be the guide and reference for the Chinese media industry's development. Of course, the two have different economic contexts and the experience can not be used automatically, we should choose the most appropriate development strategy and actively promote the China's media industry.China's media industry is largely directed by the internal dynamics and external pressures.The first and the foremost ones contain the political impetus, the audience needs power and the force of capital accumulation;the latter ones conclude two parts: the international level and the national level.On one hand, China is bound to open the national market to the international media as a member in the WTO, so it definitely will bring huge pressure to the national media; On the other hand, audience demand and the progress of science and technology promote the restructure of the domestic media companies.It means a lot to the China's media industry of studying the external pressures and the internal dynamics for it can have a full view of China's media industry's current industrial structure and explore the significant opportunities and challenges facing the media industry at this stage.