Construction And Deconstruction Of Chinese Journalists’ Professional Identity

Taking constructivism as theoretical approach and across-border relationship as analytical frame, the research is aim to discover the mechanism of Chinese journalists’ professional identity construction. It takes the group of journalists from China Youth Daily as a case, and put them into the historical scene where the state, media and the public/readers interacted, conflicted and negotiated with each other.We can conclude that there are three models of relationship which decide Chinese journalists’ professional identity construction:Firstly, there is "unification relationship model". In this model, China Youth Daily and its readers were unified into the state system. As the supervisor, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League (CYL) directly participated into the news making, writing or revising the editorial, making specific report assignment, pre-censor the content, etc.Bearing the mission of teaching the youth with Marxism and Maoism thoughts, China Youth Daily and its readers were in an unbalanced relationship——the teacher and the taught, by one-way instilling. The public space with public anticipation and discussion was not developed.This "unification relationship model" greatly threatened media’s autonomy, and did not allow public norm negotiation, which finally resulted in the media’s widespread lying.Secondly, there is "professional control relationship model". In this model, direct control by the CYL was weakened and China Youth Daily depended more and more on the readers who pay to buy the newspaper.China Youth Daily was given more autonomy and did not simply obey the order from the CYL rather than negotiated on the basis of professional practice.In the new relationship model, the journalists of China Youth Daily developed new news style, which is called "in-depth reporting". They also build up high professional identification."We are journalists and we report news","the first element is fact, the second element is fact, and the third element is still fact"became their motto.Thirdly, there is "resistance and incorporation relationship model". Resistance and incorporation were used by Birmingham School to discuss subculture of English teenager. We can not completely equal the journalists’professional practice of China Youth Daily to subculture, but it is obvious that the journalists of China Youth Daily have developed a different culture and identification from that of main party newspaper such as People Daily. From this point of view, they can be seen as some sort "subculture".China Youth Daily’s transformation to "mainstream newspaper" and "commercial enterprise" is translated as a kind of resistance to say goodbye to the Soviet party newspaper model. It’s impossible for the CCP’s Central Publicity Department(CPD) and the CYL to ignore this transformation and resistance. They take commercial and ideological incorporation to stop it, such as increasing the newspaper’s circulation and changing the journalists’salary standard and conceptualizing and labeling the unfavorable news report by China Youth Daily. These incorporations aroused more resistance from the journalists, which finally tend to lose-lose situation.In the last chapter, the on-going professional identification is showed on the basis of in-depth interviews with the journalists of China Youth Daily. It finds that the interviewed journalists think journalism as a sacred profession and their conception of journalism is close to professional journalism rather than the traditional role "the party’s ears, eyes and tongue". Through practice and internal discussion, they developed their own professional norms, which are carried on through personal examples as well as verbal instructions. On the other hand, they are facing a common distortion and hold a low evaluation toward the present professional identification in China.