Autonomy through social networks: Law, politics, and the news media in modern China, 1931--1957

My dissertation explores historical changes in the relationship between the Chinese state and urban intellectuals from the latter part of the Republican era (1931--1949) to the early Communist period (1949--1957). My focus is law and the news media, particularly the role of social networks in creating a realm of autonomy from the central government in the context of the rise of strong party-states in twentieth-century China. Rather than simply gauge the relations between the state and these intellectuals, I analyze actual interactions between them, as each sought to influence judicial decision-making and the construction of favorable public opinion through the news media.;The influence of the news media on judicial decision-making in the most famous political trials of the Republican era, such as the New Life Weekly Case of 1935 and the Seven Gentlemen Case of 1937, constitute the crucial subject of this project. In these cases, China's Nationalist state attempted to silence non-official local elites who became notorious critics of its policies, and particularly its policy of perceived 'appeasement' toward Japan. Yet in the Nationalist period there was no clear winner. Constrained as it may have been by government censorship, media coverage of the trials provided dissident social elites with a public forum to successfully contest the government's accusations outside the courtroom in the 1930s. Comparison between the New Life Weekly and Seven Gentlemen cases demonstrates that broad horizontal social networks among urban intellectuals were effective in winning cooperation and influencing public opinion and publicity appearing in the mainstream news media. Government officials, defendants, and the news media forged social networks in the process of state building and commercialization, enabling them to cut across the boundary between the state and society and to cooperate in the construction of public opinion. However, in order to challenge state power, urban intellectuals benefited much more from accumulating broad horizontal networks with other intellectuals than possessing narrow hierarchical social networks with government officials.;In contrast to the Nationalist government, since its foundation in 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) government had been a steady winner in the tug-of-war over political representation. By 1957, urban intellectuals could no longer effectively contest government accusations and became extremely vulnerable to the state's political purges. I argue that this disparity in the state's capacity to contain political dissents is a result of the weakening of social networks during the Sino-Japanese War (1937--1945). Thus, measuring social power in the context of the dominance of state power is critical in understanding the degree of autonomy from the state intellectuals enjoyed in twentieth-century China.