| In the last three decades, the Chinese news media has changed from a totalitarian propaganda machine to a highly competitive industry. China has experienced dramatic increase of information and media autonomy. However this post-totalitarian state has also managed to strengthen its capacity to control information. This study performs an organization-based relational analysis to explore this puzzle.;I argue that the Chinese political communication is a continuous interplay between four sets of mechanisms: the state, the market, the profession and the international forces. These four intertwined mechanisms not only shaped the nature of Chinese media; but also altered their own nature and dynamics in the punctuated yet perpetuated metamorphosis of the Chinese political communication.;First, media behavior is no longer homogenous. In the black zone of highly politically sensitive news, the political logic dominates the media behavior. In the white zone of apolitical news, the market logic dominates the media behavior, while the in-between gray zone of news is shaped by the combinations of logic.;Second, the state has altered its sources of legitimacy, power and organizational structure. Correspondingly, the willingness of the state to define the boundaries across different news zones has gradually shifted. In the 1980s, the state relied on national, collective and repressive measures in controlling the media. At the turn of the century, however, the state switched to the local, individual and preventive measures. Commercialization has contributed to this process by differentiating media grievances and creating cross-cutting structure, which offers the state the structural capacity to control increasing information.;Third, organization-mediated professionalization nurtures different types of professional ethics across organizations. The discrepancy between official ideology and professional ethics maintains the news media's aggressiveness in challenging the state, but heterogeneity in journalistic value orientations also slackens the radical nature of Chinese media. Meanwhile, communication technology has constructed different media discourses during the reform, which also added the complexity of the state-media dynamics.;This study illustrates these mechanisms through several case studies on gray zone news. The analysis relies on participant observations, in-depth interviews, a survey of journalists, which were conducted between July 2004 and December 2006. |
