Representing the underprivileged: Marketized news media and the peasant-immigrant labour in urban China (Chinese text)

This study examines the relationship between the press and the peasant-immigrant labour, an underprivileged group that emerged during economic reform in contemporary urban China. The exploration focuses on the following questions: how does China's urban press cover and discuss this underprivileged group? Do the media coverage, portrayal, representation and discourse open up spaces for the group to articulate and assert their interests publicly, or do the media actually contribute to the repression of the group? Most of the past literature in this field examines European and North American societies. This study focuses on the transitional society of China.; Taking the city of Guangzhou as a case, this study systematically examines the coverage by the four dailies of the city, as well as three other newspapers. The overall contention is that the marketized urban press of China does not repress and marginalize the underprivileged, as their counterparts in western countries are often criticized as doing. On the contrary, they represent the peasant immigrant labor group both politically and culturally by advocating citizenship in the area of "redistribution politics" and by advocating discourses of cultural equality in the field of "recognition politics." The performance of the news media is the result of a confluence of factors interacting under the specific historical situation of an authoritarian state in transformation. These factors include the state, the market and the emerging journalism culture, among which the market dynamics is the most fundamental, as the news media are taking the advocacy role as a marketing strategy.; However, the ideological openness of China's press as shown in this study could not be taken as a sign of the marketized Chinese media becoming a free opinion marketplace, as liberalists would argue. Nor can they be interpreted as showing the emergence and development of oppositional media with oppositional ideology, while taking the social and political position of the underprivileged group. It could only tell us that ideological struggle in mainstream media may turn out favoring the underprivileged under some specific conditions.