A Study Of Instututional Changes Of China's News Media System

Since 1949, China's news media system has experienced extensive institutional changes and has become a complicated to many scholars of the mass media. This thesis explores the process and momentum of institutional changes in China's news media system since 1949 in terms of New Institutional Economics.Firstly, this thesis illustrates that there are three periods of institutional changes in China's news media system since 1949.They are the monopoly news media system (from 1949 to 1978), the transitional news media system (from 1978 to 1992) and the macroscopic readjustment news media system (from 1992 ). The M.A. thesis answers why the news media system in China took place these institutional changes, what would be their dynamics, what would be these changes' ways, and what direction would these changes are heading for in the future?By examining the process of the institutional changes in China's news media system, this thesis argues that the main momentum of these institutional changes consists in the behavioral subjects for potential benefit, which resulted from imbalance of the involved systems (such as economic system, political system and cultural system). Then this thesis goes further to point out that two important propellants of these changesare the news media itself and the government in particular. From this perspective, this dissertation considers that the functions of China's government in these changes and partly decide the ways of institutional changes in China's news media system, which could be called the governmental retreating way, the governmental driving way and the governmental controlling way.Finally, this thesis argues that the nature of the institutional changes in China's news media system is a kind of progressive evolvement. In a long run, the governmental retreating way and the governmental driving way will become the leading ways instead of the governmental controlling way in this process. However, it is impossible that China's news media system could get rid of the control of the political system in China. In the future, China's news media system will experience much more complicated and flexuous changes than before.