State, Market and Media: The Changing Chinese Nationalistic Discourse since the 1980s

The main aim of this thesis is to examine power relations among the Party-state, intellectuals, mass media and the ordinary citizens, the four agents that are involved in the hegemonic struggle for the leading position of nationalistic discourse in the thirty years' "reform and opening" era, and explain the features and transitions of China's nationalistic discourse and the power relations behind it from the political-economic-cultural (media) structure perspectives.;Considering nationalism as an important political issue, China's Party-state has always paid considerable attention towards acquiring the leading status for its official patriotic discourse. Yet, the mass media, intellectuals and the ordinary citizens all strived to influence the nationalistic discourse, and as a result, the fierce power struggles unfolded amongst the four agents. Such power struggles were dynamic with the rise of the Chinese nationalistic sentiment during the past thirty years. Accordingly, Chinese nationalism becomes an ideal approach to study contemporary China's power relations and its transitions.;Three nationalistic cases - TV-documentary Heshang ( River Elegy) in 1988, the anti-NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the anti-Tibet Independence movement in 2008 - will be analyzed in detail in this thesis. They were selected because these are unique cases that could clearly illustrate the relationships of the four agents and the political context during that historical period. Then, the critical realism-based hegemony approach will be suggested as a new theoretical framework in this study. From this approach, on the one hand, Chinese nationalism will be considered as a hegemonic field in which all four agents struggled in for the hegemonic status of nationalistic discourse. Accordingly, we can examine the nationalistic discourses/projects promoted by the four agents, their discursive struggles and the dynamic process of how one's nationalistic discourse acquires hegemonic status in each case. In this process, the power relations among the four agents can also be explored clearly. On the other hand, since the critical realism perspective pays attention to the dialectical relations between structure and agency, this approach can help us explore how China's transitional structures in the past thirty years - from totalitarian state to authoritarian state, from planned commodity economy to socialist market economy, and from a media market to the Internet society - shaped the power relations amongst the four agents and the hegemonic nationalistic discourse, as well as how their hegemonic power struggles contribute to the transformation of China's social structure. Moreover, the critical discourse analysis can help us clarify such issues from three levels: text/discourse, power relationships/ discursive struggles, and social structure.;By examining Chinese nationalistic discourse from discursive relations and the structural perspective, this study tries to combine "structure-agency", stressing both the deeper structural reasons in shaping nationalistic discourse and power relations amongst the four agents, as well as the active role of agents in promoting the transformation of social structures through such hegemonic struggles. Besides, considering China's social structure as a dynamic transitional process, and examining in which respect the four agents' hegemonic struggles contribute to the transformation of social structure, this study also goes beyond the dominant paradigm that regards the "state-society" as a static structure, especially in the field of communication study. Moreover, putting mass media into a broader social context, this thesis hopes to make a contribution to the study of the "publicness" of China's mass media and the role of the mass media and the Internet society in promoting democratic discourse and the formation of a civil society. This study finds that in the past thirty years, Chinese nationalistic discourse experienced significant change from intellectual-led to the CCP-led, and then, to netizen-led. Such change reflected the fierce hegemonic struggles among the four agents and the transitional power relations amongst them. Yet, fundamentally, it is the changing economic-political-cultural (media) structure in China's thirty years that shaped the power relations amongst the four agents and the features of hegemonic nationalistic discourse. Especially, it finds that market economy, combined with the authoritarian political structure, tends to promote radical nationalistic discourse, rather than a democratic and rational discourse as the consensus among the society. Then, China's media commercialization, operating under the dual logic of the state and market, further radicalized such radical anti-western discourse. The Internet society that emerged in the 2000s sharply decentralized China's authoritarian political structure. Yet, under the marketized authoritarian structure, the rational-critical discourse still cannot acquire the hegemonic status.;Besides, it finds that China's social structure indeed transformed as the unintended consequence of the agents' hegemonic struggles. Though both China's mass media and the burgeoning Internet society have not yet developed as a civil society, and the rational-critical discourse has not acquired consensus among the society, this study adopts an optimistic attitude towards them, yet, of course, the final answers indeed lie in the agents' own hands.