Who do they think they are?

Once they are in the profession, how do they see themselves? We can speculate that the withdrawal of state control from certain aspects of the media and the vast expansion of that media would reduce the commitment of Chinese journalists to the totalitarian, Maoist, interpretation of their professional role. We can imagine that commercialization of the media and liberalization of content, as the media become more responsive to the market, might have journalists become more solicitous of the customers than of the political masters. We could guess that both trends would fuse with increasing influences from western, particularly anglophone, media in driving journalists to see themselves in the ‘watchdog’ and ‘critical’ roles perceived as being archetypically ‘western’.1