ABSTRACT

Introduction Since its inception China’s television system has been structured as an integrated part of the state’s political system (Pan and Chan, 2000; Wei, 2000). The 1983 multi-tier mixed coverage decentralization policy1 led to the structural diversity of Chinese television within the Party-State system, while the recentralization of the television network from four tiers to two tiers, and the subsequent conglomeration since 1996, consolidated the power of broadcasters at the provincial level. Nevertheless, the hierarchical nature of the Chinese television system created a close bond among local television stations, broadcasting authorities and government at the same administrative level. Television stations depend on the local government and broadcasting authority’s policy protections to monopolize the market; local government and the broadcasting authority count on television stations to advance their political influence and generate financial income. Since the early 1990s, the funding allocated to the broadcasting authority by local governments could only support their daily operations; therefore, capital required for development relied on financial contributions from the media, especially television stations (Wang, 1998). Broadcasting authorities are de facto economically “affiliated” to television stations at different levels and are used to protect local interests (Chin, 2006). The fragmented nature of the governance structure of the Chinese television system raises interesting questions about the balance of power between the Central Government and localities, in general, and in media policy-making, in particular. Recent studies of media policy processes suggest that either the national policy-making process is closed or that the influence of localities in national media policy are confined to loosely interpreting and implementing policy (Kean, 2001; Lau et al., 2008). This chapter expands the second argument further, and suggests that (1) the state is selectively effective and the local authorities are selectively compliant depending on the nature of the policy; therefore, the historical and socio-political contexts are an essential and indispensable background to understanding why certain policies are important and strictly implemented while others are not; (2) the analysis of the interaction between policy formulation, implementation

and evaluation is particularly important in understanding the complexity of Chinese policy processes and policy behavior. Incorporating the concept of social learning, which sees policy development as a process of social learning by actors at or near to the center of policy-making (Pierson, 1993), this chapter examines the roles of provincial media and officials in China’s Guangdong province in the national policy process of the entry of overseas television channels (OTvC) into China, and their patterns in articulating policy influence through policy implementation and learning. Key issues are (1) the role of the Province in policy formulation, implementation and learning (2) the mechanism through which the provincial media can influence national policy makers, and (3) the function of policy learning in the overseas television channels policy process. The analysis has found that: (1) despite there being little space for the provincial media to participate in national policy formulation, they have practiced great discretion in policy implementation, and (2) policy input is primarily through the policy learning process. The policy learning process in Guangdong, China not only functioned as a response mechanism to the legacies of previous policies, but also provided a legitimate platform for the provincial media to negotiate with Central Government for both policy change and policy incentives. This chapter is in six sections: section one and two conceptualize policymaking as an aggregated process and introduce the concept of policy learning; section three discusses the links between the concept of policy learning and the common characteristics of China’s policy-making process; section four reviews policy decisions on the entry of OTvC; section five looks at the implementation of the incentive policy on advertising insertion, and provincial discretion in the OTvC’s supervision; section six examines policy learning both at the top (i.e., responses of the Party and state to the consequences of the advertising policy) and from below (i.e., provincial media’s deliberate efforts to pursue OTvC policy reform).