ABSTRACT
Shanghai has a prominent status because of its political and economic importance as well as its role in China’s international integration. Shanghai’s broadcasters, like other media in China, were traditionally owned by the State and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Since the early 2000s, amid the transformation of China’s national television policy and the subsequent relaxation of cross-regional operation, media organization’s ownership and rapidly internationalized of Chinese economy, Shanghai’s broadcasting media not only has gone through a significant structural, operational and institutional change, but also become a test zone for the further reform of the Chinese media. This chapter studies the historical development of Shanghai’s broadcasting media from the 1990s to 2015, aiming to illustrate the progress, strategies and principles of China’s national broadcasting policy over the last two decades. It shows that the “three separations” reform – the separation of the institution and enterprise, the separation of ownership and managerial authority, and the separation of production and broadcasting in Shanghai ultimately transferred the Shanghai Media Group from a state-owned institution to an independent stateowned enterprise with private investment and international expansion in the future. At the same time, the state-owned television channel and spectrum resources were relocated to lie under the direct supervision of the propaganda department of the Communist Party. The legal and capital links between the channels and programming productions no longer exist. Furthermore, the role of the Propaganda Department of the CCP moved from the background to the foreground. The political and economic consequences of such separation remains to be explored, but the implications for Chinese broadcasting system is certainly significant.
