Localizing Chinese media

In an introduction to one of the earlier volumes on the political economy of China’s provinces produced by the Provincial China Project, ¹ Hans Hendrischke (1999: 3), accounting for the absence of a distinct provincial identity in China, points to the propensity of the centrally controlled Chinese media to play down the autonomy of provinces, as well as the parallel tendency of provincial media not to boast of their degree of autonomy. This was largely true, especially during the socialist era, when China’s media and communication system was more or less structured according to a multiplicity of scales: newspapers, radio, and television at the national, provincial, municipal and county levels. Then, local and provincial media’s submission to forces at the national, central level was indeed almost always taken for granted, with municipal and county media functioning mainly as transmission services, relaying provincial and central programming with very little in the way of programming capacities (Zhao 2008a). Although studies of the Chinese media in the socialist era almost always focused on the national level and did not set out to explore the central–local dynamics and tensions, little nuance was lost in that process. Those familiar with the political culture of China’s socialist era know very well that this media and communication system both mirrored and was metonymic of spatial hierarchy. But such a picture of meekness and uniformity, if it ever was accurate in the 1990s, no longer fits, since, as Zhao points out:

In an increasingly commercialized media environment, higher-level media authorities could no longer use administrative means to enforce ‘must carry’ obligations. In another important development, all the provinces had sent their main television channels through satellite-cable to a national audience by 1998. The availability of nearly 30 provincial satellite channels and a whole range of local channels in urban cable households completely changed the Chinese television scene and challenged the monopoly of CCTV in the national television market.

(Zhao 2008a: 96)