ABSTRACT
On 19 November 2009, Xiang Xi, the top editor of Nanfang Weekend (also known as Southern Weekend, or NW), a weekly subsidiary of the Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily Media Group (Nanfang Group), found himself conducting an exclusive interview with US President Barack Obama, who was concluding his three-day visit to China. None of China’s Beijing-based national media outlets that had requested face time with Obama had such an opportunity. In the words of one US press report:
the White House’s decision to invite the Southern Weekend to do the interview, on just a day’s notice, seems clearly to have been aimed at rewarding one of China’s most respected journalistic institutions in a week that was less than a shining moment for Chinese transparency and openness.
(Dean 2009) In fact, it was through the event of the interview with this newspaper, not the content of the interview, that the US President took issue with the Chinese state’s decision to curb media access to him during his China trip, 1 and sent a message about his championship of the liberal cause in China back to his home audience. Among other things, this event highlights the reconfiguration of the relationship between national and provincial media in China’s ongoing transformation, whereby provincial media have taken advantage of market reforms for what Wanning Sun, in her chapter in this volume, calls ‘scale-jumping’, which she describes as ‘pushing the limits of a given scale into a higher and “bigger” level of space organization for the purpose of political, economic, social or cultural gain’.