ABSTRACT
Communication studies have a long tradition in Asia and have contributed greatly to what we know about the mass media in Asia today (Chu, 1988). Th e development of communication research in Asia, however, has been supplemented only recently with research focusing on political communication processes. In Hong Kong and China, for example, the fi rst political communication studies appeared in the early 1980s (Chan, 1992). Whereas many of the earlier political communication studies from Asia focused on general descriptions of the interactions between the media and the state, the past 20 years have been marked by a slow increase in the number of studies that pay more attention to media eff ects and public opinion formation.
