ABSTRACT
New China News Agency has the largest and most articulated internal news system of any organization in China. Even as the media gather and cull information for leaders, they serve another—and often contradictory—function: as a battleground. George Bush met with Zhao Ziyang and other senior Chinese leaders during his visit to China in February 1989. Even during the short-lived period of relative press freedom, elements within the leadership sought to exert a restraining influence. If all of the means by which Chinese leaders manipulate the media illustrated thus far have hovered somewhere between use and abuse, there is another that is unequivocally heinous. To the media's credit, in April and May 1989 the lap dog began to bite, breaking old taboos and expanding the parameters of acceptable public discourse. The various subgenres of elliptical messaging are one of the ways media are used, like the puppets in a Javanese shadow play, to wage political warfare.
