ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a beginning and partial effort in that direction by looking at debates in journalism policy in mainland China. Popular dissatisfaction in mainland China today with Cultural Revolution period "propaganda" is more a matter of degree than substance. There are powerful roots for educational journalism in Chinese popular and elite society and weak roots for "critical" or "pluralistic" journalism of the style which can and occasionally actually does flourish in the West. The actual rise of journalism and newspapers in China at the turn of the century reinforced the polemical and educational nature of the venture. The base-line for all discussions of the press and propaganda in mainland China is the Yenan Rectification Campaign and the reorganization of the Party press in April 1942. The struggle for a press law can be seen in the context of a long Chinese tradition for educational journalism and a continuous Chinese Communist Party tradition to combine educational and informational journalism.
