ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ‘Media Convergence’, a key concept imported from Western academic and policy discourses, and one that has been consistently appropriated by Chinese policymakers and practitioners in their efforts to achieve concrete technological, economic and political goals. Integral to the systematic transformation of the Chinese media system, new regulatory frameworks are also being formulated in response to the continuing convergence of media architecture. The commercial operation of traditional media has been dominant in China since the early 1980s and has been accelerated by the introduction of private, capital-driven Internet industries. The only exception to this is the central media group, which is owned either by the Central Committee of the Party or the central government. The Internet has become a central part of the infrastructure of China’s economy and society for both top-down policy making and people’s everyday lives. China’s media system perhaps shares more elements with the Polarized Pluralist Model, including weak professionalization and strong state intervention.
