China Media Framing in China:

China

Media Framing in China: Capitalist yet Unfree?

According to Betty Houchin Winfield and Zengjun Peng's essay "Market or Party Controls: Chinese Media in Transition," although modern China may be adopting a more market-oriented economy, a full transition to a free market system of the press as a Westerner might understand freedom is unlikely. True, ideological transition to a more deregulated media system can and is facilitated by political upheavals and the introduction of new technology like the Internet and Satellite television to some extent (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 255). Conventional political science wisdom holds that as capitalism is dependent upon a fairly unregulated economy, and the free flow of goods, currency, and ideas surrounding those goods in the form of advertising, a carefully regulated press and an unregulated marketplace are anathema. But this does not mean that the Chinese government will adopt a non-censored public marketplace of ideas.

This idea might be seen as an extension of sociological frame theory, which holds that ideologies associated with one another through political alliances often blend together, depending on how they are framed by advocates. For example, fundamentalist Protestantism and Catholicism have historically existed in a state of often violent animosity in most political arenas. In America the two ideologies have become fused in common opposition to abortion and the so-called secular forces of feminism. Frame theories of communication examine how ideas are framed, or conceived by activists and sold to the public. One might argue that by framing capitalism in terms of choice and the free market, a transition to a more open society seems inevitable (Oliver & Johnson, 2000: 38-39).

But advocates of frames as malleable mental structures also imply that because frames are the ways that human beings make sense of otherwise formless experience, and the ways that ideology is packaged to the masses, there is no one, singular inevitable frame for viewing capitalism. In China, "following the world of the Cold War, as new countries developed, scholars questioned the normative nature of the Four Theories of an ideological orientation through authoritarian, Communist, libertarian and social responsibility models" alone (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 258). China seems to be adopting a different path, as the state still reserves the right to intervene and limit the media's functions, by means of legal censorship, subsidies and direct media control. (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 258). Although the Chinese press has certainly changed and the "previous totalitarian definition of the media as an instrument of class struggle was officially dropped" the introduction of market forces was not framed as freedom, but a way of economic revitalization, as orchestrated by the benevolent Chinese authorities (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 259).

True, with greater media commercialization, the media, Party and government organs did become business entities, "similar to a western capitalist system with advertising, subscription dependence and capital investment (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 260). But while the Chinese media has become decentralized in terms of who disseminates the information, official censorship still remains. While the press is no longer a mouthpiece for Marxism and Maoism, "China's uniqueness," such as the longstanding respect for Confucianism and hierarchy "has been largely ignored," by scholars who argue that capitalism inevitably and invariably sows the seed of freedom (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 266). Such scholars are blinded by the Western frame of capitalism as unfettered choice.

In fact, "China's political system remains basically intact and persists while the economic system has been changed" (Winfield & Peng, 2005: 266).The introduction of reform for the good of the Chinese people has not been framed by the authorities, nor is it framed in the minds of most of the population, as the ability to disagree with the government. Thus "freedom of the media is more a lessening of Party control than any media liberalization in the Western sense" where the media operates independently of the ideas and interests of the state rulers (Winfield & Peng, 267). The locus of dissemination of propaganda has shifted to private rather than governmental entities, but the actual messages disseminated by such entities are not free.

Pamela E. Oliver and Frank Johnson have criticized frame theory for being insufficiently attentive to the impact of ideology in influencing frame narratives, thus they might see the framing of capitalism through the Chinese lens of ideology as distinct from an unregulated and uncensored press as a concrete demonstration of their problems with frame theory. Contrary to the ideals of advocates of globalization, who see the apparently unregulated medium of television and the Internet as a way of breaking down power hierarchies, China remains regulated in its expression, if not in its expansion of commerce (Curtain 2005: 156-157) Michael Curtain counters: "the 'ambiguous gift of capitalist modernity' is not offered at the level of individual choice nor is it spread out buffet-style for societies to select among the elements that they might wish to incorporate into their own context," and cites the example of Satellite television as evidence (Curtain 2005: 158). But even while Curtain argues that Satellite brought freer expression to Chinese elections, it ironically benefited from state regulations, such as mandating Mandarin on all channels (Curtain 2005: 168). In short, even while consuming through this new and Western-generated medium, the weight of state influence was felt, particularly by native Chinese who did not speak Mandarin as their first dialect. Another, more recent example of how state control still exists, might be China's attempts to control the freedom of users to search with Google.