ABSTRACT
Rupert Murdoch, the global media tycoon, was famous for the claim that the development of satellite TV would bring any authoritarian regimes to an end. However, in a speech given to the Communist Party School in 2003, he adjusted his tone: ‘the potential of the open market doesn’t represent any loss of power … China has the potential not only to follow the examples of the US and the UK but to improve upon those examples and achieve a level of success all its own’ (quoted in Zhao 2008: 137). Indeed, reviewing the media development of China—since the economic reform of the 1980s, then entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and the now flourishing cyberspace—the relationship between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government and the media, public opinion, and society is changing. Yet the thesis of Mughan and Gunther (2000) that mass media would bring authoritarianism to collapse is still not supported by events in China. With decades of reform, the evolution of the Chinese media has meant a move away from the socialist Party-state’s propaganda structure to a commercialized media structure, with inevitable tensions between the authoritarian state and the market. The media environment is liberalizing, but it is still not free; simultaneously, the PRC regime has still not come to an end, but is obviously transforming.
