Rethinking the Chinese Popular: Commercial and Technological Change in the News Media after Mao

Studies of 'the popular' in post-Mao China tend to celebrate the category as representing the creativity and diversity of ordinary people, as against the controlling forces of a monolithic state. To offer a more critical view of the issue, this paper looks at how China's news media has been negatively affected by commercial and technological developments that make it more oriented to popular tastes. Through the everyday discourse and work practices of journalists and editors in Beijing and Guangzhou, I show firstly that commercialization has led news producers to focus on stories that are 'hot' or popular among consumers, regardless of their social import. Second, journalists' increasing use of Internet technologies to gather news draws a further distance between the news media and social reality. It makes news production a sensorially remote activity of information management, unrelated to journalists' experiences and opinions. Both commercialization of the media and the rise of the Internet in China have been seen as leading to political liberalization by creating new arenas for popular expression. This paper shows that the same changes also lead to a certain disarticulation between such expressions or representations and lived social reality. The political significance of this form of 'the popular' remains uncertain.