After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and "Thought Work" in Reformed China.

Kinkley, Jeffrey C. ; Colwill, Elizabeth

After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and "Thought Work" in Reformed China, by Daniel C. Lynch. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1999. xiii, 327 pp. $45.00 U. S.

How far toward "post-socialism" has China really gone? Will telecommunications advances doom the present authoritarianism? Daniel C. Lynch's authoritative and well-researched book takes the often well-hidden pulse of structural change in China's new and old media and communications, throwing light on the bigger questions.

It is illuminating to compare this book, whose coverage climaxes around 1995-96, with Perry Link's The Uses of Literature (Princeton, 2000), the standard sociology of early and mid-1980s Chinese book and magazine printing and distribution. Both works are methodologically sophisticated and based on extensive interviewing in China and analysis of published sources. Lynch updates Link on the print media, telling how ISBNs are sold to private publishers and distributors, the role of paid advertising disguised as journalism, and so forth, but the big story now is television, with its handsome advertising revenues; radio, financially strapped but subsidized; cinema; and telecommunications. Lynch indicates that from 1989 to 1996, long-distance telephone calls per capita increased fifteen-fold and fax messages went from 240,000 to 5.6 million. "More than 80 per cent of Chinese households owned a television set in 1996, up from nearly none in 1978." Foreign firms sold TV commercials directly to out-of-control local stations. The latter were not above selling the same air time twice, so foreign suppliers hired Hong Kong-based monitoring firms to roam China and see if the ads were really broadcast.

Lynch's most abstract conclusions are circumspect and mostly negative: despite all the change and uncontrolled communication, China is not necessarily headed toward having a "liberal public sphere" or "civil society." Segments of society newly given voice and power by the media are striving chaotically for their own interests. The result is not a "liberal" but a "praetorian" society (Samuel Huntington's concept, duly cited). The new messages sent are not political (media messages tend toward tawdry entertainment), and even when they impinge on policy, they do not lead to the formation of new institutions.

This is not particularly startling. Might tawdriness even be distracting us from residual political effects, as it may be the Chinese authorities? After the Propaganda State deliberately excludes analysis of the content of China's new communications -- unlike Link and analyses of propaganda like Ben Xu's Disenchanted Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 1999) and Geremie Barme's In the Red (Columbia University Press, 1999). Lynch's focus is on central and local state institutions, their formal and covert relations with each other and with private and foreign firms, and their degrees of market (formerly, population) penetration. Procedures, deals, and bureaucratic rivalries are covered in illuminating detail, with state versus society as the major paradigm, and within the state, local versus central and ministry versus ministry. Little is said about the Communist Party's role in guiding the state, about which segments of"society" have newly gained a voice, or how they have changed as listeners as well as originators of messages. Lynch is, however, forced to discuss policy in his penultimate chapter, on an "omnidirectional crackdown" that began in 1993, outlawing unauthorized private TV satellite dishes, ISBN sales, "paid news," etcetera. Of course, many of those measures stalled. Again, Lynch expertly outlines the structural causes, not the policy ones. He does look at levels of political dissidence in, for instance, call-in shows.

The book's biggest contribution, apart from the wealth of data it serves up (much of which was purposely hidden by those who were profiting and flouting regulations), are not answers to the most abstract questions about where China is headed, but a purposeful complication of our understanding of all the social processes now diminishing Chinese authoritarianism. After the Propaganda State argues that administrative fragmentation, property-rights reform, and technological advance are three independent variables lessening central control of propaganda, information, and communication. New technologies enabling thousand-fold increases in messages would not have led to today's cacophony but for the simultaneous devolution of administrative power and the conferring of new rights on local broadcasters, network builders, printers, and distributors to retain profits so as to be able to earn their own keep and buy off supervising levels. How the three variables have interacted is demonstrated in case after case. Distinctions between commercialization, globalization (defined as reception of messages originating outside of China), and pluralization in the new media cacophony are also outlined. The bulk of the book is a demonstration of those three tendencies, each in its own chapter, with each chapter treating different media. To get "the full story" on any one medium (there are so many now) -- including shifts in its finances, autonomy, even which ministry it belongs to -- requires the reader to connect up passages from several chapters. It is refreshing to see "thought" and communication taken seriously as engines of social change. Yet, actually proving their importance is not a topic the author has taken up.

Technology now changes so swiftly that no book can capture it any more. China's Internet use took off after Lynch's research in China was completed. But here we judge the book's value for history and historians. After the Propaganda State will remain a rare and valuable snapshot of a society in transition, framed by nuanced explanations of the many ways in which authoritarianism can be eroded.

Jeffrey C. Kinkley

St. John's University, New York