Observers have been predicting the demise of China’s political system since Mao Zedong’s death over thirty years ago. The Chinese Communist state, however, seems to have become increasingly adept at responding to challenges ranging from leadership succession and popular unrest to administrative reorganization, legal institutionalization, and global economic integration. What political techniques and procedures have Chinese policymakers employed to manage the unsettling impact of the fastest sustained economic expansion in world history?

As the authors of these essays demonstrate, China’s political system allows for more diverse and flexible input than would be predicted from its formal structures. Many contemporary methods of governance have their roots in techniques of policy generation and implementation dating to the revolution and early PRC—techniques that emphasize continual experimentation. China’s long revolution had given rise to this guerrilla-style decisionmaking as a way of dealing creatively with pervasive uncertainty. Thus, even in a post-revolutionary PRC, the invisible hand of Chairman Mao—tamed, tweaked, and transformed—plays an important role in China’s adaptive governance.

How do market forces influence the media in China? How does the Party both introduce and try to contain the market's influence? How do commercial imperatives both accommodate and challenge Party control? 

Yuezhi Zhao interviewed a wide range of scholars, media administrators, and media professionals to answer these and other questions. Working in China in 1994 and 1995, she monitored media content, carried out extensive documentary research in Beijing, and held off-the-record meetings with Chinese media insiders. What she found informs an in-depth look at the intertwining nature of the Communist Party and the news media in China, how they affect each other, and what the future might hold for each. 

A rare on-the-ground portrait, Media, Market, and Democracy in China is must reading for scholars, media and business professionals, and policymakers who need to understand what happened to China and its mass media during a period of dynamic growth and change.