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This authoritative study explores China's rapidly evolving polity, economy, and society through the prism of its communication system. Yuezhi Zhao offers a multifaceted, interdisciplinary analysis of communication in China and its central role in the struggle for control during the country's rise to global power. The industry in all its forms--ranging from the news media to entertainment outlets to the Internet--has been a critical battleground among different social forces in this period of wrenching change. The author explores alterations in the structure and content of Chinese communication in light of the rapid evolution of state-society relations to reveal the profoundly contradictory, conflicted, and uncertain nature of China's ongoing transformation.

Party journalism in China : theory and practice -- The trajectory of media reform -- Media commercialization with Chinese characteristics -- Corruption : the journalism of decadence -- Broadcasting reform amidst commercialization -- Newspapers for the market -- Toward a propagandist/commercial model of journalism? -- Challenges and responses -- Media reform beyond commercialization

International audience ; Boosted by a Chinese translation of Manufacturing Consent in 2011, "manufacturing consent" and "propaganda model" have become fairly well-known terms in the Chinese communication studies field. Actual understandings and invocations of these ideas, however, are complex and multifaceted. Graduate students tend to have a superficial understanding of these ideas without a grasp of Herman and Chomsky"s broader critique of the political economy of global communication. State propaganda officials and communication strategists tend to accept these concepts for their demystification of the US media system on the one hand, and use Manufacturing Consent as a "how to" guide to enhance the effectiveness of Chinese official communication on the other. While there are also examples of more substantive expositions of Herman and Chomsky"s ideas on their own terms, a strong liberal perspective continues to take the US media as a normative model for China and ignore works such as Manufacturing Consent. As China expands its global reach, how Chinese scholars come to terms with Western critical communication scholarship and develop their own indigenous critique of the political economy of global communication has emerged as an issue of both theoretical and practical importance.

At a time when the academic spotlight focuses on "China's rising" in the metaphorical "global village," this article draws attention to China's real villages. It sets the context for a research agenda foregrounding the relevance of an urban–rural relationship perspective for a political economy of communication that has systematically prioritized the labor–capital relationship in the development of global capitalism. Starting with a personal biographical account and a reexamination of the place of the rural in scholarship on communication, modernization, and global capitalism, the article proceeds to foreground urban–rural relations in understanding the historical trajectory of China's engagement with global capitalism and the role of communication and culture within such a trajectory. It then focuses on Heyang as a digitally networked, globalized, and globalizing Chinese village and introduces Global to Village: Grounding Communication Research in Rural China as both a transnational research project and a pedagogical praxis in global citizenship.

From Tahrir Square to Wall Street, from Athens to Montreal, dreams of emancipation are mobilizing a new wave of revolts all over the world. Simultaneously the forces of repression are being unleashed everywhere to impose "new mechanisms of social control" with the aim of establishing "new conditions for achieving surplus value" in the aftermath of a protracted capitalist economic crisis. Some anticipated a Chinese popular uprising following the Arab Spring. Instead, since spring 2012 the world has seen a sensational drama of elite struggle surrounding the ousting of the Chongqing head of the Chinese Communist Party and Politburo member Bo Xilai, including a crackdown on his Chongqing Model of development. Whether the ousting of Bo represents "the last milestone in the Chinese path of negating socialism" remains to be seen. Adapted from the source document.

Zhao reviews LEAVING CHINA: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination by Wanning Sun.

The realm of communication & culture provide a crucial vantage point for examining current global power relations, not only as soft power through ideological & cultural persuasion, but also because the communication & culture industries are important sectors of the global economy. Currently, the author argues that China is less of an imperial rival to the US, than a regional power that is being integrated into the "informal American Empire." Using Panitch & Gindin's conception of the informal American Empire, a brief historical narrative traces Sino/US relations from the television coverage of the Nixon visit through China's recent mimicking of CNN format & style. The accelerated reorganization of the Chinese communication & culture industry in the context of domestic political authoritarianism & global integration is analyzed in the film & magazine industry. The expansion of the Chinese media as a component of the penetration of China and transnational media industry is concluded to have made the politics of the Chinese internal class system less relevant. The author concludes that China's inability to meet the cultural needs of a fractured Chinese society appears even more self-evident as political economic, cultural, & ecological contradictions of the country's global integration deepen. References. J. Harwell

Zhao reviews INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: New Dimensions of Government and Citizen Interaction, and Human Security in Mainland China, and the Taiwan Experience edited by Robert Bedeski and Helen Lansdowne.