This dissertation, examining Chinese media, has been pursued in a British institution. The potential in this arrangement is that research and analysis of the Chinese case, including the development of a theory to examine the relationship between the Chinese media, State, Communist Party, and public, can be informed by an examination of 'Western' theory. I begin my analysis with a survey of Western media theories. Then I offer an overview of the history, theories and practices of the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese journalism, describing the general structure and characteristics of the media under Party domination. I discuss the suppression of emerging media democratisation in 1989 and the subsequent turn to the market, both in media theory and practice, focusing on the Chinese media after China's entry into WTO and the growth of media organizations into business conglomerations. Through detailed case studies of media reform and commercialisation in newspapers and televisions, I try to investigate the tensions and some of the resolutions of these, resulting from Party control and market forces in the emerging commercialised media sector. Case studies, such as Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in China in 2002, will be examined to evaluate how journalism worked in the supposed 'new era' of state/party and media.

As a result of the economic reform which took place three decades ago, imported American family entertainment had gradually become an important part of the everyday entertainment for Chinese consumers. During the same period, a particular group of Chinese people, generally referred to as the post-80s or the only child generation, had emerged, grown up and become the main contributors to China’s media consumption. In this thesis, a study of the only child generation and the American family entertainment will be presented. The study sees the only child generation as groups of audience exposed to American family entertainment as the media, and the focus of this study is to understand the audience-media relationship between the two. As they are two objects emerged within their own social and cultural boundaries, the thesis will first tackle how the connection between the audience and the media was established. Then, the only child generation will be approached as a social creation. Findings on their social sophistications that are able to influence their relationship to media will be presented. Four case studies form the reset of the thesis. Each of the case studies will focus on one significant aspect of the generation’s social characteristics and how it is connected to the group’s receptions to media texts.

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This dissertation presents an account and analysis of published mainland Chinese media coverage surrounding three major events of public protest during the Hu-Wen era (2003-2013). The research makes a qualitative analysis of printed material drawn from a range of news outlets, differentiated by their specific political and commercial affiliations. The goal of the research is to better understand the role of mainstream media in social conflict resolution, a hitherto under-studied area, and to identify gradations within the ostensibly monolithic mainland Chinese media on issues of political sensitivity. China’s modern media formation displays certain characteristics of Anglophone media at its hyper-commercialised, populist core. However, the Chinese state retains an explicit, though often ambiguous, remit to engage with news production. Because of this, Chinese newspapers are often assumed to be one-dimensional propaganda ‘tools’ and, accordingly, easily dismissed from analyses of public protest. This research finds that, in an area where political actors have rescinded their monopoly on communicative power, a result of both policy decisions and the rise of Internet-based media platforms, established purveyors of news have acquired greater latitude to report on hitherto sensitive episodes of conflict but do so under the burden of having to correctly guide public opinion. The thesis examines the discursive resources that are deployed in this task, as well as reporting patterns which are suggestive of a new propaganda approach to handling social conflict within public media. Beside the explicitly political nature of coverage of protest events, the study sheds lights on gradations within China’s complex, hybrid media landscape both in terms of institutional purpose and qualitative performance.

The focus of this research is whether the Habermas’ ‘bourgeois public sphere’, which is characteristic of Western society, can be extended to China. My main contribution is to demonstrate that the concepts of ‘sentiment’ and ‘reason’ are central to any discussion of the public sphere in China. This is in sharp contrast to the West where rational discussion and the rule of law are the twin foundations of the classical discourse of the public sphere. China’s society is distinct from Western democracies the West in at least two fundamental ways. In the first place, the political system remains ‘communist’ with a single party controlling all of the media. As a result, the degree of freedom of thought and speech is extremely limited, and there is no obvious way in which the mass media can act directly as a forum for free and informed discussion of public policy. Secondly, whereas the rule of law is understood as a central element in Western democratic culture, it has a subordinate place in Chinese culture. These assumptions are examined through a study of the readership of the Popular Press and through text analysis. How the Popular Press engages with the general public, how the general public reads and judges media messages, and crucially whether the Popular Press could employ an indirect approach working to constitute an ‘imaginary’ public in China were the discoveries. In the end, this study concludes that while China’s cultural, political and economic system of control is the main factor leading to the restriction and dissent of the general public, a ‘reasoning’ popular public might, in time, be shaped through their reading of controversies in political and public affairs in the Popular Press.

This thesis discusses the interaction between media and power in China, and the influences ofthe interaction on the quality and role of journalism. The interaction is an outcome of the social process in which dissimilar values and disproportionate power compete for media discourse. The existing academic literature in the area of media-power relations over-emphasises the top-down influences of the Party-state and the market, and neglects the bottom-up counteracting force from journalists and newspaper organisations on the quality and role of journalism. Supported by the sociological theory of professionalism, this empirical work examines the cultural transformation of two newspaper organisations and the work of their journalists by using a micro approach. The arguments in this study are based on in-depth interviews with 71 journalists, participant observation during six-months of fieldwork, and textual analyses of news reports on social problems. This study has four major findings. Firstly, this study identifies a group of advocacy journalists that is emerging in China. Being different to journalists who practice Party journalism, this group of journalists wishes to tell the 'subjective truth' and they believe they can improve social development. Furthermore, their journalistic practices are coherent with professionalism. This genre of journalists is driven either by private impulse to achieve public recognition, or by a public motive of serving the public interest. Overcoming obstacles in the process of news reporting, they are practicing their beliefs. In their reports, journalists give voice to the underprivileged and no longer speak for the Party. Secondly, the coherence between advocacy journalists' practices and professionalism, however, is limited by conflicts of interest between newspaper organisations and journalists. Due to concerns about political safety, newspaper organisations limit the courageous practices of advocacy journalism. Journalists gain autonomy when the media organisation fulfils its interests. Journalists and newsrooms exploit a series of journalistic tactics to avoid touching political 'minefields' and to maximise the pursuit of private and public interests. Thirdly, the concern over political safety from the newsroom encounters the need to consider the requirements of other social forces on journalism. The intertwined power relations, and bottom-up factors, i.e. journalists' cognition and belief, the collective professionalism ofjournalists, newsroom culture, and local geo-culture plays an important role. They are either opposed to, or collaborate with, political and market intervention. The interest clash is reflected in the process of self-censorship. Finally, the value priorities of newspaper organisation and wmnmg power m power contests cause the newspaper to decide whether to seek refuge with the authority or to tactically serve the public interest. The former tends to practice Party journalism and help maintain existing social order, by speaking for the authority and the elite. By contrast, although also practicing self-censorship, the latter uses smarter tactics to make a win-win achievement of enjoying commercial revenues and of benefiting democracy and social development. A crevice is therefore created for diversified discourses that contribute to the reconfiguration of power structures and social development.

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China's media have undergone significant commercialisation since the introduction of the economic reforms initiated three decades ago. But how this process is unfolding is still not well discussed. Book publishing, the oldest media sector but the one least studied, has been in the forefront of media commercialisation and provides a useful vantage point for the investigation of this transformation. This thesis will examine the role of the party-state and the market during the commercialisation of state publishing, paying particular attention to the core processes of conglomeration and corporatisation and, since the party-state has also been decentralised, to the role of regional government. Drawing on original documentary research and primary data generated in an internship in a provincial publishing group, this thesis advances three main arguments. Firstly, that the process of commercialisation in publishing cannot be fully understood outside of the transformation of the wider economic and political context, especially the shift in the general organisation of industry and the evolution of party ideology. Secondly, that this process has been marked by persistent tensions and contradictions. And thirdly, that despite the ongoing commercialisation the publishing industry remains controlled predominantly by the party-state and is far from being a market-driven business. Decentralisation may have enabled local governments to gain strong control over the economics of local publishers, but the central party-state remains dominant on political issues.