Chinese media on the relations between government and media Essay

Chinese media on the relations between government and media - Essay Example To start with, the story of Chinese media commercialization started in 1978 and formally broke the previous subsidized propaganda epoch for local media (Zhao 1998, p. 52). However, the real situation with economic reform did not change media dramatically and government saved its authoritarian mechanism of ruling national news making. Thus, current tension in the relations between Chinese government and society have a long-term story (Spence 2013, p. 700). In fact, Shirk (2011) supports this idea by providing evidence that CCP occupied all the media (including periodic, television, radio and later the Internet) within the country after 1979 (p. 1). Precisely, the fact that right after the reform (in 1979) there still existed 69 totally controlled by the government newspapers signalizes of rather remained propaganda than new type of journalism in the country. Even though certain magazines experienced commercialization in 1980s, they originated from â€Å"politically safe† areas, like fashion and computers . In practice, this tendency results in cases of silence on potentially scandalous stories about Communist Party members, as it happened with Li Zhen. In other words, the early period of commercialization concerned only the sphere of advertising as â€Å"the new lifeblood†. Thus, it is relevant to state that media reform happened without radical change of relations between the government and Chinese society. In this situation, further commercialization did not change the previous control of CCP over social diversity.