Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China

Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China, by Anne-Marie Brady. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. xiv + 231 pp. US$75.00 (hardcover). In a year of unprecedented media coverage of China, Anne-Marie Brady has written a timely book about the Chinese media. She has done much to demystify an understudied topic by examining internal Party documents, conducting extensive interviews inside the propaganda system and providing a comprehensive literature review on political communication in China. Brady argues that, rather than leading to political liberalization, commercialization and conglomeration in the media industry have bolstered regime legitimacy by selling the merits of market reform, consumerism and a nationalist discourse that equates patriotism with support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Her work is thus an important corrective to scholarship by Daniel C. Lynch and Zhao Yuezhi, who have portrayed commercialization and media proliferation as weakening the Party's ability to guide public opinion. For Brady, Chinese media are principally Party mouthpieces, and watchdogs only for problems that are easily solved. In post-Mao China, the CCP reformed the propaganda system to adopt certain features of Western media. "In the years since 1989", Brady writes, "China has married old methodology such as using entertainment as a vehicle for political thought work, with new methodology and technology such as political PR and the Internet" (p. 87). Media reform reflected the CCP's desire to avoid the fate of Eastern European countries, where media supported democratization, and the Soviet Union, which fractured after Gorbachev encouraged media freedom under glasnost and perestroika. The book's most important contribution is to shed light on the institutions, laws and practices which trammel Chinese media. The Party's Central Propaganda Department appoints the heads of state bodies in charge of propaganda work, and determines who runs media conglomerates; Party cadres regularly instruct editors about media content to be highlighted or avoided; strict regulations control the tifa or political expressions for politically sensitive matters; senior Party cadres monitor all media content at central and provincial levels to ensure compliance. Prizes are given in recognition of the best works of propaganda, while journalists who test the limits of acceptable discourse risk punishment. Marketing Dictatorship attempts to "create a new theoretical paradigm to understand the nature of CCP rule in the contemporary era" (p. 6). Unfortunately, Brady's discussion of the paradigm does not come until the book's final pages, when she argues that the Party's use of propaganda to perpetuate its rule should be called "popular authoritarianism". This is a modest theoretical contribution to the literature on Chinese politics, in part because key aspects of the argument remain untested. True, China's rulers have persuaded "the population to accept the continuance of CCP rule". How much of this persuasion, however, should be attributed to propaganda and thought work as opposed to other factors, such as economic development, improvements in public security, pride in technological advancements, and China's rising prominence on the world stage? …