Book Review: Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, by Daniela Stockmann

Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China. Daniela Stockmann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 334 pp. $85.50 hbk. $44.95 Kindle.In the past half century, most scholars have abandoned the belief that media alone can bring political change to authoritarian societies. Stockmann examines China's commercial newspapers and argues that they actually help the Communist regime to stay in power. In their search for readers and advertising, these daily newspapers may empha- size crime, sex, and scandal, she says, but they help stabilize the regime. They provide more space for official messages to the public and allow the government to direct the media with less coercive-and less expensive-controls. Stockmann credits the govern- ment's "authoritarian resilience" for keeping all the new "deregulated" media in check.Stockmann's research is impressive. She interviewed forty-six Chinese journalists and reviewed at least sixty Chinese publications (she is fluent in Mandarin). Her 288 pages of text are full of data with impressive statistical analyses, and there are five appendices on research methods plus tables that did not fit into her twelve chapters. Overall, the book would be rewarding but very challenging to a seminar of final semester PhD students. A political scientist at Leiden University in The Netherlands, Stockmann demonstrates command of multiple research methods in what was basi- cally her PhD dissertation at the University of Michigan.The author's concentration on newspapers could raise questions since many Chinese primarily and even exclusively use the Internet and social media for gathering information as well as for communicating with each other. Stockmann argues that daily newspapers are very important in China where 80% of city residents read them. Also, since Internet sites are officially forbidden to develop their own stories, they rely on newspapers for their own news reports. She does admit that in their search for advertising revenue, the commercial newspapers tend to ignore people in rural areas where radio and television are the chief sources of news. Stockmann does not ignore the Internet but mentions it only briefly when discussing particular cases.Stockmann has a great deal of data here, perhaps too much, and her conclusions are cautious. She signals this in early warnings that she only hopes the book "expands discussion" and adds a "dynamic element to the discussion." She accepts that the large number of newspapers in China-1,943 licensed in 2009, down from 2,322 just before the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests-do provide much more information to the Chinese public. But she says this actually gives the regime greater space for its official view of the world. There is always pressure on editors to delve into scandals that might bring more readers and more advertising, but the editors know the limits. They concentrate on local scandals and get to the national level only when Beijing signals that it is acceptable to do so. In effect, there is a lot of self-censorship by jour- nalists and editors who want to keep their positions. …