China

As one of the world's oldest civilizations, China has a long, rich history in the use of media to communicate, including the inventions of paper and printing. China was the birthplace of an early version of the newspaper, as government news sheets, known as tipao, were disseminated among Han Dynasty court officials in the second and third centuries A.D. and later printed during the Tang Dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries.

But popular journalism in the form of the modern newspaper, which circulates news to a broader mass audience, came relatively late to China, compared to Europe and elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, European missionaries and other foreigners imported the modern newspaper to several major Chinese cities, where notable examples such as the British-owned Shen-bao in Shanghai flourished. This foreign involvement reflected the influence of outsiders on journalism developments in China, a pattern that would repeat itself during the twentieth century. This was especially evident between the two world wars in the tumultuous post–Qing Dynasty period of the 1920s and 1930s, with the advent of more independent commercial newspapers and the founding of journalism schools. After 1949, China adopted the Soviet-style propaganda model of journalism.

Regardless of these occasional external influences, China has often retreated from engagement with the outside world and has consistently maintained a dominant role over its own print media and later electronic media. This approach was seen not only as key to political stability but also as morally superior. As China scholar Stephen MacKinnon noted, an elite consensus in China going back to the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) has maintained that the written and printed word needed to serve the interests of the Confucian state as a means to instruct and uplift society; it has only been recently that the Chinese term for propaganda, xuanchuan, became known in a more pejorative way.

And the state has taken strong and pervasive measures to ensure that control. In the Qing Dynasty of the eighteenth century, for example, persons who spread rumors or produced unofficial newspapers risked beheading. In more modern times, China earned a reputation as the world's leader in imprisoning journalists. Nonetheless, the [Page 288]country's economic reforms of the late twentieth century spurred a media transformation that in turn demonstrated the crucial role of media in China's national development and society's transformation that continues into the twenty-first century.