(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
developmentalism in China. The communist party understands its own self-
contradictions when it talks like a communist to keep political legitimacy but acts like
a capitalist to gain economic power. Its call for building a harmonious society is an
attempt to neutralize the contradictions and conflicts and to address power challenges
from both the right and left sides of the society (Hong 2010). When compromise has
to be made, the less costly strategy is to side with neoliberals and sacrifice the
interests of the working class quietly. This is the hidden logic of pulling the television
drama off air at Beijing TV and stopping any rerun of the show at Shanghai TV
despite high audience rate and popular demand. After all, business interest of the
broadcaster and its business partners needs to be protected (as in the Beijing case).
More importantly, the political imperative to maintain social stability eventually
triumphs over any open discussion of the contradictions in China’s neoliberal urban
development (as in the Shanghai case). The following passage by Yuezhi Zhao is
useful to summarize the above discussion in a nutshell:
In short, political control, the inherent biases of a market-driven media system,
the limits of journalistic professionalism, and changed dynamics of
intersection between domestic- and international-media political economy and
culture have prevented both domestic and transnational media from serving as
effective vehicles of popular expression and communication across different
social groups in post-1989 China. … The urban middle class may dislike the
party and harbor more liberal views, but its members are allying themselves
with the pro-market faction of the party in marginalizing the voices of both the
radical Left and Right, while mediating the voices of other social groups in the
name of building a strong and powerful China (Zhao 2005, 74-75).
As discussed earlier, neoliberalism is not only a type of economic policy but also a
type of governmentality, a cultural structure, a set of particular attitudes toward
individual responsibility, entrepreneurship and self-improvement. In China, the
neoliberal governance and attitude toward individuals are established through a set of
discourses, including that of suzhi —roughly translated as “quality” in English. From
birth control policy to education rhetoric, from the tradition of cultivating embodied
qualities to contemporary eagerness for survival in a competitive society, the suzhi
discourse is pervasive in Chinese society. It reifies hierarchical/class differences, as
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