Parasitical media in post-socialist China: the financialisation of the Chinese digital news industry

Ye, Chenhao (2024) Parasitical media in post-socialist China: the financialisation of the Chinese digital news industry. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the financialisation of the Chinese digital news industry against the historical backdrop of China’s ongoing but contradictory integration into transnational financial capitalism. This study situates the complex process of media financialisation within the historical trajectory of profound post-socialist transformations and the capitalist re-orientation of the Chinese state. Theoretically, this project combines the critical political economy of communication with historical institutionalism to unpack the overdetermined nature of the dynamic state-capital nexus throughout the financialised restructuring of China’s digital news industry. Methodologically, this project adopts the historical materialist approach to documentary and policy analysis, in-depth interviews with frontline media professionals and relevant stakeholders, and an ethnographic study within a state-owned news organisation located in Shenzhen. Drawing on multiple data sources, empirical chapters of this thesis examine issues of changes in industrial structures, reconfigured manifestations of state power and changing regulatory arrangements, and the politics of financial propaganda in a post-socialist capitalist regime. The thesis starts with tracing the vicissitude of class politics inside the Chinese media system as the historical background of post-Mao media marketisation and clarifying the epistemological stance. After providing a historical overview, I explicate the theoretical framework and the rationale of methodological choices of this research. With the 2008 global financial crisis as the primary dividing line, the first two empirical chapters scrutinise two deeply intertwined facets of media financialisation: Unrelinquished state control of key moments within media financialisation and reinvented state control over media institutions through financialisation. On the one hand, the party-state has resorted to multiple financial means and diversified its policy tools to develop, govern, and remake state-owned news apparatuses through constant negotiations and complicity with both domestic financial capital and transnational financial networks. On the other hand, strategies of financialisation have reshaped the institutional assemblage of the party-state media system and enriched state capacities in manipulating both state-owned and non-state media corporations that operate both in line and contradictory with hegemonic norms of financial capitalism. After illustrating the structural media landscape, the third empirical chapter explores the politics and paradox of financial propaganda in the Chinese context and how state-owned news media reside parasitically over institutional logics of upward accountability, monopoly rent-seeking and the party’s leadership over finance. Through the lens of media financialisation, the thesis concludes with a discussion of the multifaceted connotations and implications of parasitical media in post-socialist China. Financialisation has not only consolidated the structural reliance of China’s digital news sector on the vast and ever-expanding party-state machine that continuously redefines boundaries of capitalist operations, but also intensified the political contradictions of the Chinese media system under the condition of transnational financial capitalism.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Chenhao Ye
Library of Congress subject classification:	D History General and Old World > DS Asia H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HG Finance J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Sets:	Departments > Media and Communications
Supervisor:	Meng, Bingchun and Gangadharan, Seeta Peña
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4802

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