The People’s Republic of China, governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has arguably one of the most restrictive media systems in the world. The government censors all venues of media to maintain its monopoly on power and information while pushing ambitious economic modernization reforms.
The media system in China is very different, but not totally different from the systems in all other countries in the world.
The media system in China is a combination of different media philosophies and the result of the long history of Chinese civilization. In this system, the Chinese Communist Party, government, private enterprises, media professionals, public individuals and Chinese culture play different roles and provide different forces from
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Driving forces of the media system in China
There are at least six existing forces influencing Chinese media synchronously through different organisational or social channels, which could be designated the Party Force, Governmental Force, Capital Force, Professional Force, Individual Force and Cultural Force.
Party Force could be defined as the control and influence from the CPC, which is overall directed through the Central Propaganda Department.
Governmental Force is the power generated from the central government and embedded in organisations in and regulations from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, coming all the way through the mechanism of multiple layers of administrational bureaus under the central government, from the provincial, municipal or prefectural levels to the county level. When scholars examine the Party Force and Governmental Force together and observe their combined contribution to the media system in China, they tend to label it as the Party-State model or authoritarianism
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It devotes vast energy and resources to control information as a way to maintain social stability and assert political control. The Chinese government’s sophisticated instruments of censorship and control aim to prevent all potential sources of independent reporting. The comprehensive management consists of three main categories: legal, political, and economic.
Legal methods create an environment that is unfriendly to press freedom through restrictive laws and regulations, including the structure of official media regulatory