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Paper short abstract:

This ethnography finds that newsmakers in China's ostensibly state-controlled press system are increasingly guided by radically interpersonal and contingent, rather than collective or rule-based, ethics; and uses this case to reconsider the ethics of news-making in today's 'post-political' world.

Paper long abstract:

Although China is commonly understood to have a highly 'state-controlled press', this ethnographic study of news-making in Beijing and Guangzhou finds that forces and logics of "the state" are not a predominant feature of journalists' and editors' everyday work practices. Rather, government officials, Communist Party policies and propaganda directives intermingle and coevolve with advertising clients, business opportunities and changing reportorial fashions. Newsmakers do not obey a fixed set of state-issued news standards, or orient their coverage around a coherent range of state-formulated truth claims; but negotiate with, manipulate and strategically appropriate government and Party agents and resources, to suit the contingent situations they find themselves in, just as they do all their other business rivals and collaborators. Rather than frame this, as many 'China-watchers' have, as evidence of the unprincipled opportunism and systemic corruption which is resulting from the post-Mao Party's attempt to replace Mao's revolutionary socialism with a form of Communist state-capitalism, I explore such practices as sites of what many news-makers themselves call an emergent jianghu ethic. A term drawn from Chinese martial arts literature, dating back to the 13th century, jianghu entails what Petrus Liu has described as a form of "stateless" subjectivity - a mode of sociality in which the norms and obligations that individuals feel bound by are radically relational, rather than rule-based; and interpersonal, rather than system-governed. I show how this offers an interesting perspective from which to reconsider the ethics and politics of news-making in a broader 'post-political' contemporary world.