Sei Jeong Chin

This article explores how the Chinese socialist media censorship system was established and operated without losing legitimacy at the local level in 1950s Shanghai, and why media workers complied with the censorship in daily journalistic practice. Under the strong influence of the liberal model of media in the West that assumes the relations between the state and media as antagonistic and often reduces state-media relations to a struggle between the state repression and media compliance/resistan

This paper explores the reasons behind the relative success of the CCP’s direct control over the news media in the early 1950s. Despite its importance in understanding the rise of despotism during the Mao era, the nationalization of the newspapers has not been fully studied. Building upon the recent studies emphasizing the adaptive nature of the CCP, this study analyzes the ownership transformation of the Shanghai newspapers from the 1930s to the early 1950s by going beyond the 1949 divide. I ar

This paper examined the practice of collective newspaper reading in the Newspaper Reading Group organized by the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) in the early 1950s and analyzed the new pattern of political communication and more broadly political culture in the grass-roots level that the CCP intended to promote. The CCP organized the Newspapers Reading Group as a key institution mediating between party and people within the hierarchical context of political communication. Ten to fifteen people woul

This paper analyzes conflicts and tension between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the news media that was publicly exposed during the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 in China. By doing so, I would like to examine the implication of the conflicts in understanding the relations between the party and the news media during the 1950s. Previous studies on the Chinese media during Mao era assumed that the media functioned simply as a mouthpiece of the party, so few

This article investigates the workings of the anti-US propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the marginalization of dissent in the public realm of China during the Korean War. Through an examination of the actions and reactions of both propagandists and people at the grassroots, this study demonstrates that China's eruption of patriotism and anti-Americanism during the war was far from spontaneous or natural but rather resulted from the interplay between the CCP's propaganda activit

This article explores the intricate relationship among print capitalism, war, and the popularization of newspapers in 1930s China by analyzing the motivations for publishing the Libao 立报 and the reasons behind its success. Most of the print capitalists publishing major broadsheet newspapers in Shanghai in the early 1930s did not have a strong financial motivation to popularize such broadsheets especially because of the relatively small circulation of printed materials, the underdevelopment of co

This paper explores the effect of the thought reform in the Shanghai newspaper circle in 1952 on establishing the socialist media system in China. Building upon Fegn Xiaocai’s work on thought reform of the capitalists as political ritual for the regime legitimacy, this study analyzes how thought reform in the shanghai newspaper circle as political ritual contributed to regime legitimacy. Earlier works on thought reform during the Cold War focused on the effect of thought reform on the actual tra

This article explores the ways in which the Nationalist Party established dominance over the Shanghai courts in the foreign concession area to use them as weapons against political dissidents, and it analyzes the intricate relations among the Nationalist Party, local elites, and the Shanghai courts during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937). Building on recent studies that pay attention to the limited success of the Nationalist Party’s policy of putting the judiciary under Party control, this study d

This paper explores the practice of constructing public opinion in the context of state-building and accelerated commercialization in 1930s China. By analyzing the state-society relations displayed in the process of the formation of public opinion, I have shed new light on the state-society relation in the Nationalist government in the 1930s. I see the privately-owned commercial newspapers published in Shanghai as one of the most significant institutions constituting public realms in which the p

This study explores the critical role of the media as a check on the government in the Chinese socialist system by analyzing the process of implementing the criticism and self-criticism in the early 1950s. In 1950, the CCP enforced the policy of the criticism and self-criticism nationally in order to encourage people to publish their criticism against the party and party cadres in the newspapers and get the party and the party cadres to publish self-criticism in response to the criticism. Few st

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