China’s media control system has come under the spotlight due to an incident in which journalists were prevented from reporting at the site of a gas explosion near Beijing. The All-China Journalists Association called out local government authorities for obstructing media activities. This comes amid President Xi Jinping’s increasing centralisation of power, which has seen the media’s role as both a tool for maintaining social stability and as the central government’s primary information source expand. But local officials often suppress negative news to maintain the appearance of order, creating tensions between press freedom and censorship.
On 13 March 2024, local authorities in eastern China attempted to physically prevent Chinese journalists from reporting on a gas explosion in a restaurant in Sanhe, near Beijing. Harassment is vexedly frequent for China’s journalists, but the aftermath of this incident was unusual.
Within hours, the normally tight-lipped All-China Journalists Association had issued a rare public statement that local governments ‘must not obstruct the normal duties of reporters in a simple and rough manner just to control public opinion’.
It may appear surprising that official participants in one of the world’s most tightly controlled media environments would dare to publicly demand more media freedom from the government. But once the basic contradiction built into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s media control system is understood, all mystery disappears.
The timing of the Association’s plea for media freedom comes amid Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ever-greater concentration of power at the expense of many state actors — including local governments.
At the heart of China’s media landscape lies a system of control and censorship orchestrated by the party-state. It has existed for decades, but since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has dramatically expanded his own power and authority at the expense of other political actors. The media control apparatus is intended to serve the dual purposes of upholding social stability and filtering information upward to a central Chinese leadership perpetually starved of accurate information. President Xi has concentrated on aligning media commentary with the party line.
Maintaining stability (‘weiwen’) is often touted as the most important of the goals by Chinese leadership. The CCP views public opinion as a river to be thoughtfully guided by the careful engineering of the small and secretive Central Publicity Department and its local equivalents. As long as the current of public opinion runs in an orderly and predictable way, all is well in the eyes of Party officials. But when disaster strikes and public opinion strays into the realm of unwanted negativity and criticism, the CCP moves with increasing firmness to channel discourse back towards official narratives.
At the local level, incentives for suppressing inconveniently negative events are even more pronounced — these leaders’ promotion depends, in large part, on maintaining order, or at least appearing to do so.
Yet while insisting that the public’s access to information be tightly controlled, the state makes use of the same information sources to help govern the country. One result is that China’s central government, though of undeniable power and authority, is perpetually starved of accurate information.
Above the village level, elections are non-existent and local powerholders suppress negative news. The authorities tasked with monitoring others are themselves potentially untrustworthy, internet access is tightly controlled and even citizens who use the officially-sanctioned political petition system (xinfang zhidu) are routinely ignored or even punished.
The problems arising from this sclerotic information flow are further exacerbated by the tiny size of China’s central bureaucracy. As of 2007, an exceptionally small core of only 50,000 central bureaucrats managed over 32 million public employees in a decentralised system.
This tiny central government depends in large part on provincial and local media uncovering problems of policy implementation, corruption and malfeasance. Reports of unrest can be devastating to a promising career in the Chinese civil service, and when ‘stability maintenance’ is prized above all else, accurate reporting about local problems tends to disappear.
From the perspective of an ambitious local official, only good news is permissible. While the central government remains starved of comprehensive information, local authorities wield significant power over news dissemination within their jurisdictions. China’s decentralised system exacerbates the challenges inherent in attempting to control the media, as local governments prioritise stability over transparency, often suppressing negative news to maintain a facade of order. This contradiction is at the heart of the perpetual conflicts between the Chinese press and government.
As Xi’s drive to amass greater power lumbers relentlessly onwards, this tension will only increase. And because Xi’s style of governance tends towards mass campaigns, forced study sessions, and moral exhortations, there is likely to be an accompanying increase in public central government pressure against press-shy local authorities.
Whenever something goes wrong in a distant town, there will be cross-cutting pressures as local media attempt to report, local government attempts to suppress and central authorities attempt to discern the truth. While the contradiction between press freedom and censorship persists, incidents such as that in Sanhe will likely recur, reflecting the inherent tensions within China’s authoritarian governance model.