Radio Guangdong and the Liberalisation of Chinese Media, 1978 to 1997

Laura Maynard University of Sussex [email protected]

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes deprive the ‘academic, intellectual and journalistic communities of their freedom and autonomy to produce significant knowledge’ and this tragic failure has created ‘a big knowledge vacuum’. Nowhere is this vacuum greater, I would argue, than in the field of China’s sound broadcasting, especially since radio was still the nation’s most popular mass medium right up until the early 1990s.

This paper reflects on the wealth of data which I collected on a recent field trip to Guangdong, my home town and China’s first ‘capitalist laboratory’. In one-to-one interviews with my former colleagues, some of the most senior and distinguished broadcasters of Radio Guangdong (RGD) shared with me their earliest memories of broadcasting under Mao, as well as details of how they joined RGD, and of their daily working practices during the era of liberalisation and marketisation. Their first-hand accounts have not only created a vivid picture of the broadcasting transformations which took place between the era of Mao (1949 – 1976) and that of Deng Xiaoping (1978 – 1997), but have cast doubt on some of the common perceptions of radio in China. In their remarks on propaganda, they also disclosed their ways of negotiating with the higher authorities on the one hand and of realising their journalistic ambitions on the other. In recounting their successes and frustrations they revealed their dilemmas when torn between their designated role as mouthpieces of the party-state, and the role they most desired – that of watchdog over public affairs.