POPULAR NEWSPAPERS IN POST-MAO GUANGZHOU: TOWARD A SOCIAL HISTORY OF SOUTHERN WEEKEND, 1984-2010 BY WENRUI CHEN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor James Hay, Chair Professor John Nerone, Director of Research Professor Dan Schiller Professor Matthew Ehrlich ABSTRACT This project sets out to understand the Chinese press within a regional context during the post-Mao reform era. As an extension of the Party press, post-Mao popular newspapers grew from within the Party-state bureaucracies in response to the economic and social reform since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Foregrounded by the history of Southern Weekend [Nanfang Zhoumo], a news weekly based in Guangzhou yet with national influence especially since the late 1990s, the study aims to examine how popular newspapers have explored the forms and politics of their journalism under new historical conditions. For each period of development, the project worked to locate the key transformations of the Guangzhou press, and then characterized the journalistic paradigm of Southern Weekend in reference to the sources of change. It presents a journalism history of what I call the “Party-popular” expanding from cultural to social and political realms in the post-Mao Chinese society. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The project has been a long exploration since it was first conceived during my coursework at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. I thank, first and foremost, all the teachers who generously offered their intellectual nourishment and helped me locate myself from a literary background to the new territory of communication along the way. Among them, James Hay, John Nerone, and Poshek Fu deserve my deepest appreciation for their contributions. James Hay has remained a tolerant mentor as I freely explored and later moved toward journalism history. The dissertation carries with it my early contact and negotiation with the field of cultural studies James has laboriously introduced me to. John Nerone, the director of my research, has kept me on track during the process of dissertation writing with consistent efficiency and sensible comments regardless of his own retirement in 2012. As a deadline writer, I cannot imagine the completion of this project without his pleasant encouragement and timely intervention. I thank John for his selfless support throughout and especially at the final stage of the dissertation. I am also thankful to my committee member Dan Schiller, who included me in stimulating conversations whenever possible with no easy questions. Matthew Ehrlich joined the committee despite my late request and supported me with firm commitment and contribution. The project has also enjoyed tremendous support from a number of libraries in both the United States and China during my archival work. Among them are the main library at Urbana- Champaign, Harvard-Yenching Library, the Provincial Sun Yat-sen Library in Guangzhou, and Shanghai Library. I thank all librarians for their hearty professionalism as well as Jiadong Cai for answering to my remote scanning request. The Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign offered six years of assistantship, including three summer scholarships, to support my stay and study there. The experiences of teaching stand-alone courses on Chinese Media, International Communications, and Introduction to Media went beyond my expectation in fostering my intellectual development from an international graduate student to university teacher. My undergraduate students over the years, in particular, have been an ongoing source of meaningful labor and fulfillment. In class discussions and writings, they have kept alive and broadened many of the questions that interested me in research. My graduate cohort at Illinois, too, deserve my respect for opening my eyes to their own form of intellectual power and humanities. I have learnt from my exchange with Priscilla Tse, Shinjoung Yeo, Ian Davis, Steven Doran, Nina Li, Hong Shen, Jungmo Youn, and Andrew Kennis. ICR faculty members, especially Clifford Christians and Angharad Valdivia, had helped me intellectually and personally. My former MA advisors Xiaoming Ai and Sufeng Song have extended their intellectual support years after my graduation from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, recharging me with optimism as a woman scholar every time we met. As an only daughter of the post-Mao generation, I have enjoyed and probably exploited the support from a loving family. My parents Chen Guangzhou and Weng Guorong, and parents in law He Shengwei and Zhang Mulan have provided me and my husband with full financial support in the last two years of my writing without asking questions. Their unconditional love and stretched tolerance of our absence are beyond words. Wang Yuehua, my dearest grandma iii who had passed away three months before the project finished, had been an unfailing source of happiness and love… Finally, my husband Kunyang He worked the hardest to keep our everyday journey to the West oriented, healthy, and fun. He digitized half of more than 1,500 newspaper copies, and has been my primary reader and discussant. Though I also worked (as a lousy actress) in his film projects, I would never call it even. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS………………………………………………………………………………vi INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..………….1 PART I……………………………………………………………………………………………23 CHAPTER 1: MAPPING THE REVIVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPE: TABLOID JOURNALISM OF GUANGZHOU IN THE 1980S………………………………..24 CHAPTER 2: A SOCIALIST CITY IN TRANSITION: THE GUANGZHOU PRESS AND ITS HONG KONG CONNECTIONS……………………..59 PART II…………………………………………………………………………………………..99 CHAPTER 3: THE ROAD TO NEWS: SOUTHERN WEEKEND AND THE GUANGZHOU PRESS IN THE EARLY 1990S……….100 CHAPTER 4: THE RIGHT STORY: INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM OF SOUTHERN WEEKEND IN THE LATE 1990S…..…139 PART III…………………………………………………………………………………..…….180 CHAPTER 5: MAKING THE NEW MAINSTREAM PRESS………………………………..181 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..……………………..219 APPENDIX A…………………………………………………………………………………..234 APPENDIX B…………………………………………………………………………………..235 APPENDIX C…………………………………………………………………………………..237 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………..…..239 v ABBREVIATIONS SPPA (1987-2001) State Press and Publications Administration GAPP (2001-2013 General Administration of Press and Publication SARFT (1998-2013 Administration of Radio, Film and Television GAPPRFT (2013-) State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China * SPPA was renamed GAPP in 2001 and elevated as a state ministry. * GAPP merged with SARFT into a mega ministry GAPPRFT in March, 2013. The merger was driven by the need to reduce overlap of responsibilities between the two regulators and stream- line bureaucracy especially when, with the arrival of the Internet era, both tried to exert control over the various Internet-based new media. vi INTRODUCTION Perhaps no other newspaper in the post-Mao era attracted as much attention regarding press and politics in mainland China as Southern Weekend [nanfang zhoumo]. This provincial newspaper is often studied as a groundbreaking commercial newspaper, independent voice, and organ of professional journalism. Despite apparent limitations, the prevailing image in its popular and scholarly narrative is of courageous journalists seizing on an opening to produce the kind of investigative reportage admired in the West. In the conventional story, this opening closed, and the party-state reasserted control. The story I am about to tell is more nuanced. I situate Southern Weekend in the historical context of local competition, regional experimentation, and transborder cultural flows. Its story is not one of simple confrontation with the Party-state but of mediating between a Party-state bureaucracy on the one hand and a booming chaotic media marketplace on the other. I will tell a story not of heroic individual journalists (important as they have been) but of complex newsroom developments regarding practices, structures, and divisions of labor. This would be, as John Nerone kindly summarized for me, “less a story of a discrete journalistic sphere than of a geography of news practices embedded in a national popular culture.” This project is, in short, a social and cultural history of Southern Weekend. As such, it makes a contribution to journalism history that is often written from the inside out. The conventional approach normally highlights inventions initiated by great figures within the newsroom, and contains with it an evolutionary logic in journalism towards political independence (e.g. Park, 1923). In American journalism history, dissatisfaction with the progressive paradigm appeared in !1 the 1970s, and called for writing social and cultural histories of the press (Nerone, 1987: 383). Within these new styles, the evolutionary logic moves beyond the individualism of journalists and editors. The sources of journalistic development were explored not as the working out of a particular set of professional practices but embedded within specific socio-historical conditions. The answers to what drove journalism towards the hegemonic form of “objectivity,” for instance, vary greatly depending on one’s emphasis of the “social.” While many historians agreed upon the central role of mass market in driving