racing Communication

9
EMBRACING
COMMUNICATION
China’s Post-2008 Economic
Restructuring and Labor
Yu Hong and Wei Wang

Since the information technology (IT) revolution in the 1970s, communication has
been the most active economic sector, spurring an outburst of novel products, com-
petitive businesses, and consumption fads. Digital networks have also made the world
a much smaller place, crisscrossed by the footprint of global capital. Although China is
a latecomer to this digitized capitalism, its communication industries have undergone
the most spectacular development. The country boasts the largest number of telephone,
internet, and television subscribers, hosts production capacities on a global scale for
all the major electronic products, and features a huge domestic market in the range
of a few million consumers. Amidst the 2008 economic recession, industry pundits,
mainstream economists, and policy makers around the world turned to communica-
tion for a growth comeback. Through a slew of national plans, including the Elec-
tronics and Information Industry Revitalization Plan, the Culture Industry Boosting
Plan, and the National Broadband Plan, Chinese leadership has likewise embarked on
a “communication-driven” path of economic restructuring to improve their economic
profile and to stimulate domestic demand.1
Accompanying this hype, however, are global movements fighting socioeconomic
injustice born of digital capitalism.2 From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement,
the legitimacy of the global capitalist system and its varied local configurations are
being contested. The Chinese party-state likewise went through a “thorny” top lead-
ership transition. In the face of political crises and social backlashes, the leadership
was pressed to revive progressive social and economic policy.3 This situation begs the
question of whether the touted “communication-driven mode of economic restructur-
ing” can blaze an alternative. This article underscores the contradictions of China’s
economic restructuring by bringing together communication and labor.
In what follows, we will trace the evolution of China’s information and communica-
tions technology (ICT) dominant export-processing regime. We then turn to telecom
and media operation, assessing their strategic importance in the endeavor of creating a
“commanding heights” economy. Unlike the foreign dominance of export production,

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these two are state-dominated sectors in China’s economic geography. Although show-
ered with hefty praise, they are equally crisis-ridden. We argue that in the ongoing
economic restructuring, the state’s embrace of communication in its developmental
scheme is bound to enhance the influence of communication labor and that labor is
one of the weakest links exposing the scheme’s contradictory character and threatening
to stall it.

The Evolution of China’s ICT-Dominant Export-Processing Regime

Labor has been a driving force of China’s robust economic growth in the past three
decades. Transformed by foreign direct investment into a global manufacturing pow-
erhouse, the country has deployed millions of peasant workers from its vast, stagnated
countryside to toil in industrial parks sprawling first in the Pearl River Delta and then
north into the central and interior provinces. Disenfranchised of social and political
rights, peasant workers face a capitalist labor regime where living wage, overtime com-
pensation, and basic job protections are generally absent, and, worse, stringent time
discipline, omnipresent surveillance, and machine domination have accelerated the
work pace, heightened the level of exploitation, and drained the human spirit.
Indeed, this labor regime has made China a top production hub for global ICT
industries—and ICT manufacturing is China’s largest export-processing business.4
Since the 1980s, the state has focused on attracting foreign industrial capital—as local
governments, at various levels, were given authority and incentive to develop their
local economies. Industrial parks and development zones mushroomed where local
authorities provided cheap land, modern infrastructures, friendly administrative proce-
dures, and generous fiscal incentives to outside investors. As a result, transnational cor-
porations and joint ventures, increasingly joined by private enterprises, formed a global
logistic network on the basis of China’s assembly and processing capacities. Compo-
nents are sourced from neighboring Asian countries and then processed and assembled
into final products for re-exportation to the Global North and the US in particular.
Disciplining the huge reservoir of peasant workers, however, has grown difficult. Col-
lective actions exploded in 2010. They were concentrated in the Pearl River Delta of
Guangdong, often taking place in foreign-invested enterprises, especially electronics
manufacturing enterprises. After the 2008 global economic crisis, worsening working
conditions ignited labor resistance. Heightened clashes reveal a changing working-class
disposition: unlike their older counterparts who rotated between agricultural and indus-
trial jobs, young peasants born after 1980 are de facto industrial workers with no farm-
ing experience. To win long-term rights, they are finding collective actions, instead of
frequent job changes, necessary.5 Observers warn that this outburst of collective actions
may spread across regions and further increase awareness of labor rights.6
Apart from labor struggles, the export-driven growth model had suffered from crises
of accumulation. By the late 1990s, shortage of domestic demand and oversupply of
production capacities had been acute. The outbreak of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis,
exacerbated by dropping disposable income for laid-off urban residents, threatened an
imminent slowdown. According to official statistics, 6 million people were out of job
in 1997, in addition to 12 million laid-off veteran workers.7 To avoid the fall, a series
of state actions took place, including the infamous measures to move service provisions
in housing, medical care, and education to the corporate realm as well as the creation
of the so-called Golden Weekend to promote mass consumption of leisure and tourism.

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The gist of all the reforms was to make the market a primary mechanism for distributing
resources required for livelihood, which would then transform urban citizens hitherto
entitled to welfare provisions into individualized consumers. The efforts to promote
domestic consumption only achieved limited results. For between 1995 and 2005, the
proportion of residential income in GDP had already dropped by 9.8 percent in contrast
with rising shares of corporate and governmental revenues.8
The Chinese leadership had noticed negative byproducts of the market reform,
especially the huge wastes of natural resources and duplicate construction of low-end
manufacturing capacities. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1995–2000) pledged to fix the
problems. Though, it was not the export-driven growth model that fell into doubt.
Rather, it was considered irreversible and, with respect to employment, even indispen-
sible for keeping job-seeking peasants and laid-off state workers employed. At this junc-
ture, China’s World Trade Organization accession in 2001 offered a convenient boost
to the export-processing model, as the deal brought in enormous transnational invest-
ment, further enhancing China in transnational production and global trade. With
the evasion of the economic slowdown, the plan for economic restructuring became
stillborn.
Into the 2000s, the state continued to build a “socialist labor market,” largely in favor
of corporate interests. The drafting of the new Labor Contract Law began in 2003.
Passing the law illustrated the high stakes transnational capital hold in maintaining
China as a cheap production site. During the procedure of soliciting public opinions,
the National People’s Congress received 65 percent of the comments directly from
ordinary employees. Nonetheless, transnational lobbying groups, including the Ameri-
can Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the European Union Chamber of Com-
merce, weighed in, opposing the new law for limiting “corporate autonomy” in labor
standards and even threatening a collective flee of foreign investors. The result was a
watered-down final version, which dropped the required consent of trade unions before
enterprises fired more than fifty people. It also eased the corporate burden of offering
contracts to long-serving workers.9
Transnational corporations are not the only force behind the export-processing
regime. Governments at various levels are buttressing this production system. On
the national level, export companies have considerable influence over the Ministry
of Commerce (MOC) through local chambers of commerce. When discussing mac-
roeconomic policies with central leadership, MOC officials often boast employment
contributions to justify friendly corporate measures.10 As the specter of jobless migrant
workers on a massive scale is the last thing the top leadership wants to see, employment
proves instrumental in defending the status quo.
Local governments are stakeholders as well. In 2009, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shang-
hai, Shandong, and Zhejiang made 87 percent of all China’s ICT exports. Guangdong
alone had a 42 percent share.11 It is, therefore, not surprising that provincial leaders
seriously consider the fortunes of exporters and advocate on their behalf. Between 2010
and 2013, pressed by labor disputes, these provinces allowed minimum wage to rise at
a faster pace than production output, reversing a long-standing pattern. However, to
keep their labor comparatively cheap, provinces watch their neighbors for reference.12
Nationwide, no province has a minimum wage close to 40 percent of average urban
residential income.13 Guangzhou, a leading city in the Pearl River Delta, raised its mini-
mum wage to the highest level nationwide, but, nonetheless, it is as low as 27 percent
of average urban residential income.14

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As these vested interests have continued to thwart substantive restructuring ini-

tiatives, the export-processing regime has remained intact and continued to grow in
the 2000s. Up to 2009, the bulk of ICT exports were processing trade—an astounding
80.9 percent. Solely foreign-owned enterprises were responsible for 66 percent of ICT
exports, followed by the 16 percent share of joint ventures.15 Nonetheless, around 2005,
progressive reforms made some headway outside of the export regime. Since 2004, the
National Bureau of Statistics has required the inclusion of long-stay migrants into the
category of resident populations when local governments calculate GDP per capita.
This rule forces local governments to acknowledge the enormous socioeconomic costs
of maintaining an export regime, which had been shouldered by peasant workers them-
selves. Major achievements also include the abolition of agricultural taxes in 2005,
which enabled rural income to inch up.16
The export-processing regime braked sharply in 2008. Although China was mildly
affected by the 2007 financial crisis, the ensuing economic slump caused a sudden loss
of purchasing orders from the Global North. The shrinking export markets, coupled
with rising land prices and labor costs at home, finally made the entrenched accumula-
tion structure moribund, hurting dominant stakeholders and, finally, pushing them to
seek a change. Guangdong Provincial Government, for example, has attempted to lure
labor-intensive enterprises out of the Pearl River Delta into the backward mountain-
ous areas. It is likely that negative publicity brought by the waves of worker suicides
at Foxconn in 2010 and the ensuing wage spikes were conductive to this drastic turn
of attitude. A top Guangdong provincial leader publically urged Foxconn, which had
more than 400 thousands employees in Shenzhen, to move its assembly operations to
other regions and even to other countries.17
China’s ties with global production are undergoing some adjustments but will remain
strong in the foreseeable future. It is unlikely for the country to give up on the gigantic
export market in any short term, despite its disproportionately small share of corpo-
rate profits. Policy talk about economic restructuring has indeed revived after 2008,
but competing for heavyweight companies abandoned by coastal provinces has proved
handy for those leaders serving interior provinces, whose governing experiences are
often based on the coastal model. Attracting big investors and attracting investments on
large scale, for example, became the motto for Henan Province. It offered generous
tax and land benefits to Foxconn, setting up a leadership group to facilitate corporate
requests. To become hosts, formerly labor-exporting provinces, including Henan, Sich-
uan, and Anhui, have been persuading their peasants to stay. By 2012, more Henan
and Sichuan peasants found non-agricultural jobs inside their provinces than outside.18
Given that the alliance between industrial investors and local governments is key to
suppressing labor cost,19 this mechanism seems unaltered except for its locality.

Telecoms and Commanding Heights Economy

The fallout of China’s growth model has been immense. The gigantic scale of
export-processing has made possible the galloping growth of upstream industries such
as steel, chemical, and ship-making. This mode of industrialization, however, did not
bring a commensurate employment expansion. While these industries contributed
nearly 46 percent of GDP by 2009, their employment share was at a low level of 28 per-
cent.20 Meanwhile, college graduates, shooting up from 1.06 million in 2000 to 6.3 mil-
lion in 2010, thronged the labor market.21 Available jobs, however, comprise mostly

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operator-level positions in manufacturing and service sectors characterized by low-tech

and low-pay conditions. In this context, telecom and internet services, as modern ser-
vice industries, are touted for two potential benefits: upgrading China’s economic pro-
file and creating better jobs.
Subservient to military and government needs prior to the market reform, telecom-
munications became an indispensible infrastructure in the 1980s for connecting China
with the global production system, and thus receiving preferable policy and priority
investment. In the 1990s, telecom operation, central to the US global economic domi-
nation, was among the first in the service sector that the US-China bilateral WTO
negotiation required undergo a sweeping liberalization reform. Thereafter, Chinese
telecom operators, as newly minted state-controlled, share-holding companies, engaged
in fierce competition with one another and scrambled to meet the performance expec-
tations of their shareholders.
Transnational financial capitals as minor shareholders and the Chinese state as the
majority shareholder make up a dual corporate governance structure. Public listing on
Hong Kong and New York stock markets, first and foremost, instigated telecom opera-
tors to institute market-oriented internal organizations. For initial market valuation
was based on an estimate of future profitability inferred from national telecom opera-
tors existing elsewhere in the world; the projection, although imagined, put palpable
pressure on Chinese telecom operators to emulate global market leaders.22 In 2003, the
State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council
was established to oversee large-scale state enterprises, including telecom operators.
With the objective of ensuring the value of invested capital, the state ownership agency
is aligned with the financial markets.
In contrast with the low-end character of export processing, the telecom sector is piv-
otal to creating an alternative commanding heights economy. For three decades, tele-
com operators have striven to follow the latest technological trends, modernizing the
national networks with fiber-optic cables and digital switches. Mobile communication
and broadband networks enabled by internet protocol technology are widely available
today. Corporate demand and conspicuous consumption was the initial driver. In recent
years, however, technology-driven network construction is becoming the goal itself. As
the growth momentum in the traditional voice market weakens, technology-enabled
new network capacities become a popular corporate solution to create new demand.
Recent global crazes, such as big data, cloud computing, and video-on-demand, all
hinge upon a ubiquitous, mobile, and broadband network.
During China’s economic restructuring, telecommunications is a lever to create a
“modern” production system. Network upgrading comes to dovetail with the industry
policy of cultivating domestic innovation capacities—when the state had deliberately
postponed the issuing of 3G mobile network operational licenses for ten years. In the
interim, the state orchestrated domestic equipment vendors to develop the Chinese
standard TD-SCDMA.23 In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the state instantly
issued 3G licenses to harness the financial clout of telecom operators in countering the
economic slowdown. TD-SCDMA was licensed to China Mobile, the dominant mar-
ket leader. In 2009, under competitive pressure, the three operators spent over 160 bil-
lion yuan on 3G networks, setting a world record by building 325,000 base stations in
one year. Foreign and domestic equipment suppliers, who always hustle to profit from
a new product cycle, saw this spending spree easing the brunt of the global recession.
Thanks to China Mobile’s market power and deep pockets, by 2014 TD-SCDMA had

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more than 200 million Chinese subscribers and rewarded its equipment vendors a large
market share.24 Although the extent to which this telecom-centric industry policy can
continue to increase Chinese innovation is debatable, its centrality in the state spon-
sorship of economic restructuring is beyond question.

A Disaster Zone of Informal Employment

However, what is less noticed is that Telecom’s capacity to support a commanding
heights economy hinges upon informal employment. For many years, the high-flying
profile of telecom operators and the meteoric rise of top executive salaries have fix-
ated media attention. General employment situations in this sector, however, have
missed out on public attention and are truly sobering, if not bleak. Back in the late
1990s, market mechanisms had transformed the internal organization of telecom opera-
tors, including employment practices. China Telecom, the colossus from the planning
economy, established a stock-market-oriented performance-appraisal system. To “travel
light,” China Telecom slashed its workforce from 600,000 in 1998 to 397,000 in 2001.25
China Telecom was not alone; to maximize labor productivity in their financial state-
ments, all telecom operators began hiring millions of temporary workers and, as a result,
became a major “flexible employment disaster zone” according to the All China Federa-
tion of Trade Unions.26
Despite informal status, temporary workers take up positions that are essential to
everyday business operations, including marketing, sales, logistics, customer service,
telephone installation, and network maintenance. Telecom operators are structured
along the administrative levels comprised of national, provincial, prefectural, county,
township, and village, and many more temporary workers are hired in lower-level units.
In a county branch, for example, nearly 75 percent of staff and workers hold infor-
mal employment. All combined, temporary workers likely exceed well over 50 per-
cent of the telecom workforce.27 China Telecom in Hunan Province, for example, has
17,000full-time employees, but this number obfuscates another approximately 10,000
temporary workers. The 2008 Labor Contract Law stipulates that workers on a job for
more than ten years are eligible for signing non-fixed-term labor contracts. To avoid
such obligation, some local branches deceived long-time temporary workers into sign-
ing contracts with labor-dispatching companies, thus causing protests and litigations.
Dispatch workers have suffered lower pay and been excluded from housing funds
and supplementary medical insurance only available to formal employees. They are
ineligible to join the workplace-based trade union either. It is estimated that telecom
operators have hired nearly one million dispatch workers. This systematic deployment
has, in recent years, caused low morale at the grassroots level, especially when head-to-
head competitions for subscription growth and large-scale technology-driven network
construction considerably increase the workloads of frontline workers. In view of stag-
nated wages, mounting capital spending, and rapidly replaced networks, one disgrun-
tled telecom employee wrote sarcastically in his micro-blog that network oversupply,
over-competition, and disillusioned dispatch workers are the root malaise.
Dispatch workers are not limited to the telecom sector but grow rampant in all ser-
vice sectors, many of which are state-dominated, including TV stations, railway sys-
tems, airline companies, finance, and banking. One consequence is mounting labor
disputes registered by white-collar workers.28 In 2013, the Ministry of Human Resources
and Social Security and the All China Federation of Trade Unions expected to enforce

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equal pay for dispatch workers, but this initiative received strong opposition from some
large-scale state enterprises. As a result, the equal pay mandate did not include benefits
and insurance but left this decision to corporate discretion.29
Apart from its traditional business, telecom operators also underpin a new informa-
tion economy and actually claim the lion’s share of the information service market,
approximately 78.9 percent in 2012.30 In addition to telecom operators, another 20,000
service providers that offer both telecom value-added and internet services exist,
mostly, in the coastal provinces. In Shanghai, internet information services overtake
traditional telecom services with respect to employment. If the takeoff of the Chinese
internet in the late 1990s was made possible by a group of technocratic elites, the
internet has become much more secularized in the following decade. Sustaining the
system are gray-collar software testers, call-center receptionists, short-message authors,
and in-game money-earning junkies.31 During the recession, the government promoted
cyber-entrepreneurship, encouraging job-seeking youth, whether in the city or in the
countryside, to open online stores. This further normalizes irregular employment,
and to what extent it may ameliorate economic injustice is unclear. As the genesis
of unemployment and partial employment lies in the structural characters of China’s
export-processing economy, it is no surprise that cyber-entrepreneurship, functioning as
a euphoric expression, arouses hope and gains popularity.

Media and Economic Injustice

In its heyday, the export-processing regime was celebrated for ramping up employment
by tapping into ostensibly unlimited overseas markets. The depressed wage for ordinary
workers and the ensuing deficiency of domestic consumption, however, prove lethal to
this growth model. What is ironic is that the Chinese state, held hostage to vested capi-
talistic interests and global structural forces, is inert. To deal with negative effects, it
spent unswerving efforts on dismantling the state-controlled sector to grow new indus-
tries, to increase market transactions, and, arguably, to stimulate domestic consump-
tion. The cultural sector—with media at its center—is a frontier of market expansion,
where pushing formerly state-budget-supported institutions into the market to achieve
corporate formation on the supply side and scales of economy on the consumer side is
gaining momentum.
Prior to the reform, state media had been the party’s mouthpiece, with its operation
underwritten by state budget and its staff hired as state rank and files. In the 1980s, the
reform in this realm proceeded in fits and starts when advertising replaced state budget
as the primary source of revenue. From the 1990s, the state permitted party organiza-
tions, including broadcasters and newspapers, to operate like enterprises. While still
maintaining their political and ownership affiliation with the party boss, party organiza-
tions ran a multitude of subsidiaries catering outright to commercial needs. Up to today,
national, provincial, and even municipal party organizations have transformed into the
flagships of media groups that oversee dozens of commercial enterprises.
The immense corporate demand for advertising outlets, the formation of a con-
sumer society out of urban middle-class professionals, and the state’s unabated need
for sustainable public influence have propelled media expansion. Media, following
manufacturing, tourism, and electronics and information, has risen to be the fourth
largest economic sector. In 2003, advertising expenditure on television and print media
amounted to 107.8 billion yuan. In 2013, it rose to 501.9 billion yuan, making China

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the second largest advertising market worldwide.32 Five coastal provinces, i.e., Beijing,
Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu, have claimed the bulk of market shares.
Real estate, health products, financial services, and telecommunications are among the
top advertising clients.
New hierarchical lines are defining the media landscape. In the newspaper market,
for example, evening, weekend, and metro newspapers provide information and enter-
tainment for urban residents. These mass appeal newspapers have become the cash cow
in most news groups. Meanwhile, the flagship party newspapers narrowly target the
policy-making community made up of officials, managers, and academia. During the
planning economy era, party newspapers had the obligation to speak to the “vast major-
ity of cadres and the masses.” In the 1990s, as the compulsory subscription network
crumbled, the loss of readership encouraged a deliberate editorial shift from addressing
the masses to only ruling elites.
There is no doubt that national and regional party organizations, and their mass
appeal subsidiaries, are reaping most of the economic benefits from the market reform.
They are seeking further expansion and consolidation. Advertising has been the main
source of revenue, but competition among proliferating media outlets, traditional and
new, has pressed dominant players to seek alternative revenue streams. Content sales
predicated on intellectual property rights are a vaunted new business model. In 2009,
Shanghai Media Group, a frontrunner in state media reform, reorganized itself into
Radio and Television Shanghai and Shanghai Media Group. While the former operates
broadcasting assets, including stations and channels, the latter, its corporate subsidiary,
runs non-news content production, selling to both the overseas and domestic markets.
The reform has produced losers. Those at the grassroots or the targeted “vulnerable
groups” are being stripped of material and discursive power. County-level party orga-
nizations, for example, have suffered inadequate advertising, dwindling state support,
declining subscription, and serious encroachment by national and regional competi-
tors. Prior to the market reform, they had deployed voluntary correspondents at the
grassroots level. As the reform set in, the income of journalists became dependent on
performance-based pay (we examine this in more detail in the next section). This has
caused rivalry between journalists and volunteers and, ultimately, led to the difficulty
for the latter to publish.33 Meanwhile, specialty media designated for peasants and peas-
ant workers show a tendency of “de-ruralization.”34 As paying jobs, agricultural tech-
nology, and markets for produce are mostly in the city, reporters in these media have
enough reason to pay more attention to urban issues, let alone the fact that this seems
to be the only way to survive commercial competition.35
Media have buttressed China’s economic growth model. Economic reporting, for
example, is meant to promote, rather than tarnish, market reform. “Vulnerable groups”
becomes the token term for workers and peasants, obfuscating the policy and structural
roots of the manifest disparities. On the issue of migrant workers, the ethos of ratio-
nal governance and individualistic humanism has set the tone for public discourse.
For instance, most stories in the People’s Daily take an official stance that provides
reassuring solutions to labor abuses;36 the majority of stories in Shanxi Farmers’ Daily
feature a neutral stance, with the rest split between positive reporting of entrepreneur-
ial peasants and negative reporting of low-quality migrants with little perseverance;37
finally, for the most part, Southern Metropolitan Daily, a well-known liberal newspa-
per, takes a humanistic approach, depicting migrant workers in equally positive and
negative lights.38 Regardless of the variation, the shared tendency of normalization and

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de-contextualization infused with social Darwinism does not help to explain the his-
torical connectivity between urban modernity and rural backwardness, thus reinforcing
the separate yet derogatory category of peasant workers.
In the current context of economic restructuring, the state’s encouragement of
domestic consumption affirms the important role of media in economic life. However, a
future consumer society hinges as much on advertising as on a large-scale redistribution
of resources and power in accordance with a social justice principle. How well prepared
are media and their journalists to facilitate such a restructuring? A look at journalistic
labor helps to illuminate prospects.

Journalistic Labor at Risk

Like the uneven media landscape, media professionals are spread out on a wide spec-
trum, with bureaucrats-turned-moguls and celebrity journalists on the one side and a
sprawling number of information workers on the other.39 If journalists were beneficiaries
of the reform in the 1990s that had given state media free rein to run commercials,
then in the 2000s, corporate reform would have already made inroads into media orga-
nizations, quantifying mental workloads, monetizing welfare services, and making jobs
precarious and payment contingent. Although a small number of cadres and veteran
journalists are enshrined as public employees despite the corporate reform, the growing
majority of media practitioners, including journalists, printers, and delivery persons,
are hired as contract labor. A number of surveys conducted in the 2000s confirm that
a majority of journalists do not have labor contracts.40 Even if they do, most are doing
piecework, and a low base-wage brings a set of uncompetitive employment benefits.
Indeed, commercial media have disproportionately expanded the low-paying rung of
journalists.41 However, the downward spiral doesn’t stop here: in view of the expansion
of college enrollment, especially the media and communications majors, producers are
prone to use free interns, threatening a race to the bottom.
As the costs of housing, education, and medical care rise on individual shoulders, it
is getting harder for journalists to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, prompting many to
decry their descending socioeconomic status. Nonetheless, the hierarchical division
between mental and manual labor is in no way closing. As the middle-class lifestyle
is to some extent defined by consumption, the capacity of white-collar professionals
to consume hinges upon the availability of cheap products and services provided by
blue-collar and grey-collar workers, including housekeeping nannies, motorcycle-riding
deliverymen, and massage parlor boys, just to name a few. With a status crisis in sight,
will journalists support progressive economic policy that may result in better wages for
workers but higher prices for consumers?
We argue that the journalistic community is, thus far, conservative regarding eco-
nomic justice. Though there is surely no shortage of heroic deeds—the struggle against
government censorship staged by Southern Weekly is a prominent example.42 Blatant
assaults from market tyranny, state authoritarianism, and the combination of the two
have indeed aroused sporadic resistance. However, this celebrated struggle advocates
an elitist version of press freedom infused with market liberalism.43 The recent scandal
at the 21st Century Business Herald, whereby journalists obtained millions by extor-
tion, not only exemplifies a common behavior of rent-seeking but also illuminates a
symbiotic—rather than a reflexive and critical—relationship between commercialized
media and Chinese-style capitalism.

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Online platforms have changed the media system to some extent, distracting adver-
tising revenues from traditional media and allowing users to generate content. Institu-
tional constraints seem to have weakened, as noted journalists start their own online
news syndicates.44 Despite the ostensible freedom, new media in no way break away
from corporate organization.45 Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Sina, and Sohu are the few
media conglomerates that dominate the Chinese cyberspace, let alone state media
poised to reclaim the turf. Viral posts are likely to be commercially sponsored. In con-
trast, information offered by marginalized social groups with little commercial value
is drowned out by dramatized infotainment and remains invisible to the public, as is
the case of labor NGOs’ micro-blog posts.46 Still, people have reasons to believe in
the potential of a technically improved communicative environment. As the Chinese
model of capitalism starts to encroach on the interests of a wider scope of social strata,
journalists, who were intellectuals in the past and are communication laborers today,
may find motives to tap into marginalized information enclaves.

Prospects
Since 2008, China has further embraced communication as part of the state’s agenda
for economic restructuring. Comprised of ICT manufacturing, telecoms, and media,
communication has spanned two distinct sectors in the country’s economic geography:
the export-processing economy driven by transnational capital and a parallel economy
“inside the system.”47 The former has rendered the country and its people vulnerable to
all the ruinous effects of an unruly global capitalism, from labor abuse to environmental
pollution. In the 2000s, however, the latter has given China a huge push for growth.
Since 2008, the state has enlisted the latter as a concrete and even primary platform
for economic restructuring. In light of the centrality of communication in the country’s
economic restructuring, we asked: do the Chinese state and its communication under-
pinnings have the will and demand for a change?
Although under the state’s direct supervision, telecom and media organizations have
paradoxically been entangled with global structural forces and enmeshed with domes-
tic class interests. Economic restructuring should entail a large-scale redistribution of
power and resources; however, the prevalent organization of communication, and its
bureaucratic capitalist nature, does not serve this purpose. This is not a fortress how-
ever. Top leadership, sitting on a resilient party-state system, has publically expressed
their determination to mitigate social ills for which they are both culpable and liable.
The public echoes this decision—as rising social protests can be read as both tacit and
overt support.
While communication is designated to strategic status, labor conditions are far more
sobering. Informal employment is driving communication development, let alone
export production. From the workplace to the habitus for social reproduction, com-
munication workers in a variety of occupations are facing similar predicaments with
common root causes. They can complete a “circuit of struggle,”48 with peasant workers
in the industrial complex initiating wildcat strikes, telecom workers providing com-
municative connectivity, and media workers drumming up public support. A populist
song called “My Chinese Dream” performed at the 2014 Spring Festival Gala leaves us
something to ponder: with sarcasm embedded in its down-to-earth lyrics, it bespeaks
ordinary people’s desire for common prosperity and social justice. The fact that this
socialist consciousness can find its way to China’s supreme media event and exist

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comfortably with the elitist vision of catching up with Western countries in the capi-
talist game illustrates a tacit resistance, a moral contract that the state still finds itself
bound to, and, ultimately, the inherent contradiction of China’s growth model and its
new communication-centric economic restructuring. If the China model, touted for
“leading the world by its innovative example,” is a subject for mocking,49 the formation
of conscious labor should be a reason for hope.

Notes
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