Political Regimes and the Media in Asia (review)

In 2004, a workshop was held at Murdoch University that sought to link questions about the political role of media in Asia with notions of American imperialism. The rubric for the workshop included four key points: the first of which began with the words "Revisit questions about U.S. media imperialism"; and the second of which read: "Question the continued valorisation of the transnational, triumphalist, expansionist, liberationist dimensions of American media in the context of democratic movements in Asia". In the resulting volume, however, the first word of the workshop title has vanished. Empire is no more. The organizers appear to have discovered what seemed obvious to some from the start: the main obstacles preventing Asian media from functioning as consistent agents of progressive political change lie not in U.S.-inspired geo-political imperialist designs, but in local specificities and obdurate regional regimes. American media is at best a very marginal player in Asian political transformations.

The idea of Empire may have been a big red herring, but it had the advantage of giving some thematic coherence to the proposed workshop. What we now have is a volume resulting from a workshop with a lost theme, a collection of chapters that talk about media and politics in different ways, and on different levels. Despite Krishna Sen's best efforts in her short introduction, there is no great coherence to this set of papers. They fall, essentially, into two categories. Some simply update earlier reviews of the relationship between media and politics in various countries, typically focusing on developments post-2000. Others are mainly papers that clearly have their roots in larger projects, which have been adapted for inclusion in the volume. In general, the papers in the first category are of lower quality than those in the second; they demonstrate limited conceptual rigour, drawing mainly on English-language secondary or internet sources, and not containing much real research. Some of them, however, provide very useful overviews. By contrast, many of the papers in the second category are extremely well-researched — leaving some readers to wonder exactly how they found their way into the volume.

First, the update papers. Three papers in this category deal with Singapore and Malaysia, with some emphasis on new and internet media. In his chapter on order versus liberty in Singapore and Malaysia, Cherian George looks at news coverage of terrorism and security issues since 9/11. George's is the strongest of the three chapters, but he confines his discussions of "alternative media" to a small number of political websites. Given this narrow canvas, he struggles to advance the debate media much beyond the arguments he has previously made in his own work — not to mention those outlined in Garry Rodan's important 2004 book on transparency and authoritarian rule in the two countries. Zaharom Nain gives an overview of Malaysian media during the early Badawi period, in a tidy chapter which contains little new information. The weakest chapter in the book is surely the one by co-editor Terence Lee, who gives an unremarkable account of why the "new" post-2004 Singapore turns out not to differ much from the "old" Singapore. No surprises here. Other "update" chapters are Glen Lewis's nicely-argued but rather thin discussion of the amazing demise of Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra government in 2006; and Nancy Hudson-Rodd's heavily-referenced but rather pedestrian exploration of the repression of free speech in Myanmar.

Much more interesting are the research-based chapters. As a specialist on Southeast Asia, I confess that I read the three China contributions last — only to find that they were among the best bits of the book. The chapter on Shenzhen Press Group by Chin-Chuan Lee, Zhou He, and Yu Huang is a fabulous piece of fieldwork, drawing on dozens of interviews, participant observation research, and the study of various documents. The authors demonstrate very clearly how media conglomeration in China functions as a form of...