Cornering the Market: State Strategies for Controlling China’s Commercial Media

Decentralization of state power over media ownership led to new challenges for state control of media content in the 1980s. Following the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy crisis after Tiananmen, party leaders in charge of China’s public media permitted greater freedom for news content deemed politically “safe,” while maintaining tight control over politically sensitive news content. In order to supplement coercive strategies, the state developed market incentives to encourage media to produce news that was politically acceptable and popular with consumers. To test the extent to which commercial media have complied with the state’s content priorities, this article considers evidence from a case study on news coverage of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an epidemic seen by the party as threatening to regime legitimacy. The SARS case study reveals that in the presence of tremendous market demand for information, state control of the news media was considerable but not absolute.