Have the tables turned between censorship and freedom?
Li Datong knows how it feels to be a staunch voice of dissent in the mainland's treacherous yet slowly progressing media climate.
The 56-year-old veteran journalist and editor, who began working as a reporter in 1979 for the China Youth Daily, has seen his career interrupted twice as a result of the Communist Party's consistent campaign to choke freedom of expression in public.
His first open clash with the authorities came during the 1989 Tiananmen protests and ground his career to a five-year halt. The second time came in 2006 when he lost his editorial job and was sidelined to a think-tank at China Youth Daily for repeatedly breaching Communist Party propaganda discipline.
Official power over the media has become stronger yet weaker, he said.
'On the surface, the authorities' power [to control the media] has been reinforced to an unprecedented extent but, on the ground, the system has become very fragile,' Li said.
Day-to-day operations of the mainland media is still governed by top-down orders from the party's Publicity Department.
Appeals for a proper media law to regulate and facilitate the work of newspapers and broadcasters first surfaced in the mid-1980s. There are reports that the National People's Congress drafted legislation in 1988 but the bill has never been put forward.
'It's partly because they know they can't put their oppressive thinking on the table, inscribing it into a piece of legislation,' Li said.
But as media outlets became more competitive and tested the limits of publication and broadcast, meaningful public debate about the issue emerged.
The Chinese constitution enshrines its citizens' freedom of expression but the absence of legislation means the principle has never been realised.
'I think that behind the two-decade failure to roll out the media law is a persistent standoff between rival political opinions and the Communist Party about media issues,' a Shanghai journalism professor said.
'To an extent, its absence might be good news for press freedom in China since the proposed media law could have been used as a tool to suffocate opinion and truth.'
The emergence of websites has mounted new challenges to the Communists' already loosening grip on the media. Citizen journalism fed into the conventional media and fostered broader expression of public opinion.
'In the most recent efforts by the authorities to purge perceived rebellious media outlets, officialdom failed to go as far as they used to be able to,' Li said. 'In most cases, it was a tie [between censorship and freedom].'
Baptist University media professor Huang Yu said patience and perseverance were needed.
'After all, the tables have turned,' Professor Huang said. '[Thirty years ago] they were using the media efficiently to shape people's thinking. Today they are desperately defending their bottom line of maintaining authority. That's progress.'
