Monitoring the media's pulse
For all of China's technological advances, no genius has yet been able to present Communist Party leaders with a giant multimedia remote control they could use from the sanctuary of Zhongnanhai.
Such a device must surely be on their wish list. How convenient to be able to zap embarrassing news stories at the press of a button, tone some right down or add hues of red to others. Another button might automatically lift the moral tone of soaps and reality television shows, while still another would redirect those surfing the internet for porn to sites detailing the glorious liberation of the motherland.
With the technology still lacking, however, more mundane efforts are being made to force much of the media world to march to the beat of a modern interpretation of The East is Red. Meanwhile, the media is making full use of its room to manoeuvre, often taking a feisty approach that is dictated more by market forces than political ideology.
The media landscape is bamboozling. While reruns of Qing dynasty melodramas and People's Liberation Army veteran singalongs still hold prime-time slots, they now struggle against local remakes of Friends, Sex and the City and The Apprentice. The recent chart-topper was the Super Girl contest, a local variety of American Idol, which was insanely popular. More than 400 million people reportedly watched 21-year-old Li Yuchun take the title after she clocked up about 3.5 million phone votes.
Personally, I thought the PLA veterans sounded better, so what fed this particular hype monster? Could it be, as some sociologists here say, that young mainlanders got hooked on the democratic experiment of phone voting, and the buzz of empowerment that it brought?
Foreign ownership and influence is back under the magnifying glass, too, with a spate of new regulations putting a stop to the gallop of several multinational media firms. Often operating in legal grey zones, they have nudged into areas of content and control that angers some officials. Purists see hip television presenters and music video hosts as cultural pariahs intent on destroying the national heritage.
In the proliferating press world, newspapers and magazines are also walking a thin line - attempting to grab readers while not alienating ultra-sensitive officials. Crossing the line is costly: the mainland jails more journalists than any other country in the world, and a host of other measures are also used to shackle the press.
A list of topics that journalists are not allowed to touch is regularly circulated by the Publicity Department, a large stick in the spokes of the freewheeling press. Journalists are not told where that dreaded line is, though, so the natural tendency is to err on caution's side. But all is not bleak - many cadres are increasingly supportive of the press, feeling that good watchdog reporting curbs corruption and abuse of power.
The mainland's youth turn to the internet for most of what they want to know. And despite tens of thousands of cyber-police, sophisticated blocking software and officials who go 'underground' to shift online debates in favour of the authorities, a lot of real information still manages to percolate through. It is here that the urban youth meet to analyse current affairs, critique popular culture or hook up with a new flame.
All across the mainland's media landscape lie zany, unpredictable elements that reflect a society in a state of flux and a people learning to assert and express themselves. To help follow this rapid evolution, this new weekly column will spotlight mass media developments and trends in popular culture - which can illuminate parts of the path that lies ahead for the mainland.
Peter Goff is a Beijing-based journalist
