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ContentsAcknowledgments vii Preface ix chapter 1. Introduction 1 chapter 2. A Contested Medium 28 chapter 3. From Propaganda to Publicness 46 chapter 4. An Ethic of Efficacy 70 for. Rather than treating the news in any contemporary context as an extension of the political and ideological systems that are associated with it, it is necessary to ask how the news' truth-claims are being shaped by the culturally particular ideas and sensibilities that orient its producers, distributors, and consumers to their worlds. At a time of intensifying geopolitical tensions, the hope of this book is thus to contribute to more thoughtful and nuanced ways of engaging with news both in China and beyond. chapter 1 the curreNcy of truth of you because they think that you're out to make trouble for them. And news readers don't trust you, because they think that you only say what the leaders want you to. Why should readers trust you, really? They know that you write news for your own sake and not out of concern for them. This is your rice bowl, after all. You may not be happy about the leaders' demands, but you're still going to write as you're told to because you cannot afford not to.The close involvement of Party officials and the top-down control that Zheng Wen's comments allude to are well-known features of the news media in China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) large and powerful Publicity Department (xuanchuanbu) 3 systematically stipulates what the country's newspapers can and cannot report. This arrangement dates back to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, when the newly established CCP government, with its charismatic chairman Mao Zedong at its helm, brought the nation's printing presses under its control and designated them the political and ideological mouthpiece, or "throat and tongue of the Party." While China's post-Mao marketization policies later broadened the range of topics that newspapers were permitted to cover and created more room for newsmakers to circumvent and even "push back" (Hassid 2016; Repnikova 2017) against the Party's press restrictions, the conditions that journalists work under today remain highly restrictive. Although there are now a large number of entirely market-oriented non-Party newspapers, all news outlets are to some degree still governed by "the Party principle," which demands that they accept the Party's guiding ideology as their own; publicize the Party's programs, policies, and directives; and abide by the Party's organizational principles and press commands (Y. Zhao 1998, 19). Compared to his predecessors, China's current president, Xi Jinping, has enforced this principle with renewed vigor. He has emphasized that the media should serve as "propaganda fronts" of the Party (Associated Press 2016); created new administrative offices whose mandate is to tighten the censorshi...