After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and ‘Thought Work’ in Reformed China

This book argues that a combination of property rights reform, administrative fragmentation, and technological advance has caused the post-Mao Chinese state to lose a significant degree of control over thought work, or the management of propagandistic communications flowing into and through Chinese society. The East Asian economic meltdown of the late 1990 s has reinforced the conviction, derived from Communism s nearly worldwide collapse a decade earlier, that the only path to sustained prosperity combines an openness to trade and investment with market economies that are minimally impinged upon by state intervention. But, the author argues, the situations in China demonstrates that the political, social, and cultural costs of reform and opening are high.