Open Collections

Xia, Huizhong

University of British Columbia

Drawing on newspaper archives and personal memoirs, this thesis examines the paradigm shift in Chinese journalism from American-style professionalism to a Soviet-inspired, state-oriented model before the Second Sino-Japanese war. It focuses on two early advocates of the new model, Yuan Shu (袁殊) and Zhang Youyu (张友渔). Current research mostly focuses on the state, either Communist or Nationalist, depriving professions such as journalism of its autonomy via top-down violence. This study, by contrast, argues that journalists themsleves voluntarily embraced deprofessionalization in defending against the Japanese colonizers. Concerns with the nation-state’s best interests, Yuan and Zhang repudiated the commericial-professional model. Instead, taking after the Marxist-Leninist class theory, they redefined journalism from a profession to a solution––specifically, a weapon––to tackle the imminent national crisis. This new paradigm gained higher currency among professionals in the late 1930s, and was institutionalized in the 1942 Yan’an Rectification Movement by the Chinese Communist Party. This research moves beyond a tradition-centered approach that overemphasizes the influence of local tradition, and argues for the significance of anti-colonial warfare in molding Chinese modernity through the 1930s journalism paradigm shift. Instead of portraying propaganda as merely authoritarian governance tactics, it understands the Chinese media experience as part of the nation’s legacies of anti-colonial revolution. It demonstrates how weak national-self against mighty invaders warfare profoundly reshaped the self-perception and journalistic practices of Chinese journalism. In the end, this research highlights the broader significance of the Chinese experience by putting this Chinese history into conversation with experiences from post-colonial societies to explore how other types of journalistic norms could offer an escape out of Western-centric assumptions in media.

Text

2024-08-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88997

History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/