China's State-Run Tabloids

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese Communist Party's major provincial organs have established a large number of highly commercialized and urban-reader oriented daily newspapers, which are widely regarded as an `individual' press category called `city newspapers'. As an important press phenomenon that significantly reflects some recent changes in Chinese print media, the rise of city newspapers has attracted little attention in western communication scholarship so far. After a general description of the historical development of city newspapers, this article further examines their characteristics and impact on the Chinese press. The article argues that though market-oriented city newspapers are not independent operations but additional offerings of Party organs and therefore have little to do with the concept of press freedom, their emergence and rapid development significantly illustrate that the heyday of propaganda-oriented Party and government organs in China is apparently over, even though they still formally remain the authoritative voice of the ruling power. It is also argued that the growing success of city newspapers, while financially contributing to their parent Party organs, has brought challenges to them as well.