Reform and Challenge

Abstract

A survey of 30 of China's journalism and communication schools traces changes and continuity in the country's journalism education in the past three decades during which dramatic economic and sociopolitical reforms were implemented. Guided by the classic theories of the press and their more recent extensions, this study focuses on two major areas of observation and analysis: (1) journalism schools' internal structural adaptation to the changing social environment; and (2) facilitating forces and constraints imposed on journalism education reform stemming from a unique mixture of commercialization under authoritarian political control. The authors found increasingly intimate ties between pedagogical strategies and market demands. However, despite attempts to push the ideological limits towards more liberalized training, journalism schools continue to yield to political pressure for conformity to the orthodox party line.