Hassid, Jonathan
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Publication Review of: The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media and Authoritarian Rule in China, by Ya-Wen Lei. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. vii+284 pp. US$39.50/£32.95 (cloth).(The University of chicago Press, 2019-01) Hassid, Jonathan; Political ScienceYa-Wen Lei’s The Contentious Public Sphere: Law, Media & Authoritarian Rule in China is an nice synthesis which ties together many current strands of research on the Chinese media, the internet and legal system into a single, readable volume based on both qualitative interviews and quantitative content analysis. Lei thankfully does not simply develop a snapshot in time, but delves into the technological, media and market changes which have rocked the Chinese media sector since the 1990s (and even earlier).Publication Why Chinese print journalists embrace the Internet(Sage Journals, 2016) Hassid, Jonathan; Repnikova, Maria; Political ScienceWestern media studies have largely presented the relationship between new and traditional media as adversarial, often claiming that the Internet challenges the survival of traditional journalism. Focusing on China, this article re-evaluates this relationship in a non-Western context. Relying on extensive interviews with Chinese journalists, we argue that the relationship between China’s print and Internet media is symbiotic. Although it does challenge traditional business models, the Internet also helps journalists improve their commercial competitiveness and presents new channels for resisting censorship and expanding the boundaries of permissible reporting.Publication Review of: The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China, edited by Jacques deLisle, Avery Goldstein, and Guobin Yang. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. vi+284 pp. US$49.95/£32.50 (paper).(University of Chicago Press, 2017) Hassid, Jonathan; Political ScienceIn just a decade, media research has gone from a sleepy backwater to the forefront of China studies. This burgeoning popularity stems in part from the flexibility of the topic area. Scholars can use the media as a lens through which to examine other aspects of Chinese society and politics. Unfortunately this blossoming of interest has also brought a proliferation of studies that rehash old ground. Not so the new volume edited by DeLisle, Goldstein and Yang. A series of lucid, well-written chapters cover a wide range of media-centric topics with refreshing originality and lively content. As an edited book it covers a lot of ground, but all the chapters present a real contribution to media studies.Publication Censorship, the Media, and the Market in China(Springer Nature, 2020-03-16) Hassid, Jonathan; Political SciencePervasive media censorship in China is often seen as a strictly political issue. Although in past years reporters have had leeway to report on economic issues, the Chinese Party/state has moved to tamp down economic journalism, even arresting those who report on bad economic news. This shift brings to the fore an issue long ignored by social scientists – economic censorship. Economic censorship takes place when state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or large private companies pressure the state to censor negative reports or directly pay off media companies to quash such reports in favor of more positive ones. Such economic censorship distorts markets and shifts investor money away from new market entrants and towards large, well-resourced and well-connected SOEs. Using a database of Chinese newspaper articles from 2004 to 2006 and a separate database of newspaper articles, blog posts and micro-blog posts from 2010, and supplemented by secondary sources, this paper examines how media coverage is distorted by censorship and corruption to the benefit of China’s entrenched interests. In particular, I find that private and provincially owned companies receive much more press coverage than do their central government (SASAC) owned equivalents, controlling for a number of factors.Publication China's Responsiveness to Internet Opinion: A Double-Edged Sword(Sage Journals, 2015-06-01) Hassid, Jonathan; Political ScienceDespite its authoritarian bent, the Chinese government quickly and actively moves to respond to public pressure over misdeeds revealed and discussed on the internet. Netizens have reacted with dismay to news about natural and man-made disasters, official corruption, abuse of the legal system and other prominent issues. Yet in spite of the sensitivity of such topics and the persistence of China's censorship apparatus, Beijing usually acts to quickly address these problems rather than sweeping them under the rug. This paper discusses the implications of China's responsiveness to online opinion. While the advantages of a responsive government are clear, there are also potential dangers lurking in Beijing's quickness to be swayed by online mass opinion. First, online opinion makers are demographically skewed toward the relative “winners” in China's economic reforms, a process that creates short-term stability but potentially ensures that in the long run the concerns of less fortunate citizens are ignored. And, second, the increasing power of internet commentary risks warping the slow, fitful – but genuine – progress that China has made in recent years toward reforming its political and legal systems.Publication Review of: Engaging Social Media in China, edited by Guobin Yang and Wei Wang. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021. 352 pp. US$49.95 (paper), US$49.95 (e-book).(The University of Chicago Press, 2023-07) Hassid, Jonathan; Political ScienceRecognizing that too much of the literature on digital politics in China leans on the “state vs. society” lens, the editors of this interesting volume set out to concentrate work on the technical side of China’s internet. With the goal in mind of seeing how technical issues line up with politics, the book provides a nuanced analysis of recent state-sponsored “platformization” – the consolidation of the mainstream Chinese internet to a handful of powerful apps. The contributors to the volume explore the links between politics, commerce, and technology in an often insightful way, though the chapters vary in quality.Publication Stability Maintenance and Chinese Media: Beyond Political Communication?(Sage Journals, 2015-06-01) Hassid, Jonathan; Sun, Wanning; Political ScienceFor political scientists, Chinese media practices and communication systems provide an enduring prism through which to understand how Chinese politics work. By contrast, for media and communication scholars, politics is one of the main domains in which various media and communication forms, practices and policies can be fruitfully explored. While political scientists and media scholars share this common interest, they tend to pursue different research agendas, adopt different methods of data-gathering and analysis, and at times seem to speak a different language. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that political scientists and media scholars may even have different understandings of what constitutes valid empirical data or worthy lines of inquiry and which theoretical models and paradigms are fashionable or out of date. Because of this divide, the two groups of scholars unearth different findings and reach different conclusions. This leads to the curious situation in which scholars of the same field – but in different disciplines – talk past each other, or worse still, look upon each other's work with deep suspicion.Publication Doing good or doing nothing? Celebrity, media and philanthropy in China(Taylor and Francis, 2015-01-15) Hassid, Jonathan; Jeffreys, Elaine; Political ScienceBased on a statistical analysis of 91 celebrity-endorsed charities in the People’s Republic of China, this paper challenges the popular assumption that celebrity involvement with not-for-profit organisations attracts extensive media coverage. Although China is the largest media market in the world, previous studies of celebrity philanthropy have been conducted almost exclusively in a Western context. Such studies argue passionately for and against the role that celebrities can play in attracting attention to humanitarian causes, focusing on the activities of Western celebrities, corporations and consumers as essential or problematic promoters and providers of aid to people in developing countries. We show that – in China, at least – most of this debate is overblown. Rather than arguing in favour of or against celebrity philanthropy, we provide statistical results suggesting that celebrity endorsement has very little impact on press coverage of charities.