Alienation and Everyday Performance of Journalists in China: An Ethnographic Study at Paper X’s Police Beat

This study is designed to understand the media-journalist relations through journalists’ everyday performance. Recent years’ changes in Chinese social, political, economic and after all media environments have introduced a variety of values and ideas to journalistic role perceptions. New elements in journalistic perceptions bring tremendous uncertainties to not only media products but also this increasingly mediated society. Like most existing studies, this study recognizes the predominant role Chinese leadership plays over media structures. However, the reality of everyday news production is more complicated than political censorship and self-censorship. It involves organizations, institutions and agencies. Unlike those studies which overwhelmingly focused on the political dynamic of Chinese media, this study also recognizes the roles that individual journalists play in negotiation with these media structures. Lefebvre’s concept of alienation will be adopted in the paper to analyze everyday performance of journalists. However, given that the Chinese media context is different from capitalist society that Lefebvre critiqued in his theory, this paper also offers a malleable understanding of the concept of alienation. It argues that everyday performance of journalists involves constant negotiations of alienation and de-alienation from a variety of dimensions.