"Big City, Small Place:" Clientelism and Media in Shanghai

This paper commences by asking why the media in Shanghai lag behind their peers in Beijing and Guangzhou in terms of political courage. Several explanations have been furnished. We hold the cultural “traits” of Shanghai people to be too reductive and too general. Market abundance may be important to understanding the media’s complacency, but is still inadequate to account for political factors. In sum, we must explain the political economy of the media in relation to a particular cultural milieu. The most crucial explanation appears to lie in the patron-client relationship in the practices of authoritarian corporatism. Based on field interviews, we conclude that Shanghai is a big city but a small place: a resource-rich city that only has one layer of power authorities, and hence the distance from the epicenter of power to various media organizations is very short, making media control through a patron-client system very effective and powerful. We have examined this patron-client relationship from the perspectives of media conglomeration, elite circulation, resource allocation, and (lack of) media professionalism.