Construction of Media Public Sphere in Social Transformation: A Study of News Commentary Column in Southern Metropolis Daily

China in the past three decades has experienced a phenomenal economic growth and social structure adjustment. While the media were still far more heavily censored than in most democratic societies, the way was open for symbolic resistance and the expression of nonCommunist values. Pluralism in public discourse increased, even in the official sector. The difficulty in applying the pubic sphere ideal to China is that a post-revolutionary Party-state as China, after having eliminated the pre-revolution Chinese bourgeois public sphere and made a claim to represent a variety of counter-bourgeois publics-farmers, workers, ethnic groups–is simultaneously re-engendering a capitalist class and claiming to represent this class. Moreover, this occurs in the era of accelerated globalization, with all its domestic and international ramifications. Some scholars, like Zhao Yuezhi, argued that the role of the journalists in China must be understood within the doubly-articulated imperatives of struggling against a repressive state on the one hand and containing popular threats from below on the other. It that the real situation in China? Southern Metropolis Daily is a marketized newspaper located in Guangdong Province of China, whose news editorials and also commentaries rank high among all marketized Chinese newspapers. I use this case to analyze how the media, especially the one that targets at the urban population, contributes to the construction of the emerging public sphere in transitional China. My sample includes editorials and commentaries from Southern Metropolis Daily during a three year period, from Mar. 2003 to Mar. 2006. To examine the content of the commentaries, two techniques were used: a traditional analysis of the subject covered by the editorial and column pages, and an analysis of frames. This paper also draws on in-depth interviews with key personnel at the news commentary department in Southern Metropolis Daily as well as several prestigious column writers in China. The result suggests that, on the one hand, new frames and media discursive packages are used by writers to extend the fringes of discursive legality. On the other hand, by further clearly cut the line between the public sphere and private sphere, it evokes readers’ reflection on the definition of “publicness”. Moreover, an issue that has been discussed a lot in the commentary pages is the tension between public power and public interest. The study finds out that it is true that, the news media may speak for the marginal group of Chinese society and use their life stories to expose systemic social problems. However, journalists are situated within the reconstituted middle-class social strata and are dedicated to the needs of the “new rich” in urban and coastal areas. Their criticism on the social injustice is based on a bourgeois belief system and when they are referring to “we”, tens of millions of Chinese workers and farmers are excluded.