Shanghai television broadcasters: from state institution to mix-ownership enterprise

Shanghai in China has a prominent status because of its political and economic importance as well as its role in China's international integration. Shanghai's broadcasters, like other media in China, were traditionally owned by the State and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Since the early 2000s, amid the transformation of China’s national television policy and the subsequent relaxation of cross-regional operation, media organisation's ownership and rapidly internationalized of Chinese economy, Shanghai’s broadcasting media not only has gone through a significant structural, operational and institutional change, but also become a test zone for the further reform of the Chinese media. This papers studies the historical development of Shanghai's broadcasting media, i.e. the Shanghai Media Group (SMG) from the 1990s to 2015, aiming to illustrate the progress, strategies and principles of China's national broadcasting policy over the last two decades. It shows that the ‘three separations’ reform - separation of the institution and enterprise, separation of ownership and managerial authority, and separation of production and broadcasting - in Shanghai ultimately transferred the Shanghai Media Group from a state-owned institution to an independent state-owned enterprise with possible private investment and international expansion in the future. At the same time, the state-owned television channel and spectrum resources are relocated to under the direct supervision of the propaganda department of the Communist Party. The legal and capital links between the channels and programming productions no longer exist while the role of the Propaganda Department of the CCP moved from the background to the foreground. The paper argues that the change from institution to enterprise and from state-owned to mixed-ownership is partly about the autonomy of the broadcasting media and partly about capitalization of political power to personal welfare. The appearance of mixedowned and state-owned commercial media enterprises do not guarantee plurality of voices, given the control of broadcasting channels by the Party and self-interest-oriented media.Moreover, the development of China’s broadcasting policy and structure since the late 1990s was largely influenced and constrained by the country’s economic transformation and the political adjustment of the CCP. The nature of the broadcasting sector’s transformation has reflected the logic of the economic and political changes of the country. From this point of view, it is not surprising to see that the most significant changes have happened in the economic domain. The political and economic consequences of three-separation remains to be explored, but the implications for Chinese broadcasting system is significant.