Understanding the political realities of the mass media in the post-communist context: Poland, Russia, China

Abstract

This article, which is based on a paper first delivered at XXIX Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação in Brasília in September 2006, offers an alternative to the dominant theory of transition, which was developed partly in relation to the Latin American experience, and in particular to that of Brasil. In its place, the article resumes the theory of elite continuity developed to explain changes in the central European postcommunist countries in the 1990s. The article tests whether this approach can (a) be extended in time to explain the political realities of the mass media after a decade of social change and (b) whether it can be extended in space to explain the political realities of the mass media in other societies in which the nature of transition has been different. While we can in the Polish case make an argument for a relatively successful transition to democracy, Russia is often seen to have regressed from the immediate post-communist period towards a more authoritarian order, and China, while have experienced rapid and successful marketization, remains a communist dictatorship. The article examines the relationship of the mass media to political life in these three countries and finds a surprising number of similarities. The theory of elite continuity, for which there is now more substantial empirical evidence, explains these processes much better than do available alternatives. In one important respect, the stress upon the necessity of a political revolution to break the hold of the Communist Party, the theory that was developed to explain the central European cases requires modification, since the Chinese experience demonstrates that it is possible for the elite to recompose itself without any substantial political transformation.