China and its Discontents

“Hold high the great flag of socialism with Chinese characteristics, under the guidance of Deng Xiaoping theory, the important thought of ‘Three Represents,’ and the Scientific Outlook on Development, and firmly and steadfastly advance on the road to socialism with Chinese characteristics, so as to build an all-around moderately-prosperous society and continue the struggle.”

When Western political commentators speculate on whether Xi Jinping could implement political reform, they are really asking whether or not Xi Jinping can successfully deal with Mao’s legacy and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legitimacy in the context of a modern, state-capitalist country. This is tricky because Mao’s legacy and the CCP’s legitimacy are inextricably linked—pull on one thread of the “Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong” formula and the entire apparatus could come crashing down.

The slogan shown, displayed on Tiananmen Square last November after the CCP’s 18^th Party Congress (from a picture I took at the time), takes pains to include the ideas of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, but makes no mention of what is supposedly the foundation of the CCP: Maoism, Marxism, and Leninism. Marxism and Leninism have always been in the Party Constitution; Maoism was added in 1945, and taken out only briefly after Stalin’s death when some CCP leaders were afraid of replicating Stalin’s personality cult around Mao. Maoism was added back in after those leaders were purged. But now the CCP can’t be bothered to include these three in a propaganda outlet in one of the most visible spots in the country, right in front of Mao’s Mausoleum.

The sign is symbolic of an unsolvable paradox—the CCP is undermined by an ideological platform completely contradicted by its current economic and social systems, but it cannot change its ideology without the party losing its monopoly on power and the cadres losing their wealth and influence. That’s why it’s unlikely the CCP will reform politically until it is inevitably forced to change.

In his conclusion, Gans is annoyed by what are relatively common complaints against journalism: that journalists are prone to charges of distortion, that they don’t select the right facts, they don’t ask the right questions, and they don’t inform a lay audience in the right way. He also makes the point that these inherent problems with journalism arise because as Karl Mannheim said, “all knowledge is relational to the knower’s perspective.” Our perspective determines what facts we recognize, what questions we ask.

Gans’s solution to this, what he calls “Multiperspectival News,” is both an unworkable solution to an impossible-to-solve problem, and fully realized in the modern internet. Let’s start with the fully-realized bit. His described solution, and especially the “two-tier model” is the internet and modern media landscape. The internet consists of a multitude of heterogenous news outlets that “devote themselves primarily to reanalyzing and reinterpreting news gathered by the central media…adding their own commentary and backing these up with as much original reporting, particularly to supply bottom-up, representative, and service news…” (318) What Gans describes sounds like the blogs I read every day.

Modern media does of course fall short of Gans’s ideal: even though it is structurally similar, no outlet is really multiperspectival in the ways Gans wants them to be. And as I said before, I don’t think they can be. Gans briefly mentions my critique on page 311: you cannot add up every perspective together. If you try, you end up with nonsense and incoherence. As he says, “One cannot be a Marxist and a libertarian concurrently.” And we can’t each adopt only a single, pure perspective either. That is too limiting and not realistic to our life experiences. Instead, every person must synthesize, and this involves blending perspectives together. And once you do that, you automatically leave some things out of your perspective. That’s why no individual journalist can ever approach the ideal of “multiperspectival news”, and why collectively no journalistic organization will reach it either. We just have to live with this limitation; and we might do better for ourselves if we didn’t view it so much as a limitation, dropped the goal of “multiperspectival news”, and asked a different set of questions!