Watchdogs on Party Leashes? Contexts and implications of investigative journalism in post-Deng China

Although investigative reporting is not new to journalism in China, a number of important transformations in the political and media settings have contributed to the tentative institutionalization of a form of watchdog journalism that is both popular with media audiences and instrumental to the Party leadership in the post-Deng era. While media organizations and journalists have commercial and professional imperatives, the central Party leadership has promoted a media watchdog role to reassert control over a dysfunctional bureaucracy and expose elements of bureaucratic capitalism that had become so ruthless that they have threatened the very existence of the state bureaucracy itself. By exposing officially denounced problems, calling individual transgressors to account, and drawing attention to the need for specific reforms, watchdog journalism promises to strengthen the Party's hegemony by smoothing the rough edges of the ongoing Chinese transformation and policing the political, economic, and social boundaries of an emerging authoritarian market society.