The resignation of outspoken journalist Hu Shuli illustrates the limits of media pluralism in China
The U.S. administration’s policy of “strategic reassurance” to China, criticized as political timidity by some, should not deter President Barack Obama from using his “superlative skills as a communicator, bridge-builder, and moral beacon” to address issues of human rights and reform on his forthcoming debut visit, write Brookings’ analysts Cheng Li and Jordan Lee.
Last year’s Tibetan uprising and this year’s turmoil in Xinjiang should not go unmentioned during Obama’s visit, they argue, and he could also impart the lessons of America’s civil rights movement. Steps have already been taken to address military and economic mistrust, they note, but the political dimension of strategic reassurance remains undefined, they write:
In part, this haziness is a reflection of how discombobulated the world’s leading liberal democracy feels vis-à-vis the increasingly powerful but still authoritarian China. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies expected successive waves of democratization to extend democratic capitalism to the farthest reaches of the globe. Instead, China’s model of state capitalism appears to have weathered a series of financial storms better than democratic capitalism, and the United States now struggles with the question of how to engage this hybrid authoritarian-capitalist state in the post-Cold War world.
They note the progress China has made in opening up large swathes of society – from markets to media – while maintaining the party’s political monopoly.
But the resignation of Hu Shuli, one of the country’s most outspoken and influential journalists, as editor of Caijing magazine, serves as a reminder of how the media remains tightly circumscribed by less overt forms of control, including self-censorship.
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