PROFIT OR IDEOLOGY - THE CHINESE PRESS BETWEEN PARTY AND MARKET

Economic reforms have taken priority over political reforms in post-Ma o China. This has caused the serious dilemma in which most newspapers find themselves. On the one hand, they are no longer financed or subsi dized by the state; on the other hand, they are still expected to be a t the ideological service of the state. The party-state has the last s ay in whether they can be published and who should be appointed editor -in-chief. Hence, the press in China now continues to be controlled by the party ideologically, while it relies on the market financially. T his divorce between ideological dependence and financial independence has led to two interesting tendencies: first, most newspapers have sta rted to increase their volume to print light-hearted material in order to increase readership and ultimately to maximize advertising income; second, some have even started to run other businesses such as servic e industries and thus to become a kind of media conglomerate. In this sense, newspapers are on the way to becoming true profit-making enterp rises which eventually will undermine the role of mouthpiece for the p arty-state. This article analyses these problems, using several nation al and regional papers as exemplars to illustrate the tensions much of the Chinese press is going through.