China's Political Economy of Public Communication

Complexifying a rights approach to information

Abstract

In China, public information and media is a dimension of political communication and subject to political management. Understanding the function and complexity of information-based public discourse in China is important in understanding the conditions for cultural rights. The aim of this article is to offer an insight into the complex role of information in China, and why ‘cultural rights’ cannot be assumed to be a single category of inquiry. Indeed, any form of rights in regard to cultural expression, production and distribution, needs to be understood in the context of the changing political imaginary of the Chinese nation-state – an emerging nationalism based not on imperialist militarism and territorial expansion but on cultural self-determination. This article constructs an historical-critical narrative on the emergence, and major instances, of the growing political management of public communication as a strategy of nation-building through cultural revival.