Journalism via Systems Cybernetics: The Birth of the Chinese Communication Discipline and Post-Mao Press Reforms

Abstract

In China's reform era (1979-), to revitalize the newspaper for economic modernization, journalism scholars turned to American mass communication study after Wilbur Schramm's visit in 1982.This familiar story of the birth of the Chinese communication discipline misses a critical thread.Faced with constant political contractions, systems cybernetics crept in: The supposed founder of communication, Wilbur Schramm, spoke in Claude Shannon's name; China's "King of Rocketry," Qian Xuesen, pledged to augment Norbert Wiener; and Engels's writing on dialectical materialism was seized upon as part of official Marxism.1980s China is known for the revival of humanism.However, in the tightly controlled news sector, reformist scholars conjoined systems cybernetics and Engels's Marxist philosophy, dismantling the human subject in the process.This articulation of the epistemology and ethic of newsmaking, which has persisted to this day in the disciplinary assumptions of Chinese journalism-communication, allowed the regime to depart from Maoism and legitimate a state-managed marketization.Excavating an unknown episode in the global history of cybernetics, this revisionist study sheds new light on the post-Mao trajectories of journalism and media governance.It also dislodges the ossified binaries between science and political ideology, and between socialist centralism and capitalist liberalism, which are prevalent in (post-)Cold War narratives.

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