Democracy in modern China: Press coverage of public participation policy issues in Wenling.

摘要

Public participation is an important mechanism for rational governance, and in the West, local newspapers play an essential role in facilitating public participation by announcing meetings, providing background, presenting alternative points of view, and summarizing results. Recently, China has begun a series of "experiments" in public participation. This thesis examined the role of two party papers and a popular paper in these public participation experiments in Wenling, a pioneer county well known for its experimentation. Research questions were: What were the coverage patterns concerning public participation policies? Who were sources and writers? Did the stories carry a dialogue or present conflict? What would the readers learn from the stories?;A content analysis of articles about four public participation policies published in the three newspapers---Wenling Daily, Taizhou Daily, and Taizhou Evening---was conducted to identify and compare the coverage patterns. Qualitative analysis was employed to describe dialogue and analyze what readers would learn.;Findings indicate that China's newspaper coverage falls short of the Western model in several respects. Usually, there was no advance notice of meetings. Only 14 of 213 articles contained alternative points of view. Government officials wrote at least a third of the articles. The local party newspaper focused on locally initiated policies while the prefecture party newspaper stressed nationally arranged policy "experiments". The popular commercial newspaper has not yet found its role. It ran few articles, although several were very long and in-depth. However, it also ran one of only two articles that explicitly included conflict.