Daniela Stockmann

As far as I can tell from a brief perusal of the author’s homepage, this book seems to draw a lot of material directly from her PhD thesis. I could not find the entire thesis online for free so I did not conduct a direct comparison, but I would guess that a lot of text has been copied directly from the thesis to this book. The style is vapid, as most theses tend to be. The author has read a lot of earlier studies and is anxious to cite them all, but she is unable to link her own research to the broader contexts of Chinese politics. It was unclear for me throughout the book what the purpose of this research was. Now that I’ve finished the book, the only conclusion I can remember is that the authoritarian party machine exercises partial control over the media, and that the party benefits from keeping it only partial. That is a poor haul from a 260-page book.

I don’t really understand why this book was published. Experts in Chinese media studies could just as well read the author’s PhD thesis, and there is very little material in it which would be of interest to a broader reading public. Although the author writes flawless English, she needs more practice on how to write an argument for a general audience. That would require more background context, brevity and focus, but also broader conclusions which provide the opportunity to link this book to one's previous knowledge about China. This book is weak on all four counts, so it isn't very good. The author could well be writing great books on Chinese politics for general readers a decade from now, but this one reads like a beginner’s work.… (más)