Media systems in transition: Poland, Russia, China
Colin Sparks*
University of Westminster, UK
This article discusses the transformation of the media system in three countries
moving away from the classical ‘‘communist’’ model: Poland, Russia and China.
Despite very significant differences, all three of these societies displayed similar
starting points in terms of economics, politics and media. The dominant political
science tradition has discussed post-communism as part of a more general theory
of ‘‘transitology’’, seeing the processes involved in these cases as examples of a
world-wide transition from dictatorial regimes towards western-style democracy.
An alternative is to see the shift away from communism as an example of ‘‘elite
continuity’’, in which the former bureaucratic ruling class attempts to restructure
itself as the owners of private capital. The article tests the two theoretical views in
these three cases. It is demonstrated that transitology gives very little insight into
the prevailing situations, and that the theory of elite continuity accounts much
better for major features of the media systems.
Keywords: media systems; comparative analysis; Russia; Poland; China
Introduction
1
After a decade and half of transformation, the former communist states of central
and Eastern Europe and the USSR present a very varied picture. If we widen our
lens and consider the contemporary situation in other states with a similar historical
legacy, most notably China, then the diversity is even greater. There are no agreed
criteria whereby we can measure change with any degree of scientific precision, but a
survey of a range of different approaches to the European cases found that there
were surprising uniformities across them (Berg-Schlosser, 2004). According to this
study, it is possible to group the various countries into four categories which run
through A (Full Democracy: examples include Poland), B (Almost Liberal
Democracy: examples include Bulgaria), C (Electoral Democracy: examples include
Russia) to D (Not Democratic: examples include Belarus). If we are to include non-
European examples, China, North Korea, and Cuba and so on, then we would
perhaps need another category – E (Exceptionally Not Democratic).
These differences, which are clear and obvious to any observer, are so substantial
as to demand explanation, particularly since the starting points, although of course
nationally-inflected, displayed such strong similarities. Why should it be that a group
of countries which 20 years ago shared a similar if not identical political system, a
similar if not identical economic system, and a similar if not identical media system,
today demonstrate such a wide range of political, economic and media forms?
Quirks of accident and individual influence aside, the problems involved are clearly
ones that demand a systematic answer.
*Email: [email protected]
Chinese Journal of Communication
Vol. 1, No. 1, April 2008, 7–24
ISSN 1754-4750 print/ISSN 1754-4769 online
� 2008 The Communication Research Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
DOI: 10.1080/17544750701861871
http://www.informaworld.com
This article begins by considering the dominant tradition of thinking about the
ending of dictatorial regimes, which finds its most elaborate theoretical exposition in
political science but which influences many studies that focus more narrowly on the
mass media. It then offers an alternative, the theory of elite continuity, developed in
the study of changes to the media in the western fringes of the former Soviet empire.
It attempts to test the explanatory power of these two theories by considering three
cases: Poland, Russia and China. The changes in the media systems in these three
cases are reviewed and compared with the claims of the two theories. Finally, the
article considers the implications of the findings for more general theoretical
considerations about social change.
Transitology
In political science, there is a well-established paradigm for studying the shift from
dictatorial to democratic regimes. It is usually known, accurately if inelegantly, as
‘‘transitology’’, and it has been developed to explain a wide spectrum of changes
from the end of European fascism in the 1970s, through Latin America and Southern
Africa to the contemporary problems of post-communism. The most famous, if not
the most original, theorist of this school is Samuel Huntington (1991). The aim of
transitology is to explain explicitly political change from dictatorial to democratic
regimes and for them; ‘‘What we refer to as the ‘transition’ is the interval between
one political regime and another’’ (O’Donnnell & Schmitter, 1986, p. 2). The
consensus amongst authors working in this tradition, however much they disagree
about other things, is to follow Schumpeter and to stress a ‘‘minimalist’’ conception
of democracy (O’Donnell, 2000, pp. 6–11). As one author put it: ‘‘a transition to
democracy is complete when: (1) there is a real possibility of partisan alternation in
office, (2) reversible policy changes can result from alternation in office, and (3)
effective civilian control has been established over the military’’ (Przeworski, 1992,
p. 105). In theory at least, issues of social structure are an obstacle to a proper
understanding of political transition: as one writer proudly proclaimed, transitology
‘‘deliberately excludes from [the] basic denotation of democratic government, as a
tactic of inquiry, any references to social structures and socioeconomic relations,
believing that their inclusion is likely to obscure rather than facilitate the scientific
comparative probing of political regimes’’ (Shain, 1995, p. 47). Even more critical
writers, who do acknowledge that democratisation has the potential of profound
social implications, distinguish these issues from the consideration of democratiza-
tion per se (O’Donnell & Schmitter, 1986).
In practice, the model of democratic society is taken from the ‘‘originator’’
countries of North West Europe and North America and it is against the prevailing
conditions there that the process of change in other countries is judged. Such
judgment inevitably involves at least some consideration of factors other than the
process of elections. The first non-minimal factor that is invariably assumed is that
there is an organic connection between democratization and the free market (Linz &
Stepan, 1996). Secondly, there is sometimes a consideration of media performance as
a factor in the exercise of democracy, albeit a rather cursory one. There are one or
two honourable exceptions (O’Neil, 1998; Pei, 1994) but ‘‘Students of democratiza-
tion often assert that a free press is one of the key ‘pillars of democracy’, but this idea
is rarely developed any further’’ (O’Neil, 1996, p. 3).
8 C. Sparks
Implicitly, at least, the model of political change advanced by transitology is that
there are observable twin process of democratic political change and the burgeoning
of market economies. Together, these factors are working to change previously
undemocratic societies in the direction of the political and economic conditions
prevailing in the USA. They are therefore best considered as teleological theories
which claim to identify two linked processes which are working towards a pre-
determined end.
This approach also strongly influences much of the writing about media in
former communist countries. While there are some very important exceptions
(Downing, 1996; Koltsova, 2006; Reading, 2003; Splichal 1994; Zhao, 1998) the
mainstream clearly argues that the key criterion to observe are the extent to which
the media in post-communist countries have evolved towards a state similar to that
prevailing in North America or Western Europe (for example, Gross, 2002;
Jakubowicz, 2003a; Mickiewicz, 1999). In other words, the really-existing media of
different countries are measured against what has come to be known as the ‘‘liberal
model’’ (Hallin & Mancini, 2004).
The problem for this approach is that a gathering body of evidence suggests that
the reality of social and political change is much more complicated, and indeed
contradictory, than is allowed for by the theoretical framework. As one
commentator noted, thinking about these problems should ‘‘start by assuming that
what is often thought of as an uneasy, precarious, middle-ground between full-
fledged democracy and outright dictatorship is actually the most common political
condition today of countries in the developing world and the post-communist world’’
(Carothers, 2002, pp. 17–18). As a consequence, there has been a proliferation of
what has been called ‘‘adjectival democracy’’. The end state has been redefined as a
‘‘liberal democracy’’, which is differentiated from a variety of other states, variously
classified by different authors as ‘‘electoral democracy’’, ‘‘feckless pluralism’’,
‘‘dominant power politics’’, ‘‘sultanism’’, and so on. The seemingly endless
proliferation of different intermediate stages between democracy and dictatorship
not only reduce the elegance of the paradigm but also bring into question its
explanatory power.
The theory of elite continuity
As an alternative explanation of the dynamics of post-communist media systems we
may consider the theory of elite continuity. When studying the complex and
protracted evolution of the media in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and
Slovakia in the first years after the fall of communism, it quickly becomes apparent
that the course of events did not follow the programmes outlined either by the
former dissidents who were now in power nor by the legion of consultants from
western Europe and the USA who were offering them advice as to how to restructure
broadcasting and the press. The very worthy aim shared by almost everyone
involved in the early years of transition might be summarised not too inaccurately as
an attempt to create newspapers like the New York Times and broadcasters like the
BBC (Sparks, 2001). In fact, what emerged were newspapers that were highly
partisan in their orientation and broadcasters that remained closely aligned with the
state rather than the public (Sparks, 1998).
Chinese Journal of Communication 9
In an attempt to offer a theoretical explanation offered for these realities, seven
major components were identified:
(1) The events in central and eastern Europe were genuine revolutions. In most
cases these revolutions were negotiated between a section of the dissident
opposition and the reform wing of the Communist Party, but even in those
cases they represented a clean break in the organisation of political life. The
monopoly of political power held by the Communist Party was broken
both formally and substantially; new political parties were formed and
contested for power.
(2) There was considerable continuity in both institutions and personnel
between the old regime and the new. Institutions like the civil service, the
army and the broadcasters remained substantially intact, both in their
social position and in terms of their internal structure. In broadcasting, for
example, the old state broadcasters were nowhere broken up or privatised.
They remained central to the media systems, and they retained a very high
proportion of their existing personnel.
(3) The shift towards a market economy was a highly political process, with
the award of favourable opportunities being very closely connected to
political power. The licensing of the new commercial broadcasters was a
case in point, where political connections were essential to the winning of
franchises.
(4) The media institutions that emerged from the process of transition were
everywhere strongly influenced by the political elite. This was particularly
obvious in the case of the broadcasters, where regulatory bodies were
recomposed to follow the shifting results of elections. The media had
changed from being a locus of power to one of the stakes of power.
(5) The revolutions were, following this logic, certainly political revolutions, in
that they transformed very rapidly the ways in which the countries in
question were governed, but they were not social revolutions in that they
did not pose any fundamental challenge to the social in industry or
the state machine.
(6) The main dynamic of the revolutions was that it permitted the old elite
(roughly, the nomenklatura) to transform itself from one that rested upon
the collective ownership of state property, which it guaranteed through its
political monopoly, to one that rests on private property, acquired formally
or informally through the exercise of political power, but sustained
economically in the manner familiar from western capitalist societies.
(7) The degree of democratization, if any, is secondary in this model. While the
shift to individualised private capital certainly implies a pluralisation of
power in the society, it does not automatically follow that this will be
articulated through a democratic framework. In the cases studied during
the 1990s, there was indeed a considerable degree of democratization,
notably in establishing rights to free expression and political association,
but theoretically this remained a contingent feature of the new , not
its essence.
This theoretical model, which lays its primary stress upon the social continuity in
societies in transition, rather than assuming that the process was essentially one of
10 C. Sparks
democratization, provided a good fit to the events in the first decade after the fall of
communism in the westernmost European communist states. The weakest parts of
the model were, first, that there was then little sociological evidence as to the
personnel shifts in the elite; and second, that the examples studied did not provide
any evidence to test the hypothesis that democratic rule was a contingent factor
rather than an integral part of the process. In all four cases considered, the outcomes
were sufficiently close to at least the Western European model of democracy as to
permit the countries to successfully apply for membership in the EC. In addition, it
was not clear whether the model was specific to its particular time-frame and
geographical focus, or whether it could be extended to explain more generally the
features of transition.
Poland, Russia, China
We may contrast briefly the two different explanations of change along two
dimensions. Transitology is primarily a political theory, but there is a twin process of
marketization and democratization whose outcomes will include independent media.
Elite continuity is primarily a sociological theory in which there is a process of
marketization, but democratization and independent media are contingent and
dependent. We may test the power of these theories by examining the evidence from
various post-communist states.
Comparative studies of the media in different countries face at least three major
problems: establishing the validity of the chosen examples; limiting the scope of the
comparison to allow due weight to distinctive national features; and the choice of
valid indicators upon which to make the comparison. We will consider these one by
one.
The countries selected for this comparison are Poland, Russia and China. The
first case is relatively unexceptional: it is the largest of the eight former communist
countries that have entered the EC. It is rated one of the highest in the classification
of democratic completion discussed above and thus seems to be a case of more or less
successful transition. Russia, again, can be easily justified. It was the core of the old
USSR and is the largest and most powerful of the successor states. It is rated in a
lower category of democratic completion than Poland. It is fairly easy to see how a
fruitful comparison might be made between these two examples.
It is the choice of the third country, China, which is probably the most
contentious; this is a society in which there has been no political transition. The
Chinese Communist Party still holds a monopoly of political power and vigorously
represses any movement that even appears to threaten it. China is, however, a society
that has advanced a long way down the road to marketization, particularly, as we
shall see, in the case of the mass media. In addition, there is strong evidence of a
similar dynamic at work in this case, but it is one that produces a quite different
outcome.
Although the countries had a common starting point in that they shared the
main features of a ‘‘communist’’ system of economic, social and political
organisation, there were, of course, very important differences. Although the ruling
elites in all three countries claimed allegiance to Marx and Lenin, they differed
significantly in their interpretations of what that allegiance signified: the differences
were so substantial that the Chinese used to accuse the Russians of ‘‘the all-round
Chinese Journal of Communication 11
restoration of capitalism’’ and relations were so strained that on several occasions
their respective military exchanged small-arms fire across their common central
Asian b . In both Russia and China, the regimes could make some nationalist
claims to legitimacy, whereas in Poland the Communist Party was widely perceived
as having been put in power by Russian tanks. Following directly from that, Poland
saw by far the largest and most enduring opposition to communist rule, culminating
in the mass movement led by Solidarnosc in 1980–81. On another dimension, Poland
was, as a consequence of Nazi crimes, most horribly the Holocaust, an ethnically
homogenous society. China has important national minorities, some of whom have
aspirations that are politically sensitive. Today’s Russia was then embedded in the
multi-national USSR, as its dominant nationality. Pressures to autonomy and
independence were a central feature of the demise of the old system and remain
major problems up to the present. Again, although none of these countries was rich
and urbanised in the way that the advanced societies of the West are, China was then
a significantly more rural and, as a consequence, poorer country than Poland or
Russia. Given these obvious differences, we would not expect to find a uniform
process of change in all three countries, whatever theoretical model we chose, and
any analysis must be sensitive to the fact that the observable differences need to be
accounted for.
While giving due weight to these factors, we believe that it is still legitimate to
make a comparison between the three cases since the similarities of starting point are
so strong, particularly with regard to media systems. There are several dimensions
upon which we might make comparisons, but the most obvious one is the extent to
which the media carry out the sort of ‘‘public sphere’’ role that is essential to any
theory of democratic polity. Following the hopes of the dissidents, we might ask to
what extent press and broadcast media are able to report and comment freely upon
the doings of the political and economic elites in the manner which, at their best, the
BBC and the New York Times are able to do.
Contemporary discussions of comparative media systems are heavily indebted to
Hallin and Mancini’s work, which was developed in to consider the media
systems of Western Europe and North America. With some reservation, this
provides a useful starting point for considering how to operationalise our own
geographically and historically distinct concerns. They identify four key dimensions
of media systems along which they may be compared:
(l) The development of media markets, with particular emphasis on the strong or weak
development of a mass circulation press; (2) political parallelism, that is the degree and
nature of the links between the media and political parties or, more broadly, the extent
to which the media system reflects the major political divisions in society; (3) the
development of journalistic professionalism; and (4) the degree and nature of state
intervention in the media system’ (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 21).
Of these, three seem particularly useful. The issue of the development of a mass
circulation press seems problematic even in their own account, and does not provide
much insight for our purposes: press circulation has been subject to such rapid
changes, in different directions, in all three of our cases, that it is difficult to see how
it might be taken as a distinctive feature. Political parallelism, on the other hand, is a
way of thinking about the extent and manner of the links between media and
political forces that are central to our concerns. Journalistic professionalism, in the
sense of journalists being able to act ‘‘autonomously’’, free from direct intervention
12 C. Sparks
from outside the newsroom is again a valuable consideration in our three cases. The
utility of considering state intervention is, we think, self-evident.
In using all three of these categories, we are not attempting to apply them in
exactly the same way, or with exactly the same content, as do Hallin and Mancini.
On the contrary, we think there are significant ways in which their categories are, no
doubt unconsciously, dependent upon a transitological conception of the media, but
it makes sense, in the interests of developing a common body of knowledge, to follow
them as far as is practicable in the very different environment that we wish to
consider.
Poland
The official media in Poland were, for most of the communist period, very tightly
controlled, but usually, there were also some independent media and independent
discussion tolerated. Since the 1950s, the Catholic Church was able to publish its
own newspapers, and according to Jakubowicz the opposition was able to have a
public presence from the mid-1970s (Jakubowicz, 1991). With the birth of
Solidarnosc, party control over the official press and broadcasting was seriously
challenged, and very radical ideas were put forward for democratising the media
(Goban-Klas, 1994; Jakubowicz, 1995). Martial law ended the open movement but,
according to one estimate, 2,077 underground periodicals were produced during that
period (Jakubowicz, 1991). As a consequence, the reformists inside the party were
able to enter Round Table discussions with the less extreme opposition and reach an
agreement on the transition that included allowing the opposition access to the mass
media (Goban-Klas, 1990).
The media system that emerged out of transition was marked by the survival in
legal form of some of the former oppositional papers, notably Gazeta Wyborcza, and
the controlled privatization of the existing press (Jakubowicz, 1995). The press which
emerged was overwhelmingly ‘‘political’’ in orientation, despite being dependent
upon the market for their survival; many new titles did not survive (Goban-Klas,
1996). The result was that the press: ‘‘helps air diverse views and opinions, but
usually of party elites, rather than their rank-and-file members or of groups in
society in general’’ (Jakubowicz, 2003b, p. 237). Broadcasting, too, has been strongly
marked by political control, particularly of the main regulatory body, the KRRiT.
One recent detailed study found that ‘‘The composition of the KRRit has been
systematically politicized, not only in the sense of who appoints its members but,
more importantly, in the fact that the members have been more or less clearly
affiliated to political parties’’ (Krajewski, 2005, p. 1144). This politicization has
proved not to be a passing phase associated with the immediate post-communist
period: the 2005 incoming Law and Justice (PiS) led government has changed
broadcasting law and imposed its own appointees to leading bodies (PISS, May 19,
2006).
In terms of three categories of comparison, the Polish media is characterised by a
high degree of political parallelism, journalistic autonomy is low, and state (more
properly, government) intervention is very high. The evidence from what is one of
the more successfully democratized post-communist countries does not show the
evolution of an independent media. The media in Poland is certainly highly
marketised and plural, and in that it marks a decisive break from the official media
Chinese Journal of Communication 13
of the communist era, but it remains subordinated to elite groups rather than
developing a public service orientation.
Russia
While there was certainly discontent and dissidence in the USSR, this was not on the
scale of Poland and the initiative for social change appears to have emerged from
inside the party (Ryabov, 2004; White, Gill, & Slyder, 1993). This led to a sharp
division between the reformers (around Yeltsin) and the conservatives (around
Ligachev), with Gorbachev attempting to balance in between (Gibbs, 1999). The
media were able to take advantage of this opening to act more independently, and
many observers see this as the ‘‘golden age’’ of the media, who could pursue self-
determined journalistic objectives while still enjoying the economic security provided
by subsidies (Hagstrom 2000; Ryabov 2004).
As the political crisis deepened after 1990, journalists began to take over their
papers and the failed coup of 1991, which inaugurated the ‘‘Second Russian
Revolution’’ and led to the end of the USSR, confirmed that process. The newly-
liberated press, however, faced serious difficulties. Politically, it owed its position to
the Yeltsin victory and thus found itself taking a partisan stance in his support.
Economically, costs rose sharply while circulation dropped away very quickly and
advertising revenues did not provide adequate compensation. The press faced the
real prospect of bankruptcy and one after another the independent newspapers were
bought up by the new oligarchs, who used the papers to promote their own interests
(Belin, 2002a; Fadin, 2002; Zassoursky, 1999). In broadcasting, the main state
stations fell into the hands of different sections of the political elite and when private
broadcasting began it was dependent upon the same group of oligarchs as controlled
the press. NTV, owned by the oligarch Gusinsky, did engage in some independent
reporting, notably of the first Chechen War, but in the longer term the convergence
of interests between the oligarchs and the Kremlin meant that the 1996 presidential
election saw an orchestrated campaign overwhelmingly in favour of Yeltsin.
In the first five years after communism, Russian media changed markedly, but
the new-found diversity did not necessarily reflect a greater degree of public service:
‘‘what differentiates this situation from the previous Soviet regime is that various
power groups compete in their struggle for resources, thus providing some pluralism
of interpretations that sometimes grows into fierce ‘information wars’’’ (Koltsova,
2001, pp. 322–333). To some observers, this seemed a retreat from the last years of
communism, since the media’s democratizing role had narrowed to that of
supporting Yeltsin and the interests of their owners (Ryabov, 2004).
The period after Yelsin’s re-election in 1996 saw a resurrection of the power of the
state, certainly with respect to the oligarchs whose fortunes had been established
through favourable deals with the weakened state of the previous period. As the state
moved to regain its dominant position, it also attempted to re-assert its own heavily
nationalist definition of the public interest against the private interests of big business.
Yeltsin and his chosen successor Putin launched a campaign aimed at bringing the
media, and in particular television, back under their own close control (Belin, 2002b;
Lipman & McFaul, 2005). The owners of the main national media are very closely
allied with the Kremlin. One consequence is that there has been relatively little critical
reporting of the Second Chechen War, despite its protracted horrors.
14 C. Sparks
The Russian case thus represents, in much more exaggerated form, the same
basic tendencies that are present in Poland. The media are now much more plural in
ownership and no longer depend on subsidy from the state. They are, however, very
clearly in the hands of different sections of the elite, who use their control of media
outlets to bargain with each other over the disposal of material assets and political
power. They demonstrate a very high degree of political parallelism, low journalistic
autonomy, and strong state intervention. Very far from representing the interests of
the public, they are entirely beholden to the state and its wealthy allies, and they are
used as political instruments to sustain …
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