International Center for Cultural Studies

側記｜Journalism in the jianghu: Digital news as “post-public” institution

2025-10-21

Date and Time: 2025/10/21 16:30-18:30 (GMT+8)

Venue：R106A, HA Building 2, Guangfu Campus, NYCU

Speaker: Emily H. C. Chua (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore)

Discussant: Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang (Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, NYCU)

Moderator: Allen Chun ( International Center for Cultural Studies , NYCU)

Event Info | LINK

Event Photo | LINK

Reported by｜Serena Di Maria (Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, NYCU)

Sub-project｜Subproject I: The Geopolitics and Cultural Economy of Societal Relations in a New GreaterChina

Convener｜Allen Chun

On October 21, 2025, professor Emily Chua (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore) delivered a talk on her 2023 monograph The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era. The event, hosted by the International Center for Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (ICCS-NYCU), was organized and moderated by Professor Allen Chun (ICCS-NYCU).

The Currency of Truth is an ethnography investigating the logic of newsmaking in China at a time when traditional journalistic ideals such as truthfulness, objectivity, neutrality and informativeness hold reduced significance in the everyday practice of making news.

The book’s central argument is that, in this context, news should no longer be understood as a medium of mass communication, but rather as a form of currency exchanged among various actors involved in the newsmaking enterprise, who foster and manage their relationship to one another.

The book’s fieldwork, conducted in 2010 at a Guangzhou-based newspaper called The Times, centers on two main informants, Zheng Wen and Liang Yong. At the time, they were young, idealistic journalists working in the newspaper’s Politics section, who regarded their profession as a heroic pursuit of truth. A decade later, their paths had diverged: Liang Yong had become an editor at the Politics section, while Zheng Wen had risen to the higher position of deputy editor-in-chief, earning a salary more than twice that of his former peer.

To explain this rift—symptomatic of the contemporary conditions and logic of newsmaking in China—the author departs from the traditional interpretation that attributes career success or failure solely to one’s degree of compliance or defiance within the system. Instead, the book offers a more nuanced portrait of the constraints that journalists face in their professional environment.

The conventional framework for analyzing news takes into account two main factors: political influence and commercialism. Good journalism is traditionally expected to minimize the impact of both. Chua contends that this framework is insufficient for understanding the mechanisms of newsmaking in China and proposes an alternative approach that reconceptualizes news as a form of currency. Yet, instead of suggesting that the production of news as currency implies a loss of ethics, she argues that an ethic of efficacy has replaced the traditional ethic of truthfulness.

The book further theorizes that contemporary news production in China (and beyond) is directed not toward an actual public, but toward the generation of a specific form of publicness. Drawing on Michael Warner’s notion of the public as a “virtual” entity that exists only by virtue of being addressed, Chua suggests that news hold value not because they are read by real audiences, but because they address a potential readership. Chua deploys the notion of publicness to describe the transformation of media business models accompanying the shift from print circulation to digital platforms. Whereas printed articles once generated revenue through actual readership and market monopoly—circulating as newspapers that need to be purchased as physical wholes—digital articles derive value from their greater shareability and circulation potential. Their value lies in being addressable to specific audiences rather than to a general public, a logic that appeals both to advertisers seeking targeted sponsorships and to government officials capable of offering institutional patronage. In this new model, newspapers no longer need to reach a tangible public; it suffices that they address the right kind of imagined reader, thus producing a particular form of publicness.

It is precisely this transformation that redefines the function of news as currency. The term currency is understood here, following Bandelj et al., as a medium used to engage in what they call “relational work” (Money Talks, 2017). Building on this idea, Chua argues that to be a journalist is to make and use news in order to manage networks of relationships with various stakeholders and to produce the kind of publicness that sustains those relations.

These conditions are conducive to what Chua calls an ethic of efficacy: a “good” journalist in this context is one who can effectively use newsmaking to accumulate resources—both political and commercial—for the newspaper. This is not to say that news cease to be true; rather, in an environment where newspapers no longer hold a monopoly on public attention and lack stable sources of revenue, journalists can no longer afford to pursue truth for its own sake. Instead, news are primarily conceived as possessing exchange value for various purposes such as securing business partnerships to generate income, cultivating relations with government officials, and maintaining good standing with one’s superiors.

The constraints journalists face are not reducible to political or commercial pressures but emerge from the web of interpersonal obligations that structure their work. This intricate matrix of relations and obligations define the imagined world whereby journalists operate, which Chua describes as jianghu 江湖. Unlike Charles Taylor’s concept of the “modern social imaginary,” grounded in notions of mutual benefit and the defense of individual rights, the notion of jianghu emphasizes the role of social obligations as the constitutive limits placed on the Self. As Petrus Liu writes in describing Jin Yong’s historical fiction, “the point is to take stock of the limits of social autonomy and to recognize that there is no “I” that is not, in some ways, constituted by unwelcome constraints, norms and regulations” (Stateless Subjects, 2011: 115). Building on this view, Chua conceives news as a post-public institution, one in which the significance of any given news story cannot be understood outside the nexus of relationships that produced and circulated it.

At the end of Chua’s presentation, the participants engaged in a productive discussion with the speaker. The invited discussant, Professor Lawrence Yang from the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies (NYCU), opened the floor with several observations and questions. He first raised some points for reflection regarding the concept of publicness. In particular, he asked whether news outlets can effectively dispense with empirical measures of audience engagement—such as click rates or other statistics indicating general responses—and to what extent they can detach the notion of the “public” as data from that of “publicness” as relationality.

Yang also addressed the interplay between the digital turn and the policy changes occurring during the period of Chua’s fieldwork. He observed that the mid-2000s marked a time of major transformation in China’s media landscape, when policy reforms and digitalization were unfolding in parallel. Before becoming president, Xi Jinping was involved in reshaping media governance. This was also a critical moment when media outlets began moving their operations online. Many news organizations were still in the process of redefining their business models and their relationships with the Party and other stakeholders. Yang asked the speaker for her view on this historical period and whether she believes the conditions identified in her research have changed in more recent years, particularly following Xi Jinping’s rise to power.

Beyond the question of historical change, Yang also raised further inquiries concerning the role of regional differences and propaganda in shaping newsmakers’ practices and ethics. As regards the first point, since Chua’s fieldwork was conducted in Guangzhou—a southern city close to Hong Kong and Shenzhen—he wondered whether there might be significant regional and social differences that have to do with the specific local milieu of the South.

With regard to the question of propaganda, Yang was surprised to read that editors do not regard propaganda work as a purely negative task; rather, they approach it as a form of resourcefulness—something to work with, or to complete first, in order to gain the space and flexibility needed to pursue their own journalistic objectives. In addition, Yang pointed out that the book further classifies different kinds of news functioning as currency within the jianghu context, including one particular type referred to as “black news,” which news outlets may use to blackmail their interlocutors, such as sponsors or other stakeholders, or pressure them to cooperate.

In response to Yang’s questions, Chua noted that the system for collecting statistics on audience engagement has become significantly more sophisticated in recent years, and this technical infrastructure plays an important role in shaping media operations. Nevertheless, she emphasized that even with such attention to data, metrics like click rates still reflect only the potential for attention rather than the engagement of an actual stable audience. She further observed that the overall atmosphere has changed considerably since the rise of Xi Jinping and, later, the COVID-19 pandemic. Journalists and editors have become less willing to discuss their work openly, and the industry has sought to shift away from an overreliance on market forces toward a more politically aligned and ideologically driven model of news production. This has also affected the kinds of people entering the profession, who are less idealistic than the previous generations, with a growing sense that what is possible to publish and say has been reduced even further. Regarding regional differences, Chua remarked that while there is no sharp north–south divide, each city retains its own distinct media culture. As for the last question, she acknowledged that editors and journalists are conscious of their own constraints and act pragmatically, even if they do not necessarily enjoy or endorse the assignment of propaganda.

Subsequently, Allen Chun enriched the discussion with a question regarding the specific relevance of China’s “digital era” in Chua’s research. He noted that the term could refer to the wider context of the advanced digital economy in China. Addressing the impact of digitalization, he contrasted Chua’s concept of publicness with what Cass R. Sunstein describes as a “divided democracy in the age of social media.” Chun pointed out that social media are not truly social, but rather an extension of the personal into the social sphere — a process that fractures the public into segmented audiences, arguably the very opposite of publicness. He further observed that even the commercialization of news outlets caters to this fragmented public, raising the question of what such dynamics might reveal about China’s digital economy.

Chun also pointed out a different interpretation of the term jianghu, drawing on its association with martial arts literature and the underlying idea of acting with flexibility or fluidity in relation to the norms of the political system. He contended that politics can never be dismissed from analyses of media practices, and that it remains inseparable from the logics of commercialization and the ethics of efficacy.

Chua responded that the “digital era” in her research refers more specifically to the moment when news outlets were compelled to adopt new business models following their transition to online platforms. Online news articles possess a distinct circulatory potential, different from that of printed newspapers. The traditional notion of the newspaper as both a business and an independent political institution was grounded in the print-based model, which collapsed once audiences became unwilling to pay for subscriptions and other forms of direct revenue. The notions of news as currency and publicness address precisely this dimension of digitalization. Chua clarified that her book does not focus on the role of social media. The idea of publicness, she explained, rejects the normative assumption of the public as a unified “whole” prior to the moment of fragmentation associated with the digital era. During the Mao period, there prevailed a fantasy of unity between the Party and the public, sustained by the system of the Party press; in contrast, the post-Mao era’s fragmentation and diversification of newsmaking came to be viewed as a fact to be celebrated, even if only in compromised forms.

Professor Joyce Liu (ICCS-NYCU) also intervened in the discussion by questioning how much political or public truth can be brought to light amid the power struggles and jianghu entanglements that structure the newsmaking environment, suggesting that the possibilities appear extremely limited. Chua agreed, acknowledging that very little political truth can be openly expressed. While some journalists attempt to maintain independence, their efforts are often short-lived. At times of relative optimism, certain alternative media may provide readers with valuable information that individual journalists and newspapers do not, yet they still lack the platforms necessary to make their work widely visible.