Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass SocietyBy JohnAlekna, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2024. xiv+359 pp. $35 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐1‐50‐363857‐0

Abstract

How did an economically poor and technologically backward country like China during much of the 20th century experience an information revolution? How did the relationship between information technology and political development play out in the world's most populous country? These are some of the questions John Alekna addresses in his impressive study of radio broadcasting in China's changing “newsscape.” Over the half century since its arrival in China in the winter of 1922–1923, Alekna argues, radio brought central government movements and directives to the rural area where 90% of the population lived, thus quickly and inexpensively reordered the political geography of the country. It created a space for a reorganized and powerful Chinese state in the latter half of the 20th century (p. 12). As an illustration, the book begins with the dramatic “war on sparrows” that was launched across the People's Republic of China (PRC) in spring 1958. The government mobilized tens of millions of urban and rural residents, largely over radio, into a common task of killing sparrows that had been designated as pests, in remarkable synchronicity and scale. Borrowing from Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies, Alekna uses “technopolitical process” to underscore the close relationship between technological and political development, seeing them as “aspects of a single process that expresses itself through the infrastructures and practices of news” (p. 63). He defines “news” broadly as all time-sensitive information. While focusing on radio broadcasting, Alekna goes to great lengths to emphasize that it is just one technological practice of a larger information ecosystem, which he calls newsscape (p. 5). With this holistic heuristic, he aims to “decenter institutions and objects, while foregrounding experience” (p. 11). The book's first chapter sets up the baseline by showing in concrete details the forms and functions of China's newsscape before radio broadcasting: in 1919, news of the May 4th student protest in Beijing took days to reach other urban centers, and still longer for the public. Chapter 2 introduces the debut of radio in China, through a speech by Sun Yat-sen that was broadcast over the novel media in the “semicolonial” enclave of Shanghai in early 1923. While his audience was small, Alekna notes, both Sun's vision and the radio's technological potential would gradually turn into reality, albeit in uneven and often unexpected ways. After reviewing its slow start due to political divisions, Chapter 3 shows a different picture in northeastern China (Manchuria), where the government of warlord Zhang Zuolin embraced the radio and built China's most powerful wireless station as part of its drive for modernization. At this point Alekna declares a shift away from the elites and political centers to explore local practices and listeners' experience of the radio. Chapter 4 on the Nanjing decade (1927–1937) under the Nationalists details, among other things, the practice of training local “broadcast monitors” who would operate radio receivers in the interior and disseminate news through multiple media such as mimeographed newssheets. Chapter 5 on the full-scale war between China and Japan reveals other key developments: on the one hand, continued radio broadcasting by the Nationalists from Chongqing signaled to the country and the world its perseverance in resistance; on the other, the Japanese occupation and collaborationist regimes consolidated and greatly expanded broadcasting and listenership, under the slogan “Without Radio There Is No Nation.” The last three chapters of the book examine radio broadcasting under the Chinese Communists, with its humble start of one transmitter gifted from the Soviet Union in 1940. In Chapter 6, the author again demonstrates radio broadcasting as a multi-medium experience including radio newspapers in the Communist-controlled areas. By the time the PRC was founded in October 1949, famously through Mao Zedong's voice broadcast from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Communist authorities had inherited a nascent national broadcasting network. It wasted no time in consolidating its control by banning private radio broadcasting and further expanding its reach to nearly all localities through wired broadcasting. This technopolitical process coincided with several country-wide campaigns such as collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. The final chapter takes up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and highlights the outbreak of mass violence in cities throughout China, with information technology as an agent of disorder. By casting a long temporal gaze over half a century and across different political regimes, Alekna demonstrates convincingly both changes and continuities in China's newsscape in the 20th century. For instance, the ubiquitous broadcasting posts in rural areas in the PRC were first pioneered in the Nationalist era. The phenomenal expansion of radio listenership and ownership of receivers in Japanese-controlled Manchukuo and other occupied areas, Alekna argues, laid a foundation of the newsscape in the PRC, constituting what he calls a “constructive” aspect of an otherwise destructive war. Alekna's wide spatial coverage serves as a much-needed corrective to many media studies centered on China's treaty ports: just as his chapter on northeastern China before 1931 reveals “an advanced technological modernity” outside Shanghai, his detailed analysis of rural and interior China shows how the bulk of China's population experienced the information revolution. To supplement the limited government archives in China as well as the lack of reliable statistical data, Alekna makes abundant use of numerous personal memoirs and popular trade/science journals in Chinese as well as records of the Shanghai Municipal Police and US Office of War Information. One can assume that Japanese-language materials will shed further light on the newsscape in the Japanese-occupied areas, a subject which he rightfully emphasizes. In one telling case, Alekna uses the available Chinese archival sources—reports of local broadcasting stations in Xishui County, Hubei Province—to demonstrate the pivotal role of the radio as well as lower cadres in the onset of the great famine during the Great Leap Forward: “the unending stories of success from around the country, and from the local community, made everyone more willing to overlook evidence of failure in front of their eyes” (p. 237). With many examples like this, Alekna's book offers a fresh angle for understanding many familiar events in 20th century China, and is a welcome addition to the expanding scholarship in media studies. By revealing a complex technopolitical process, it also challenges established developmental narratives and social theory. Throughout the book, Alekna highlights the underdeveloped state of newsscape in early 20th century China: low literacy rate, small circulation of newspapers as well as their limited and slow reach due to the poor transportation infrastructure. The onset of radio broadcasting did not fundamentally alter the situation: radio receivers were prohibitively expensive for its population and electricity was scarce beyond urban areas. As a result, the total number of radio receivers and listeners was miniscule when compared with Western countries and Japan around the same time. Alekna notes that in China, similar to colonial India, “for most people, radio was not a direct or even exclusively aural experience” (p. 20). Whereas most histories of radio broadcasting in the West take individualized listening for granted, he argues, much of radio broadcasting in China functioned as “socialized media,” where listening on the street, in broadcast meetings, and through wired loudspeakers was a common experience for tens of millions of people, including the illiterate and the poor. Alekna not only demonstrates that the technopolitical process appears to have expressed itself differently in China (p. 266), but he also offers new insights into the relationship between state and society. For instance, he rejects Jürgen Habermas' notion of the emergence of a bourgeois “public sphere” as an informational space free of the state. Alekna does not see the state as omnipotent either, even as he acknowledges the power of institutions like the state, which he defines as the “elite, decision-making bodies within society” (p. 63). While the state intentionally created the infrastructure that reorganized quotidian experience, he argues, the individual and collective desire for information also drove the technopolitical process (p. 8). In China, he argues, “like other agrarian societies, its people desired technologies and social formations that could promise greater information flows” (p. 6). The widespread demand for information meant that individuals and communities set about reorganizing themselves when the technological means became available, producing a reconfiguration of the rural newsscape. Questioning James Scott's emphasis on the state's scheme of legibility and administrative power, Alekna echoes Bruno Latour's notion of mass action and sees a mass society rising through the reorganization of social practices motivated by the desire for information, albeit in multiple forms and with different possible outcomes (p. 263). Whether one fully agrees with the Alekna's assumption about the fundamental human need for news as well as its transformative potential, or with his characterization of specific newsscape in modern China, there is no doubt that his book makes an important contribution to scholarship, not the least by bringing China into conversation with mainstream media studies and social theory. Seeking News, Making China is an empirically rich, conceptually innovative, and theoretically provocative book. It should interest not only historians of modern China but also anyone thinking about media, technology, and society. The author declares no conflicts of interest.