Media Products as Law: The Mass Media as Enforcers and Sources of Law in China

摘要

Government propaganda so permeates Chinese society, it is impossible to escape its reach. Given this fact, the relationship between law and propaganda is an important subject for study. To my knowledge, it has not been studied before now, except in my previous examination of the relationship between the media and China's legal bureaucracy. In that study, I found that the legal bureaucracy is closely aligned with the state-run media, and that the commercialization of the last two decades of the twentieth century did not loosen this connection, at least with respect to laws that fall into a realm labeled "political."1 In this study, I probe more deeply the problem of how closely bound propaganda and law are in China.