and Media in Shanghai

In seeking to explain why Shanghai,China’s economic capital, has a more timid media system than its sibling cities, we examine the political economy of the Shanghai media from the perspective of clientelism in the post-Communist and cultural milieus of what we call “party-market corporatism. ” Through field work we analyze four aspects of clientelism, including media conglomeration, elite circulation, resource allocation, and (lack of) media professionalism.We conclude that Shanghai is at once a “big city ” and yet a “small place: ” a resource-rich city governed by one layer of power authority, hence the distance from the epicenter of power to vari-ous media organizations is so short and direct as to make media control through clientelism very effective and powerful. Clientelism represents one of the three major patterns of party-market corporatism in China’s media sector