The rise and fall of tabloid journalism in post-Mao China: ideology, the market, and the new media revolution

This chapter investigates the bumpy journey that tabloid journalism in post-Mao China has experienced. From being totally banned in the Mao era from 1950s to 1970s and heatedly debated in the 1980s, tabloid journalism in China flourished and enjoyed its golden decade from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. It has however rapidly declined since then and has ceased to exist in any real sense as a result of the interplay of some drastic ideological, communication, technological, and media market changes. It is argued that an investigation of the rise and fall of tabloid journalism in the People’s Republic may shed some new light on a better understanding of not just China’s tabloid press sector itself, but also the country’s journalism in general and even some of the common issues regarding the changing ecology of print journalism in diverse social contexts.