Freeing the Press: How Field Environment Explains Critical News Reporting in China

This article examines critical news reporting in China as an instance of collective resistance in authoritarian contexts. It draws on field theory to understand why and how news media in certain localities were able to resist political pressure and report critically on important social problems, despite limited media freedom. Through a comparative study of six newspaper organizations in the three coastal cities of Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai, the article demonstrates the significance of local field environment for critical news reporting. The findings reveal how site-specific field environments can alternately enable or constrain collective resistance in an authoritarian context. In localities where the journalist communities were paired with a competitive newspaper market and less unified state agencies, the field environment allowed journalists to produce critical news reports. But when the local political and economic fields were less fragmented and competitive, respectively, the opposite was true.