Maria Repnikova's talk will address the key facet of her book project on the relations between China's critical journalists and the state. She will introduce how critical journalism is managed by the state and negotiated by journalists on routine bases in the past decade, drawing on the bottom-up perspective of over 100 media professionals working at nationally reputable investigative news outlets. She will categorise and explain journalists' experiences with different types of restrictions, including pre-publication censorship, limited access to official information, and post-publication coercion, and discuss creative tactics journalists use to navigate this complex political landscape. The findings from Repnikova's research hold policy implications for Western efforts at fostering civil society and information openness in complex closed societies, like China. Specifically, she demonstrates that in order to provide effective media assistance, it is integral to first grasp the experiences of journalists pushing the boundaries of the permissible on the ground, and then to equip them with skills and frameworks to accomplish their goals. Repnikova concludes with some innovative ideas for better engaging China's critical journalists as integral civil society actors, and some comparisons to similar research carried out in the Russian context.
Maria Repnikova is a scholar of China's media governance and society. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication, completing a book manuscript on relations between critical journalists and the party-state. She holds a doctorate (DPhil) in politics from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In addition to China's media politics, Repnikova's current research engages with China's crisis communication, digital persuasion, external propaganda, as well as Russia's information politics, and the role of global tech companies in closed societies. She has spent over two years in China carrying out fieldwork for the book and other research projects, including a year on China-Russia border as a Fulbright Scholar.