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The Media and the Courts: Towards Competitive Supervision?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

Benjamin L. Liebman
Benjamin L. Liebman
Affiliation:
Columbia Law School. Email: bliebm@law.columbia.edu
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Abstract

Scholarship on Chinese governance has examined a range of factors that help to explain the resilience of authoritarianism. One understudied aspect of regime resilience and institutionalization has been the growing importance of supervision by a range of party-state entities. Examining court–media relations in China demonstrates that “competitive supervision” is an increasingly important tool for increasing state responsiveness and improving accountability. Court–media relations suggest that China is seeking to develop novel forms of horizontal accountability. Placing such relations in a broader institutional context also helps to explain why common paradigms used to analyse them may be inapplicable in China.

Keywords

Chinacourtsmediasupervisionhorizontal accountabilityauthoritarianism
Type
Special Section on the Chinese Media
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 208 , December 2011 , pp. 833 - 850
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2011

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72 Andreas Schedler, “Conceptualizing accountability” in Schedler, Diamond and Plattner, The Self-restraining State, p. 19.

73 Ibid. p. 20.