Chinese media as a lens of Chinese politics

The information revolution and increasing openness in Chinese society has done wonders for making China more understandable to outsiders, but it's still amazing to me how little things have changed when it comes to understanding Chinese politics and Chinese Communist Party power struggles.

Case in point: The recent return of vice premier Huang Ju to the Politburo's nine-member Standing Committee, after an unexplained five-month absense. He just disappeared from public view earlier this year, and then suddenly reappared, according to the account in the Washington Post by Edward Cody.

Unlike other countries, Chinese media cannot discuss or offer speculation regarding appointments, factionalism, or policy regarding senior state and CCP officials. News must originate from the New China News Agency (新華社). In Huang's case, members of the public did not know he was back on the scene until state television (I assume China Central Television) and the People's Daily (人民日報）mentioned that he was back, and taking part in committee procedings. The Washington Post reporter describes a lot of rumor about why he disappeared; you can read it here.

Getting back to the original point of this post: The central government's methods of letting people know about internal operations -- and observers' methods of making sense of what's going on -- is not much different than it was in the 1970s, or even earlier. Roger Garside, who lived in Beijing in the 1970s, recalls the period after Mao Zedong's death in his book "Coming Alive: China After Mao" (1981) and how state media played a role in understanding political shifts:

“Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for.”

This excerpt is from page 3 of Garside's book.