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Book review: Zheng Tiantian, Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 304 pp., with index and notes. US$22.50. ISBN: 978-0-816-65903-6 (pbk)

and frequently market based forms of censorship and self-censorship help to maintain Party domination of the marketized media. Expanding the emphasis in her prior works on the importance of international capital in China’s communication system, she demonstrates not only the intricacies of those linkages but also the complex division of labor within China’s media structure in which party-state media dominates the news, transnational media provides international and business news and lifestyle coverage to the elite, and domestic media focuses on amusing the masses. In so doing, she argues that the media, though marketized, is not a free media. It is not based on the right of the people to produce their own media, which occurred briefly in the Democracy Wall period when small-scale independent bottom up publications flourished. Nor is it based on the right to be informed which, to a lesser extent, was approached in 1989 when editorial freedom within the party-state media increased. Rather, restrictions on the ownership of private media, exemplified by the closing of two leftist websites because they did not have the minimal capitalization of 10 million RMB (US$1.2 million) (p. 58), reinforce the point that what is presented in the media is dominated by the party-state and related class interests. Unifying this analysis is the argument that all is not simple or unidirectional. Rather, while the media plays a key role in distributing political power and values and contributing to class construction, the transformation of the media itself is contested. Worker and rural populations as well as leftists struggle on unequal terms to construct this communication structure with the party-state and with market-oriented media outlets and their middle class allies who hope to use limited citizen rights to defuse social conflicts, create a (classical) liberal constitutional state and avoid radical social revolution (p. 278). Zhao’s detailed case studies reinforce her argument. Using examples ranging from theoretical controversies over the right to debate neoliberalism to controversies arising in everyday situations, such as that surrounding Sun Zhigang (the first university graduate from his village since 1949 who, because he had left his ID at home, was picked up as an undocumented migrant worker and beaten to death while in police custody in Guangzhou), she demonstrates how such debates are increasingly framed in ways which exclude the viewpoints and voices of vast if not majority elements of the population. The framing of such debates thus contributes to how the party-state continues to use the marketized media to maintain control of the commanding heights in this critical area of society. In short, Zhao skillfully argues that despite the recent advocacy of social harmony by and the perceived populism of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership, China is both an increasingly class divided and a globalized society in a period of ongoing struggle and transition which can be seen through the evolution of its communication structure.