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conglomeration” would produce a change from Soviet-style propaganda to transparency and eventual supervision by a public sphere. Far from it, says the author: “the Party-state has actually strengthened its ties with media management”, with pernicious consequences for journalistic practices. Precisely because of the new style of corporate governance has the state maintained political control, while the media remain loyal conveyors of official doctrine. Xie concludes that the commercial agenda “leads media credibility and accountability to nowhere but rhetoric and illusion”. On media activism, Chapter 6 argues the inadequacy of reading the present relation between media and state by way of pre-Mao analogies. Here, the author uses the “skylight” metaphor – blank pages to indicate journalistic protest during the pre-1949 Guomindang government – to show that the recent cases of the use of “skylights” are compromised by commercial collusion. Such consensus is shown to merely strengthen the state’s “adaptive management” of the contradiction between communist ideology and the capitalist economic base, exacerbating the uneasy alliance of media, politics and profit and unmasking the “state-versus-media dichotomy” as no more than a rhetorical device covering up a depoliticised and hollow media professionalism. The concluding chapter resumes the conceptual centrality of “transparency” as a critical tool exposing the “transparency illusion” as a veil behind which the oppressive collaboration of state and media is able to thrive unimpeded. Methodologically, a flaw seems to me to be the author’s unnecessary reliance on an explication of how concepts do their work in their “relations to other concepts of the system”, a theory that inevitably leads to infinite regress. Another unnecessary claim is that empirical case studies “verify a theory in the real world”. At best, they can only corroborate a theory. A third minor worry is that the Habermasian public sphere is said to be vitiated by its idealist presuppositions, while “transparency” is not. But these are minor shortcomings in an otherwise carefully researched book, richly rewarding the reader with empirical data and a consistent, critical strategy. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the contested relation between state, media and the public in today’s China.