At the height of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) Chinese leaders could mobilize hundreds of millions of people simultaneously. How did this capability evolve? What was the significance of news and communications technology to the emergence of a Chinese mass society? What is the relationship between technology, news, media, and politics more generally? Answering these questions, the introduction establishes this book's perspective on the history of news, arguing that it must be understood intermedially, and that as the result of the dialectical interaction of technology and politics.

The events of the anti-colonial May Fourth Movement are taken as a case study of the newsscape of China before mass media and mass politics. The concept of newsscape is introduced and elaborated through illustrations of the infrastructures, geographies, and practices of news within the Chinese cultural and political context.

Techniques of mass politics and mass communications are produced dialectically together through what I call the technopolitical process. In this chapter, the origins and unity of this technopolitical process are explored through the simultaneous foundation of Leninist mass parties and broadcasting in China. The chapter also investigates the social and political meanings ascribed to popular radio listening through the magazines and newspapers articles devoted to the practice.

Competition with foreign mass-oriented states in advanced stages of the technopolitical process drove the Manchurian state to construct a more complex newsscape centered around an elaborate radio network. Exploring this story up until the Japanese takeover in the 1931 Mukden Incident, the chapter illustrates how engineers, soldiers, and politicians worked together to build the technological infrastructures of news. In contrast to most existing scholarship, this chapter thus places a 'warlord' polity at the center of China's technopolitical narrative.

The radio profoundly reshaped the experience of news and politics in the 1930s, though in unexpected ways. Through radio newspapers, some rural areas experienced daily news for the first time. Illiterate workers could listen-in for free on street-side loudspeakers. While demonstrating that people experienced news with greater contemporaneity as the crises of late 1930s mounted, the chapter emphasizes the intermediality of that phenomenon. Radio's place within the newsscape can only be understood contextually.

The drive for information lay near the heart of the Chinese wartime experience as civilians desperately sought news. A network of thousands of small radio newspapers behind enemy lines kept Nationalist communications open, while Japanese-occupation governments constructed a robust news and propaganda network, reshaping the newsscape of China. The war thus deepened the technopolitical process, though largely through the efforts of the Japanese and collaborationists, a fact which overturns established narratives of the war's impact on Chinese society.

The voice of news and authority on early Chinese radio was largely female, a techno-social gendering that marked the Chinese newsscape as distinctive. This was particularly true for the Communist forces. In fact, at war's end Communist women led the charge to take over Japanese-built broadcasting stations, co-opt Japanese technicians, and insert themselves into the existing newsscape throughout the country. The chapter thus also highlights the Communist Party's dependence on established infrastructures in years before its seizure of power.

In the post-1949 'socialized media' environment, radio listening became required and participatory; citizens listened hours a day. The radio networks gave the Center the power to synchronize the nation, keeping everyone apace of each campaign. It enabled society to move as one body and, I argue, radically expanded the possibilities of national political life. Radio monitoring stations were established in rural areas throughout the country to received news and government directives, becoming a key institution in the foundation of the new People's Republic. The chapter concludes by illustrating the role these stations played in the disaster of the Great Leap Forward.

This chapter offers the reader a new analysis of the Culture Revolution as communications event. The newsscape of the Cultural Revolution reflected a society saturated with information. Small groups and individuals seized the means of communications. Tracing events throughout the newsscape, the chapter demonstrates how broadcasting helped synchronize political events and practices across the urban-rural divide. Examining the breakdown of social order in the first two years of the period, the chapter emphasizes the non-teleological nature of the technopolitical process.

The conclusion meditates on the centrality of news in human experience. Driven by a desire for news, people reorganize their behaviors and, as a consequence, their societies, leading to the adoption of mass communications technologies and mass social formations. Bringing the reader up to the present day, the chapter offers some final thoughts on the relation of time-sensitive information and politics, and points towards the conclusion that the effects of the technopolitical process are not inevitable, but choices.