Political scandal at the end of ideology? The mediatized politics of the Bo Xilai case

In this article, I use the high-profile Bo Xilai case to illustrate the dialectics of media and politics in contemporary China. I start by explaining some of the similarities and key differences between mediatized politics in the West and in China. This leads to an emphasis on the ideological dimension of media logic that is largely missing from discussions derived from a liberal democratic context. I then analyze the dialectics of the mediatized ideological struggle and politicized media logic running through the Bo Xilai scandal. In the last section, I summarize the theoretical contributions that the Chinese case makes to the study of mediatized politics.