The explosion of the commercial media sphere in China over the last decade hasn't been particularly subtle, especially if you're anything like us and walk past multiple Chinese newsstands in the morning. But let's look beyond the way kiosks have traded promoting the Beijing Evening News for hawking glossy cosmetics adverts and celebrity gossip rags, and ask how the rise of a for-profit motive in the press has affected the way the Chinese government regulates the industry, and what the consequences of this are for the rise of what we traditionally think of as the role of the fourth estate in Western democracies.

As we turn our focus to these questions this week, Kaiser Kuo is delighted to be joined by Daniela Stockmann, assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Leiden and the woman who quite literally wrote the book on this subject with the publication of Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, a fact-heavy tome that goes into detail about how China has managed to maintain its apparatus of media control despite its ostensible shift towards a commercially-oriented media sector.

On a final note, we should point out that we've just put together a new version of Popup Chinese platform, and one of the features of the new site is a fancy new javascript-powered audio player that will let you listen to all of our shows directly using your iPhone or Android or flash-free tablet. That said, if you still want to download today's show as a standalone mp3 file, please consider yourself welcome to do so. And if you have any feedback on the show or suggestions about guests you'd like to see us host in the future.