Media Openings and Political Transitions Glasnost versus Yulun Jiandu Maria Repnikova Communication Department, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA Partial political liberalization presents a double-edged sword for authoritarian regimes: it can increase the risk of democratization and it can also facilitate regime adaptability. This article examines this phenomenon through the prism of the media—an important yet an understudied variable in the study of transition processes. Specifically, the article compares two opposite cases of media opening up: the Soviet policy of glasnost, which facilitated a democratic movement, and China’ s reform-era policy of media supervision, or yulun jiandu, which has thus far contributed to regime durability. The paper demonstrates how the two policies, while similar on the surface, differed significantly in their modes of implementation. In particular, the Chinese approach of allowing media to take on an oversight role has featured a more careful strategic calculus as well as more ambiguity combined with continuous, intensive guidance over the media. The article, therefore, highlights the importance of the practices of implementation of media liberalization, in order to explain political outcomes. POLITICAL LIBERALIZATION AND THE MEDIA Partial political liberalization presents a double-edged sword for authoritarian regimes: it can stimulate a democratic transition and as well as facilitate political adaptability and resilience. Scholarship on democratic transitions under- scores the importance of initial openings in spurring a wider political transformation. In a study of over a dozen cases of democratic transitions in Southern Europe and Latin America, for instance, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter demonstrate that each case started with some form of liberalization (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). Drawing on the analysis of the “third wave” of democratization, Samuel Huntington famously argued that the “halfway house does not stand,” meaning that partial liberalizations are not sustainable (Huntington 1991, 174– 175). Some scholars go as far as to equate liberalization with democratization (Mamadou 1998); others carefully distinguish between the two processes while emphasizing their interactions (Kamrava and Mora 1998). At the same time, in response to a global wave of authoritarianism in the past decade, recent scholarship has shifted away from the transitions paradigm toward analyzing political liberaliza- tion as a feature of these hybrid or semi-authoritarian poli- tical systems (Carothers 2003), a feature that has been referred to as a “democratic enclave” (Gilley 2010). These works demonstrate that state-sanctioned liberalization, pri- marily in the electoral domain, can help sustain authoritarian rule by creating a façade of participation while ensuring that the outcomes align with regimes’ preferences (Morse 2012; Levitsky and Way 2010). The persisting tensions between democratization and authoritarian durability in bounded spaces for political par- ticipation are sharply manifested in the critical, yet largely overlooked domain of the media, as media openings simul- taneously embody threats to, as well as necessary tools for, regimes’ continuing survival in the interconnected world. On the one hand, critical media can both damage a regime’ s reputation and legitimacy (Rawnsley and Rawnsley 1998) and facilitate the emergence of a wider public sphere (Khamis and Vaughn 2011)—factors conducive to demo- cratic transitions. Cases ranging from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring point to the importance of communication spaces for unmasking authoritarian regimes and mobilizing social movements. At the same time, media openings can provide feedback channels for authoritarian regimes that face a skewed information problem Address correspondence to Maria Repnikova, Communication Department, Georgia State University, 25 Park Place, Suite 928, Atlanta, GA 30312, USA. E-mail: mrepnikova@gsu.edu. Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 64, nos. 3–4, 2017, 141–151 Copyright © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1075-8216 (print)/1557-783X (online) DOI: 10.1080/10758216.2017.1307118