First off the Post : When Media Brokers Crossed the Taiwan Strait

Due to its historical and political complexities, cross-strait relations (the term refers to the interactions between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait) have been portrayed frequently as knotty, thorny and intractable by the media. For the past 20 years, however, the media has perceived itself to be increasingly involved in a continuum of historical cross-strait events, not only as the disseminator in the traditional sense but more remarkably as a media broker between the two political rivals. This extraordinary phenomenon was initially illustrated by a dramatic media event. In order to boost its prestige in the media market, The Independence Evening Post, the first private newspaper published in the Taiwan area, took the initiative of dispatching two journalists Lee Yung-teh and Hsu Lu to the Chinese mainland in September 1987 for a two-week long reporting mission. This initiative represented a lifting of a 38-year-old political taboo that began with the establishments of rival governments in Beijing and Taipei in 1949. The two journalists not only flouted the travel ban to the Chinese mainland imposed by the KMT (the Kuomintang or the Nationalist) government of Taiwan, but also played a vital role in guiding the two adversarial governments into interacting with each other. This historic visit provides an opportunity for an empirical case study of a situation in which journalists acted as media brokers between the two sides. Hence, treating as a case study the two Taiwanese journalists’ visit to the Chinese mainland in 1987, the paper attempts to explore the behaviour of both The Post and its journalists within the conceptual model of media-broker diplomacy originally formulated by Eytan Gilboa and defined as “international mediation conducted and initiated by media professionals”. Based on the conceptual analysis of media-broker diplomacy in cross-strait context, the paper sheds light on the dynamics between media brokers and cross-strait relations and renders three consequent implications.