Chinese media

This is from today's New York Times

From the moment the earthquake struck on May 12, the Chinese government dispatched soldiers, police officers and rescue workers in the type of mass mobilization expected of the ruling Communist Party. But an unexpected mobilization, prompted partly by unusually vigorous and dramatic coverage of the disaster in the state-run news media, has come from outside official channels. Thousands of Chinese have streamed into the quake region or donated record sums of money in a striking and unscripted public response.

It's weird. I've seen snippets of TV coverage from clips on the web -- a reporter talking excitedly from a helicopter in high speed above the disaster zone, as a PLA soldier tossed boxes of aid relief out the open door -- and it certainly seemed "unusual". Usually, in times of natural disaster, especially if there's been any accusations of official corruption in building strength or cleanup efforts, as there has in the Sichuan earthquake, the CCP will restrain the media and prevent live reports or any detailed reporting.

Most commentators have assumed this is because the party wants to position themselves opposite to the irrational autocracy in Burma. There's likely some truth to that, though it seems to be kicking China while they're facing a tragedy. And, certainly, there has been corruption with regard to the building construction, as there always is in China. (I'm less convinced about not planning for the dam, as even industrialized countries with widespread and efficient state capacity can't plan for everything; and as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been any flooding.)

But the mobilization-via-media proves a point I was making a couple of months ago in an essay I wrote for a class of mine at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), about the role of the Chinese media in China's political process (based on English-language sources only). That although the Chinese media do operate under a degree of state control, they do have a meaningful role to play in Chinese politics and society, although this role will not at all resemble (as yet) Western notions of freedom of the press. Drawing people from across the country to come and volunteer is certainly an accomplishment, though it could also be argued that the Chinese people themselves deserve the credit here, rather than the media.

Here's my (please excuse the "academeze") conclusion:

It’s obvious from considering changes since 1978 that the press has expanded its presence in the lives of citizens and politicians, through both a proliferation of newspapers and the internet’s ability to circumvent geographical limitations to stories. The commercial imperatives introduced by market reforms have significantly expanded the permissibility of discussing political options, and though openness is not at the level it was during the lead up to the Tiananmen tragedy, there is so much intellectual opinion and commentary circulating in papers that some analysts are convinced that they may actually shape the government’s agenda, in both foreign policy settings and in the domestic political order.

As illustrated earlier, the press is still open to overt control by the CCP; yet, as one scholar points out, noting that during the Cultural Revolution Mao said he “could not even publish articles defending his own position”, this may reflect the political factionalism inherent to China’s one-party system , and may be broadly similar to the alliances – and leaked documents – between newspapers in the West and political parties in a liberal democracy.

...everywhere the press is used by politicians for obviously political ends. Two can play at that game, anyway. Citizens can use the press just as much as the state; ordinary people increasingly make up for their lack of participation in the political process by contributing to it through the media – tipping off reporters about systemic abuse in the country’s examination system, for example, thereby trigging a journalistic investigation which received a national government response; or consistently informing journalists about localised environmental abuse.

These changes were unimaginable before 1978, and clearly the role of the press in the political process has expanded to some degree. But is this role meaningful? That depends on who asks the question. Newspapers’ role in Chinese politics is meaningful to the extent that citizens are becoming more engaged in the nation’s decision-making and to the extent journalists have less political restraints.

Even when editors are forced to censor articles, they can be quite open about the process, their reasons, and go to great lengths to right the situation by publishing full accounts elsewhere. But to many Western theorists this is not enough: the role of the press is to check the power of all government, regardless of its level; that China’s media seems either unable or unwilling to do this most of the time is self-evidence for a lack of press freedoms necessary for a meaningful journalistic role in politics. Certainly, one should not hold their breath waiting for front page stories on central government corruption or investigations into officials which have not previously been earmarked by the Party.

The arguments put forward in this paper do not constitute an “Asian values” defence of censorship and authoritarian control of the media. Indeed, such an approach would expect a press that is static over time, which refused to evolve when central authority conceded the political space to do so; further, this approach would deny the occasionally vibrant, aggressive – even revolutionary – fervour with which Chinese journalists attacked politicians. The evidence in this paper points to the opposite: that the Chinese press has evolved and grown bolder despite authoritarian control, and that opportunities – such as market reforms or the pre-Tiananmen liberalisation process – were seized vigorously; further, this paper advances the idea that viewing the Chinese press from the extremes of either “Asian values” or from Western conceptions of democratic press freedoms, actually distorts the Chinese press out of its present political reality, and is unable to evaluate its role in the political process with any sense of objectivity.

But in a wider sense, it is at least partially true in most countries that systemic criticism of governmental structures is limited to small-circulation journals read by an educated, comfortable elite; and that mass-market media usually consist of jingoistic drivel that only masquerades as reportage. The hegemonic trust within China’s news media of its systemic government structures should then be expected, as it is common to most countries. When was the last time the mainstream British press castigated Whitehall for engaging in elections? Have large American newspapers at all hinted they would prefer a more benevolent, anti-interventionist communitarian White House to the Bush Administration? Not in recent memory. And so it is worth considering that Chinese journalists have made – in (John King) Fairbank’s words – “a lot more progress” in the past century than their American colleagues, and that: “If they seem still to have a lot farther to go, consider where they had to start from.”

Bearing in mind that I have only analyzed the news media, and not the mass proliferation of politicized commentary online, and the dissident culture of opinion or guerrilla news-writing for non-official sources (and here the jailing of Hu Jia is certainly an outrage), this all points towards a hopeful trend.

I was at a Press Freedom in Beijing conference in Paris in mid-April, and what seemed apparent to some of the journalist/academics there, as opposed to the democratic activists wanting to trojan-horse freedom of speech in China via foreign broadcasts, was that press freedom in China was getting better, and that it seemed the Olympics (and the accompanying media pressures for domestic journalists) were actually going to be a downward blip on an overall upward trend.