A Kinder and Gentler China?
Don't believe reports that Beijing is loosening its grip over the media.
The problem for the censors has become especially acute in recent years as Chinese society has become more open, free, and dynamic and as Hu Jintao has steered the Chinese government backward. Beijing, unfortunately, is in the sixth year of a crackdown. China is thought to have the most sophisticated media and internet controls in the world, yet the mighty one-party state has had trouble keeping up with an emboldened and defiant citizenry.
Especially in the streets. There are tens of thousands of protests each year in the People’s Republic. The central government occasionally releases statistics, but it is unclear whether any of them are accurate. Jerome Cohen of the Council of Foreign Relations thinks that there could have been more than 150,000 of them in 2005. If anything, the number has gone up since then.
Last month, the Chinese have been particularly unruly. In northwest Gansu province, about 1,000 rioters attacked a government office, smashed cars, and beat police and officials. In southern Guangdong, shop owners took to the streets, as did homeowners in Beijing and residents in Hebei. Taxi cab and bus drivers have staged an extraordinary series of demonstrations across China. Perhaps of most concern to the regime are recent street protests of workers, many of them demanding back pay from bankrupt businesses. At least 67,000 factories have closed in the first half of this year, and many more have and will go under, leaving employees short of pay, out of luck, and extremely discontented.
In the past, the Chinese central government hid protests from foreigners and even its own people. Today, that’s just not possible given the advent of cheap, mass communications in a country that claims the most number of internet users in the world. Therefore, the always cunning and sometimes pragmatic authorities in Beijing have hit upon a new strategy to control information. Instead of attempting to hide bad news, officials are trying to be the first to report it.
Early reporting gives them the opportunity to spin events. “They are trying to control the news by publicizing the news,” a Chinese academic, with close ties to propaganda officials, told Reuters. “Comrades on the news battle line” — journalists in Western parlance — “must fully recognize the great responsibility they bear,” said Hu Jintao in his June 20 remarks. They must play a role in “consolidating a common ideological foundation for the whole Party and the people of every ethnic group in the whole country to unite in struggle.”
What does this mean in practice? Journalists covering the Sichuan earthquake, which took about 85,000 lives this May, were initially given more latitude to report events. But as soon as local governments recovered and central propaganda authorities set upon the “correct” line, coverage uniformly adopted a Maoist heroic tone, praising relief workers — especially soldiers — and shunning talk of shoddy building construction that led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Yet the new strategy, although sophisticated, was short lived. When journalists began to report on the collapsed schools that triggered so much anger among residents in the quake area, central authorities resorted to the old way of doing things by issuing a notice banning coverage of the matter. Local officials then detained reporters, and paramilitary troops blocked access to others of them. Some things never change in dictatorial states.
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Gordon G. Chang is the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World and The Coming Collapse of China.
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8 Comments
1. dan:ah, the communists. it seems they adopt strategies to entice the willing West to fund their development, while coyly maintaining the ability to administer their state with a minimum of concessions to Western expectations. the question is, what is the reality? have the communists simply acknowledged the weaknesses of their grasp of political economy, or are they confident that communist control is strong enough to allow much greater latitude than their more overtly totalitarian predecessors? hard to say, ultimately. but then, the CCP still does rule China, and the KGB still does rule Russia; Cuba is run by Raul, Vietnam by its clique, DPRK by Jong Il (or his successors); the former Soviet Republics of Asia by KGB or Central Committee members. Scheverdnadze in Georgia had ruled until Saakishvili took over in 2004 – Scheverdnadze, who had been a member of the Soviet Politburo since 1972. and now we see how Georgia is treated by the “new Russia”!
who knows, really, what is going on these states? with any luck, they really are as confused and prostrate to the realities of the market as so many analysts seem to believe. i for one, though, have trouble believing it.
Dec 2, 2008 - 6:28 am 2. dan:has anyone else read ion mihai pacepa’s book “red horizon”? as former acting head of the romanian intelligence service he divulges many interesting details. the most interesting, in retrospect, is ceaucesceau’s major propaganda operation during pacepa’s tenure: to induce the West to believe that his Romania was in fact a Soviet Bloc renegade, and that if only they would send him grain deals and make technology transfers and cooperate in military and diplomatic initiatives Romania could be pulled away from the Kremlin and the Eastern Bloc would begin to fracture.
the culmination? carter invited ceaucesceau to the white house. and they used the same strategy with arafat too – “always keep promising them peace, and they will always keep giving you money and weapons and increasing recognition, but you will never have to actually deliver anything to them but speeches.”
Dec 2, 2008 - 7:35 am 3. Ann:Dear, dear Mr. Chang, Where did you get the idea that normal people who have been paying attention were even tempted to believe that China was loosening the reins on the media?
We were all choking and spitting our Coke when apparently a bunch of MSM types were so excited about the “media freedom” being offered prior to the Olympics that they became shocked! Shocked, I tell you! when those freedoms didn’t exactly work out.
Don’t worry. We’re not surprised or shocked. Beijing can’t afford to let up for one minute. They know the peasants would indeed be at the gates and over the walls the moment they realized there was a little itty bit of freedom.
Being in the position you are, can you please tell us something we don’t know?
I get so very tired of the endless dumbing down of public discourse. Folks, if you scan the opinion/discussion articles re politics, international pressures, financial messes, etc. etc. 95% of those articles consist of things that we already know; or, they present as facts things that we know not to be true (in which case, apparently there are a bunch of people who still do believe). Not only have we lost the language; we have apparently completely misplaced any repository of commonly accepted knowledge as to what is true and what is not true, what works and what doesn’t work. No wonder we have such a mess. Neither public nor private discussions have a common meeting ground any more for “what is so”. We’re starting from “zero” all the time and having to rebuild what should be firmly in place.
We have a looming Presidency which will be presided over by someone who doesn’t like America and doesn’t care who knows it.
We have a media which refuses to use the phrase “Islamic terrorists” while hundreds die.
We have schools fighting for shrinking dollars because citizens are sick and tired of being taxed for demonstrably incompetent teaching methods governed by political correctness and teachers whose only motive is job security.
…and we have a Congress which still thinks that if you run out of money, you just write another check.
If you and I lived the way that our institutions are functioning, we’d all either starve to death or be in jail.
Dec 2, 2008 - 9:42 am 4. gao:Ann, don’t be too generalizing. The cn censorship only blocks a not-that-wide selection of topics and people know what these topics are. Toilets run awash when CCTV begins its daily news sesstion. Netizens surely know where to find information, don’ they? For all pratical purposes getting 98% info on the web isn’t a that crippling suprression from 100% available. Of course, unless you make a living by that 2%.
Dec 2, 2008 - 10:40 am 5. valle:The West is making a dangerous bet.
Dec 2, 2008 - 11:18 am 6. Ann:Gao–I appreciate your comments. Assuming you have experience and insight here, where do we (I) “go wrong” then in assuming the censorship is actually more than it actually is? It seems to me (from my reading of various China blogs, travelogues and Epoch Times, for example)that there IS an ice cold and rock hard limit in place which is crossed only at the personal peril of any writer (casual or professional)and which leaves a high percentage of information unavailable to the Chinese public.
Would you be saying that I am perhaps responding simply to the “shock experience of the hard line” (regardless of what percentage of news is prohibited)rather than the extent of things actually hidden behind the line?
It seems to me some pretty significant things are outside the bounds of open discussion and simple dissemination of facts: religious oppression and related arrests (including Falun Gong), truthful news regarding manufacturing performances and quality control issues, closures of businesses, the problems faced by petitioners who cross into subject areas that are forbidden, facts re poor quality resulting in earthquake damage, movement of troops in southwest China, …for example.
Are you seriously saying that all of these constitute less than 2% of potential “open” coverage? If you are, I’m interested in understanding your perspective.
Dec 2, 2008 - 11:20 am 7. Kenneth Elder:The Chinese so called Communist party have gone from Communism to Fascism, totalitarian capitalism. The party promotes Atheistic capitalism which suppresses all forms of meditation since they want to keep the workers mentally enslaved to superficiality and consumerism. Welcome to the Brave New World of totalitarian consumerism.
Dec 6, 2008 - 8:27 pm 8. David Zhuang:My advice:
Get a life, Gordon!
Stop hating China so much
Dec 17, 2008 - 12:55 pm