• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Analysis: World's Media Focus on China in Run-Up to 2008

Posted on: Monday, 14 November 2005, 09:00 CST

Text of editorial analysis by Peter Feuilherade of BBC Monitoring at NewsXchange 2005 in Amsterdam

The immense scale of China's current economic and social transformations has got the world's media scrambling to cover the story, delegates at the recent NewsXchange media industry conference in Amsterdam heard.

Domestically, the Chinese media are under pressure to spread the good news about economic prosperity.

But both local and foreign media in China face different sets of problems and pressures in reporting.

Some analysts of the media in China believe that with the leadership's concerns about political instability and how it is reported, the news and media sector may be among the last to open up.

Pushing the limits

As the number of radio, TV, newspaper, magazines and web outlets in China has mushroomed, so has the number of journalists. The total stands at about 750,000, according to figures this month from the All-China Journalists Association.

The Communist Party's Publicity Department (formerly called the Propaganda Department), under the direct control of the Party Central Committee, regularly issues instructions on how sensitive subjects should be treated, and Chinese journalists who defy them risk detention and legal action.

But although China is going through a severe crackdown on the media, many Chinese journalists continue to - in the words of NewsXchange delegates - "push the limits" in exposing corruption and medical scandals, and reporting labour disputes and abuses of power by local officials.

So successful were many of these exposes that the authorities brought in rules forbidding a journalist from one province from going to other provinces to report on events there without official permission.

The majority of speakers at the conference felt that despite censorship, China was becoming a freer place for the media.

Huang Hung, CEO of the China Interactive Media Group in Beijing, said: "As regards social and political coverage, we feel a lot more control of the government on the media. But historically we've moved forward quite a bit." She cited the example of a weekly programme on state-run China Central TV which was based on Western-style investigative journalism.

David Schlesinger, global managing editor of Reuters, commented: "Taking a long-term look at the way trends are going, the Chinese media have changed tremendously."

China's internet users, who now total 105 million, have been targeted by the authorities too. In the latest of a series of regulations this year, the State Council (cabinet) in September banned the publication online of news content that "harms national security, reveals state secrets, subverts political power, undermines national unity or inflames ethnic hatred".

Jaime Florcruz, CNN Beijing bureau chief, told the conference: "Just as Chinese get more sophisticated in getting around internet blocks, the government is inventing new ways to reinforce the great firewall of China."

The crackdown on web surfers comes against the backdrop of the government appearing to pull back in mid-2005 from allowing foreign media groups to invest and operate more widely in China, on the grounds of defending "national cultural security".

As for the international media, the government rigorously controls the number of correspondents and people based in China that each foreign organization is allowed to have. If accreditation is for Beijing, legally a journalist cannot leave the capital without permission to go on a reporting trip.

Some media organizations based in Beijing push the rules as far as they can by doing secret reporting trips. But the risk is that people may not talk to foreign reporters who don't have proper accreditation, and reprisals may follow.

Foreign and Chinese journalists each face different sets of repercussions. For foreign journalists, at worst they could be kicked out and their organization might face problems in getting staff back into China to report. A Chinese reporter could end up in jail, which is why Chinese journalists sometimes self-censor their reporting.

2008 media invasion

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, major news organizations are already focusing more on China and commissioning a wider range of stories from the country.

One UK-based China analyst believes that in decades gone by, news reports by many media, including the BBC, reinforced old stereotypes, with less sensitivity to the fact that there is more to China.

Several speakers at NewsXchange argued that China now deserves to be reported in a more complex and sensitive way, because global audiences are after more than just hard politics. They want reports about sport, entertainment, lifestyle, science and technology, health and social issues. But delegates also noted that foreign media have not always been able to report such stories from China in depth, often because access has been restricted.

Mutual understanding

The predicted massive influx of foreign media into China in 2008 for the Olympics is set to change how China's bureaucracy interacts with the world's media.

Among many top-level Chinese spokesmen, there is currently a low level of understanding about the West and its institutions, including the media. The insistence on "spinning" coverage lingers on.

As a recent article by Mure Dickie in the Financial Times put it, the Communist Party of China "still holds firmly to the Maoist tenet that retaining power requires mastery of the `two barrels': the barrel of the gun and the barrel of the pen".

But media analysts at the NewsXchange gathering said that in recent years, middle-level Chinese officials have begun to acquire a greater awareness of how the international media operate, and a readiness to meet their news requirements.

Source: BBC Monitoring Media

More News in this Category