The press is under China's thumb

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By ROBYN S. BLUMNER

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 27, 2001

China may have opened its economy over the last 20 years, but its press is another story. Xinhua, which publishes in seven languages and employs 10,000 people, is the largest news agency in the nation. Described as a cross between the Associated Press and the now defunct United States Information Agency, Xinhua is a propaganda organ for the state. Of course, there is nothing unique in that. The country has no independent media source. All domestic news outlets serve at the pleasure of the state -- a fact that becomes perfectly clear when editors push the limits and newspaper offices are instantly shuttered.

Sitting around a wide conference table in the Xinhua agency's downtown offices, our visiting group of 25 columnists and editorial writers is bluntly told by senior editors that they cover and report on whatever the government wants. Often they don't change a word from a government press release.

"Sometimes I have my personal judgment," says correspondent Yuan Bingzhong a bit defensively, "but the gatekeepers say, "No, you are too young, you are not a mature journalist.' " Through this form of self-censorship, the agency constantly filters the news. It's no wonder the English-language China Daily reads like it was put out by China's tourism bureau.

The Xinhua staff point to one encouraging sign. Lately, they say, the media have been permitted to report on government corruption. But we learn from other sources that the central government is merely using the press as a way to police provincial and village-level wrongdoing. As the chain of corruption reaches higher, the reports mysteriously stop.

All this is to be expected in the authoritarian environment of China. But the question for the country's future is whether a free economy can flourish with an intellectually shackled populace. Is it possible to usher in the information age while blocking the Web site of the New York Times and scrambling CNN?

Apparently, Beijing thinks so. While there, the International Herald Tribune arrived at our hotel with the same page missing from every edition. Through a circuitous route, a colleague accessed the paper's Web site (its direct Web address was blocked) and discovered the page contained a story about China's oppression of religious dissidents. This heavy-handed censorship is jarring for Western journalists, but for Rebecca McKinnon, the Beijing bureau chief for CNN, it's business as usual. She says Chinese security forces are stationed at post offices for the purpose of ripping offending pages out of newspapers as they enter the country. The government justifies this "great fire wall" as necessary to prevent social unrest.

If there was one universal message given us by academics, Western diplomats and our Chinese guides alike, it was that social stability is the preeminent domestic concern for the central government of President Jiang Zemin and every decision is measured against this value. The Communist Party government came to power in 1949 as a consequence of a people's rebellion and is scared to death that it will be ousted from power the same way.

Even so, there are some promising signs that a more robust press may be on the horizon. The government is so eager to look like a legitimate player in the world economy that it allows the Xinhua staff to publish financial and economic news free of government controls. Here, the journalists have an opportunity to criticize Beijing by reporting on problems of economic dislocation, unemployment, bankruptcies, unproductive state-owned factories and environmental degradation caused by industrial polluters (again, predominantly state-owned). Through this back-door reporting, objective news finds a way out.

And for the next generation, there's the new journalism program at Tsinghua University, where Professor Li Xiguang is teaching his students the fundamentals of objective reporting. "I am an advocate of American journalism," says Li. "I'm teaching my students watchdog journalism."

So far at least the government has left him and his program alone.

Internationally, China will never be fully trusted until it opens itself to the scrutiny that comes with a free press. The ironic truth for China is that the world stature it so desperately desires is within its grasp, but only after allowing the press out of its grip.

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