It’s no secret that foreign media has entertained sweet dreams of courting the Chinese market.
The Chinese regime recently pushed their agenda for legitimacy on the world stage during the World Media Summit in Beijing.
Xinhua News Agency, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, hosted the event, with co-sponsors such as world media veterans Reuters, AP, Agence France-Presse, Itar-Tass, Kyodo News, News Corporation, U.S. Cable News International, the BBC, and Google. According to Xinhua, over 100 international media and more than 40 domestic media enrolled in the summit.
The many politically-motivated ideas of the Chinese regime, buffered by the world media summit, are entirely different from those that go through the minds of Western media tycoons. These media have hoped to exchange market opportunities through supporting the Chinese summit. Since the 1990s, foreign media has dreamed of capturing the Chinese market.
For the past 20 years, these dreams have risen up and been dashed by various provisions of the Chinese regime, over and over again. The dreams have risen once again, like the proverbial phoenix. Now Western media has unwittingly become intoxicated by their own dreams.
The summit held extraordinary significance for Beijing. The Chinese regime is notorious for ironclad control of its media—Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily, and China Central TV Station are all just mouthpieces of the Party.
In days without significant major events to report on, these entities dispassionately carry out the most basic functions of media by reporting on finance, market trends, social events, life, and travel.
But these mouthpieces will invariably display their true colors when challenged about national events, such as the Olympics, domestic ethnic group incidents in Tibet or Xinjiang, or anything related to politics or social stability. Its ostentatious, clown-like behavior is in stark contrast to Western media outlets.
Xinhua News Agency, as a media that lacks dignity, is well aware of how it is perceived by its international counterparts, as well as its reputation as an outlier in the media industry.
While international media has co-sponsored the summit, it however has a completely different agenda from Beijing. It is appropriate to say that the parties make strange bedfellows.
The Chinese regime is exploiting the summit to showcase its non-military power (soft power), and Xinhua, as a host, is now able to prove its authentic status, with the intent to claim for itself the coveted status of the world’s media leader. The use of the word “summit” is no coincidence, in its insinuation of highest and best. To the Chinese regime, the G8 Summit is the gathering of the leaders of world powers, while the World Media Summit correlates to the gathering of the major media players of these world powers.
In the words of Xinhua News, “Cooperation and development are conceived as the aim of the World Media Summit.” This objective is almost identical to that of the G8 Summit. The level of intensity has been taken up many notches higher than the world Chinese Language Media Assembly held a few years ago.
The Chinese-language media assembly was merely a gathering of the Chinese unified governmental agencies and directly or indirectly propped up by the Chinese regime. The World Media Summit, however, has major media participants, including England, the U.S., France, Russia and Japan.
The joint status of the participation of these heavy hitters is dozens of times stronger than the contingency of participants of the overseas Chinese language media—their participation indicates that the increasingly stronger soft power persuasion that the regime relies on has put its image on a par with that of the United States.
The Summit was held in the Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese regime stages its annual Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and National People's Congress (NPC.) The location somewhat lent an air of gravity to the summit, with a not-so-subtle wink at the Chinese people that foreign media outlets are playing the role of “politically consultative (political vase)” in China under the regime's rule.
In Chapter Ten of my book, The Fog of Censorship: Media Control in China, I analyzed the potential to penetrate the Chinese media industry. I discussed that to allow foreign media to enter the Chinese market is like an allegory from Aesop’s Fables. A farmer sped up a donkey by waving a stalk in front of the donkey’s nose. The Chinese regime has been playing the farmer, and some of the foreign media have been the donkey attracted to the stalk—the permission to enter the Chinese media market.
The most universally known donkey is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, also a sponsor of the summit. His experience in China has been detailed in the book, Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife, written by his former assistant, Australian journalist Bruce Dover. The book describes how Murdoch has tried to enter the Chinese market by kowtowing to Beijing and compromising his conscience to build his business empire.
In 2005, when the world’s media were singing in chorus the praises of China, they considered that such an event would allow them a way into the Chinese market. But this fond dream was turned on its head when, in August, six governmental departments, including the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Culture, Radio, Film and Television, and the General Administration of Press and Publication sent out the “Guideline to Strengthen Management of Cultural Product Imports.” Since then, several years have passed without hearing the idiotic choruses of the foreign press.
Curtailing talks does not mean that dreaming can be arrested. On July 22 this year, China issued a “Cultural Industry Promotion Plan,” claimed to be the 11th largest industry development plan, after the development in textile and light industries. Its purpose is to revitalize and guide the future development of the Chinese cultural industry.
Some people believe this plan will attract more social capital and foreign capital for China’s cultural industry. Thus many foreign media groups view it as an opportunity, and have started fantasizing about how the industrialized media could facilitate China’s freedom of press.
These major foreign media put down their posturing and joined the long-time media outlier, Xinhua News Agency, in the unprecedented world media summit. Their sole intent is to open up the media market in China. As to whether or not it will help to facilitate media freedom in China, they know the prospects could be unrealistic.
What these journalists have been facing in China may prove that the freedom of media in China is far from becoming a reality. One participant, Google, for instance, knows well how to cooperate and comply with the Chinese regime to strengthen control over the Internet.
It is fair to say that the World Media Summit is a show, co-staged by both the Chinese government and Western media. Through this image-enhancing effort, the Chinese government gets to method act its way through the play with soft power, whereas the Western media, in exchange for playing gratuitous roles as supporting characters in the Summit, entertain hopes of winning the opportunity to enter the Chinese media market.
Read the original Chinese article.
Originally published in Human Rights in China, a biweekly Chinese journal.
