A distinguished group of panelists, each of whom has personal experiences with the news media in China, met on Monday, Nov 1, at the Heritage Foundation to hold a lively discussion of the current working environment for journalists in Communist China for both foreign and native journalists.
The assumption of this forum was that the media serves as an important barometer of the likelihood China will one day become a democracy. The way a state regards its media—whether free or unfree—can serve as a guide to how much it can tolerate criticism, and how much it trusts its own people to know the truth. The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, DC ‘think tank,’ frequently holds forums and lectures and publishes books and papers on Asia policy from a conservative perspective.
To set the tone for the meeting, Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mi) was invited to make some introductory remarks. Rep McCotter, a member of the newly formed Congressional China Caucus, has spoken out in the past on ending the human rights violations in China. He took on the widespread belief often stated that “economic prosperity will ineluctably lead to democratic reform” in China.
He mentioned a new obstacle to democracy taking hold—prosperity. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the people could see their government’s policies and lies by “looking over the wall and seeing what they did not have.” The Congressman asked, “What happens within the wall, when you have everything you want for your material needs?” Does democracy then become a dangerous thing in your mind? And what kind of democracy would it be if such a thing did take hold in China as some are predicting?
McCotter said to answer these questions, we can look at how the media is regarded. The “media acts as a bellwether of what will happen.” In China, we see a “crackdown on satellite dishes, text messages intercepted and traced back, cyber police on the internet, and the great wall of sound preventing radio waves from coming in.”
Worse yet, many Western companies have assisted these developments. “At the end of the day, what kind of democracy will there be in China?”, he asked rhetorically. As the Chinese people strive to achieve democracy, how will the West feel in the future that we “helped a totalitarian government spy upon them, imprison them, and kept them from becoming free?”
The panelists, who spoke after Congressman McCotter’s departure, painted a bleak picture of the Chinese government’s approach to the free press. Thirty-one journalists are in prison, according to Lucie Morillon, Washington Director of Reporters Without Borders, who described China as the “world’s biggest prison for journalists.” Ms. Morillon described their report on Xinhua News Agency, which is the state-controlled news media for mainland China.
Xinhua is the world’s largest news bureau, disseminating 1,000 reports a day, employing more than 8,000 people. Morillon said, “Nothing can be seen, heard, or said in China without prior approval of the government.” She described how investigative journalism is an alien concept; reporters are not trained to go out and check a source.
A list of subjects the media is not allowed to disclose was enumerated upon by Dan Southerland, VP and Executive Director of Radio Free Asia. High level corruption is rarely allowed to be investigated unless the culprits are fallen leaders. No coverage is allowed of riots in the countryside, farmers’ issues, and petitioning. Religious subjects are avoided; there is no coverage of “the propaganda campaign against the Falun Gong spiritual movement.”
When the Pope died, no Catholics loyal to the Vatican could be interviewed. History of the Communist Party is a forbidden subject. How many millions died from Mao’s campaigns is not discussed, according Southerland, who was the Washington Post Bureau Chief in Beijing from 1985-1990. A New York Times reporter has been in jail for about a year now for merely revealing Jiang Zemin’s retirement from the military commission, he said.
Foreign affairs coverage is absent too. Nothing about the sales of military technology overseas is mentioned. Chinese are kept ignorant of developments in Taiwan. In July 2003, when 500,000 demonstrators marched in Hong Kong against Beijing’s imposed Anti-Sedition Law, the number wasn’t reported, nor were there any pictures. This huge protest was hardly mentioned on the mainland, and what was said was only from the Beijing perspective.
However, some reporting on topics formerly excluded are allowed now. For example, the national disaster death tolls are no longer held as “state secrets.” Limited coverage is allowed on health related issues, AIDS, bird flu, mining explosions, prostitution and gambling, and corruption. However, good investigative journalism is missing, and it is a rare journalist who would ever find “the political system responsible for negative developments in China.”
The psychology of how the reporting system works in China at a daily newspaper was described by Liu Kin-Ming, who is a political columnist for the Apple Daily, the largest daily newspaper in Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong, since 1997, became united with “Red” China, the city has held a special status and retains some press freedom, which Liu described as subtly being eradicated. Liu explains how the atmosphere has changed in the press room since the handover. “No one says, ‘you can’t write this story.’ No! Somehow… you just know.”
Liu was describing the “self-censorship” so often mentioned. He explained that you can’t prove there is censorship. He was simply told, “Readers are not interested” in an article against the Chinese regime. “You have to stop” [writing them]. “They don’t fire you,” he says, “they just make your life miserable, and you can’t do anything but move on to another paper.”
Originally, at the time of the handover, many thought Hong Kong would spread its democracy to the China mainland. Now, he says, “Hong Kong is becoming an ordinary Chinese city,” and “Journalists sound more and more like government officials.”
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