Posted on 12/24/2001 10:02:56 AM PST by super175
Good news is news, bad news is not news, is how Professor Li Xiguang, dean of the Department of Communications at Tsinghua University in Beijing, describes the attitude of the propagandists who have traditionally controlled China's official media. And he adds: Always make bad news look like good news.
However, according to Professor Li, in recent years the Chinese press has gradually won new freedoms, including freedom to make money, to debate politics, to publish unflattering opinions - and to report bad news. He attributed the progress to forces unleashed by market reforms and globalisation, as well as new technologies and the Internet.
The conventional ideology that the Chinese Government would not loosen control of the press is not supported by the empirical evidence in such newspapers like China Youth Daily, he said at a seminar at the University of Hong Kong last Monday. The seminar was the first in a series on China's Media After the WTO, sponsored by the university's Journalism and Media Studies Centre.
China formally joined the World Trade Organisation on December 11. Its party propagandists, too, are gearing up for new challenges. A recent article in a provincial party paper, Gansu Ribao, declared that the accession to the WTO has not changed the ruling position of the Chinese Communist Party and there will be no fundamental changes in the operation mechanism and competition environment of China's news media.
A collision between Asian and Western cultures is unavoidable, it warned, and foreign lifestyles will surely sneak into China. Party newspapers, it said, should strengthen the role of early warning and guidance.
But it did recognise the need for reform so that party newspapers could meet the demands for news and information from readers of different levels and guide the people to rationally understand foreign culture.
Certainly, in the future, even government mouthpieces will have to learn to be more sophisticated. Hitherto, propaganda journalism has often been crude. A Chinese poet, writing in the January 1999 issue of the monthly journal Poems, provided examples of the kind of good-news headlines in the official press: There have been no bad train accidents, Public servants have not taken bribes in recent years, and Drug stores do not sell fake drugs.
Party papers give top priority to reports on party or government meetings. Thus, the top 10 stories in the People's Daily were led by the first meeting ofthe Ninth National People's Congress, a joint working meeting of the Central Committee and the State Council, and a comprehensive victory against flooding fought under the leadership of the party's Central Committee with Comrade Jiang Zemin as the core. The latter is an example of bad news, the flooding, presented as good news.
By contrast, the top stories in the China Youth Daily that year were the passing of a law on village committees, which indicated that China is taking the first legal step towards democracy, the direct election of party secretaries in a county in Shanxi province, and an expose of how three farmers who had a brief argument with some township cadres were detained and treated as criminal suspects.
China, it seems, is holding major party organs to their role as official mouthpieces while allowing a degree of press freedom in other newspapers.
These new freedoms are, in a sense, the result of social and economic forces unleashed by the party's economic reforms of the past two decades. While in the past people could only turn to the Government for news, it has now lost its monopoly. As Professor Li said, there are 2,300 daily newspapers, 732 radio stations, 1,313 TV stations, 242,739 Web sites, 26.5 million Internet users and100 million mobile phones.
Today, people can turn to the Internet as an alternative source of news. While some Western sites are blocked, others, including that of the New York Times, are not. There are also Web sites in Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan that are available to mainland people. And, in another sign that China is less fearful than before of the contamination of foreign ideas, the Government has given approval to foreign media companies to broadcast to Guangdong province, a move that is likely to be extended in the future.
Increasingly, citizens will be able to form opinions based on multiple sources of information.
The Chinese press may well become a mix of a limited number of official papers which toe the party line, while others are free to report and comment on events as they see fit.
Hopefully, China will gradually move closer to the realisation of the promise contained in Article 35 of its constitution, which states: Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Frank Ching (frankching1@aol.com) is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator.
That's a big deal. That means alot.
I don't think multi-party system will work in China. I expect a ruling party with differnt factions, kind of like Japan's Liberal Democratic Party.
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