How China Manages the Press
HOPKINS, MARK
CONTROL BY EXAMPLE How China Manages the Press By Mark Hopkins When Chinese journalists took their struggle for a free press to the streets last month they mounted a remarkable and daring...
...Mark Hopkins, a frequent NL contributor, has just returned from a four-year stay in the People's Republic of China...
...Later they publicly presented a petition signed by more than 1,000 reporters urging the government to discuss censorship...
...It was a unique Chinese newspaper from the start, reflecting Qin's conviction that free expression is essential to modernizing China...
...Some studied in the United States and took home with them the concept of an independent press monitoring government and society...
...Equally important, it relied solely on newly accepted advertising and on sales revenues for income...
...Gradually proving itself a candid, positive force for political and economic reform, the Herald gained the support by 1984 of then Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang...
...Holding banners aloft, the journalists strode before the Beijing headquarters of Xinhua, a main vehicle of press control...
...The Herald came to play the role of social critic largely because of Qin's personal courage...
...Overall, Chinese authorities deal with the editors of about 1,000 major newspapers, 5,000 magazines and more than 1,000 television and radio centers...
...If such efforts have been relatively few, there are nevertheless many individual journalists working on major newspapers, or in central television and radio, who have quietly objected to censorship...
...The huge official New China News Agency, for instance, functions as a daily guide to acceptable news...
...In 1985 he wrote that 80 per cent of the news in the Chinese press should be positive, and 20 per cent should be negative...
...CONTROL BY EXAMPLE How China Manages the Press By Mark Hopkins When Chinese journalists took their struggle for a free press to the streets last month they mounted a remarkable and daring challenge to the Communist Party...
...The controversy has been over the right of Chinese journalists to report factually and the right of legions of Party and government functionaries, factory managers and other civil servants to defend themselves against criticism...
...The Herald, it should be noted, has not been completely alone in testing the limits of officially sanctioned news...
...Educated during the war with Japan, he moved to Shanghai just as the Communists were sealing their victory over Nationalist armies in the late 1940s...
...Last month the China Youth News Service published information about the student protests that the main Chinese press initially refused to report...
...The Shanghai Party's takeover of the World Economic Herald produced still other protests by Chinese journalists who know and respect Qin Benli...
...Official Party policy, confirmed in a variety of documents and journalism textbooks, continues to stress that the Chinese media's primary role is to publicize the Party line...
...Rehabilitated in 1976, Qin returned to Shanghai and four years later, as new Party strongman Deng Xiaoping introduced reform policies, founded the World Economic Herald...
...Their willingness to march on Beijing streets demanding press freedom was of course all the more significant because they closed ranks with the students demonstrating for democracy, and the two groups reinforced each other...
...The main Party newspapers, such as People's Daily, reinforce by example the major themes the press should emphasize...
...Not since the Communists seized power in China in 1949, and installed a censorship system loosely adapted from the Soviet Union, had journalists publicly denounced the restraints imposed upon them...
...Press censorship consequently is applied unevenly...
...Some 500 wrote aletter to the Party Politburo demanding his reinstatement...
...The starting point for this debate can be sensed from the words of the late Party leader Hu Yaobang...
...But much of it is peripheral, consisting of reports of natural disasters or commentaries admitting to popular dissatisfaction over prices or food supply...
...The Shenzhen Youth Daily, published in China's southern special economic zone, ran afoul of authorities two years ago when it suggested that Deng retire...
...In the conservative backlash following the 1986-87 student demonstrations, Zhao personally protected Qin Benli, who already was a target of Party stalwarts...
...Zhao clearly was not powerful enough to save himself, let alone Qin, this time around...
...For one thing, it was established under the auspices of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and thus did not have any Party ties...
...Those of faint heart or with doubts simply and safely refer to the Department of Propaganda...
...Chinese journalists are the first to acknowledge that they are permitted to publish or broadcast news today that would never have been allowed in Mao's day...
...The most effective press censorship in China is exercised by editors themselves...
...In his place a four-man Party team was installed at the weekly's editorial offices in order to prevent further publication of what had been politically provocative reports and commentaries...
...Then he went to work for the People's Daily in Beijing—until he fell victim to the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and was sent to the countryside for "re-education...
...The issue has repeatedly been raised as well in published commentaries by Chinese intellectuals who have argued that Deng's reforms cannot succeed without a marketplace of ideas—a free press...
...As the Herald expanded from its initial 20,000 copies and staff of five, Qin was able to do his own hiring rather than take government allocated writers...
...Thousands of Shanghai students also rallied behind the Herald...
...In recent months, for example, the Herald published articles that questioned major policies of Mao Zedong, that delved deeply into the roots of the Cultural Revolution, and that attacked the Department of Propaganda, which oversees press, radio and television censorship...
...The huge, entrenchedPartyandgovernment bureaucracy prefers a docile, parrot-like press...
...Its erratic nature is one reason why many Chinese journalists have been championing a law to define the " free press" guaranteed in China's Constitution...
...Not surprisingly, they tend to be young...
...A probing critical press, after all, might expose the official corruption that has so incensed both Chinese students and workers...
...Additional signals are sent out via the daily 7 p.m...
...He was hailed by some Chinese journalists for his progressive approach...
...central television news program that is relayed throughout the country and reaches a potential audience now of 300 million...
...The Chinese press still cannot touch the heart of what matters— how political power is wielded and by whom...
...Among the editorial staffs and local Party committees there are conservatives and reformists, the cautious rural officials and the outward looking urban cadres...
...Many reform-minded Chinese journalists have looked to it as a model of a financially independent newspaper that defied censorship and served as a loyal critic of the government...
...Although its circulation is only 300,000, the Herald's influence has extended far beyond its relatively small printing...
...A commission has been debating a draft law for years, and a final proposal may be completed by this fall...
...Under Deng Xiaoping's leadership the press unquestionably has become more open...
...The problem for Chinese journalists is that they are somewhat in the position of people who, objecting to pornography, say they can't define it but know it when they see it...
...The Herald's 40-man editorial staff issued their own written support of Qin...
...Instead, in various more amorphous ways the Party Central Committee's Department of Propaganda briefs editors on what they should report...
...in Mao's day, they recalled, 100 per cent of the news was good...
...There he joined the Party and launched his journalistic career...
...They are Party members, and just as an editor of an American corporate house organ knows not to publish employee criticism of management, Chinese editors have a sense of what is correct news and commentary...
...The show is prerecorded and viewed personally by the head of the Ministry of Radio, Television and Film, or one of his deputies, before it airs...
...In contrast to the Soviet Union, where themassmediais controlled by the government agency called Glavlit, China has never had a specific organization that set down in secret internal documents lists of banned news and information...
...On April 27, hundreds of journalists working for the New ChinaNews Agency (Xinhua), the Party newspaper People's Daily, and radio and television broadcasting joined the students in one of the largest demonstrations in the Chinese capital...
...In the midst of those first huge peaceful student marches, the Party committee that runs the port city of Shanghai abruptly decided to fire 71-year-old Qin Benli, the editor of the country's most daring newspaper, the World Economic Herald...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 8
