Reflections

...After former Chairman Mao Zedong "went to Marx," as the Chinese sometimes ironically term dying, one American polisher made it a point to delete the honorific "wise leader" from all references to Mao's successor, Hua Guofeng...

...Comrade Jack won't say...

...All journalism serves the interests of a particular class...

...But neither must they be mere bystanders," Mu Qing said...

...The first blush of the Sino-American rapprochement has faded, and for some journalists there is little to report beyond the harsh reality, disappointment, and impatience of life in a complex postrevolu-tionary society...

...At times, working as "polisher" (sub-editing or light copy work) in the Home News for International Transmission section, I've discussed with my American colleagues around the desk—some have been working with Xinhua for more than thirty years— what it is the agency hopes to learn about journalism from the West...

...It's not really a question of whether to report or not, but of how to report...

...Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley are in their graves...

...Such things as natural disasters should be reported," he told Cranfield, "but we shouldn't overemphasize them to the exclusion of other news, so that people become dispirited and lose their ability to see the whole picture...

...the average salary is fifty yuan ($30) a month...

...I should note in all fairness that such flexibility is not entirely new...

...In the People's Republic, that kind of journalism does not seem to be in the cards...

...In much of the dialogue, the direcAt times there is a temptation to describe the Xinhua News Agency as Byzantine-but Chinese bureaucracy predates the Byzantine Empire tor general sounds much like an ideological hard liner: "There is no such thing as a free press anywhere in the world...

...Western newsmen stress timeliness...

...Suggestions, properly put, get results, as in a recent instance where I noted that a story I polished—which suggested that workers throughout China had been producing at record individual levels in anticipation of the convocation of the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party—was not credible as written...

...Like most work units in China, Xinhua is considerably overstaffed and—by general, if not unanimous, opinion—underpaid...

...Leads to hard news stories are still routinely buried in the next-to-last paragraph, in a reflection of the Chinese literary style...

...I have been telling our journalists that they must not copy the Western attitude to their profession, where it is sometimes said that journalists are kings without crowns...

...Mu Qing outlined some of his thoughts on journalism and Western influences on the profession in China in an interview conducted before his recent elevation, which was published in the Hong Kong magazine Media...

...But apart from during our dark age, under the Gang of Four, I have never felt that I wasn't free to report anything I wanted to...

...The video display terminals are not yet equipped with memory functions and, as is maddeningly traditional in this country, the teletype operators who set English, French, and Spanish speak only Chinese...

...The pace is slower than I remember it from the Associated Press, where I once worked, but the job gets done every day...

...But at the same time there is an encouraging willingness to accept and act on advice from temporarily resident barbarians from the West...

...According to an AP analysis, China "is actively trying to separate party and government functions, keep the party from meddling, and ensure accurate news reporting," hence the shift...

...REFLECTIONS Mark I. Pinsky From a New China Hand More than a little wistfulness is to be expected from a journalist coming to a big story forty-five years late, which may account in part for the sullen mood these days among Western correspondents posted to Peking...

...But in China, a lot of our news happens over a long period of time...

...As if to make the point very clear, that same week Communist Party Chairman Hu Yaobang gave an exclusive, extended interview to Henri Pi-geat, visiting chairman of Agence France Presse, something he has yet to do for Xinhua...

...today's news must be written and read today...

...And, indications by the chief to the contrary notwithstanding, journalism need not always and automatically defer to politics...

...Late last summer, the National People's Congress, a governmental body of debatable power, shifted Xinhua from the direct control of the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to ministerial status under the State Council, designating the agency as "the state organ for unified releasing of important news...

...Among the leadership and much of the bureaucracy, at least where any initiative in decision-making is concerned, the dominant theory of management is what is known in the U.S...

...At the same time administrative control of the news agency was shifted, Xinhua itself got a new director general, Mu Qing, who, at sixty-five, is considered a youngster by Chinese leadership standards...

...Professionally—as reporters, translators, and editors—the newsmen and newswomen of Xinhua may realistically aspire to practice "developmental journalism," a vague concept that seems to mean putting the best face possible on domestic news and engaging in moderated cheer-leading in international reporting, both in a fashion technically comparable to Western standards...

...It makes no difference that this may only be the hostility of small differences—what Herbert Marcuse called the "repressive tolerance" of corporate liberalism...

...Many employees live across the street in blocks of small, spartan flats owned by the agency, which charges them only nominal rent...

...and there are curtains across the open doorways of many offices in the building, blocking the view of what, if anything, goes on within...

...At times, there is a temptation to describe the machinery of the agency, like that of the government and of the party, as Byzantine, except that Chinese bureaucracy predates the Byzantine Empire...

...Confined by convenience and the Foreign Ministry to the diplomatic quarter of Peking—a city whose ambience for many Western residents combines the least salutary characteristics of Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C.—reporters here tend to stew or overheat, like dumplings in a bamboo steamer...

...But we must not copy mechanically, as a formula...

...Errors or exaggerations on the wire are criticized in letters to the editor of China Daily, the new English-language paper in Peking...

...After seventeen years with Xinhua, including a period during the Cultural Revolution when he worked as a dishwasher and bricklayer, he was promoted to deputy director general of the agency...

...China-watching as a specialty is fast passing into the "new hands" of television correspondents and visiting (or returning) celebrities...

...There is, however, room for optimism at Xinhua...

...While some of the 4,000 comrades here are resigned and cynical—in some cases, bitter—from where they sit, in the capital of a disastrously overcrowded Third World country that is 80 per cent peasant, both in population and leadership, most are muddling through at an acceptable pace...

...There is, to be sure, a malaise, an apparently pervasive attitude among the workforce at Xinhua, as elsewhere in China, most reminiscent of the Britishism, I'm all right, Jack...

...Still, there is a fundamental contradiction in bringing the latest crop of less ideological Western experts to Xinhua...

...Jack Belden is in France, aging and ailing...

...In September, electricians were completing the installation of central air conditioning in the building...

...Fortunately, Cranfield asked Mu Qing the same question: "How to organize and present material with the right balance of background and news angles, how to write more entertainingly, how to be briefer...

...There are problems, which no one avoids mentioning...

...What my colleagues here admire about contemporary American journalism is that it is "lively" and "spirited"—by which they mean that it sometimes stands in an adversary relationship to those who wield economic and political power...

...The story never went out on the wire...

...Teddy White has finished his memoirs, and the caves of Yenan are now a museum...

...military and many American corporations as "CYA" (cover your ass), or "Make inertia work for you...

...Our requirements are therefore sometimes different, and not all foreign techniques are always suitable...

...The new chief comes from a poor Moslem family of seven children, and dropped out of high school in his hometown of Kaifeng to join the Red Army...

...Mark I. Pinsky is a free-lance writer normally based in Durham, North Carolina...

...The hardest answer for a foreigner, new on the job, is to the question: "Who's in charge here...

...If China does not "stink" (James Kenneson, Harper's) or is not "alive in the bitter sea" (Fox But-terfield, The New York Times), then the morning line "from the center of the Earth" (Richard Bernstein, Time) is that the future does not work...

...As a government agency, our biggest task is to serve the revolutionary cause of our country and our people and to promote the prosperity and progress of the motherland...

...We must take a positive attitude toward bad news and not give the impression of helplessness in the face of calamities...

...They shower next door to their ten-story office building, lunch in the adjoining canteen, watch new movies on midday break, send their children to agency daycare centers or nurseries, and play volleyball and basketball on company courts out back, or badminton and ping-pong in some of the corridors...

...Domestic staff members and foreign experts alike have long complained about Xinhua's laggard reporting of train wrecks, plane crashes, floods, and earthquakes...

...The media are very influential and cannot therefore afford to be onesided...

...He spends his time these days warning Chinese journalists about the dangers of prolonged exposure to video display terminals, and would like to be remembered for bringing Liquid Paper to the Middle Kingdom...

...When Hua fell, the prestige of the polisher—an American Communist long resident in China—rose considerably...

...On nuts-and-bolts issues, however, Mu Qing evinces a more subtle understanding of the problems of reporting in the Third World...

...American writers in pursuit of glamor, romance, heroism, and clear-cut issues of the sort found by Jack Reed and Louise Bryant in Moscow sixty-five years ago—and once associated with reporting from China in the 1930s and 1940s—are these days better advised to head for Central America...

...Sometimes the deletion stuck, sometimes it didn't...

...First in Yenan and later in Hunan Province and Northeast China, he alternated slogan and leaflet writing with guerrilla fighting and combat reporting...

...The interviewer was Bill Cranfield, a former foreign expert at Xinhua from Britain...

...The perspective from Xinhua (New China) News Agency, where I have been working as a "foreign expert" for seven months, is a bit different...

...there is too much vagueness and imprecision where sources and figures are concerned...