Reporting China on the Rise

Habitus and Prisms of China Correspondents

Yuan Zeng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429997365
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on the structural-constructivist framework of journalistic field and habitus, Reporting China on the Rise examines the internal and external dynamics which are shaping the work of foreign correspondents in China during Xi Jinping's tenure.

This study presents findings from extensive surveys and interviews with current and former correspondents based in China. It aims to explore how they have responded, and continue to respond, to pressures from within the journalistic field (such as a transforming media industry), as well as from constant shifts in global geopolitics, and China's increasingly restrictive journalistic environment. These factors are shown to work together to relationally define the news production practice of these correspondents and, ultimately, shape the final news product.

Journalism in modern China has become a widely discussed, yet gravely under-researched topic, both for policy-makers and academics. Reporting China on the Rise seeks to open up discussions around the role of the foreign press in generating meaningful media coverage of this growing superpower. It will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of Journalism and Media Studies.

1
Introduction

The first two decades of the 21st century are by any measure restive. The Western-orchestrated liberal global order is undergoing drastic changes, major established Western democracies burned with old and new threats ranging from the staggering economy, the rise of populism, and increasing distrust in the establishments to global security issues and climate change. Coupled with this shake-up, in the traditional Global South, China has risen to unprecedented significance in almost all dimensions and is still keeping its momentum on the rise. Its decades of blistering economic growth outshining other major economies and its growing assertive diplomatic stance have been drawing extensive global attention. It is not only described as the world’s most populous country and the world’s second-largest economy, but also as the emerging superpower, or the leader of a new world order. Meanwhile, at home, President Xi Jinping has been relentlessly tightening political and ideological control, further undermining press freedom and civil society, solidifying the illiberal autocratic governance of the ‘China Model.’

The whole world is attentively watching China and looking for any hint at changes in the global order. Yet in media industry, fake news and the proliferating social media are further complicating the landscape of global journalism. Amid fear and bewilderment is a genuine need for a better understanding of the constructed reality. The foreign press corps in China play the important role of making sense of this mammoth ‘other’ for the global public and policy makers. Through selection and reinterpretation, foreign correspondents make daily occurrences into news cycles that shape the mediated reality of China.

By internalizing norms of reporting China, these foreign correspondents have morphed into key agents who interpret China for the rest of the world, operating in what Bourdieu calls a journalistic field in a transnational context. In Jean Chalaby’s (1998) words, the journalistic field is a specialized and relatively autonomous field of discursive production with ‘a tremendous impact on the discourse produced by the press’. While being semi-autonomously dominated and defined by internal norms and dynamics (journalistic logic), the journalistic field is also shaped by the political and economic powers in its immediate social space. It is in this relational and spatial power sphere that foreign correspondents enter the field within which they construct the news narratives on China. These news narratives in turn shape the societal level perceptions and conflicts.

Drawing on the conceptual framework of field theory and social structural constructivism, this book focuses on the dynamics internally and externally shaping the field of foreign correspondence in China during the first tenure of China’s President Xi Jinping, from late 2012 to early 2018. The aim of this book is to unpack how foreign correspondents respond to pressures from within the journalistic field (such as a transforming media industry) as well as from the changing global geopolitics and China’s increasingly restrictive media environment.

Perceiving China on the rise

The Chinese economy has transitioned from developing-country status to newly industrialized economy (NIE) status and is on its way to becoming a fully developed economy. Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast that, by 2030, China’s economy will overtake the US, in terms of GDP, to become the world biggest economy.¹ A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that publics in Russia, Canada, Australia, and most European countries see China, instead of the US, as the world’s leading economic power.²

Riding the wave of huge economic success, China has been trying to achieve more prominence, most notably on the diplomatic front. Steering away from the long-held ‘hide and bide’ (tao guang yang hui) doctrine adopted by Deng Xiaoping, the country is now crafting a much more assertive national image while seeking to gain pervasive influence on the world stage. China’s President Xi Jinping, having scrapped the constitutional requirement on presidential office term, is abandoning the decades-old collective leadership established by Deng Xiaoping at home. Posing for a more centralized one-man rule, Xi has called on his country to head for ‘the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation’ and to attain the status of ‘a global leader in terms of comprehensive national strength and international influence’ by mid-century.³ Pursuing national rejuvenation, China has been relentlessly building a China-defined network of regional and international institutions, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank. It also has begun to implement its most ambitious geopolitical expansion scheme, the ‘Belt and Road Initiative,’ which promises to invest an estimated $1 trillion or more in infrastructures in 60 countries. The scheme includes one-third of world trade and GDP, covering over 60% of the world’s population (World Bank, 2018).⁴

The international community has been speculating on these moves. It is eagerly seeking to understand what a rising China means. Just a quick glance at the narratives of media and policy makers around the world would sketch out the ongoing global conversation about China: keywords evidently being ‘rise,’ ‘threat,’ and occasionally ‘enemy,’ or a ‘destabilizing revision-ist power.’⁵ The American think tank National Endowment for Democracy coined the notion of ‘sharp power,’ proposing to gauge an aggressive China on the rise from the perspective of its extraterritorial influence – the pervasive coercion and manipulation China employs to quell unfavourable opinion worldwide. The US-led West is especially worried about the expansion of an illiberal Chinese model, which is posing as a ‘dangerously appealing’ alternative to Western-style liberal democracy, both in internal governance and international norms for other developing nations. The New York Times talks of a ‘new Cold War’ triggered by China. National Public Radio of the US produced a rarely seen special series of reports, entitled ‘What an Emboldened China Means for the World.’⁶

As the world’s only superpower so far, the US increasingly sees China as its biggest threat in both geopolitical and geo-economic domains. Pundits and policy makers refer to it as the ‘most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history.’⁷ In its 2017 National Security Strategy, the Trump administration officially labels China as the ‘strategic competitor’ and a ‘revisionist power,’ which is trying to ‘change the international order in their favor.’⁸ In a speech delivered ahead of the mid-term election in late 2018, Vice President Mike Pence explicitly singled out China as the sole enemy of the Trump administration, pinpointing China’s ‘authoritarian expansionism.’ As The New York Times points out, it is the first time a top American official delivered a narrative of Chinese aggression so publicly.⁹

In Australia, the Turnbull administration commissioned a report on Chinese influence, which, according to Australian media and pundits, was the main inspiration for the foreign interference law passed in 2017, Australia’s most drastic addition to its espionage laws in decades.

It is difficult to measure the role of media in the current world perception of China and its assertive rise. Attempting to do so is beyond the scope of this book. But one can never overestimate the symbiotic relationship between news media and policy making. This could be epitomized by a quote from Vice President Mike Pence’s latest speech on America’s China policy delivered in October 2018:

It’s … great to see more journalists reporting the truth without fear or favor, digging deep to find where China is interfering in our society, and why. And we hope that American and global news organizations will continue to join this effort on an increasing basis.¹⁰

Alice in the wonderland of Middle Kingdom – the foreign press corps as mediator and sense maker

After its three decades of uninterrupted growth, China has arguably become an international news hotspot, attracting global journalists with ‘a billion stories’ (Osnos, 2013) and hailed as ‘one of the wonderful places to be for a reporter, because it is both amazing and important.’¹¹ The case of foreign correspondence in China is part of foreign reporting in a globalized and networked journalism environment that makes sense beyond borders. A conduit for influence from policy makers, both domestic and foreign, foreign reporting is also a counter force to influence policy making, by not only providing world citizens with insights into a mediated reality ‘foreign’ to them, but also affecting foreign policy. As Ebo (1997) notes, ‘the international image of a nation as articulated in the international media is an important assessment of the acceptance or impact of a nation’s foreign policy in the global arena’ (p. 47).

Yet in the increasingly interconnected globe where the public can have access to transnational information through various channels, the foreign news hole in general is shrinking (Emery, 1989; Hannerz, 2004; Hachten & Scotton, 2011). Global media conglomeration in pursuit of maximum profit has also contributed to the withering of foreign correspondence. Coping with what Sambrook (2010) calls ‘structural changes,’ the profession of foreign correspondents has ‘evolved to flourish’ (Hamilton & Jenner, 2004). With the interconnectedness brought by globalization and new technology, the value of foreign correspondence is shifting from providing timely information to providing interpretation as sense makers. Consumers of foreign news understandably lack background knowledge about a distant foreign nation to make sense out of a news story as news makers expect they do. They need a professional guide or ‘curator,’ as how an NPR Beijing correspondent terms their role as foreign correspondents, to walk the public through the knotted net of contextualized information and meanings.

Geographically vast, culturally diverse, and ideologically remote as China has been for foreign correspondents, there is never easy interpretation of this Middle Kingdom. Paul French (2009) likens foreign correspondents trying to get sense out of China to Lewis Carroll’s Alice: as Alice in Wonderland, foreign correspondents come to China carrying their own looking glass and expectations, shaped by their previous life experience; these looking glasses and expectations, together with the ‘twists and turns on the journey’ (p. 3), shape their news production practice. The practice of an individual foreign correspondent or individual news outlet should be understood in the larger context of both the news outlets where foreign correspondents are employed and other interacting institutions outside news outlets per se, with proper consideration of the dynamics affecting journalistic practice at both the organizational level and the institutional level. Only with more knowledge on this could we understand how the wandering Alice makes sense of the wonderland of the Middle Kingdom.

Since China’s opening up to foreign press in the early 1980s, news organizations from major countries have been steadily maintaining their presence in China. In the past five years, the foreign press corps operating in China has counted around 600 journalists.¹² The strong presence especially from countries such as the United States, Britain, and Japan, remains notable, even amid the global decline of foreign correspondence. These news organizations of various national origins are competing in Beijing, where the political system remains rigidly authoritarian and the Leninist-style control of party journalism prevails. This illiberal political and media system in China restricts foreign press not only by directly exerting pressure and coercion, but also by nurturing what Qian and Bandurski (2011) call an ‘information vacuum’ (p. 56). The government’s strategy of muzzling China’s own press complicates the dynamics of foreign reporting in China in a context where foreign correspondents are becoming increasingly important to convey to the world happenings in China. There has been, for example, a noticeable decline of investigative journalism in China following the decade-long ‘golden period’ that preceded Xi’s coming to power (Svensson, Sæther & Zhang, 2014). Compared with the past decade, in which investigative journalism and civil society in China were relatively flourishing (see e.g. de Burgh, 2004; Hassid, 2011; Lee, 2006; Tong, 2011), foreign journalists are now increasingly being relied on to mediate and make sense of China.

Faced with the paradox of a significant China and a repressive reporting environment, foreign correspondents fight for their positions where they reconcile and interpret China for their audience at home, helping to frame the world’s understanding of China and thus contributing to shaping international relations. Especially in the internet age, foreign media coverage plays a large part in shaping public discourse in China by being circulated back into China. These factors make the field of China correspondence a particularly interesting case to build up and unpack foreign reporting. China’s rise may provide China correspondents with better-than-ever organizational resource support and make it easier for them to mobilize interest from both audience and editors. Additionally, entry restrictions may foster diversity and competitiveness, as more individuals are trying to secure a position in the field. But the intensifying competition within the field potentially results in changes on the power relations, for example, with external pressures.

Structure of the book

Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of journalistic field and habitus, this book aims to build up a conceptual framework of ‘the field of foreign correspondence’ and to tap on the changing structure and dynamics of foreign correspondence in a rising China. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Confrontation and obedience: when foreign journalists meet Chinese media culture
• 3 China or journalism: habitus and types of China correspondents
• 4 Organizational control and autonomy: journalistic logic in the newsroom
• 5 Reporting as a tribe: journalistic logic in collective interpretation
• 6 ‘The anaconda in the chandelier’: China’s uncodified state coercion
• 7 Conclusion: reporting the unreportable China?
• References
• Index