The subject of this book is Chinese war correspondents from mainland China and their news coverage of world hotspots, including the Libyan War, the Syrian War, the Afghanistan War, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It does not provide a thorough historical and/or comparative analysis of war reporting in China and the wider world. The primary focus is the roles, values, practices, performances, and news output of contemporary Chinese war correspondents in the twenty-first century. It will help readers understand Chinese wartime journalism in a global environment.
Research questions posed in this book include: (1) How do the Chinese journalists perceive their roles in the conflict zones outside China? (2) How do Chinese journalists cover overseas conflicts? (3) Who are the actors, and how do they influence Chinese war correspondence? and (4) Do the Chinese news media practice peace or war journalism? Pressing issues in relation to war reporting, ranging from the journalistsâ roles, objectivity, digital/social media (ICTs - Information and Communications Technologies), media-foreign policy relation, embedded journalism, resident correspondents, and parachute journalists to peace journalism will be addressed.
In this chapter, I will explore the significance of studying Chinese war correspondents, elaborate upon the phenomenon of a greater number of Chinese journalists going to conflict zones overseas, define war correspondents, propose a new theoretical model on the basis of news sociology to study contemporary war correspondents, indicate research methods, and finally provide an outline of the structure of chapters.
1 Chinese Journalists Go to War
There have been many wars and conflicts since the Cold War, including crises in the Middle East. The principal metanarrative for understanding war in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Boyd-Barrett (2004: 36â37) argues, is about the establishment of US capitalistic worldwide hegemony. Western media fail to place the wars and conflicts within the grand narrative of US hegemony and the secondary narrative of oil supremacy. In addition, Nohrsted and Ottosen (2015: 158) argue that the two globalization and mediatization trends pose new challenges to war journalism. Two conflicting views, the neo-realistic perspective of nation-states and the multilateral, UN-focused perspectives, struggle for hegemony today. In this struggle, Western mainstream media, take the side of the neo-realistic option and assess a countryâs contribution to international development based on its democratic or authoritarian political system (ibid).
As debates over wars and conflicts become globalized and denationalized, âissues as important as war must be understood beyond a single national contextâ and âthrough a more multilateral cultural media lensâ (Reese 2004: 262â263). The Chinese news mediaâs war reporting remains a mystery in this multilateral world. This study will fill in the gap that has left out China and shed light on conflict coverage through a non-Western media lens and the âdomestic glassesâ (Nossek 2004) worn by Chinese journalists.
China, as a permanent Security Council member of the UN, is an emerging power and influencer in regional conflicts. It is involved in international peacekeeping and mediation efforts, and has growing national interests in regions such as the Middle East. The Chinese media often declare that China is a peace-loving country and that the Chinese are a peace-loving people. The authorities say that China needs a peaceful international environment in order to modernize itself in a smooth and speedy way. But other people are not so sanguine about Chinaâs peace-loving claims. They often cite the countryâs border clashes with its neighbors since 1949 as signs of Chinese belligerence, including the outstanding territorial disputes in the South China Sea (Chan 1998).
Today, Chinese journalists are an emerging force in contemporary war zones. They are no longer simply relaying and repackaging wired news from Western news agencies. With Chinaâs expanding political and economic interests overseas and its increasing diplomatic role in international affairs, more and more Chinese journalists have traveled to war zones overseas to cover distant conflicts for domestic audiences.
Since the 1990s, Chinese journalists have been posted overseas to cover news from international conflict hotspots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Israel, Palestine, Libya, and Syria. In these wars and conflicts, although China is not a participant country and is not involved directly, Chinese correspondents entered the war zones and filed reports for home. Consider the Libyan War in 2011, where approximately 30â40 Chinese journalists were present. Chinese-language TV media âmade a collective debut on the worldâs battle fieldâ. News organizations, including China Central Television Station (CCTV), Dragon TV in Shanghai, and Phoenix Satellite TV in Hong Kong sent reporters to the front lines. CCTV dispatched a total of 16 correspondents to report from the front line and filed more than 1000 news pieces back home. Commercialized newspapers such as Global Times, a spin-off tabloid under the umbrella of Peopleâs Daily, Southern Weekend, and Southern Metropolis Daily also assigned journalists to bring news reports from Libya (Zhang, 2014b).
The rationale behind this phenomenon lies in domestic market demands and competition, the growing financial strengths of national and metropolitan news organizations, the availability of digital technology, and the stateâs strategy of enhancing soft power and making Chinaâs voices heard in the global arena. In 2008, the Chinese government initiated an outward strategy and invested US$6 billion on state media to boost its media presentation globally and to strengthen its impact on global public opinion (Zhang, 2013).
In the past, in the regional conflicts overseas where China was the non-warring state, Chinese correspondents used to be confined to hotel rooms and press rooms. They acted more like âhotel roof reportersâ who took no initiative to go deep into the battlefield and search for stories. They merely stayed in their hotels, listened to the radio, and then packaged and edited some reports (ibid).
Recent years have witnessed dramatic changes in Chinese war correspondentsâ roles and war reportage: from obtaining second- or third-hand information to first-hand information, from relying on what Chinese journalists have perceived as âbiasedâ and âuntrueâ reports by the Western media to bringing back their own âcredibleâ reports from a Chinese perspective. The Chinese news media, both the market-oriented media and the state media, are becoming more and more active in overseas wars and conflicts. The monopoly of the few central media outlets, Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua), CCTV, and Peopleâs Daily, has been broken by men and women from market-oriented media also going to the front lines (ibid).
In September 2010, Qiu Yongzheng and Hao Zhou, two correspondents from Global Times, an influential, profitable, and elite newspaper affiliated with Peopleâs Daily, were embedded with the 101st Airborne Division of the American military in Kandahar, Afghanistan, for a couple of weeks, witnessing missions of rooting out Taliban militants. This was heralded as âthe first time in history that Chinese reporters witnessed US forces fighting alongside troopsâ (âChinese war correspondentsâ, Global Times 2011) (ibid).
The Chinese news media are state-owned. The traditional view is that the Chinese news media are the apparatus of Chinaâs party-state system. Since the early 1990s, Chinese journalism has transformed from pure propaganda to a more informative service in response to dramatic political and economic changes and the ongoing commercialization of the press. But the Chinese news media are still under tight government control (Huang 2003; Lee 2000; Winfield and Peng 2005; Zhao 1998; Peng 2008). Particularly in international news reporting, the Chinese news media are closely tied to the party and government line, echoing government foreign policies and orientation (Zhao 1998; Peng 2008). In line with this logic, Chinese war correspondents are expected to propagate and follow government policies. They encounter restrictions on what and how to report sensitive topics. Indeed, media censorship in the form of top-down formal censorship and self-censorship âform political control in the newsrooms and cause political conformityâ (Zhang 2014a: 91). But the degree of censorship varies across different news outlets and genres. At national levels, the media are closely watched, whereas at provincial and local levels, they may enjoy a higher degree of autonomy. The coverage of international news usually encounters less censorship than that of domestic political and social news. In addition, resistance to censorship within the news organizations forms a counterforce to top-down editorial censorship.
With Chinaâs rising influence, the growth of domestic market-driven news media, and the development of journalistic professionalism, Chinaâs political influence on its correspondentsâ performances and practices in conflict zones has become subtle. It is significant to study how the Chinese news media cover news from the worldâs hotspots and shape domestic public opinion.
2 Defining War Correspondents
War correspondents were historically a subcategory of journalists (Knightley 2002). But most contemporary journalists prefer the term âforeign correspondentsâ because âconflict reporting is often part of a foreign posting, or an assignment for a domestically based correspondent who is sent to cover specific stories, rather than a specialist war correspondentâ (Anderson and Trembath 2011: 7). In this book, Chinese war correspondents are defined broadly as those Chinese journalists who have been to areas of conflict overseas at least once and covered stories about the region for their news outlets.
War correspondence is emerging in China today. Chinese journalists admit that there are no real war correspondents, due to their lack of experience and expertise, and the short time period they stayed in the war/conflict zones. Most Chinese journalists who have covered regional conflict(s) overseas do not regard themselves as war correspondents and prefer to call themselves âinternational news reportersâ, âbreaking news reportersâ, âfrontline reportersâ, or just ânews reportersâ.
In the Chinese context, war correspondents are regarded as specialist reporters who have received special training and whose job focuses on the coverage of wars and conflicts. Ideally, a war correspondent spends a long time in war zones, gathers information from all warring sides, and does in-depth reports. Those who have been to conflict zones once or twice cannot be called war correspondents, in the strict sense. One journalist said:
War correspondents from (Western) mainstream media take war reportage as their profession. We donât. We participate in the conflicts to a limited extent. Although Iâve been covering wars in the past two years, comparatively speaking, we are the emerging war correspondents. Itâs more appropriate to call us international news reporters. (Personal communication 2012)
War correspondence is a glorified profession in China. Some journalists believe that âwar correspondentâ is a term that young Chinese people use to glorify a hard and dangerous profession. âIt sounds heroic but actually it is not,â said one journalist. One senior newspaper editor uses the term âwar touristsâ to refer to those Chinese journalists who just roam around outside the core war zones and write something that is not very significant. However, many Chinese journalists...
