China's Environment and China's Environment Journalists

A Study

Hugo De Burgh, Zeng Rong

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781841504698
• eBook ISBN: 9781841506067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Environmental issues are of growing concern in China, with numerous initiatives aimed at encouraging dialogue and increasing awareness. And key to these initiatives is the environmental journalist. The first English-language study of this burgeoning field, this book investigates Chinese environmental journalists – their methodologies, their attitudes toward the environment and their views on the significance of their work – and concludes that most respond enthusiastically to government promptings to report on the environment and climate change. Additional chapters demonstrate journalists' impact in helping to shape governmental decision-making.

Chapter 1

Contents

Origins of this book

In June 2009 a seminar on environmental journalism in China was held in Peking under the auspices of Caijing magazine, China’s foremost financial periodical and a leading exponent of investigative journalism. It was instigated by International Media Support (IMS), a non-governmental organisation which is funded by the Danish government to train journalists around the world in what that government advocates as good practice.

In Europe, governments’ concerns about global warminghave resulted in much attention being devoted to raising awareness of it among their citizens through environmental journalism. This is because they believe that environmental journalism can help to shape European policy and strengthen civil society by informing and mobilising individuals and grass roots organisations.

In China rapid industrialisation is throwing up concerns about pollution, and has led to a growth in its environmental organisations and networks of environmental journalists, along with a widespread disquiet over the possible impact of China’s environmental problems on the rest of the world.

Thus, having decided to focus on the question of how the Chinese media are dealing with environment issues, IMS commissioned the China Media Centre (CMC) to interview the participants and report on the seminar. The CMC is a specialist research institute based in London, which, in addition to its research, has carried out consultancy projects for European and Chinese institutions. It is a self-supporting component of the UK's leading research organisation dealing with the media, CAMRI (Communication and Media Research Institute).

As far as we are aware, little research has been conducted on how the media reflect environmental issues in China, although China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has for some years been producing reports of its own activities aimed at stimulating media interest in environment issues (see http://zls.mep.gov.cn/).

In the West, the influence of the media on public perceptions of environment issues has been examined by a number of academics, notably Hansen (1993) and Boykoff and Rajan (2007). The latter found that ‘journalism and public concerns have shaped decisions in climate science and policy, just as climate science and policy have shaped media reporting and public understanding’ (2007: 210). Other studies see the media as agenda setting, or at least having a powerful influence in determining how people view the issue - see Wilson (1995), Ungar (2000) and Corbett and Durfee (2004). Reinforcing the findings that media coverage influences public attention to climate change are studies by Trumbo (1994) and Hester and Gonzenbach (1997).

China's media today¹

Although news production in China still operates in an authoritarian political system, in which the political leadership aims to guide and control both the media and public opinion, the Chinese media world has altered as a result of far-reaching ideological and socio-economic changes. These include commercialisation, globalisation, the increased social tension between the poor and the rich and the rising consciousness of the media's social and cultural responsibilities in China's public discourse.

In the 1990s, the major characteristic of the Chinese media was that they were subject to often contradictory forces - the market's commercial line and the Party's political line. Today, they have to be alert to the expectations of the public as well; they need to be more responsive to customers, and to cover issues that interest them with treatments that appeal. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls upon the media to ‘supervise’ official institutions as a way of curbing widespread and serious problems, such as corruption and the negligent implementation of laws and policies. These developments have brought about more critical and investigative reporting and a reinvigorated role for the media as mediator between State and citizens (for a discussion of earlier manifestations of media-authority relations, see de Burgh 2003). Over the past twenty years, investigative reporting has sometimes been vigorously undertaken and widely valued, although interpretation varies (de Burgh 2003a; Tong 2008; Wang 2009; Tong2011).

A different factor contributory to the growth in investigative reporting is a developing professionalism among journalists, who increasingly see themselves as scrutinisers of the powerful and protectors of the weak and vulnerable. Several newspapers and magazines, such as Beijing Youth Daily, Weekend South, Southern City News and Caijing, have a reputation for publishing critical and investigative stories. Since the early 1990s, there has also been a proliferation of investigative programmes on television, such as News Probe and Focal Point.

However, the media remain under government supervision, and stories can be killed by the government at the local or provincial level; local media may find it risky to investigate abuses by people who are powerful in their own locality and therefore feed the stories to journalists from elsewhere, in the hope both of fulfilling what they see as their professional duty and of receiving reciprocal help later.

International observers have been very critical of what they perceive as Chinese government suppression of information and the persecution of some journalists by various authorities. Foreign journalists operating in China have also been critical of their handling - and that of their Chinese colleagues - although there maybe a consensus that, from the foreigners’ perspective, the situation is improving (Watts 2007).

On occasion, journalists enlist the international media - or at least provide the information on which those media may base stories - to get their reports published. Increasing attention is being paid to Chinese environment issues by the western media, and some of this (as we shall see below) has impressed Chinese journalists, although it can also be viewed as motivated by hostility to China.

In recent years we have seen cases where the Chinese media have been able to shape public opinion, influence policy and instigate law-making; however, it is difficult to establish exactly when and why this becomes feasible and to what extent the media can affect public policy-making, and influence China's social and political development.

As to public policy-makers influencing the media, professional and academic opinion in the anglophone countries has usually had a very different approach than China's, considering that the media should attempt to remain impartial on the great issues of the moment, or at least treat them in an impartial manner. Press barons, political parties, politicians and, most recently, academics who have attempted to manipulate - or in some countries totally determine - how issues are covered are considered reprehensible.

It appears that an exception is being made in the case of climate change. Roberts puts it thus:

With regard to the climate change debate, there is a persuasive case to be made that an owner who influenced the editorial content through his or her own ideological views in a) cover of the issue at all and b) an acceptance of its anthropogenic nature arguably has done a service to the wider society and future health of the planet. Although this line of reasoning may sound perverse in relation to the democratic functioning of the public agenda, it is instructive to note that theorists such as Boykoff and Boykoff (2004: 125— 136) and Boykoff and Rajan (2007) have stressed that ‘the norm ofbalanced reporting has had a rather detrimental effect on the media coverage of climate science ... by “providing both sides in any significant dispute with roughly equal attention” (Entman 1993)'... This has important repercussions on public policy; if this process of media framing - whereby the bounds of discourse and meanings are constructed and reinforced - confuses rather than clarifies scientific understanding, it creates opportunities for policy-makers to defray responsibility and delay action. (2007: 210)

(Roberts 2009: 9)

It can be argued that the environment is an issue that media moguls want to be seen to stand up for, and over which they insist on their proprietorial rights. This may also be because they are fully aware that the issue attracts public attention, and that it earns profits. This was a point made by James Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation, Europe and Asia,in his 2008 Marketing Society Annual Lecture in the UK:

At Lake Tai in June 2007. Courtesy of An Guangxi.

The Sun recently offered an energy efficient light bulb to every reader.

Four and half million light bulbs were distributed and the paper sold over 400,000 extra copies on that day. Readers recognise that we are engaging with them on matters that matter deeply. The future belongs to brands that do more than pay lip service to real dialogue and recognise that their consumers want them to believe in something.

(Roberts 2009: 33-34)

These points - demonstrating the influence of proprietors in getting environment issues on to the media agenda, and their perception that doing so is profitable - are salient to the Chinese case. In the West, criticism of the fact that China’s Party and government heavily influence media content is commonplace. And yet the fact that Chinese journalists are increasingly aware of the importance of environment issues to China and of China's responsibility to the world is, in the view of journalists (as we shall see from the research below), rather more a result of government policy than of reaction to journalists’ autonomous enlightenment or public demand.

Method

The interviewers approached most of the subjects at the seminar and interviewed them at that location. Further interviews were subsequently undertaken. The subjects varied from mature, established journalists with a clear brief to cover the environment to young reporters for whom environment reporting was a new or tangential beat. There was also an official government spokesman who had been an environment journalist, and several environment specialists who were not journalists but who had a strong professional interest in environment journalism. They are referred to in the findings as ‘government officials', but of course this is an expression that, in China, might equally be applied to journalists. To inform themselves, the interviewing team met with people in related fields and interviewed three non-Chinese people. It should be remembered that very few non-Chinese pay attention to the Chinese media at all, let alone systematically.

At the outset, the interviewers undertook not to reveal the identities, or make possible the identification, of the respondents. Each interviewee or group of interviewees was given an R number. Thus R3 denotes a group of four journalists and R12 a government spokesman.

Where there is no reference number, the point was made repeatedly by different people. Where Chinese users of English have been quoted in English, the language may have been revised.

Notes

1. This section has been adapted from CMC documents written in preparation for the research project by Professors Sparks and de Burgh.

Chapter 2

China's Environmental Governance

Environmental issues: Overview¹

From Northern Tibet, the Angry River twists and turns through the deep gorges of Yunnan until it enters Burma. In 2003, at China’s behest, UNESCO declared those areas a World Heritage Site for its animal, bird and plant life. Within days, it was announced on Yunnan Television that developers would uproot the entire area by building thirteen massive dams (see Our Attachment to the Nujiang River website).

The struggle to save the Angry River is unusual - in a country where vast numbers of building projects are created more to provide profits for builders than out of any proven need² - for the strength of opposition it has incited and the way it has helped the promotion of the green NGOs in China. Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand all claim that the business plan to make Yunnan the main seller of power in the region has already reduced water flows, threatening the livelihoods of many millions and the feeding of millions more (Litzinger 2004). The three affected countries contacted two of China's environmental groups, Green Volunteers and Friends of Nature. Publicity in the Chinese and other media was the result, a website was created (www.nujiang.ngo.cn) and in April 2004 the Prime Minister ordered the project be suspended for examination.

If - braving the smog and wiping the sandstorm dust from your eyes - you visit the Temple of Heaven in south-east Peking you will see a symbol of traditional attitudes to the environment, for until 1912 it was here that the Emperor assured the Almighty of his reverence. Before 1949, a conventional Chinese view was of heaven and earth in a symbiotic relationship, with humans needing to respect nature, lest heaven take its revenge by drought or flood.

China is a country of climatic extremes: there has always been a need to manage water, and for several centuries huge dust storms have driven forward the great deserts of the north and west. There are frequent earthquakes and, because of the long, low coastline, sensitivity to temperature change. Although some historians contradict this, it is widely believed that for at least 4000 years the exploitation of flora and fauna was regulated and the culture extolled nature.

Then came the so-called Enlightenment ofthe early twentieth century, greatly influenced by socialist Russia, and with it the belief that progress consisted of industrialisation and collectivisation regardless of cost, that the land and its product, like the human beings who got in the way of progress, should be conquered or simply destroyed. The results for China ofthe socialist vision have been well documented by Shapiro (2001). Forests have been eliminated, nuclear waste dumped, rivers dangerously diverted, fishing stocks depleted, rare species extinguished, mining allowed to destroy huge areas, and pollution of earth, water and air has become among the worst on the planet. As O'Donnell (2004) points out, in a very short period of time, whole areas, such as the Tibetan Plateau since China's in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Contents
• Chapter 2: China's Environmental Governance
• Chapter 3: Findings
• Chapter 4: Illustrative Cases
• Chapter 5: Recommendations
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Bibliography and References
• Glossary
• The Authors