Reporting for China

How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World

Pál Nyíri

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295741321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. The Chinese government is financing most of this growth, hoping to strengthen its influence and improve its public image. But do these reporters willingly serve formulated agendas or do they follow their own interests? And are they changing Chinese citizens' views of the world? Based on interviews and informal conversations with over seventy current and former correspondents, Reporting for China documents a diverse group of professionals who hold political views from nationalist to liberal, but are constrained in their ability to report on the world by China's media control, audience tastes, and the declining market for traditional media.

CHAPTER 1

The Worldwide Expansion of China’s Media

THE lackluster performance of the Chinese media in investigating the Malaysian Airlines incident resulted in a lively debate on the Chinese Internet, within the news profession and beyond. Had the country’s investment in expanding its media overseas been worthwhile?

Seven years earlier, the Shanghai-based financial newspaper 21st Century Business Herald, launched in 2001, had sent a correspondent to New York. (Prior to that, foreign news stories had been written by China-based journalists who occasionally traveled abroad on reporting trips or based on Xinhua agency reports.) This was the first overseas correspondent for the so-called commercialized (shichanghua, i.e., non-state-subsidized) Chinese media, soon followed by others working for the business magazine Caijing, First Financial Daily, and Caixin Media. Recalling the context of the decision, Zuo Zhixian, 21st Century Business Herald’s foreign desk editor at the time, wrote that China’s economic expansion into Africa and South America and its competition with the United States was “a transformation unseen in three thousand years” that was an “irresistible temptation for journalists, the writers of history’s first draft.”¹

For both Western and Chinese observers, the social significance of this development has been overshadowed by concern with the government’s intentions behind its support for this global expansion. At the same time as the commercial media began sending correspondents abroad but on a much larger scale, the news organizations funded by central Party and government organs—Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV), CRI, People’s Daily, and the English-language China Daily, often referred to as “central media” in Chinese—began receiving large amounts of extra funding, whose amount has not been made public but is usually said by journalists to have been ¥45 billion (around $5.5 billion at the 2008 rate), to expand their foreign networks as part of a broader government effort of creating internationally competitive media conglomerates in China that would make “China’s voice heard internationally.”² People’s Daily now has around seventy foreign correspondents spread over thirty bureaus, possibly the largest number of any daily newspaper in the world, compared to around thirty before the expansion started. According to its website, Xinhua had 102 bureaus outside mainland China in 2014; the largest, regional bureaus have twenty to thirty Chinese staff as well as local employees, while the smallest have just one Chinese correspondent. In sub-Saharan Africa, Xinhua has twenty-seven bureaus, the largest coverage of any news agency. It has a bureau in nearly every European country, and in some countries, several bureaus, including three in Germany and two in Poland. CCTV has around seventy foreign bureaus and regional hubs in Washington, London and Nairobi; the largest one, in Washington, has around one hundred staff. It has seven bureaus in Latin America, as against CNN’s three. CRI has 32 bureaus abroad, as well as some studios producing local-language content, with over one hundred Chinese staff in total. Even Guangming Daily, the Party’s “theory” newspaper regarded as a domain of tweedy ideologists and obscure debates, has built a network of bureaus that numbers eleven in Europe alone. Unlike commercialized media, these networks have not been constrained by falling advertising revenues and the digitalization of media consumption, which unfolded in China later than in the West but, by 2013, was taking on dramatic proportions. By 2015, twelve mainland Chinese media organizations had correspondents in Brussels, from their perspective a relatively unimportant station on the global scheme of things.³ Only one of those twelve organizations was commercialized, and after its correspondent went home he was not replaced. In contrast, for some of the smaller central media like Guangming Daily, setting up bureaus in places like Helsinki or Prague may have been a means to generate extra income through government funding more than anything else.

As another component of this initiative, the Ministry of Education and the Party’s Central Propaganda Department funded the creation of master’s programs in global journalism at five leading university media schools. A graduate of the first such class at Tsinghua University, launched in 2009, described its objective as training journalists who can write well in English, are familiar with international communication, and are able to express “China’s voice.” The focus of the program was on English news writing, “national conditions,” and some financial journalism. Students also did “field research”: her class went to southern Gansu province to write about Tibetan students who were learning Chinese.

In 2012, the government set the goal of “creating a group of … internationally competitive … corporations for expansion abroad” and one hundred thousand “internationalized news media and publishing personnel” by 2015, using “developing countries as a base.”⁴ This call was again consistent both with economic and with political goals: it was seen as important to sway public opinion in the countries in which Chinese companies are engaged in extractive and infrastructural megaprojects to create, in Hu’s words, a “harmonious international environment,” particularly in Africa where both media and audiences were seen as overly reliant on Western wires unfriendly to China. But at the same time, Africa was an emerging media market: a place where market penetration of Western wires was relatively low and there was room for a lower-priced news agency product; it is here that Xinhua had had the most success in selling its news. It was also a market poorly served by new, particularly mobile media. So, as with other emerging Chinese multinationals, Africa was suitable as a place to pilot Chinese media’s international products and learn. “We don’t need money—we have that. But sales are important because they are a measure of influence,” a Xinhua reporter explained. As a CRI bureau chief put it, “If you are not able to influence people here, then how could you influence” other audiences in richer countries?

In 2011, CNC World, the English-language TV channel of the Chinese State news agency Xinhua, reached cable television audiences in Africa. The following year, CCTV, Beijing Review, and China Daily all set up or upgraded their regional bureaus in Africa. China Daily’s Africa bureau chief explained that they, like CCTV and Xinhua, chose Nairobi for the regional bureau because Kenya was both politically stable and open, with a strong presence of other major international media whose operations they could learn from. CCTV America and CCTV Africa, both of which launched their own programming in 2012, each have about one hundred journalists, some recruited from CNN, NBC, Fox, and CBS in Washington and from popular Kenyan TV shows in Nairobi. CCTV International now claims to reach some forty million viewers, and CCTV-4 another ten million Chinese speakers. Chinese journalists have become a formidable presence at major international events: at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in 2013, around seventy of them were in attendance.

Western scholars’ and policy analysts’ attention to the expansion of China’s media abroad has focused on the state’s strategy of soft power behind the global spread of institutions such as Xinhua and CCTV, on the propagandistic image of China that these institutions seek to project in their foreign-language programming, and on the potential damage to media freedom in poorer countries if these media were to be embraced as models by governments with authoritarian leanings. This debate is still unfolding, with scholars disagreeing on how successful this soft-power building effort has been and may become, how central it is to the actual operation of Chinese media abroad, and whether or not there is a link between it and dangers to free expression worldwide.⁵ Yet the impact on these processes on how audiences in China see the world is potentially more important.

While the full extent of that impact can only be measured in a few years from now and will require extensive audience research, this book approaches the question through conversations with Chinese correspondents abroad.

CHINA’S MEDIA IN THE WORLD

For the financial media, associated with free-market liberalism, the decision to set up overseas bureaus was driven by the evolving needs of their readers: businesspeople, managers, and economic policymakers affected by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and a growing upper middle class interested in reliable information on investing abroad or sending their children to study overseas. It also had to do with growing competition as these media, set up in the early 2000s, matured. But the overseas correspondent networks of these papers remain very modest. They are typically limited to a few reporters in the United States—without a question the most important beat for any Chinese media organization—and one or two in Europe, totaling no more than five to six journalists. They operate on a shoestring, mostly without offices and trying to take advantage of scholarships for staff at foreign universities or journalists whose spouses get jobs in foreign countries. (In 2013, US correspondents’ monthly salaries tended to be around $3,200, higher than at central media, but insufficient to cover rent in New York, so journalists had to share apartments and often wrote at cafes.) This means that foreign correspondents rotate often and long-term strategy—beyond the imperative to have someone on the ground in New York or Washington, DC—is largely absent and unaffected by the Chinese leadership’s decision in the late 2000s to push for a worldwide expansion of Chinese media.

The motives for that decision were a characteristic mix of the political with the economic. Expanding China’s “soft power” had been increasingly important for China’s leaders since the early 2000s. As the director of the State Council’s Information Office, Wang Chen, said in 2010, “a leap in our country’s international media development … is a necessity. The purpose is to improve international society’s understanding of China … actively participate in international cultural competition; recognize the necessity of enhancing our country’s soft power; defeat the Western monopoly on public opinion.”⁶

But though Wang was taking his cue from a 2007 speech by former Party chairman Hu Jintao, actually allocating a budget to the media—as well as, for example, to publishers producing books and periodicals for the foreign market and to universities running degree programs in international journalism—was likely to do with China’s WTO entry, which created the specter of international media groups entering China’s domestic market.

Xinhua, People’s Daily, and a few other central media had maintained foreign correspondent networks for many decades and undergone an earlier expansion in the 1980s, but their visibility and impact had been limited because, as 21st Century Business Herald foreign desk editor Luo Xiaojun quipped, they had focused on the question “What do leaders like?” rather than “What do readers like?” Now, they were being told to think about readers, both foreign and Chinese, and find ways to become credible sources of information and opinion about the world, capable of setting agendas rather than merely reacting to those set by the West. In the words of a senior People’s Daily foreign correspondent: “In the past, People’s Daily followed the New York Times and other Western media too much: whatever they thought was important we wrote about too. On many issues, we had no stand of our own; we unconsciously reported the Western position. This is why people didn’t take us seriously, why People’s Daily had little credibility, and Chinese media have little voice [internationally].”

People’s Daily’s market-oriented offshoot Global Times, which had been complaining about Chinese media following Western agendas for at least ten years, made much the same point in an earlier editorial: “Not many people around the world are willing to listen” to Chinese media; “its international credibility is pitifully low…. In this, Western prejudice towards China is a factor, but we ourselves are a factor too.”⁷ Yang Qi, a former head of Xinhua’s international department, criticized foreign correspondents for merely translating foreign agency materials but added that they were only partly to blame: it was true that their sources tended to be too limited and their efforts to investigate insufficient, but even when this was not so, political sensitivity meant that journalists often “could not or dared not” delve into what was behind the news.⁸

Conclusions from this frank admission were not only to be felt in the resources invested in creating a more convincing foreign-language media, although that was and remains the top priority. Under its director from 2008 until 2014, Li Congjun, a former Propaganda Department official, Xinhua has made “professionalization” and global market share a priority while undergoing what the director-general of Xinhua Europe, Wang Chaowen, described as a “strategic transformation” with the purpose of “getting closer to the reader.” As in the case of People’s Daily, this has involved a cautious shift to a more colloquial language and building up a presence in social media. While the news doctrine of “three getting-closers” (san ge tiejin, i.e., getting closer to reality, the masses, and life) was announced by Hu Jintao back in 2003, after 2012, the trend to “speak human language” was bolstered by the “mass line” espoused by the new Party leader, Xi Jinping.⁹ Global Times, which became one of China’s best-selling papers in part by enforcing the use of plain language, must have served as an inspiration. Some prominent Xinhua correspondents—like Liu Hong, a former longstanding foreign correspondent and later deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua’s Globe Magazine—were increasingly adopting a style close to that of Global Times, especially in their writings outside the news wire. Liu’s 2012 book The American “Conspiracy” contains a number of commentaries (shiping), a type of editorial Xinhua has recently developed as a new product. Commentaries are produced with the understanding that they would be read as a reflection of what Chinese officials think and are therefore written by trusted journalists and signed off on by senior Xinhua officials. Many commentaries and other articles in Liu’s book are concerned with rejecting what he describes as Western pressure on China in a plain and sometimes strident language that has become a hallmark of Global Times editorials.

For People’s Daily, expanding its foreign correspondent network was one of the ways to bolster its credibility. But for other central media, the primary goal of that expansion has been to increase China’s influence in the global news market. For example, 90 percent of the stories filed by Xinhua’s Zimbabwe bureau are in English and are typically sold to media in African countries. How successful Xinhua, CCTV, China Daily, and the others actually are in this effort to expand China’s soft power is too early to tell, although most observers, including the journalists I interviewed, tend to conclude that the results so far hardly justify the investment, and perhaps never will.¹⁰ Some anticipate a withdrawal of funding, which could potentially result in the reduction of foreign correspondent networks.

The impact on the internal dynamics of Chinese media, however, is already tangible. Until the mid-2000s, overseas bureaus were mostly manned by senior journalists, generally men: the postings paid well compared to domestic salaries (although very poorly by local standards) and were relatively stress free. These posts were often seen as a reward for years of work in China for those who posed no risk of defection because they had families at home. Studies of Xinhua and People’s Daily based on research in the 2000s paint a picture of staff whose main job was rewriting stories published in local news.¹¹ When a thirty-six-year-old People’s Daily correspondent was posted to Brussels in 2000, he found himself the youngest Chinese reporter in town. Today, most overseas correspondents are around thirty and often female—even in the Middle East and Africa, where Western media, out of safety concerns, rarely send young women. Many posts are now filled by fresh graduates after a half-year stint at headquarters, or, in some cases, filled locally after applicants have graduated from a foreign university. People’s Daily’s Paris bureau, for example, recently expanded from two to four staff, all of whom except the veteran bureau chief are in their twenties. At the Washington, DC, bureau, considered the most important, the oldest of five journalists apart from the bureau chief is in his early thirties.

The change in foreign correspondent demographics is dramatic not only compared to the past but also compared to the practice of Western news organizations, where foreign assignments are often offered to experienced reporters, sometimes as a reward for past performance. Xinhua’s and CCTV’s regional bureau chiefs, who oversee entire continents, are relatively senior in both age and rank, but they, too, now tend to have track records as former foreign correspondents, rather than, as in the past, administrative cadre parachuted in from headquarters. Xinhua’s Africa chief, Yuan Bingzhong, for example, was by his own account very active both as a White House correspondent and as a United Nations correspondent in Geneva, and served as frontline correspondent in Afghanistan.¹²

Because overseas postings are typically for around three years, Xinhua replaces two hundred to three hundred correspondents every year. The international department, which used to have a monopoly on foreign posts, is far short of these numbers; therefore, for those working in other departments but with a good command of a foreign language, it is relatively easy to go abroad. The same is true for CCTV and CRI. The dramatic demographic change among foreign correspondents is not only due to the shortage of language-proficient senior staff, however. It is also related to the latter’s reluctance to be away from headquarters, as it may mean weakening of important personal networks or worse, missing promotions to positions of leadership. Furthermore, many foreign correspondents agr...