Global Journalist

The winding road

By Yao Qingjiang and Josie Liu Posted Apr 1 2005

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Sun Zhigang was arrested in 2003.His only offense was failing to carry an ID card. Because the 27-year-old graphic designer had recently moved from central China to the bustling southern city of Guangzhou, he was considered a migrant and was therefore required by law to carry a temporary residence permit. But when local officials stopped him in March 2003, Sun did not have his residence card with him, and so he was treated as a vagrant and detained in a local repatriation center. Shortly after arriving at the center he was beaten to death. Sun’s story went unreported in the Chinese media for nearly a month.

The Southern Metropolitan Daily was finally able to break the news in late April when the SARS epidemic ushered in a relatively open environment of press freedom. At that time, SARS had been spreading through the country unannounced for months, and Chinese government agencies were dealing with the health disaster as they had dealt with other sensitive issues in the past — by covering it up for the sake of maintaining “social stability.” But when a military doctor revealed the extent of the outbreak to Western media in early April 2003, international pressure for full access to information was enormous. The Chinese government began to change its attitude. China’s media were allowed to update the number of new SARS cases daily, and Chinese people from all walks of life realized that only by knowing the truth could the epidemic be defeated and national stability be maintained.

Taking advantage of this sentiment, once the Southern Metropolitan Daily broke the story of Sun Zhigang’s death, the nation’s media began devoting enormous attention to the incident. This in turn led to substantial public discussion of the flaws of the repatriation system. Within two months, the State Council declared that the government would replace the system and rescind the regulation allowing police to detain people who failed to produce local residence permits.

This marked substantial progress for the Chinese press, as it was seen as the first case in which media coverage caused pressure that led the central government to make a substantial policy change.

The Path to Progress

The victories won in the SARS and Sun Zhigang cases did not take place all of a sudden. Rather, they are but two highlights on China’s long road to media reform. In the late 1950s, not long after the Communist Party of China came to power, privately-owned media disappeared from the mainland and newspapers essentially became non-commercial political leaflets owned and run by the state. Advertisements and all forms of controversial content were eliminated.

So, when the Jie Fang Daily, a newspaper run by the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party, ran an advertisement in 1979, the audience was shocked. In the view of some scholars, this bold move announced the beginnings of China’s ongoing media reform.

After that, the use of advertisements spread quickly, and publications began to feel pressure to attract more readers and advertisers. To meet this demand, in the mid-1980s flashier special weekend editions of party or state-owned daily papers were born.

Unlike their serious daily counterparts, these weekend editions were allowed to carry stories of wider appeal, including topics such as crime, the history of the Communist Party and societal legends. Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at the People’s University of China, considers the advent of the weekend editions to be another major milestone in China’s media reform. Along with metropolitan papers that emerged later, these weekend editions not only changed the content but also the business model of the conventionally propagandistic press.

Following China’s 1992 policy of moving more boldly to a market economy, media began to gain recognition in China as a money-making industry. Although the media remain wholly government-owned and private investment in the editorial arm of the press is prohibited, investors have still found ways to pump capital into the industry.

Since it is impossible to launch a new publication without a government-issued license, investors instead began pouring money into revamping unprofitable publications that already had the needed licenses. With Sichuan Daily leading the way in 1994, many communist and state-owned newspapers also began launching more stylish metropolitan papers under the umbrella of their original propagandistic papers.

Within a few years, most major provincial dailies around the country were publishing their own metropolitan papers this way. In addition to greater coverage of civic life, many of the newly created metropolitans attracted larger circulation and advertising revenues by revealing and criticizing injustice in the society and the corruption, crimes and other wrongdoings of government officials.

Proactive Change

All of these changes were initiated by journalists, editors, investors and businesspeople who gradually but persistently pressured the government to unofficially relax restrictions on the media. In June 2003, the government took a big step in officially modifying its policy toward the press, implementing one of the most powerful deregulating acts since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

For decades, most newspapers and magazines run by the Communist Party or government agencies collected their subscriptions by administrative order. In other words, public institutions such as schools, research institutes and state-owned companies were required to subscribe to these publications despite the fact that many of them carried little interesting content. The subscribing institutions had found this to be a financial burden for years.

In 2003, the Communist Party and the central government relieved this burden by requesting that all newspapers and magazines, except those serving as organizational publications for the central and provincial committees of the Communist Party, solicit public institutions through marketing techniques rather than administrative order. Newspapers and magazines now had to attract subscribers and advertisers on their own, rather than relying on government-mandated support.

The Communist Party took another step towards officially recognizing the importance of a free press when, in February 2004, it released regulations on how to supervise government officials and prevent corruption. In these regulations, the press was listed as one of the eight major means by which to oversee party and government officials. For the first time, the watchdog function of the media was upheld in official regulations of the Communist Party.

Looking Ahead

Scholars and journalists have hailed these advances, and many Chinese journalists feel that the media have enjoyed unprecedented freedom in the last few years. In light of these changes, Professor Yu wrote in an article that media ownership is now the biggest obstacle on the path to further media reform. The government currently retains sole ownership over all media outlets, thus allowing it to appoint executives of its own choosing and effectively preventing private or foreign control of the media.

However, with overall daily newspaper circulation now topping more than 82 million and advertising revenues increasing by 80 percent in the past five years alone, many newspapers – though still government- owned – are now financially independent. In December, for example, the circulation, advertising, printing and distribution branches of the Beijing Youth Daily went on the Hong Kong stock market; only its editorial branch remains under traditional government ownership.

The press’s newfound financial independence has also raised questions regarding the media’s relationship with the state. Although official policy and national journalism textbooks still view the media as a mouthpiece for the government, in practice the situation has changed dramatically. Li Xiguang, director of the Center for International Communications Studies of Tsinghua University, says that when the press no longer depends on the government for funding, then it is also no longer its mouthpiece. Li is currently helping train public relations specialists who will work independent of the media. It is these specialists, and not the press, who should be the new spokespeople for the central and provincial governments, he says.

Until now, however, the government is unwilling to relinquish its power to regulate media content. Although it does not typically exercise prior review, the Propaganda Department does regularly release a list of current topics that are off-limits – such as the initial spread of SARS, financial scandals and ongoing criminal investigations – as well as a list of recommended stories, usually pertaining to government accomplishments. It also regulates content post-publication, and administers punishment when coverage is deemed inappropriate.

Soon after the Southern Metropolitan Daily ran several SARS-related scoops and broke the story of Sun Zhigang, for example, three of its senior editors were arrested. Although they were officially charged with embezzling state funds, it was widely believed that these charges were trumped up in an effort to punish them for pushing the limits too far.

In an essay posted on the internet, Jiao Guobiao, an associate professor of journalism at Peking University, argued that the absence of clear laws delineating journalistic rights and responsibilities allows the propaganda department to make arbitrary decisions that violate the Chinese constitution. It also makes it impossible for journalists to know where the line really is, he said.

A journalism law was drafted more than 20 years ago and slated to be implemented at the end of 1989. That law was never enacted, however, due in part to the Tiananmen Square affair in the summer of 1989.

In recent years, the push for journalism legislation has once again resurfaced. A General Press and Publication Administration work plan for the decade starting in 2000 stated that the government will establish journalism and publishing laws before 2010. But some scholars, like Professor Sun Xupei, who helped draft the original journalism law, do not think the law will be established by then. Instead, Sun says, he sees the pledge as merely a means to pacify the growing demands of legislators and scholars.