Out of control
By Qian Gang and David Bandurski Posted Apr 1 2007
In January news of the murder of Lan Chengzhang, a fresh recruit for a small industry newspaper called China Trade News, made headlines across the world. The story behind Lan’s murder offers a sketch of the complex problems
facing professional journalism in China.
Lan, as reported by China Economic Times, Southern Metropolis Daily and other newspapers, was beaten by hired thugs at the behest of a mine owner known as “Hou Si” while investigating an illegal coal mine not far from the city of Datong in China’s Shanxi province. Lan and a colleague attempted to extort an unspecified amount from mine bosses by waving the threat of negative news coverage, a practice that has become widespread in Chinese media. A close friend of Lan’s, who spoke anonymously with Southern Weekend newspaper, confirmed that the reporter had been given a quota by China Trade News to bring in 180,000 yuan (U.S. $23,000 ) a year for the paper.
But Lan’s story is about more than one reporter’s unscrupulous conduct. As a journalist under pressure to generate revenue for his newspaper in any way
possible, Lan was impacted not just by the criminal acts of the mine bosses and their gangsters, but by the mixture of control and commercialization that permeates China’s media landscape.
So-called “news extortion” and other ethical woes in Chinese journalism have been on the rise since the mid-1990s. Blame for this trend is often heaped on commercialization. With state support pulled from all but the most crucial media, such as People’s Daily and China Central Television, the “mouthpieces” of the past have pushed out into the marketplace. As more media crowd in and scramble for their shares of a finite advertising market, the game gets dirtier and dirtier. Investigative exposes have now become a way for journalists to arm-twist companies or officials into shelling out cash for ad contracts. In one rare documented case in 2004, reporters at Hubei province’s Edong Evening News confessed on national television that they had been pressured by newspaper bosses to “generate revenues” through extortion. The practice became such an endemic part of the office culture that a common greeting in the newsroom reportedly became, “So, how’s business lately?”
But simple criticisms of commercialization risk neglecting the overarching role state censorship plays in discouraging journalistic professionalism in China.
People recognize the Central Propaganda Department as the face of censorship in China. Through a national network of regional and local propaganda offices at various levels of the Party bureaucracy – such as county, city, province – propaganda officials issue notices to media on a regular basis, usually by telephone so there is no written record. Report this, they say. Don’t report that.
Publications that do not obey risk possible disciplinary measures, including shutdown or removal of editors or reporters.
But control of the media happens in other ways too. For starters, Communist Party leaders maintain total control over the licensing process. Licenses issued by China’s General Administration of Press and Publications to so-called “supervising units,” or zhuguan danwei, act as points of contact for Party control. GAPP can limit a publication’s scope of coverage from the get-go, so magazines are restricted in their coverage of political affairs, according to Jin Liping, managing editor of China Newsweekly magazine. The Party controls the appointment of top media personnel, so the editor-in-chief of a Beijing-based newspaper, for example, must be approved by top Party leaders in that city.
To enforce a culture of self-censorship, leaders reserve the right to shut down uncomplying media and discipline their staff. This happened in January 2006 when Freezing Point, a supplement of China Youth Daily newspaper, was shut down and its top two editors removed after it ran an essay by a Chinese historian which criticized historical lessons in Chinese school textbooks.
Beginning in the 1990s, as economic reforms took hold in other sectors, top leaders in China pushed a project of commercial reform in the media. As China’s economic dealings with the outside world increased and China worked toward gaining membership in the World Trade Organization, the prospect of competition from foreign media became more real. By pushing media out into the market, the Party could cut down on expenditures while at the same time creating domestic media groups that could contribute to overall economic growth and do battle with other media conglomerates. Former provincial or city newspapers and television networks run by the Party became integrated media conglomerates, referred to provocatively as “aircraft carriers” because of their use as strategic political resources.
While commercialization propels Chinese media toward financial independence, the information they provide is severely restricted by the Party’s press control apparatus. It’s not hard to imagine how this creates an incentive to offer bottom-of-the-barrel fluff – sensationalism is another charge leveled at Chinese media today by officials, media experts and the public – and a disincentive to hit the newsstand with real stories. Why risk going public with an expose about corruption in the local education system, for example, when the report might draw political pressure? Isn’t it far preferable to accommodate all at once the goals of economic and political survival by faxing a draft copy to principals of the schools in question, as happened at the Edong Evening News, and asking them to ante up?
Problems are aggravated by the quasi-official status of the news media. In a competitive media environment where resources such as journalism talent and investment capital are limited, there is temptation to leverage the most readily available resource, power, to generate profit. This problem goes beyond reporters such as Lan Chengzhang. It is so widespread that insiders say many top editorial and bureau posts are now open to the highest bidder with the tacit understanding there is major money to be made in the gray wasteland between the editorial and business sides.
On May 16, 2006, GAPP issued an official news release detailing extortion at the regional bureaus of four publications. Positions at regional news bureaus are often open to anyone willing to pay who has the gumption and connections to generate revenues for the publication. Like news extortion, there are few documented cases, but insiders say this too has become part of the culture.
But there are other forms of Party press controls. There is also the licensing of journalists. It is the Party’s prerogative to issue official five-year “press cards.” The Party defines their conditions, including participation in mass training sessions in the “Marxist view of journalism,” which emphasizes Party control of the media and opposition to “bourgeois” concepts like freedom of speech. Regulations issued by GAPP in 2005 specified that “news workers involved in reporting activities must possess a press card and must take the initiative in presenting it during interviews.”
Which is why, in the wake of Lan’s death, whether or not he had been a “real” reporter became a very real question.
Within days of his death, city leaders in Datong launched a campaign to
eradicate “fake reporters” in the region. Lan, they said, had not possessed an official “press card” issued by the government. When Lan’s story was taken national on Jan. 16 by Southern Metropolis Daily, a commercial newspaper from China’s southern Guangdong province, the debate over “real” versus “fake” reporters spilled over into other media and onto the Web. What made a reporter “real”? Did it matter that they had a press card? Weren’t there a great number of journalists working for real media who didn’t carry press cards?
Zhang Ping, a former editor at Southern Weekend who was removed with Qian Gang for publishing an article about a criminal gang in 2001, pointed out in a Jan. 17 editorial in Southern Metropolis Daily that journalists had been given five years to comply with government standards for training and professional examination issued back in 2003. Moreover, the latest press card regulations, which went into effect in 2005, made one year of work experience a precondition for press cards. This meant there were still a significant number of “real” journalists working for bona fide news media who did not possess press cards.
But media corruption is not confined to those without valid press cards. In one of China’s most high-profile media corruption cases, it was uncovered in 2003 that four journalists working for the official Xinhua News Agency accepted cash and gold in exchange for keeping quiet about the death of 37 workers at a gold mine in Shanxi province.
The debate over “real” and “fake” journalists might seem like an exercise in semantics, but it is really a debate about the future of professional journalism in China, the role of the press and what it means to be a “journalist.” Is a journalist defined by licensing, training in Marxist views, public opinion “guidance” and the Party line? Or are journalists defined by the work they do, their sense of professionalism and their duty to the public?
Employing all of these control mechanisms, the Party asserts a monopoly over journalism and its role in Chinese society. Media censorship and control, much more than commercialization or anarchy in the issuing of press credentials, is what propels Chinese media on the road to media corruption and sensationalism. If journalists were granted greater rights and protection in
China, if they were permitted to act with greater independence out of a sense of duty to the public interest rather than the Party interest, they could make real progress toward a responsible and self-regulating profession.
But the Lan Chengzhang story offers hope as well as despair. Although the case is in many ways a portrait of everything wrong with Chinese journalism, it offers hints that professional journalism is alive and growing in China despite the challenges of Party control, commercialization and media corruption. Some clues were visible in the debate itself, as media openly questioned their social role. Others could be seen in the professionalism and sophistication with which some media reported the Lan story.
As the case became national news, journalists in China exchanged viewpoints. Wang Keqin, who is generally regarded as one of China’s best investigative journalists, said he was upset by Lan’s death before going to Shanxi to report the story. Having faced threats in the past – an expose on fraud had once put a price on his head and forced him to flee his native Lanzhou province – Wang expressed sympathy for the murdered reporter and anger toward his killers.
Soon after, Wang set off for Shanxi, where he investigated the case in exhausting detail and wrote a news report of more than 10,000 words for China Economic Times, a leading newspaper in Beijing. Wang’s sources included, among others, Lan’s family members, his friends and colleagues, workers at the illegal coal mine in Datong and police officers on the case. Wang’s story painted a vivid picture of the circumstances surrounding Lan’s death and the environment of rampant media corruption in Shanxi of which he had been a part.
“When I first started out doing journalism, I wanted to uphold my professional ideals,” Wang quoted an anonymous Shanxi reporter, who admitted accepting payoffs to keep stories under wraps. “The circumstances [of the profession] changed me.”
Before he set out to report the Lan story, Wang spoke passionately
about its injustices. Days later his news report became the most authoritative
version of events, reported with a cool-headed determination to gather all of the facts from a great variety of sources and present them without bias. Wang’s report remains one of the fullest pictures of the Lan case. Other media, including Southern Metropolis Daily and China Newsweekly, also made important contributions to the story.
The work of these journalists might encourage people to remember that while China’s media environment is fraught with problems, there are also reporters and editors braving the odds and seeking to uphold a standard of professionalism.