Word Games — page 2

Learning how to keep quiet and toe the party line starts early for China's journalists. A textbook used by the journalism program at Fudan University, one of China's top schools, still lists "broadcasting the government's policy" and "acting as a bridge between the government and the people" as key functions of the media. (Indeed, the political role of China's media is reflected in the language itself: in Mandarin, the word xuanchuan means both propaganda and publicity). Reporters regularly come home to find that police have searched their living quarters, either to look for sensitive documents tying them to taboo coverage or simply to rattle them. Under regulations issued by the Ministry of Publicity, Chinese journalists are not allowed to accept interviews from foreign media or, in some cases, even to meet foreigners without applying first for permission. When contacted by TIME, more than a dozen Chinese reporters refused to discuss any aspect of their jobs, for fear they might be punished by their superiors.

Other rules also discourage full disclosure. Chinese editors regularly circulate to their reporters directives from the local publicity (that is, propaganda) department listing topics that cannot be mentioned in print. In Shanghai, for instance, journalists say they are forbidden from covering the controversial property dealings of the city's richest citizen, Zhou Zhengyi, or, for that matter, alluding to any real estate scandals at all. "The local government has asked us to keep silent in order not to affect the climate for foreign investment," says a reporter with the Shanghai Morning Post. In the southern city of Guangzhou, forbidden topics include a string of murders using rat poison; meanwhile, Beijing papers have been prohibited from writing about the difficulty that recent college graduates have had in finding jobs. "Mostly, we know what we can't write, so we don't even bother looking at those topics," says Duan Wen, a Southern Group reporter who says he switched from law to journalism five years ago because he believes "the media can make a bigger difference than the law."

Indeed, despite the official straitjacket, China's media are reporting more freely and extensively than before. A decade ago, the newsprint used to wrap fish in southern Guangdong province would have contained the same monotonous news as a daily published thousands of miles away in Gansu province: China's relations with a small African republic were happier than ever or Beijing's newest economic policy was meeting with unprecedented success. Readers learned mostly to ignore the press and depend on the rumor mill for the real scoop. Today, in contrast, there are about 2,000 licensed newspapers in China, 11 times more than in 1978. Government censors simply cannot keep up with the information overload. Industrial accidents or natural disasters, which disappeared into a news black hole a few years ago, are reported with relish. Local corruption is fair game, particularly if the media outlet operates in a province outside of where the malfeasance is taking place. The increasingly fractured power structure in China explains why the Guangdong-based Southern Group can report aggressively on scandals outside of Guangdong but was disciplined for covering SARS and the infamous case of a migrant beaten to death in a detention center in Guangzhou—both of which were stories that occurred in the media group's own backyard.

Nothing has catalyzed China's information revolution more than the free market, which received a boost last month when Beijing began officially allowing private ownership stakes in the media. With the government gradually withdrawing state subsidies from money-losing media outlets, China's press suddenly has been tasked with catering to readers' needs in order to stay solvent. Subscribers want juicy stories, and the wealth of information available online has underlined the disconnect between reality and what most of China's anodyne press were reporting. So as the newspaper wars heated up, editors began signing off on more and more courageous reporting, and newsstand sales reflected the readers' approval. A Southern Metropolis Daily issue last spring that offered a relatively unvarnished account of the SARS threat was one of the paper's best sellers ever. Around the same time, a special issue by Southern Weekend on popular ex-Premier Zhu sold out in just hours, even though the fawning tribute was seen as politically awkward because the weekly was giving more coverage to Zhu's retirement than it had to former President Jiang Zemin's. Shortly after the Zhu package was printed, Southern Weekend's chief editor was demoted, in part for the profile on the Premier, and replaced by a cadre from the provincial publicity department. "We always have to balance political considerations with economic needs," says the Southern Metropolis Daily reporter. "It's a delicate balance."

There are other ways in which economic considerations make certain stories too treacherous to touch. Compared with other college graduates, Chinese journalists are paid relatively low wages, averaging $3,000 annually, and many are compensated per published word, instead of receiving a fixed salary. That makes them less likely to embark on sensitive pieces, which may be nixed by risk-averse editors. The underwhelming pay also makes journalists easy targets for bribes from companies hungry for good press. Even when foreign media contact Chinese companies, their p.r. people often ask how much the interview will cost. Just showing up at a press conference can net a Chinese journalist $20—the amount is dubbed a "car-horse fee" for transportation, but it obviously covers more than a taxi ride. Gushing 500-word stories can net a reporter $60. The most lucrative time is Chinese New Year, when companies hand out "red packets" of up to $6,000 to reporters from big-name publications who lavished them with positive coverage over the past year. "We have jumped directly from a propaganda-based media to a commercialized media," laments Li Xiguang, vice director of the School of Journalism and Communications at Tsinghua University in Beijing. "Unless we convince our journalists to report in an independent and unbiased manner, democracy will never come to China." In the end, China is discovering that reporters' greed can be as corrosive to probing journalism as political repression.

—With reporting by Bu Hua/Shanghai and Zhou Xingping/Beijing

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