The news about the news in China is anything but good. I first learned about it close to 2 weeks
ago, when my China mentor, and the former Assistant Dean of the Journalism
School at Shantou University where I taught the fall semester in 2008, sent the
following news clip, a story by Teddy Ng in the authoritative Hong Kong-based
newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP)
“The Communist Party's propaganda authority is planning to tighten
its control over major journalism schools across the country and increase
Marxist education at the universities,” Ng reported.
“Three people familiar with the plan said senior local propaganda
officials would become heads or high-level officials of journalism programs at
10 top-tier universities, in an attempt to ensure their teaching is in line
with authorities' directives.”
Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have hardly hidden their plan,
which is to spread soon from 10 elite J-schools to all places where Journalism
is taught in China.
The story had actually been reported by Japan’s Kyodo News Agency
almost a week earlier.
Kyodo’s story cited a party source on what triggered the
J-School takeover. “President Xi Jinping
senses a crisis ‘at universities and in the mass media where reformists (who
support such values as democracy) have the most influence.’”
Several reports agree that officials from the party's Central
Propaganda Department will, in Kyodo’s words, “take over the top posts of their
journalism schools, and also beef up the media's role in serving as the ‘throat
and tongue’ of the Communist Party.”
Herford, whose long career in journalism education was preceded by
a distinguished record as a senior producer and bureau chief at CBS News, was
properly horrified.
“I feel for our former students and those who might have been our
future students,” Peter emailed. “This
latest step cements changes that have been creeping forward. They include the
seven "no’s", a list of basics that are no longer to be taught in
Chinese universities. These include Human Rights concepts and many of the
foundations of literature and history (expunging foreign and particularly
Western influences).”
According to SCPM’s Ng, the creeps have been advancing since
2001, when party hard-liners took control of journalism education at Shanghai’s
Fudan University.one of the top schools in the country. Back then, Ng reported, “Jiefang Daily quoted then Shanghai deputy party secretary
Gong Xueping as saying the arrangement would ensure local propaganda authorities
utilized their strength in leading and organizing the mass media.”
And sure enough, today, Ng said, “The current head of the
university's journalism program is Song Chao , who is a deputy propaganda
director for Shanghai.”
But today, a dozen years
after the CCP put its foot down at Fudan, the party propagandists’ plan for control
is widely predicted to be ineffective.
Ng quoted Li Datong, a former editor
with China Youth Daily:
"’The journalists will memorise some lines of Marxist thought but in the
end they won't care too much about it,’"
5 days later, Ng wrote that the CCP crackdown would extend
beyond Journalism, to everything taught at China’s universities, and to what
the Chinese people will see on their major broadcast networks “specific programmes for
spreading socialist ideologies, as well as more public service advertisements.”
But will President Xi’s dictates make a
difference? Ng cited another skeptic, Zhang Ming, a political science professor
at Renmin University, another top university in Beijing, "’The question
remains whether the public will buy it. It is impossible to carve them into the
brain’."
Xi’s problem is
simple: the world of information is complex, even in China, where the
government and Party are just 2 of thousands of would-be sculptors, carving
away at the public brain. Cracking down
on J-Schools or all schools, lobotomizing the content of mass media, is a sad old
story, and a lot of the sadness and frustration is inside the government/party
power structure, which still feels besieged.
Still, like
Peter, and some other former visiting teachers at Shantou, I was pretty
disheartened by the news. Until I saw the
following response my wife Amy got from a Chinese friend who is both a
professional translator, and a volunteer in a 20-year campaign to give all
Chinese access to the significant ideas current in the world, by publishing
translations on the internet.
He wrote: The crackdown is “routine, rather than news.” CCP policing of the media, “particularly in
terms of politic issues,” he wrote, has turned “most Chinese journalists into mere
zombie followers who retweet everything the Party says.
“Luckily,” he added, “we are not living in North Korea. The best
thing that ever happened is the internet. I don't have a TV and I subscribe to
no newspaper. I look out to the world through my optic fiber, in which way I
can get information from both sides and make my own judgment.”
Which was, he said, “I am sure the CCP, no matter how hard they
try to tighten their grip on journalism, has weaker influence today on
intellectuals and the economically advanced areas in this country. For journalists, it is just one more test to
pass, for which they have already been inoculated during their school days.”
Which reminded me of my own wonderful experience at Shantou, and
left me convinced he’s got it right. Even 5 years ago, the Journalism school,
like every school at the University, had a Party Secretary, who was largely
unseen and unheard, but could pop out at any moment with some annoying judgment
or admonition. I was warned (and had
already assumed) every class had an assigned Party snitch.
Kyodo reported, as early as last May, “university officials in
Beijing and Shanghai were saying that Chinese authorities had banned the
discussion in university classes of seven subjects (Peter Herford’s “7 No’s.”) including "freedom of the press,"
"citizen rights," "universal values" implying respect for
human rights and democracy, and "historical mistakes of the Communist
Party."
In 2008, there was no such explicit ban, and I regularly
discussed journalism’s role in society using all those forbidden concepts,
except the last one, on which my students had nothing to learn from me: they were
already experts. Clearly, someone ratted
me out to the Dean, who counseled me to “stop talking about China and human
rights, and just teach them what you know about journalism.”
I kept to my prior teaching plan, and never heard another word.
Here are 2 things my students taught me (here I paraphrase and
combine sources):
(1) “Journalism in China is a regulated profession. To work, you must be a member of the Party
and go regularly to meetings on party policy and propaganda. This is true for us as students and will be
true for us as journalists for as long as we work.”
“How do you deal with that?” I asked several students. Their answers made for Lesson (2)
“It’s all bullshit and everyone knows it. You join the Party. You go to meetings. You nod your head, and go home or back to the
office. Then you do your best to give
people real information and hope you don’t piss anybody off too much. The whole thing is a pain, and it hurts us
and the country, but you’d be surprised how much gets through.”
I was surprised at the results of a game my students and I
played every week. I would name a story
that had appeared on a portion of the internet which I could see because I was
a visiting professor, but which never appeared on a server they could use, and
ask them to have read it by my next class.
Every time, every student passed the test. For them, as for hundreds of millions of
Chinese netizens every day, the news does get through.
Which brings me
to another country where the government is trying desperately to control information
and citizens alike: Ukraine.
Over the past
year, the Soviet-style governance of President Viktor Yanukovych has asserted
increasing direct and indirect control over the nation’s news media, and, recently,
has stepped up thuggish violence against opposition reporters and demonstrators. But all this wave of authoritarianism has
produced is a backlash of popular
commitment to opposition, and widespread use of new and old communication
networks. Yanukovych, like President Xi
in China, is not just failing to cut the flow of ideas, he is failing to suppress
the demand for reform.
In Kyiv, the
worse the government behaves, the more people know about it. It has now been documented; the government’s
own violence produces bigger crowds of demonstrators and more definitive demands
for reform.
A recent blog post in the Washington Post by Oxford
University political scientist Olga Onuch passed along the results from ongoing
polling of demonstrators in Kyiv. They suggest that a lot of journalists and
activists have been mis-describing what’s going on there.
For one thing, Onuch reported, more than 1200
interviews show, the protests are not a youth movement. “While
many reports have championed Ukrainian students and youths for being the
predominant actors in the protests, the majority of the respondents (69
percent) are in fact older than 30. The average age of the Ukrainian protester
in Kyiv is closer to 36, with approximately 24 percent of participants older
than 55.”
What the
crowds are is diverse: students, academics, workers, and retired people;
Orthodox and Catholic believers and
atheists. One characteristic of the
people on the streets of the Ukraine capitol that should be shockingly bad news
for the government is how many of those polled are newly declared dissidents.
Onuch reported, “A surprising 38 percent of current protesters did not
participate in previous protests, and 37 percent did not participate in the
“Orange Revolution” [of 2004.]
“This
is, of course, not to say that students, youths and activists are not a
significant group,” Onuch reported, “but they do not represent the majority of
participants.”
The diverse protesters against the government have,
Onuch’s poll revealed, definably diverse goals.
“The
students and youth under 30 use more media savvy language of ‘EU
accession,’ ‘global human rights’ and employ abstract concepts such as ‘freedom.’
But,
Onuch wrote, “The 30 to 45 year-old protesters focus more on practical
matters like ‘economic security,’ ‘better opportunities for their children,’
and their desire to live in a ‘normal, European democracy.’ They insist that their presence lets the
regime known the ‘voters are here.’
“The
protesters over 55 explain that they ‘have lived through many injustices’
and that because they are ‘retired, [they] can protest in the place of the
young, who have to work and raise families.’ Thus, they see themselves as
guardians of the protests, when others cannot be there.”
And while social media are important, informing
people about the time and place of manifestations and framing issues, they are
just part of a diverse set of communications inputs Ukrainians draw on, inputs
that, as in China, are moving more and more from the policed official media to
the internet.
Asked how they follow the protest campaign, 48% of
those polled said they watched on broadcast TV; but, already 41% said they have
shifted their allegiance and now watched internet news channels instead.
Internet influence could be seen in the way personal contacts outweighed media contacts, including social media. Almost everyone told the pollsters they got political information from their friends, most of it from computers, tablets and mobile phones: 46% by text messages, 30% via email, versus 23% by telephone. Asked if they responded to protest invitations posted on social media, 10.4% said yes, they had responded to an invitation on Facebook, 14% from Russian competitor VKontakte.
It is in a form of “elite communication,” that
Onuch said the polls showed important influence from the social networks. “Our analysis of demands (as reflected
in slogans and signage), is still very preliminary, [but] it does seem to
follow certain patterns of words mentioned on Twitter, Facebook, chain e-mails
and internet news sites. We have noticed a pattern whereby a sign or slogan
first goes viral on Facebook, and then seems to show up more often in protester
signs. While making any serious conclusions from this method is complicated,
first impressions point to an “Internet-to-the-streets” directionality of
claims and framing of demands.”
In
China, this pattern has long been observed, although the word patterns are
closer to coding than sloganeering.
Although mass media coverage of the Arab Spring was long-delayed and
closely-crimped in China, it soon acquired an internet code name, “Jasmine,” which
soon became a banished word from the Chinese internet. Banished, but not forgotten.
As the
world changes, communication, social and journalistic, changes with it. Usually, it is the repressive government that
can’t keep up.
Will
that mean political change? The attitude
I get from people in China is typically patient and confident. Just as most your people assume it is
inevitable that the 21st Century will be China’s (just as the 20th
was America’s), they also assume, slowly, the unstoppable spread of popular
knowledge about the ideas and options available outside China will force the
government in Beijing to serious reform.
Right
now, most of the global evidence suggests, the coalescence of public
recognition of the realities of the world into greater public participation in political
and economic power is a long way off.
Great
troughs of information, most of it introduced to the region by Al Jazeera
(Arabic), and the implicit imperative for viewers to sort it out for
themselves, are what set off the Arab Spring.
Today, a few short years later, “people power” in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya,
Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria is being crushed, the old-fashioned way, under the
boot heels of unpopular state force (except in Libya, where the state, as well
as the people, are prey to the new-fashioned pandemonium of well-armed,
poorly-disciplined independent militias.)
Long-term,
I’m betting on information and the innumerable ways people devise to obtain it
The
master-pessimist Herman Melville unforgettably wrote: “What like a bullet can
undeceive?”
To which
I reply, “What like a tyrant can unleash communication?”
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