Global Journalist

Cutting through the red tape

By Jonathan Haagen Posted Sun, Sep 7 2008

Home / Recent Stories / Cutting through the red tape

In early August, the news hit the United States: Chinese-made toys were a threat to American children. American consumers’ worst fears about made-in-China products had seemingly proved true, Chinese manufacturers were more than willing to put lives at risk just to make an extra buck.

Amidst this hysteria, Louisa Lim, a correspondent for National Public Radio in Shanghai, traveled to the world’s largest wholesale market in the Chinese city of Yiwu in the Zhejiang province. Instead of finding it deserted in the wake of the scandal, the market’s toy section teemed with international buyers. Christmas was just a few months away, and China still had the cheapest toys.

“Assigning blame for quality problems is not easy in these situations,” says Lim. “I talked with workers at a Christmas tree factory. They told me ‘look, it’s not our fault. Western companies have been cutting the amount they are willing to pay.’ Other people had reported on the what, but being in China meant I could explain a little more of the how and why.”

The role of arbiter between East and West has fallen to foreign correspondents like Lim, who are charged with explaining and interpreting an often inscrutable China to readers abroad.

“The issues we cover are quite nuanced,” says Lim. “They cannot just be covered in black and white.”

Unique challenges come hand-in-hand with this weighty responsibility. Deep-rooted traditions of secrecy, different perspectives on the role of news media, and the inescapable uncertainty inherent in covering a place as fast-changing as China all make the work of a foreign correspondent complex and difficult.

That means covering a broad spectrum of issues. Foreign correspondents in China cannot afford to specialize.

“What do I report on? Everything,” says Lim. “(News organizations) are allowed so few accreditizations that we really have to report on everything.”

Edward Cody, the Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, is a perfect example. In the past few months, he has tackled stories on everything from the U.S. response to elections in Taiwan to China’s land policy for farmers to ecological problems related to the Three Gorges Dam project.

In late December, Cody wrote another story, this one about a retired Beijing man who filed a lawsuit against the government for removing his post on the Internet. Chen Yuhua’s protest of the municipal government’s regulation “barring any dog over 14 inches high” is certainly not as grand a news story as some of the others Cody has covered. The author himself allows that Chen’s quest may be “quixotic,” however, he argues that telling these types of stories helps give readers abroad a more balanced picture of China.

“I try to find a personal case that epitomizes something larger that is happening in China,” says Cody. “On the surface, we have a man with a dog who chafed at censorship, but his story also serves as a sign that educated people in China may be growing impatient with controls on expression.”

Some controls on expression, however, are loosening up. In January 2007, the central government issued new rules for all foreign journalists, stating that correspondents may talk to anyone willing to be interviewed without seeking the permission of local authorities until
October 2008.

The new regulations have been a welcome change for journalists who previously had to rely on stealth and a willful skirting of the rules to get their scoops. However, despite increased journalistic freedoms, three major challenges remain.

First, the atmosphere in China does not allow for a wide airing of issues in the way that many Western countries do.

“If I am in a country like Italy and I read the news everyday, I can get a pretty good insight into the pulse of the country,” says Cody. “In China, you just can’t get your finger on the pulse in the same way.”

Compounding this issue is the fact that, even when central officials call for greater journalistic freedoms, local officials tend to encumber correspondents in their area in any way they can.

“Local authorities simply don’t want us around,” says Cody. “Even with the new rules, it can be very tricky, because even if they can’t stop us directly, they have the power to hurt our sources.”

Their greatest challenge, however, remains access. While openness and transparency are considered the ideal in Western countries, the convention in China has long been secrecy. This has meant that although none of the foreign correspondents interviewed considered any topics to be ‘taboo,’ certain subjects have been difficult to cover effectively.

“The government in particular has a tradition of secrecy, and our efforts in the face of that have been feeble,” says Cody.

Other correspondents suggest that a great deal of the concealment is due to officials having no viable system for dealing with the foreign press.

“Chinese companies and ministries will frequently be surprisingly open to friendly Chinese journalists, but lack any systematic channel for foreign news organizations to confirm or deny rumors,” explains Lucy Hornby, a Reuters reporter in Beijing.

“Chinese officials, both corporate and government, often have no clear framework for how much they can talk about or what is a ‘state secret,’ with the result that they clam up in response to what I might consider to be an innocuous request,” she says.

The tendency to restrict access and information in ambiguous situations not only makes work harder for the correspondents but also often results in more negative portrayals of China.

During one outing, David Wivell’s A. P. Television News team was filming the main gate of Peking University for a piece on a university ceremony. When police came and forcibly detained his team, he was forced to cancel the piece.

“Things have been getting much better, but it breaks up our story every time something like that happens,” explains Wivell. “Instead of a nice story about a celebration at the school, we are left with a story about police roughing up journalists.”

Many in China believe that foreign media engage in “China bashing” or, at the very least, choose to cover stories that portray China in a negative light. The foreign correspondents interviewed bristled at the suggestion that they would be so biased, or that their stories could be subject to editorial pressures in their home countries.

“The whole point of having a correspondent is that they have a more informed perspective than people back home,” says Cody. “It is really expensive to maintain a correspondent abroad. If editors in America were telling me what to write, it would destroy the whole point of me being here.”

Other correspondents argued that striving for accuracy and objectivity in reporting inevitably means that stories will run the gamut from good to bad.

“It is very simplistic, binary thinking to consider the foreign media to be pro-China or anti-China,” contends Lim. “Foreign correspondents who actually live in China recognize that the country is far from monolithic and don’t report on it in that way.”

Wivell attributes Chinese suspicions to a fundamental difference in the roles of news media in China and other parts of the world. Because the job of Western media is to agitate and question authority, there is a different end goal than that of the Chinese press.

“Compared to Americans, Chinese people are not used to seeing ‘bad’ news, because the government — right or wrong — uses media to teach, guide and send a message. I think Chinese audiences take bad news a little more personally than other audiences, because they don’t see as much that is negative — especially about things happening in China,” says Wivell.

There is a distinction to be made between foreign correspondents in China and foreign media that fly in to cover a particular story. Hornby described the latter as tending to write stories that conformed to comfortable clichés about China.

“You do have instances of ‘cookie cutter’ journalists who come to China with a particular story in mind, and then go in search of facts that fit,” admits Cody. “Even in those instances, though, the accuracy of the stories is compromised less by the author being ‘anti-China’ as by their trying to appeal to readers for whom China is a potential bonanza — essentially arguing that economic evolution will produce political progress, and looking the other way whenever that proves false.”

It seems that every year China becomes more complex and difficult to cover. However, this year, the single event of the Olympics has captured the attention and imagination of the foreign correspondents in China now, and the thousands more waiting to descend on Beijing in August.

“It’s such a big deal, I can’t help but look forward to the Olympics,” says Hornby. “If I can possibly think of an angle that hasn’t been told, I won’t be telling anyone until after it hits the Reuters wire with my name on it.”

Of all the foreign correspondents interviewed, only Wivell seemed ready to look past the games. “I am looking forward to when the Olympics are over — to when China has proven itself, and can relax a bit and get comfortable with the interesting country it has always been.”