China's peace offering to Olympic media
By Katharina Schneider-Roos Posted Wed, Sep 17 2008
As part of Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, Wang Wei, Secretary General of the Beijing Bid Committee, promised: “When foreign media will come to the Olympics, they will be given complete freedom to report.” Promises of top Olympic and government officials concerning human rights and press freedom, which influenced the decision of the International Olympic Committee, followed.
What China exactly promised is contained in the Host City Contract, which is not yet open to the public.
China won the Olympic bid by a wide margin on July 13, 2001, a decision that was controversial but unequivocal. Those who believed supporting China in hosting the Olympics would morally oblige the country to work on its human rights records won over those who wanted China to change its practices first and host the Olympics later.
The reporting conditions for foreign correspondents have improved but are still not up to international standards. Melinda Liu, president of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China, says, “There has been improvement in the regulations governing foreign correspondents’ reporting activities. Specifically, the new regulations enacted on Jan. 1, 2007 and due to expire in October 2008 have liberalized the restrictions on journalists who travel in order to report.”
In the past, journalists had to get prior permission from local authorities to do an interview. Under the new rules, all journalists need is the consent of the subjects and they can do the interview. The journalists’ situation has changed, but those who they want to interview and their Chinese assistants are under enormous pressure.
“Chinese officials have not yet fulfilled their promise. During the last two weeks of March, foreign correspondents experienced at least 50 incidents of reporting interference, mostly when they tried to report in Tibetan areas,” added Liu. During the past year there have been 180 cases of interference.
Although it was not initially clear, it became obvious that Tibet was an exception. As many as 21,500 accredited and about 5,000 to 10,000 non-accredited journalists are expected to come to China to cover the Olympics, compared to the 760 total in 2007.
The situation of the Chinese media, however, was not mentioned in the bid. Just as in the past, controls have tightened before other big events like China’s National People’s and Party Congresses. Editors receive lists of forbidden topics and are told to avoid writing negative reports on them. The Central Propaganda Bureau forms a tight net, which controls media on all levels. Every week the rules for reporting are passed on to journalists through meetings, fax or telephone calls. Around 30 journalists are imprisoned, and liberal newspapers like Beijing News, Caijing Magazine and Southern Metropolis Daily have been targeted by the government.
David Bandurski, an editor for the China Media Project in Hong Kong, and a long -time observer of the media situation in China, says, “China’s hosting of the Olympic Games has so far had no appreciable positive impact on Chinese journalists. On the contrary, media controls have intensified as Chinese leaders seek to ensure social and economic stability ahead of what they view as an international event of great strategic national importance.”
Instead of enjoying the expected positive public relations the Olympics would bring, China finds itself on the defense. Protesters have turned the attention of American and European media from sports to the crackdown in Tibet. Human rights violations and China’s investments in Sudan are public relations disasters for China, which wanted to present itself as an open and modern society. However, torch protesters unwillingly serve another goal — they unite China.
While looking at a picture of Jin Jing, the wheelchair fencer from whom a pro-Tibet demonstrator tried to grab the torch in Paris, Roland Soong, founder of the popular Chinese news blog EastSouthWestNorth comments, “There is a public relations disaster, but the question is for whom? The paramount goal of the Chinese Communists is to retain control of China, and therefore it is the response from Chinese citizens that matters. Thanks to the protests, Chinese Communists may have consolidated support by its citizens for years to come.”
There is a lack of intellectual reflection in the media on this nationalism. Reflection did surface, however, in the form of an essay entitled, “How to find the Truth About Lhasa” by Chang Ping on April 3. Ping, former deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, discussed the recent Chinese attacks on the bias of the western media in the wake of the Lhasa riots and applied the same reasoning to the domestic media. The discussion was brought to the pages of the Beijing Evening News, where the “universal values” Chang Ping was referring to were ridiculed. Ping has since been fired from his position and labeled a traitor.
The development of Chinese media has its own logic and history. Having been the Party’s mouthpiece for more than 30 years where “each word and line, each character and sentence, must take the Party into consideration,” there were first talks of formal independence of the press in the 1980s.
In November 2007, the Emergency Response Law was passed after the mishandling of emergency situations like SARS and the Songhua River pollution incident of 2002. The first version still included the passage states “news media that irregularly report the development and handling of emergencies without authorization, or release fraudulent reports will be fined from $6,250 to $12, 500 if the reports lead to serious consequences.” The provision was cut after a public outcry and a discussion on press freedom on Southern Metropolis Daily and blogs. Despite the removal of this passage, there is still a grey area that gives room for media control.
However, there have been drawbacks. According to Bandurski, “changes in China’s press environment since 2001 is owed predominantly to the changeover in leadership. Hu Jintao has taken a tougher stance on press control, and tougher journalism, notably investigative reporting, has suffered as a result. There is no relationship between the Olympic bid and the state of China’s press terrain since 2001.”
So what does influence China’s press terrain? “You can’t just say that the Chinese government controls the media. The media control lies within the party. You actually have to say that the government in the form of the State Council has a more open attitude concerning media,” says Li Datong, the former editor in chief of Freezing Point, a supplement of China Youth Daily, which was shut down by the authorities in January 2006. Li was also an activist who led a group of 1,000 reporters to meet with China’s central leadership to talk about press reform in 1989.
China’s State Council is also behind the Freedom of Information Act, which went into effect on May 1, 2008, and which will force the Chinese government on all levels to disclose government information to the media and the public. According to Cheng Jie, an associate professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Law, “the scope and nature of the government information is not clear.” Without freedom of the press, the effect of the right of information for the public is limited.
A report published in Feb. 2008 entitled Storming the Fortress: A Research Report on China’s Political System Reform after the 17th Party Congress, sheds some light on the reformers in the Communist Party of China. The report, by scholars of China’s Central Party School, the party’s top think tank, offered a comprehensive political system reform plan and detailed steps to further democracy.
In the report, the media were criticized for having lost contact with society and credibility with the masses. Unlawful interference by local government bodies was to be limited. In the eyes of the reformers, media should have the function of a watchdog but always under the control of the party. The central government is interested in using the Chinese and foreign media to find out about injustices and local officials who do not live up to the standards set on a national level. These thoughts are not yet mainstream, but they at least can be printed.
Nevertheless, the Internet, blogs, contact with Western journalistic standards and an interest of the party to move toward a certain degree of independence of the media have changed the Chinese media landscape over the past 30 years. This process has many steps ahead, and its drawbacks will continue after the Olympic Games.
Alternatively, Li says, “there is pressure on Beijing to comply with some international standards, but it would be naïve to believe that the Chinese government would change over night. It will be a long-term and latent change. In China change can’t be brought along by foreign countries. There has to be a change of inner Chinese powers. Think of it: in 1989 there were one million people on the street and it brought no change; do you really think, a few days of Olympics will make such a big change?”
Still, there is always hope and still three months in which the Chinese government can show that it respects its own moral engagement for the Olympic Games and will demonstrate political good will by opening restrictions on the local media and at least freeing some imprisoned journalists.