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A former vice-mayor of a poverty-stricken city in the coal-rich province of Shanxi was on Wednesday sentenced to death, without reprieve, for accepting over one billion yuan in bribes (US$160 million), March 29.
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China’s press faces increasingly oppressive restrictions on their coverage
“They can’t write the facts even if they know them. They only deal with the surface, pretending to be ignorant of the background. They often engage in self-censorship. A few years ago, they were banned from covering politics. Later, they were banned from covering the economy. Now, they can’t even cover the entertainment industry. The press are like a cicada in late autumn – they can’t make a sound. Things are really desperate.” Recently, a news outlet in Hong Kong ran an in-depth interview with members of the press in China. While it’s widely known that the freedom of the press is a travesty in China, the story told by media workers is truly grim. Multiple layers of censorship Censorship of translations is routine. Reporting guidelines arrive via fax from the central and local governments. Staff from each department drop by to make a copy by hand – the handwritten method is still preferred to prevent the guidelines from being leaked to the outside. Reporting on domestic politics is obviously impossible. There used to be coverage of “dead tigers” – powerful figures ensnared in corruption – but even those reports are hard to find now. No reporters dig around, looking for a scoop. Foreign politics is another topic the media avoids. When China’s constitution was amended at the beginning of the year to eliminate term limits for President Xi Jinping, the media couldn’t cover foreign political systems, such as Putin’s Russia, that might offer clues about dictatorships. After a certain point, coverage of major social issues started to decrease. Regardless of the amount of popular interest, these topics are crushed before they morph into criticism of the government. Earlier this year, the film “Dying to Survive,” which raised issues with how the supply of pharmaceuticals was managed, was a big hit, but reviews of the film were banned after its fourth day on screens. The government even manages the lists of “most viewed” news articles that appear on internet portals. Articles that make it into the top ten are artificially pushed down and out of the rankings to prevent them from shaping public opinion. There has also been a gradual increase in restrictions on business and industry news. At the beginning of the US-China trade war, the reporting guidelines called for a stern attitude but then later banned the media from even using the word “trade war.” Currently, they used the phrase “trade conflict,” but they don’t report the details. That explains why Chinese media has boasted that China is right and will win without providing any facts. Restrictions even encroach on entertainment coverage A large number of newspapers have given up on political and economic reporting and have turned into entertainment media. While they’ve tried to cover the most popular celebrities, they aren’t allowed to report on the recent hip-hop craze because of the genre’s rebelliousness and vulgar language. Articles on the South Korean entertainment industry were also made off limits because of the ban on Korean cultural imports. Even when reporters try to go behind the scenes in the entertainment industry, they have to avoid sensational topics such as infidelity. The inevitable result is that “edifying stories” become the main source of news. ”Sensitive words” and getting a screen shot while one still can Once an article is completed, the article is run through a search engine for “sensitive words,” rather like a spell check, and revisions continue until no sensitive words turn up. There are even professional editors in charge of this. But ultimately, some reports get canned. An editor might post an article temporarily and then call in the reporter to offer some consolation, saying, “Get a screen shot while you can, since you won’t be able to see the article anymore.” Out of frustration, young reporters change their line of work, and their spots are filled with even younger reporters, who themselves leave in frustration and make way for others. This leads to a situation where the workforce has youth but no energy or experience. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying shocked foreign reporters during the regular press briefing on Aug. 30 when she said that “the Japanese government needs to educate and control domestic media.” Though Hua was responding to a controversy about a reporter from the far-right newspaper the Sankei Shimbun who had been blocked from joining the press pool covering a meeting between the Chinese and Japanese governments the previous day, remarks about the government’s education and regulation of a free press were hard for reporters to swallow. But the Chinese government educates the press and in this way controls the entire society. “The Chinese state-run media repeatedly make three arguments – that the Chinese leaders are hard at work on behalf of the people, that this makes the Chinese people happy, and that life in foreign countries is hard because of various accidents and incidents,” said a 30-something member of the Communist Party. This is also why it’s becoming harder for foreign countries, including South Korea, to gain a proper understanding of China. By Kim Oi-hyun, Beijing correspondent Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
