Controlling the media is Xi's message
By Peter Lee
The run-up to the Chinese Communist Party's Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress was surrounded by a lot of America-style political/policy hoopla, with advance leaks to the media from policy advisers in the know, and an exponential multiplication of think pieces, charts, and graphics and informed commentary on where the party would and had to go courtesy of reformists in the Chinese press and China experts from overseas.
Finally, it seemed, the CCP was inching toward the open public
debate mediated through, well, the media that distinguishes the manufacture of political and policy sausage in the West.
Not so fast.
The Third Plenum itself, in the form of its communique, turned its back on this modern, new media frippery and delivered a turgid and uninformative statement of principles and ideals. More than a nothingburger, it was a retro nothingburger, harking back to the old days when party pronouncements were enshrined in People's Daily for the wonderment of the populace and the bewilderment of China watchers, and later parsed, explained, and amplified to the rank and file in closed party venues.
Maybe that was the point here.
There is an understandable tendency to equate the PRC's march to world power status with certain political and social upgrades: more democracy, enhanced government transparency, surrender of more of the economy to market forces, and greater freedom of expression.
According to the Western cookbook, this is a recipe for a legitimate, robust regime able to uplift its people and contribute wealth, power, and leadership to the planet in a responsible way.
But that's not where the PRC seems to be headed, judging by the bland Third Party Plenum communique, which was long on soporific slogans and distinctly lacking in specific, energizing policy prescriptions or newsworthy soundbites.
When Xi Jinping looks at China's challenges - decreased investment efficiency, burgeoning income inequality, the looming middle-income-trap, and a demographic cul de sac - it seems he is not regarding democracy, free markets, and transparency as welcome and unavoidable panaceas. Just the opposite, perhaps.
And that's a story that the liberal democratic press isn't particularly well-equipped to conceptualize, let alone cover.
The PRC seems to be swinging away from Western-style reformism to what could be termed technocratic authoritarianism, one that relies on a united and effective central leadership core to formulate and impose policies throughout the country.
And who can blame President Xi (other than the legions of aggrieved, disappointed, and condescending pundits, analysts and journalists who consider themselves experts on good governance by virtue of having grown up within the Western system during the brief, golden era when America was the world's number one boss)?
Instead of indulging the Jeffersonian fantasies of ideal liberal democracies, consider the concrete results that the Western system has delivered in the last few months in its flagship enterprise, the United States.
On the democracy front, a collapse in governance brought the United States to the brink of default and revealed that weaknesses in the political system could allow a small minority to thwart the will of the executive (a pressing concern for the Chinese regime, which is all executive), the legislature, and arguably the people.
As for the victorious charge of free markets, the Obama administration's flailing efforts to bring US healthcare into the 20th century - by jury rigging a hybrid government/business/federal/state instead of imposing a socialistic government single-payer system - threatens to become its own chapter in the epic of American political dysfunction.
And on the matters of government transparency and freedom of expression, while Xi is undoubtedly reveling in the discomfiture (and domestic and foreign policy difficulties) that the NSA surveillance and spying revelations have brought to President Barack Obama, he is certainly not interested in ordering up a heaped plate of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald for his own table.
All bumps in the road, you might say, in the glorious path to democratic nirvana. However, even the US system, underpinned by 200 years of robust democracy, rampant free-marketism, and the ability to impose its version of reality on the world thanks to its military and economic heft, is experiencing tremendous stress.
What of a rickety, vulnerable, single-party Chinese state, whose only claim to legitimacy is a perceived ability to keep the economic wheels turning no matter what?
From this perspective, it is unsurprising that Xi shows little appetite for the liberal democratic secret sauce of success.
Instead of that "one push of the button" vision of a transparent, vibrant public union of policy, principle, market forces, and political process that intoxicates Westerners (and may have doomed Obamacare), Xi may have chosen not to issue public rallying cries through the Third Plenum communique or other high profile national forums. Instead, he may proceed cautiously, incrementally, and secretly through the opaque party apparatus, pursuing particularism instead of universality, isolating his enemies and aggressively marginalizing dissenters instead of giving them the legitimacy of a nationwide platform.
The central government's willingness to comport itself more openly as the instrument of CCP authoritarianism after a superficial and futile flirtation with soft-power namby-pambyism is one of the more interesting characteristics of the Xi regime. Xi has worked to enhance party discipline and unity and minimize the social and political role of dissent, apparently in preparation for the day when he is confident that his apparatus can handle the internal and external stresses and can roll out the policies he deems desirable.
Some of this trend can be inferred from the delicate task of neutralizing former party official Bo Xilai and destroying his power base in Chongqing, and the creeping campaign against the top management of the China National Petroleum Company. These can be regarded as examples of political score-settling and consolidation of the power of Xi and his clique. They can also be viewed more broadly as harbingers of the new regime's priorities in party rectification and reform of state-owned enterprises.
Furthermore, Xi's efforts to improve the performance, honesty, image, and authority of the party may also reflect his interest in disciplining and mobilizing the centrally-directed party apparatus, so it can confront the economic, political, and social black hole at the heart of the PRC system.
This is the incompetence, impunity, and debt-development-and landgrab-fueled economic and social destructiveness of the PRC's local governments - which were cut loose on the revenue side in the 1990s and whose funding and governance crises were temporarily papered over by recourse to land seizures, real estate development, and indebtedness at the local level and economic growth fueled by infrastructure spending and the state's attention to a parallel economic reality of revitalized state-owned enterprises at the center.
Optimists about the efficacy of the free market in labor, market, and ideas appear to hope that reforming the household control or "hukou" system and promoting urbanization at a county level will allow the country to grow out of its local governance and finance problem.
Pessimists - like me - see policy-driven urbanization as just another bout of mixed-socialist laissez faire provoking one more ruinous round of corrupt, debt-and-infrastructure-fueled growth that will find the PRC with the same political and economic problems a decade from now, just bigger and more entrenched. To fix the countryside, in other words, the central party will have to reform the local governments, instead of bypassing or superseding them.
If Xi is considering a reform of local governments and the corrupt local interests that underpin them, he must also make plans to handle the inevitable political and media rumpus that will result.
What appears new is that the central PRC regime is becoming increasingly proactive in shaping the message on issues that previously might have been allowed to play out at the local level and through uncontrolled social media, either as queasy/cautious toleration of populism or as an opportunistic willingness to let local governments wrestle with local problems.
An interesting hint of Xi's inclination to end the era of benign/malign neglect that began when local governments were cut loose on the revenue side in the 1990s can be seen right under the noses of interested journalists - in the regime's determined efforts both to shrink the already diminished reach of domestic and international critical opinion in the media sphere and a growing willingness to push aside the localities and take explicit ownership of the message in local as well as national stories.
Evidence of tightening control of professional and social media - from the announcement of new media regulations and the pursuit of allegedly rumor-mongering big Weibo (microblogging) accounts - is irrefutable.
Consider the PRC's official response to the Philippine super-typhoon Haiyan disaster.
The Chinese government originally pledged 1 million yuan (US$164,100) to the effort in government aid and another 1 million yuan through the Chinese Red Cross. It then supplemented this pittance with 10 million yuan in disaster relief materiel and sympathetic words from Xi - still a far cry from the multi-million dollar pledges by the United States, Japan, and Australia.
Reuters concern-trolled (an Internet term for an insincere expression of concern actually meant to highlight an embarrassing fact) the PRC's lackluster effort under the headline: "China's Meager Aid to the Philippines Could Dent Its Image".
There are various plausible reasons why the PRC is not stepping up, including leadership focus on the Third Plenum and the generally dismal state of PRC-Philippine relations.
Perhaps the real reason is that Xi has his eye squarely on the domestic ball of public opinion, and does not want to be seen getting all soft and squishy, pursuing international popularity will o' the wisps when his main business is to convince the Chinese populace that the CCP has the domestic dissent/control/reform agenda well in hand.
Those with longer memories (a characteristic of the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy) might remember how foreign aid issues got rolled up in a spate of horrific school bus accidents that claimed dozens of lives in China in the winter of 2012. Netizen scorn was heaped on the government for concurrently providing school buses to Macedonia as an aid gambit even as China's own children perished on antiquated and unsafe buses.
More recently, the Chinese government came in for considerable criticism in the wake of Cyclone Fitow. In a few hours in October (in another one of those unprecedented calamities probably exacerbated by global warming and now recurring with such frequency that the previous instances are quickly forgotten), that storm dropped a half-meter or so of rain on northern Zhejiang province - more than the region had seen in a century - flooding 70% of a sizable city called Yuyao. There was considerable local disgruntlement at the provincial government's inability to provide prompt relief.
However, instead of serving as another example of effective netizen information sharing (or, in the government's view, irresponsible rumor mongering) to put moral and political pressure on the local government and exploit the center's frequent willingness to let often incompetent local governments take their public relations lumps while Beijing reserved for itself the role of Mr Good Guy/Deep Pockets, Yuyao served as the arena for the central government's media operation to move in and, as we say in US political parlance, "take ownership" of the Yuyao story.
The infamous rule against 500+ retweets of rumors was applied to a popular political cartoonist, Wang Liming, also known as "Revolutionary Pepper", who was detained in Beijing for retweeting a report alleging that a baby had starved to death while her mother waited in vain for government assistance to arrive.
The local propaganda chief scotched the story, claiming it wasn't true. Wang was released for "absence of malice" in passing on the allegedly false report, but the message had been delivered.
Even though the government subsequently called in riot police a week after the floods in order to suppress vocal local dissatisfaction, the lack of national media resonance - attributed to the intimidating scrutiny of Weibo retweets - deprived the story of activist catharsis.
With the Fitow context (and with the current example of the admittedly lesser losses and suffering that the Haiyin super-typhoon inflicted on the Chinese mainland), it would seem logical that the Xi government would not be interested in squandering its messaging victory by expending moral, political, and economic resources on the Philippines while the local situation is far from bright, thereby inviting netizen criticism of the government in the (for China) still privileged space of protected expression reserved for outpourings of nationalist and xenophobic bile.
In this case, letting the Philippines lean primarily on its eager allies, the United States and Japan (Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is particularly eager to use the disaster to demonstrate a regional role for Japan's Self-Defense Forces) sends a message that China's business is domestic, and China means business.
The Xi administration seems to be abandoning the passive "let the local government twist in the wind and serve as the focus of citizen ire" media approach that characterized the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao regime not only on Wukan (a Guangdong province village that was the focus of protests in late 2011) but on myriad other local environmental, land-grab, stability maintenance, chengguan (local government agency) outrages.
If Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang do have serious ambitions for local reform - and an appetite for handling the inevitable fallout in social, professional, and foreign media - they are probably aware of the time and focus it needs to contain and control a single story, let alone the thousands that might be unleashed by a broad-brush reform movement.
So look for the regime to proceed cautiously, incrementally, and covertly, and fight its battles where it has the best chance of controlling the media messaging, either by shaping it or suppressing it.
At the national level, it looks like even less lip service is being paid to the Western respect for the free press than the CCP usually displays. In the New York Times, Edward Wong this week relayed the dismay of Bloomberg reporters whose critical reporting on the wealth-accumulation proclivities of yet another CCP supremo were "withheld" at the behest of the regime, apparently so that Bloomberg's bread and butter business of providing financial news terminals to China would not suffer from Chinese unhappiness.
PJ Mooney, a Reuters correspondent, was denied a visa to return to China, reportedly for aggressive reporting on the PRC's harsh Tibet policy. Apparently, the New York Times and Bloomberg's efforts to maintain and expand their staffs within China have been systematically blocked by the Chinese government.
The case of Chen Yongzhou - the New Express reporter who, it is plausibly alleged, took money and disparaging information from a competitor to slander the construction manufacturer Zoomlion (leaving aside the interesting question of whether the disparaging tittle-tattle was true or not, an issue that has been submerged in excoriation of Chen's lapse in journalistic ethics) - was another heaven-sent opportunity for the government to discredit critical voices in the media.
The maximalist expression of festering foreign journalistic dissatisfaction with the PRC's information-management techniques was the violation of Godwin's Rule, the tongue-in-cheek dictum that all political debates invoking Hitler analogies promptly decay into irrelevance.
Bloomberg's editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, allegedly told reporters that the stories had to be spiked not so that the news terminal division could continue to suck in revenue from Chinese banks and brokerages, but so that Bloomberg could continue to fight the journalistic good fight in the tradition of "self-censorship by foreign news bureaus trying to preserve their ability to report inside Nazi-era Germany". Winkler said in a widely reported email last Friday that the articles from Hong Kong "are active and not spiked".
It is perhaps a low blow for China reporters (some of the more put-upon and frustrated journalists on the planet) to point out that self-censorship by news bureaus is practiced in order to preserve their ability to report - anywhere and everywhere.
Of course, even as the New York Times was risking serious injury patting itself on the back for David Barboza's story on the billions that had somehow stuck to the fingers of Wen's family, the Times had pre-publication meetings with the Chinese authorities. But when the Washington Post's Bernard Gellman goes after the NSA, the Post meets with the US government, either to push back or get pushed around in order to define the suitable boundaries to its coverage.
The Guardian publishes Edward Snowden's revelations, but agrees to destroy some hard drives under British government supervision.
Bottom line, news organizations render under Caesar for the privilege of doing business in various jurisdictions. The cost of doing journalistic business in China is extremely high - and Xi Jinping appears to have raised the price.
Whether Xi is simply interested in protecting himself and his cronies or wishes to control the PRC's media message in pursuit of higher and perhaps even worthwhile goals is an interesting question that events of the next few years - and ambitious and enquiring journos - will hopefully answer.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.
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