China's media blitz needs fact-checking
By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - As news organizations across the world have slashed budgets and
laid off journalists during the global economic downturn, China is enjoying a
media boom.
Stung by critical international news coverage, Chinese leaders have allocated
45 billion yuan (US$6.6 billion) for the expansion of state media groups such
as the Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV) and China Radio
International (CRI). The aim is to improve China's image abroad, which has
taken repeated hits over Beijing's human rights record and riots in the regions
of Xinjiang and Tibet.
CCTV recently added an Arabic-language channel that reaches 300 million people
in 22 countries; soon the broadcaster will also
begin a Russian-language service. CRI can be heard in 43 different languages,
and Xinhua is busy adding 117 bureaus around the world reporting in eight
different languages. In addition, last April, amid dire predictions of the
death of the newspaper in the Western world, Beijing launched an
English-language version of the Global Times, a paper noted for its
enthusiastic nationalism.
Underscoring this new media drive, this month the first World Media Summit -
dubbed the "Media Olympics" - was held in the Great Hall of the People in
Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with President Hu Jintao delivering the keynote
address to such media luminaries as News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch, BBC global
news director Richard Sambrook, Associated Press president Thomas Curley and
Kyodo News boss Satoshi Ishikawa.
The idea for the two-day summit was born during talks between Xinhua president,
Li Congjun, its host, and international media moguls who gathered in Beijing
for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The stated aim of the conference, which drew
300 representatives from more than 170 media outlets in 80 countries, was to
take up the technological challenges and opportunities of the digital age. But
Beijing's larger, unspoken purpose was to soften up the world's leading news
executives while stoking their dreams of a share of China's huge and still
rapidly growing media market.
A country of 1.3 billion people, China already tops the world in Internet users
with 338 million, more than the entire US population. Its mobile-phone market,
with 710 million users, is also the world's largest.
News Corp's Murdoch is still waiting on Chinese authorities to allow Hong
Kong-based Star TV, which he purchased in 1993 with an eye on the expanding
mainland market, to compete throughout China. At present, Star's market access
is severely restricted on the mainland.
Although his faith in Chinese authorities may have been misplaced, Murdoch's
business sense was right. While many news organizations are struggling for
survival in the West, business on the mainland is booming. In 1950, a year
after the communist revolution established the People's Republic of China, the
country had 65 radio and television stations and 253 newspapers with a daily
circulation of 2.53 million; now there are 2,000 radio and television stations
and nearly 2,000 papers with a circulation of 200 million. There is still much
room for growth.
It was no surprise that Murdoch and his cohorts were models of reserve during
their two-day conference in Beijing. When Hu promised to "safeguard the
legitimate rights and interests of foreign news organizations and reporters and
facilitate foreign media coverage of China in accordance with China's laws and
regulations", none of the assembled media moguls raised questions about
crippling restrictions on their coverage of trouble spots such as Xinjiang and
Tibet. In last July's ethnic clashes in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi,
reporters were beaten and detained for doing their job.
And, no one dared mention the draconian limitations placed on the national
media, which receives regular edicts from Beijing's propaganda czar about what
they can and cannot report, or the central government's routine efforts to
block the Internet as well as mobile-phone coverage.
Indeed, the whole idea of holding a "Media Olympics" in a country where the
media are not free - and the spectacle of global media executives kowtowing to
Chinese leaders in the Great Hall of the People - should be seen as an
unsettling development for serious journalists everywhere. This is especially
true when it comes at a time when Beijing is spending billions of dollars on a
massive international media campaign.
How can the heads of the world's most prominent media organizations gather for
two days of talks in the Chinese capital and ignore the elephant in the room -
the central government's ongoing repression of the media? The topic of media
freedom was conspicuous by its absence on the conference agenda and was also
largely avoided in comments made on the sidelines by the bigwigs in attendance.
For example, this was AP president Curley's take on Hu's keynote, "I was
delighted to hear, some 15 months after the Olympics, that the progress [in
opening up to international media] will continue. Obviously, there are still
some challenges and some issues, but his statement seemed quite sincere. That
he joined us this morning was an important gesture as well."
Editor-in-chief of Reuters, David Schlesinger, was more blunt. "Companies and
government departments and government officials need to be ready to be open,"
he said. "They need to take interviews and to reveal figures. Journalists
working for foreign media are still too often excluded or granted a lower level
of access."
But Schlesinger's criticism, mild as it was, was the exception to the general
rule of deference to the host.
Still, Beijing was, by all accounts, a superb host. Accommodation at the
Beijing Hotel and the Grand Hotel was first rate, and the Great Hall of the
People provided a grand stage for the event, which Xinhua organized with
notable style and professionalism.
From Beijing's point of view, the conference was a great success. In exchange
for a few vague presidential promises about protecting the rights of foreign
reporters, Chinese media officials, who dream of building their own
state-controlled version of news and entertainment conglomerates like Time
Warner and the Turner Broadcasting System, got to pick the brains of the
world's most successful media executives.
There is no denying that Chinese leaders have made progress on media freedom;
indeed, they were forced to make a raft of promises on this score to win their
bid for the Olympic Games. It is also clear, however, that the country still
has a long way to go, and the sincerity of those promises remains very much in
doubt.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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