Media
stirs hornet's nest in
Guangzhou By Sreeram Chaulia
At a time when there is a chorus to
regulate and control the news media in established
democracies like the United Kingdom and India, a
converse drama is ensuing in authoritarian China
through a mini-revolt of journalists in Guangdong
province against excessive government interference
and skewing of reportage.
Unlike in free
societies, where some sections of the media are
being accused of sensationalism, irresponsibility
and larger-than-life kingmaker roles in politics,
the problem in single-party ruled China is the
classic one of a censorship state that has never
allowed print and audio-visual media to express
themselves honestly and objectively.
The
unfamiliar sight of 100-odd journalists gathering
in the metropolitan hub of Guangzhou, holding
banners and chanting
slogans denouncing the
gagging acts of the local propaganda chief of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), comes as a fresh
challenge to the new leadership under Xi Jinping.
The media persons who decided to take the
courageous step of marching in public and writing
open letters demanding the resignation of the
censorship boss are well aware of the risks to
personal safety and security for locking horns
with authorities in a closed polity like China.
But they were driven to such desperate measures by
subtle changes are occurring in Chinese society,
viz what the rebellious Southern Weekly's
daredevils have summed up as an "era of greater
openness".
China's economic opening up to
the world, which is now into its fourth decade,
was bound to also engender hunger for greater
information and scrutiny of how wealth and power
are being distributed and exercised. The architect
of China's economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping,
admitted this risk when he warned that opening the
windows will bring in not only "fresh air" (ie
avenues for economic growth and prosperity) but
also "flies and insects" (irritants to
dictatorship).
The CCP's gamble with
economic liberalization is whether the state and
its agents will be sufficiently in command of the
environment to swat the flies and to selectively
leverage the benefits of integrating China into
the global economy.
Hence the elaborate
paraphernalia adopted by the Party to censor
printed and aired news, build "Great Firewalls" on
the Internet, and weed out "unpatriotic" content
that can give Chinese people wrong ideas about
living in a more transparent system where
criticism of power-wielders carries no costs. But
what if the "flies" metastasize into a swarm of
locusts or a ubiquitous netherworld where mockery
of CCP elites and their wrongdoings becomes so
pervasive that it could undermine the core
legitimacy of the party?
The journalists who
are enraged by crude attempts of provincial CCP
propaganda units to rewrite editorials that even
mildly and generically discuss flaws in the status
quo are young Chinese "netizens" exposed to the
finest traditions of international investigative
and critical reporting. They would have already
scented some leeway to go after incidents of
official malfeasance following Xi Jinping's
opening speech as CCP general secretary last
November, in which he chided his party colleagues
for a culture of "taking bribes" and "being out of
touch with the people".
Although Xi is not a
Mikhail Gorbachev who might open the floodgates
for a free press through a Chinese
glasnost, he is ruling a China that is a
lot more information-saturated, web-savvy and
impatient about the glacial pace of political
reforms. Journalists have often been the avant
garde in using small windows of opportunity to
whittle away despotic forms of rule since they
have the training to probe deeper while the rest
of the public can only skim the surface.
The pioneering staff of the Southern
Weekly are testing the limits of a China that is
today relatively freer than it was before. They
are also trying to exploit a perceived gap between
the central government's overall guiding
objectives and the unscrupulous behavior of
provincial CCP bosses. By appealing to Beijing to
fire a propaganda bureaucrat in Guangzhou who is
stuck in a time warp, the journalists are seeking
a new China that is in sync with the worldwide
trend of pushing for greater accountability.
Will the fire lit by the conscientious
media in Guangzhou provoke nationwide agitation
against the muzzling of the press and spread of
disinformation? Xi will not be amenable to making
major policy changes on the way the media is
governed following protests owing to fear that
such concessions would attract more uprisings.
When poor peasants in a village called Wukan
(also in Guangdong province) rose up to defend
themselves against CCP-enabled land-grabbing and
corruption in September 2011, the crisis was
nipped in the bud at the local level through a
mixture of the symbolic removal of errant party
apparatchiks, state intimidation and co-option.
The Chinese state has developed a sophisticated
crisis-response mechanism that deploys sticks and
carrots and contains unrest, both geographical and
ideational.
It would be naive to expect
that China's close to rank bottom standing in the
global Press Freedom Index (published by Reporters
Without Borders) will improve in the near future.
It is currently placed at number 174 in a listing
of 179 countries for media freedom, with only the
likes of Iran, Syria and North Korea faring worse.
But the conjoined nature of economic and political
rights, and the contradictions of a society where
the former have advanced while the latter lag,
mean that China does not have to languish forever
as a journalist's nightmare.
The liberal
thinker Michael Ignatieff posits that
"post-Communist oligarchies" like China and Russia
are "are attempting to demonstrate a novel
proposition: that economic freedoms can be severed
from political and civil freedom, and that freedom
is divisible". The bold behavior of the striking
journalists of Guangzhou and their sympathizers
across China is effectively rejecting this
divisibility thesis.
The proverbial
"bread" cannot be dissociated in the human
aspirational matrix from "freedom" precisely
because we are not mere physical bodies with
material needs but also spirits and souls that
desire dignity and respect. China's Fourth Estate
is fighting for freedom, inch by inch, and history
may eventually reward its struggle.
Sreeram Chaulia is a professor
and dean at the Jindal School of International
Affairs in Sonipat, Haryana, India and the author
of the forthcoming book, Politics of the
Global Economic Crisis: Regulation, Responsibility
and Radicalism.
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