Beijing Newspeak

I recently decided the job title of language polisher at Xinhua should be - without wishing to make myself sound too important - changed to National Face-Saving Officer. My disillusionment came amidst a sea of Spring Festival stories. All the reporters were required to write several news stories days in advance, which is never a particularly easy task given the nature of news. I have previously heard one editor comment that negativity should be cut down to a minimum during the national holidays as people are not interested in bad news during these joyous occasions (he seemed to forget the readership was not Chinese). The job became a task of damage limitation. Reject one, rewrite another, release one reluctantly. Then a feature comes along that shows genuine talent and quality. But due to the very nature of Xinhua, features are rarely used in full by anyone. I have a weekend off. In the absence of any foreign editors, a story about smelly taxis (featured in imagethief’s blog) is released with the grammatical nouse of a backward infant.

Some Beijing taxi drivers should take it seriously the smell inside their cabs, which may tarnish the city’s image in the 2008 Olympic Games, a political advisor has said.

Shi Xiangpeng, who came from Hong Kong to attend the annual session of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said on the basis of his own experience that about one third of the taxis in Beijing were smelly.

“Sometimes I could smell unbearable stink once I got into the cab, but was afraid of being too rude to get off immediately. So I had to roll down the windows, regardless of how cold it was outside,” said Shi, a CPPCC member who visited Beijing frequently.

The story zips all round the world. Loss of face secured. So finally (I’m new to this blog writing malarkey but I guess I can get away with blatant journalistic malpractice) here comes the link to the headline. The parliamentary sessions are regarded as one of the most important two-week periods in the state media calendar even though nothing new ever comes to light. In fact they are so important, foreign editors aren’t allowed anywhere near Xinhua’s stories, just like during the China-Africa Forum, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Six-Party Talks… Urgent! First Lead. Second Lead …. Sixth Lead. All fly onto the wire without being inspected by a native eye. Why? Stories have to be released quicker than you can say harmonious society. Which shouldn’t be that hard given Xinhua receive Premier Wen’s report  in the morning before his address. Trouble is Reuters had already got hold of a copy from somewhere and released it hours before.

The worst thing about it is that there is a group of highly intelligent Xinhua reporters slaving away inside the Great Hall of People trying to make Mandarin newspeak remotely acceptable in their second language. They deserve to have their stories at least make grammatical sense. But the ”Two Sessions” are too important for that.