Beijing Newspeak

Well I heard he is living near Xining so I will keep an eye out for him during my week-long trip to Qinghai starting from tomorrow. Just wanted to have a chuckle with him about some of the stories Xinhua was told to release about his uncle this past week. The DL did an inteview with Der Spiegel at the end of March and it has taken the Information Office of the State Council nearly a month to deliver a riposte or three. In fact, it wanted Xinhua to release four stories on four consecutive days but Xinhua decided three were all their readers could stomach. Actually, the fourth was released in a slightly different guise on Friday which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.

 The 11th Panchen Lama, Gyaincain Norbu, currently the highest ranking figure of Tibetan Buddhism in China, on Friday visited two space science research institutes in Beijing.

At the Chinese Research Institute of Space Technology, the bespectacled 17-year-old, wearing a Tibetan Buddhist robe, walked through the research facilities and listened to briefings on China’s aerospace science development.

The institute is responsible for developing spacecraft and satellites for remote sensing, telecommunications, meteorology, earth resources and navigation.

He later visited the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center and met with China’s first astronaut Yang Liwei.

The young Panchen lama said he had always had a keen interest in aerospace science and felt enormously proud at the thought of China’s manned spacecraft roaming around in outer space.

He said he would, as a religious figure, remain concerned about the country’s development and make greater efforts in scientific studies in order to contribute to the development of the motherland.

Gyaincain Norbu was born on February 13, 1990 in Lhari County of Nagqu Prefecture in northern Tibet. In November 1995, he was approved by the central government as the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama, who died in 1989, after a lot drawing ceremony among the three candidates in the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.

I actually had no idea the CPC believed their selected Panchen Lama was in fact a reincarnation.

Looking forward to another break from the office of course but I will be sad to miss the reporting of the Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay’s visit to China on April 29. He will be airing Canada’s anger at the sentencing of Huseyin Celil to life imprisonment. Incidentally, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday that the issue was none of Canada’s business because it was “in essence related to anti-terrorism”. That should give Mackay a point to argue. Celil was only sentenced to ten years on terrorism charges. Life was for “secessionism”.

China’s health service is in total disarray. Government officials freely admit it and Xinhua has carried numerous stories highlighting the problems of bribery, extortionate medical costs and fake medicines. The latest post on Time’s China Blog has a few stats. But just recently there has been a drive by propaganda chiefs to extol the virtues of the new rural co-operative health system.

Under the scheme, each person pays a mere ten yuan a year, while the state supplies another 40 yuan for each participant to the cooperative fund. Members of the scheme are then entitled to discounts on their medical fees using the fund pool. The idea is a very good one. The difficulty of providing medical care to 1.3 billion people can not be underestimated and China is a developing country. So let’s be honest about it. Yes, the situation is better than it was five years ago but it is still virtually unworkable in practice. Report the problems the Chinese government faces and how it proposes to overcome them.

Last week, Xinhua released this feature with the headline “Chinese government under pressure to make rural healthcare system work”. Ok, it’s long and not sparkling journalism but worth a read I reckon. Some of the quotes are very telling:

 ”With an average reimbursement rate for hospital fees only standing at a meagre 27.5 percent, the current subsidies are still utterly inadequate in dealing with grave and terminal diseases,” said Wu Ming, professor with the Medical School of Peking University.

and:

Zhao Jiqing, director of the Public Health Bureau of Beipiao, believes that the funding is not enough.

    ”Without the consistent support from central government coffers, the new scheme can hardly sustain itself. It is imperative the government increases the fund pool to make hospital fees more affordable for farmers,” he said.

and:

According to Wu Ming, professor with the Medical School of Peking University, the problem of rural healthcare should not be underestimated.

    ”The fact that 900 million farmers have limited access to medical care is so grave that it could diminish the government’s efforts to close the yawning wealth gap by throwing disease-plagued farmers back into poverty,” he said.

Given these opinions, it was immensely frustrating that the story had to go through four revisions before all of them were included in the story. Of course, there is always going to be a problem if a story is written with the specific aim of “showing the world that China’s rural healthcare system is better than it was” as one editor put it. This led to a glowing appraisal of the whole scheme with the reality buried in the second half of the story. A polishing colleague saw this story before I got my grubby hands on it and became embroiled in arguments with the writer about how we should be reporting the whole picture. The writer believed that the co-op scheme deserved high praise. But gradually she managed to pull out more information to the contrary.

She even managed to change one farmer’s quote which finished up looking like this:

Farmer Ma Yongshan, in Beipiao County of northeast China’s Liaoning Province, was stricken by colon cancer and a brain infarction. He received a reimbursement of 6,590 yuan for his hospital fees after joining the scheme.

But he still has 10,000 yuan left to pay by himself, which is not easy for a farmer whose annual disposable income is around 3,000 yuan.

“The program eased my burden - at least I could pay the bill on my own without borrowing. But if 60 percent of the expenses could have been refunded, that would have been a great blessing,” Ma said.

The first version of the story had no acknowledgement of the difficulty Ma faced in forking out 10,000 yuan. The original quote went something along the lines of “The program is fantastic”. Who knows if Ma exists, who knows what he really said, but the writer was willing to change his quote into something more believable.

It is not the first time, a story on rural healthcare in China has had to be turned on its head and it won’t be the last. But there are now three features on the Xinhua database and, more importantly on the Internet, depicting something approaching the reality. (The third is here). So surely, there can’t be many more occasions when a piece of blinkered rural healthcare propaganda lands on the polishing desk …

A stint at Xinhua has ensured I will never be able to write about China for a foreign news agency. I edited this story last night:

 The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee said on Monday that China would promote and produce more “healthy online cultural products” as part of their efforts to promote social harmony.

Participants at the Politburo meeting, presided over by Chinese President Hu Jintao asked all publicity and cultural organizations to produce more high-quality online cultural products, which “represent the social progress and the splendid traditional culture of China”.

Such moves were aimed at “nurturing a healthy online culture” and preventing “decadent” online material from spreading over the Internet, said a news release from the meeting.

The Politburo said China would also make more efforts to promote the ideology of Marxism over the Internet, according to the news release.

China’s Internet population jumped by almost 24 percent last year to reach 137 million, around one in ten Chinese, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

President Hu Jintao said earlier this year that the rapid development of the Internet in China has played an important role in spreading information, knowledge and CPC policy, but has also raised new issues for the country’s cultural development.

“Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information and the stability of the state,” Hu said.

In other words, same old. Not worth bashing letters on a keyboard - as is demonstrated by the quality of my editing. Although, I did have to send back the first version of it to ask the writer to make sense of embarrassing phrases such as “promote the good, the pure and the beautiful”. I told her not to waste much time on it. Just another barrage of empty words, I said. Clearly not a news story, I concluded.

Of course, Reuters and AP picked it up and now it is all over the Internet. Not that I am admitting I was wrong. Reuters said it themselves in their own report (before repeating the same old).

The meeting was far from the first time China has sought to rein in the Internet. In January, Hu made a similar call to “purify” it, and there have been many such calls before.

But the announcement indicated that Hu wants ever tighter controls as he braces for a series of political hurdles and seeks to govern a generation of young Chinese for whom Mao Zedong’s socialist revolution is a hazy history lesson.

I suppose being drowned in news/government press releases every day does lead to saturation. Gradually, you lose touch with what is deemed newsworthy overseas (emphasis on deemed of course). Tales of Internet censorship just don’t do it for me anymore. What I want to know is what does the Politburo think of proxies? But I would hope that even readers of MSNBC were not spilling their coffee in reaction to the headline “China launches plan to censor Internet”.

Ah well, I’m off to try and explain to an editor why AP and Reuters picked up a story I labelled “worthless”.

By the way, Xinhua managed to write a couple of articles about Boris Yeltsin without mentioning the phrase “stood on top of a tank during the 1991 coup attempt”.

I doubt this post is going to provoke quite the same level of coverage, debate and entertaining abuse (actually maybe the latter will be constant) as the previous one but anyway …

The story below landed on my desk at a particularly busy time this week. I glanced at it, giggled at what I considered to be its utter irrelevance and put it at the bottom of the pile with the intention of writing a rejection note on it at the end of my shift. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about it and it was released in the early hours by an impatient editor without being edited.

HOHHOT, April 17 (Xinhua) - Seventeen chefs from the Republic of Mongolia have wrapped up their 15-day training in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China on Monday.

The selected chefs from the South-Gobi Aymag who arrived at the Urad Rear Banner on April 1 were sent to four restaurants, said Qegeg Delger, chairman of the South-Gobi branch of the Mongolian Chef Association.

They learnt to cook more than 20 hot dishes, 30 cold dishes and 20 snacks made of wheat.

Miao Xi, a chef with the Dianli Hotel who had exchanges with four female Mongolian chefs was quite impressed by their diligence. “They took notes from time to time of the ingredients and procedure,” he said.

The Mongolian chefs also taught their counterparts in the Urad Rear Banner to cook 20 cold dishes and 20 hot dishes and soups.  Enditem.

It was with sheer horror that I saw its presence on the database - probably the most woeful attempt to laud China-Mongolia relations I have ever seen. Still, I’m sure the reporter from the Inner Mongolian bureau got a tasty yak out of it.

The following day, I pointed it out to the first editor that came into my office fully expecting him to laugh and cry. Unfortunately, the editor in question wasn’t in a good mood. He had taken exception to a story I had polished the night before about Ablikim Abdiriyim, son of Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, being sentenced to nine years in prison. He didn’t appreciate my efforts to try and make it resemble some kind of news story by adding quotation marks around certain phrases and “a document released by the Urumqi court said …”. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking it was an open trial. So, he read the chef exclusive with a stony face and said, “Of course it is relevant. The Mongolian News Agency would be interested.”

“Even if I was a Mongolian chef with a penchant for wheat snacks, I wouldn’t be interested,” I replied churlishly.

My subsequent glance at the Mongolian English-language press prompted me to curse my own arrogance. Although, the story in question was nowhere to be seen, there was this snippet from Montsame, the Mongolian state news agency, previewing the chefs’ visit under the headline ”Cooks to leave for China”.

Ulaanbaatar, /MONTSAME/. Twenty cooks of Omnogobi aimag will improve their professional qualifications by being involved in courses in China. The training will be conducted for 20 days in the Bayannuur city of Inner Mongolia, China within the scope of the “Year for Great Construction and Increase of Vacancies”. The above cooks will study methods to prepare various meals of foreign countries. This year, vacancies are being created in the culinary field in all soums of the aimag. B. Bolortuya.

Shame on me for not looking at the wider picture in terms of Xinhua subscribers. And shame on Xinhua for depriving Montsame of the scoop of the week with such an embarrassing effort.

If Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed finds herself on an extended holiday, she would be advised to strike China off her list of refuge spots.

Sneed wrote in the Chicago newspaper on Tuesday that the Virginia Tech gunman was Chinese. On Tuesday evening, Virginia State Police identified the killer as South Korean. During the twelve hours between Sneed’s column hitting the shelves and the official statement, China was quivering. A host of international websites carried the story “Chinese student suspected of Virginia massacre”. The main international news agencies wisely chose to wait for the official statement much to the relief of Xinhua. Alarm bells were ringing on the eighth floor, which is home to the international news department, and there was a flurry of activity to work out how to report the nationality of the gunman.

In the end, we will never know how they planned to approach it but suffice to say the senior editors were delighted when “South Korea” was read out at the press conference. Back-slapping and congratulations ensued - one editor said that it would have been a inconceivable loss of face if the gunman had been Chinese. Xinhua can now go forth and write about the incident all they want but there is no doubt that if the gunman had been Chinese the reporting would have been understated to say the least. Galling really. To think a potential loss of face dwarfed a sense of responsibility to report such a tragic world news event.

A CCTV 9 news bulletin around 10pm on Tuesday did not lead with the story. It showed no footage from Virginia, choosing to settle with the Foreign Ministry statement expressing China’s condolences. It could be pure cynicism on my part but I wonder if the decision to report it this way was made on the assumption that the gunman was Chinese. I welcome slap downs from CCTV 9ers on this point. But on the subject of CCTV 9, their midnight bulletin, although following standard practice, inspired a hefty rant. The main news item was the Pakistani Prime Minister’s visit to China including a three-minute interview. It was followed by Wen Jiabao meeting the top Greek legislator, who promised to raise the strategic partnership … Then came China and Tunisia relations before finally a report - with footage - of the Virginia police naming South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui.

The odd week cavorting in the countryside is a well-known antidote to institutionalisation. Plough through an excessive stint at Xinhua and - apart from spelling centre “center” without even remembering to growl with patriotic pride - you can end up being unable to distinguish between the run-of-the-mill and the ridiculous.

 Yesterday - my first day in the office after a week’s holiday - I was able to look at the working day with a fresh mind. Frightening. First up was the question to my fellow polishers, “So how’s it been?” This usually invokes pained expressions as brains are racked for the best example of absurdity from the past seven days. My favourite was an account of one of the most ludicrous pieces of censorship I have seen in a year and three months. The story concerned was actually very entertaining (barring the broken body parts), revealing the latest calamity to befall “China’s leading amateur birdman” who crashed his home-made aircraft in a field in Beijing. Extra amusement came from the fact that birdman Li Xianfeng works in a ten-pin bowling alley in Tsinghua University which according to the “uncensored” copy has produced “some of China’s most prominent engineers”. Any hint of irony was lost when a senior editor (and I must stress this particular editor is especially keen to cover his back at every opportunity, which is not a fair reflection on his colleagues) decided to add two words:

“which has produced some of China’s most prominent engineers and politicians”

Why the politician addition? Because Hu Jintao studied at Tsinghua University. Oh dear god.

My second action was to log in to the editing system. The previous days’ carnage was on display. The stories that never made it. One intro read:

“A popular science book was published in China to popularize anti-terrorism knowledge among public.”

Another story talked of the Danish Ambassador to China, Laurids Mikaelsen, on a trip to Jiangxi Province where he was visiting the hospital in which he was born in 1948. “Mikaelsen noted that he had preserved some Chinese customs even to date, such as eating Chinese food.” Umm … authentic.

One headline which read, “China is frank on human rights issues, says Austrian experts”, was preceded by the word “ABORTED”. The story that was polished into something more palatable can be found here and China Daily put its own version on page three.

Neither of these two versions included the following material that my colleague received in the original text:

In a talk with officials of the Office of the State Council Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, Hosek for the first time learned that the Three Gorges Project is a multi-purpose water conservancy project in the Yangtze River.

“I have never heard such a huge project before,” said Hosek, “it has both anti-flood and electricity-generation functions and its ultimate goal is to safeguard the life and property of millions of Chinese citizens.”

I often wonder about the accuracy of the quotes from Xinhua reporters in the local bureaus or if they have ever heard of a notepad. What they do possess is an incredible ability to make overseas visitors sound very clueless. I think I’ll take the opportunity to email Austrian delegation leader Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek to see whether this reporting is an accurate reflection of her visit.

Later in the afternoon one of my polishing colleagues received a story about the difficulties Beijing is facing in standardising English translations on menus in the capital’s restaurants. He didn’t appreciate these efforts to “sanitize” Beijing, nor was he impressed with the total lack of substance to the article. So he decided to make up a quote expressing his own opinion.

However not everyone agrees with the need to standardize everything. “Weird and wonderful English on Beijing menus - like ‘pea soup’, ‘complicated cakes’ and ‘grass with fishy smell’ - are part of the city’s charm,” said Theo Theodopolopodis, a Greek businessman who has been living in Beijing for two years. “If we sanitize everything, what happens to local flavour?”

I certainly don’t advocate the fabrication of news but it was partly my fault. I thought he was just joking around when I mentioned Theo’s name. But he sent it through and it was released. Quite frankly I couldn’t be arsed to deliver a lecture on responsibility and thought it was best to allow things to follow their natural course. The author of the article was most unimpressed.

The final folly was conveyed to me by a polisher in the international department. He was called up at home and asked to be on the panel of judges for a Xinhua oratory competition. “Sure, no problem,” was his reply. “And just one other thing … we would like you to do a performance.” “Eh? What do you mean, a perfomance?” “Just a small song.” “Er, sorry I don’t really sing.” “Ok then, what about a few tricks?” “Er, sorry I don’t know any tricks.” “Juggling?” “Sorry, I can’t.” “Oh … a story about your hometown?” “I am happy to be on the panel but I’m not doing anything else.” “Ah, ok well your boss will probably call you later to ask again.”

Good to be back.

Off to Lijiang for a few days with my visiting family so my life is a Xinhua-free zone for a week or so. Due to my dear mother’s dislike of blade-slashing maniacs I have imposed a news black-out regarding Sunday’s shenanigans when a tour guide spontaneously stabbed 20 people in the middle of the old town. I will be sure to quiz Lijiangers about possible motives for the attack (out of earshot of the folks of course) as the best the police have come up with so far is that the tour guide had “an unhappy childhood”. Must remember to tear out that dangers and annoyances section from the Lonely Planet that talks about daylight muggings in Lijiang’s Black Dragon Pool Park. There’s a lot to be said for this censorship malarkey.

I have been vexed by this question for a while. The stories I enjoy editing most at Xinhua are the ones that revolve around quotes from officials that scream “BULLSHIT!” and are able to be proved as such (that last bit is a crucial add-on - I see a lot of bullshit).  When the opportunity to do a simple bit of detective work arises, I log on to the database, confirm my suspicions and then lavish attention on official comment that is contradictory and deserving of scorn. I slip in a smattering of my own comment - a whole line, an innocent adjective, an adverb loaded with negative connotations - pointing out, on Xinhua News Agency’s behalf, that a discrepancy might exist. Nothing special, just a snippet of analysis that is commonplace in news writing but often completely alien in my place of work.

I do this not out of mischief, a foreigner trying to fiddle with a tiny screw inside what is perceived to be a mighty propaganda machine. I do it because I want Xinhua to distance itself away from officials who should have no authority over it and produce a proper news story. I want Xinhua not to patronise its international readership and earn some credibility. Take this story from last week for example. The headline has been changed by the government portal site, China.org.cn, to an emphatic statement rather than a claim, its brashness magnified by the use of capital letters. “Drought Won’t Affect Power Generation In Three Gorges”. Actually, it appears to be a direct refutation of one of my earlier blog posts - I wish.

The “polisher’s asides” are obvious. Number one:

The Yangtze was at its lowest level last year since records began in 1877,” said Yuan, “but I believe it is unlikely there will be a significant drop in the inflow of water into the Three Gorges Reservoir from the upper reaches this year.

Therefore, power generation in the Three Gorges Area will not be affected,” he said.

Observers, however, expressed concern that Yuan fails to take consideration of the issue of climate change.

The Ministry of Water Resources Wang Shucheng said earlier this month that extreme and abnormal climatic phenomena like drought and floods have occurred more frequently due to global warming in recent years. 

More than 2.62 million people in southwest China’s Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality on the upstream of the Three Gorges have been suffering from drinking water shortages since late February.

This particular aside was toned down from some line I added about Yuan failing to provide any scientific evidence for his assertion. That is the reason, I would like to stress, for the erroneous grammar. I added a couple of paragraphs of drought background copied and pasted from the Xinhua database and decided the story was slightly more palatable.

Number two:

Cao Guangjing, deputy general manager of China Three Gorges Project Corp., said the Three Gorges Reservoir had gained a storage capacity of 11 billion cubic meters of water after the water level retained in the reservoir was raised to 156 meters last October.

“With the reservoir’s newly gained storage capacity, we can regulate the use of water needed for power generation in an efficient way and make sure that electricity is produced evenly,” said Cao.

Cao’s comments appear to contradict those of Yuan Jie early in February when the Three Gorges Project Corporation told Xinhua that the water level in the reservoir was being lowered to feed the drought-ravaged river.

“The water level in the reservoir will fall by four meters from the current 155 meters,” he said.

After editing this story, I waited to see if it would be changed by the senior editor on its way to the wire. In a pathetic and deluded kind of way I felt a rush of triumph when this story was released. Even more so when it was reprinted in full by China.org.cn, which is subject to far narrower constraints than Xinhua. Officials heavily involved in the Chinese government’s darling project for the 21st Century being gently mocked on the government’s internet gateway. Nice.

But, when I really think about it, it is absurd. Rather than reflecting a shift in what Xinhua allows itself or is allowed to report, it just comes down to one British bloke in an office scouring the database like some sort of geeky vigilante. The reporter who wrote the story is not capable of analysis or informed comment. In this case, it is not because the reporter is not allowed to add his or her own asides. It is simply because translating almost word for word a confused and jumbled Chinese version is a far easier task than needing to apply some thought, which in turn is more conducive to meeting a story quota for the month.

I suppose the role of foreign editor can be regarded as a crucial part of the Xinhua news process. My current colleagues and myself do seem to have unprecedented authority in terms of editing and asking reporters to dig out more information. But is the “polisher’s aside” just a fraud? When we are long gone and our seats are filled by other native speakers who are more interested in switching onto auto pilot and changing some grammar, will all the stories just revert to being as bland as boiled tofu? This kind of content would never be added by anyone from the senior editorial ranks. Picking holes in officials’ quotes just isn’t in any Xinhua job descriptions. Maybe, if the Three Gorges story had gone to a different senior editor, the two asides would have been deleted entirely.

I will keep on doing it though. Just maybe, when the Xinhua database is littered with “polisher’s asides”, reporters will start to copy and paste them into their news stories. Maybe, the odd piece of sarcasm or beligerence will capture an editor’s imagination. More and more reporters and editors will jump on the bandwagon of snide one-liners. The craze will spread up the corridor until one day the diplomatic section says something like: “China and Sudan have signed a strategic partnership pledging to raise bilateral relations to a new level - despite international criticism that China is propping up a murderous regime….” Allow a polisher his dreams.