Beijing Newspeak

The working week after a run of night shifts is luxurious, perhaps even equivalent to being served a glut of cardboard-free baozi banquets after being force-fed two-year-old zongzi for seven breakfasts in succession. Working 9am to 4pm means the story flow is light, the opportunities to discuss old journalistic adages - it was “jia chou bu ke wai yang” (something like: don’t spread bad news outside the home) this week - are numerous and I have left the building by the time the ministry “urgings” pour in. Basically, there is more time to think. This week a series of ”items” caught my attention but none of them were really worthy of the “whole post” treatment. So I thought I’d do a medley:

1) Maybe my nose for a news story has been bashed out of joint by too many “bilateral relations” epics. Maybe the last thing anyone wanted to do last Saturday afternoon was to look at Xinhua’s English wire service. But I have to admit to thinking this story about the Ministry of Education banning students from renting private accommodation off campus, released by Xinhua on Saturday, would be picked up by the foreign media.

The story was reported by the Beijing Morning Post but the paper did not detail the reasons the Ministry of Education gave for the new regulation, muttering something about safety. We found the MOE statement and the first four paragraphs were born:

BEIJING, July 7 (Xinhua) — China’s Ministry of Education has banned university students from renting private accommodation during their studies, telling all students that they must share four to eight-person dormitories.

In a notice issued on Friday, the ministry instructed all universities to make the dormitories “another front for political and ideological education” in order to create a “good climate for the students’ growth”.

The ministry told the universities to strengthen the administration of dormitories, in what it says will ensure the safety of students and facilitate communication between them.

It also ruled that students sharing dormitories should be classmates with the aim of making it easier for teachers to monitor students’ lifestyles outside the classroom.

A subsequent conversation with an intern, who is in her third-year at university, was interesting. She had read about the story in the Beijing newspaper and, describing herself as a traditional kind of girl, said she much preferred living in an on-campus dormitory. But she was visibly taken aback by the “political education” line from the ministry. “But it makes no sense, what does it mean? … If that was given as the main reason, I would find it very difficult to accept.” It was as if she was surprised that Chinese government departments still speak in such an antiquated fashion.

When I first started working at Xinhua I used to try and make every government statement sound human so the language wouldn’t sound so awkward. Officials sometimes do of course - it’s just that Xinhua has an outstanding ability to make them appear like robots anyway. But ministry statements are as dry as a Xinhua annual dinner (plastic cups of coke all round apart from the leaders who have red wine). So I suppose if this stiffness is not reported accurately, it may falsely appear that officialspeak is undergoing a shift to something approaching natural.

2) I often cringe at Xinhua’s clumsy treatment of the war between China and Japan. The worst aspect of this is when the veterans - who must have a multitude of fascinating stories to tell - are made to sound like government officials. Last weekend, former soldiers gathered at Lugou Bridge to mark the outbreak of the war against Japan in 1937. I received the following quote from a son of a commander who was killed in battle:

Every time I come here, the seed of hatred grows inside me, but hatred doesn’t mean we should seek revenge. In fact, to build a peaceful and harmonious world is a better way of remembering and learning from the past.

I felt guilty questioning the quote - the reporter had actually been given the rare opportunity to leave the office and conduct the interview himself - but it was just that word “harmonious”, the catchword of the present-day CPC. And as it turned out, he didn’t actually use that word although the sentiment was the same. He actually said, “To maintain world peace, we should learn from history.” The reporter said he hadn’t really thought about it - the allusion to harmony was subconscious.

3) The first line of a story from Reuters about dumplings stuffed with cardboard could have sounded odd if read too quickly: “Dumplings stuffed with cardboard and bogus rabies vaccines are the focus of the latest health scares in China, where the government has banned an industrial solvent used in toothpaste after a spate of global recalls.” Maybe it was just me but I was ready to throw my arms up in the air in indignation that fake vaccines were being put in my baozi.

It occurred to my colleague and I that the propaganda department should accept a portion of responsibility for creating a market for fake rabies vaccines, which has led to cases like this one:

Beijing was also investigating bogus rabies vaccines, the Beijing Times said, after a woman bitten by a neighbor’s dog injected vaccine she bought from a local hospital.

Authorities found the hospital had been selling phials of vaccine taken off shelves two years earlier for quality problems, the paper said.

We both recalled last year’s debacle in which the “crackdown” on dogs in Beijing, spawning the one-dog policy, was preceded by countless stories of how rabies was the deadliest disease in China for the sixth successive month and how ten people had died from the disease in Beijing. Too busy whipping up mass hysteria which had Beijingers piling into emergency rooms with minor scratches from their neighbours’ overexcited puppy, the Chinese reports neglected to mention that all ten fatal cases of rabies originated outside the city of Beijing, particularly in Hebei, and the victims had been brought to Beijing hospitals where they later died.

4) Thursday was a special day. It was the last Foreign Ministry conference for a whole month so the FM bods can enjoy their summer holidays. Which means the “China told A to stop meddling in its internal affairs” stories will be kept to a minimum until mid-August. As a result many of the staff members of the diplomatic desk take annual leave at this time. Which means that the “A met B in Beijing Thursday and said the two sides should hold hands for mutual benefit and work together to promote bilateral ties and further the strategic partnership of cooperation” scenarios will be thinner on the ground. Nice.

5) I can’t read Chinese which is a great source of frustration to me. But it does mean I can’t be tempted to read Xinhua’s Chinese-language service. However, I am all too aware of the depths of acceptability the output can reach because sometimes the worst of it slips through the net and is polished by a colleague who is leaving on Sunday. You can hardly blaming him for turning a blind eye:

Hangzhou, July 11 (Xinhua) - A British businessman with a fractured cervical vertebra was rushed through immigration procedures Wednesday at east China’s Ningbo City so that he could fly out immediately on a chartered plane to be operated in Singapore.

Immigration officials knew that Philip Morris, 31, had been injured in a road accidentin Ningbo and that every minute was precious for him.

Guards waited hours on Wednesday afternoon at the parking apron for Morris’ ambulance to arrive. A Singapore-registered plane landed at 4pm with two doctors onboard.

The guards finished border control procedures in less than three minutes on the parking apron after the ambulance arrived at 7.05pm and then helped move the stretcher and medical equipment into the plane.

Ten minutes later, the plane took off for Singapore.

Morris’ family members thanked the Ningbo airport border check officials for their aid.

A line that was actually deleted from the final version was that it was a particularly hot and humid afternoon - which makes the Ningbo officials’ achievements all the more remarkable. I sincerely hope Mr Morris underwent a successful operation and I must express sympathy for him and his family that his emergency was turned into a PR exercise of “Look how we helped the foreigner” by the people who were doing their jobs and helping him to get to Singapore.

It reminded me of a story about a friend who was in east China at the age of 18 in 1998 for a year. He left his jumper on a train, which carried on for a further 15 hours after he had left the train at Wuxi, his temporary hometown. He mentioned it to a lost property employee and someone personally delivered the jumper to him a day later in Wuxi. The local transport authorities contacted the local television station for the landmark handover and he still has the interview on VHS cassette.

6) The end of the week was signalled by this headline: “Ex-convict given death penalty for robbing mistress to death”. A man had hit a woman over the head with a brick, killing her, and then took her handbag. The reporter insisted the court tried him for robbery. It was one of those conversations that makes you doubt your own sanity.