I have come across a number of occasions on which Xinhua reporters in the provincial bureaus around the country have treated breaking news with contempt. Never has this been more apparent when a reporter from the Liaoning office happened to be driving past an aquarium in Fushun on the bitterly cold afternoon of December 13. It had been a quiet news day. Actually, make that month. Wouldn’t it be great if he could just run into a story to justify his employment status of journalist until January. But, look over there. Why are there so many people standing around? The world’s tallest man is saving two dolphins’ lives by reaching his two-metre arm into their stomachs and pulling out life-threatening shards of plastic? Ah well, I suppose I should go and make a couple of notes, he thought. Could make a nib. It’s cold though. The result was a story that was picked up by every news site around the world but completely lacking in quotes. You have to wonder what would have to happen in Liaoning to set this reporter’s pulse racing.
Incidents like these make it easy to forget there are a large numbers of Xinhua reporters around the country who genuinely care about reporting breaking news, particularly when it comes to accidents and subsequent rescue operations, even if a good report will gain them no credit. A common conception is that Xinhua reporters are just spoon fed information that government officials want released. Often this is true of course, but there are numerous exceptions. Local government officials are now obliged by orders from on high to provide Xinhua reporters with all the information they desire when it comes to coal mine accidents. But they are still reticent about other accidents that happen in areas under their jurisdiction.
On Monday, a bus carrying between 20 and 30 passengers slipped off a car ferry into a river in Jiangxi province, as described in this Xinhua report. Local officials quickly cordoned off the area around the riverbank and refused to talk to the Xinhua reporters who had arrived at the scene. One reporter had phoned up the Publicity Department at around midday and a woman had given snippets of information over the phone. But, after that, she refused to play ball.
One of the reporters from the Jiangxi bureau had spent a month last year in my department so he was determined to establish as many facts as possible with the international media in mind. This isn’t always the case. Often, the local reporters who have never written for an overseas audience can not understand the need for so many questions when they produce a hole-riddled story. When they receive a call from one of my colleagues they know it is the English-language department immediately just because someone is asking them a question. So the reporter at the scene of the ferry disaster concealed his pen and notebook and snatched words whenever he could with the divers involved in the rescue operation and local villagers who had seen the bus drive onto the ferry, while trying to avoid looking, acting or sounding like a journalist. And to think I once said in my clueless days, one week after arriving at Xinhua, “What do you mean the government won’t speak to Xinhua, Xinhua is the government!”
The officials soon cleared the area of the relatives of those missing and took them all to a hotel, which made the swift identification of bodies pulled up from the river impossible. As a foreign sub-editor, I normally have a real feeling of detachment from incidents like these. If I want to find out more information I have to go through a reporter from the local news desk of my department who then passes on requests to the local bureau reporter by phone. In this case, however, it was easy to imagine families huddled together in a scruffy hotel not being told whether or not their children/husbands/wives had been found dead at the bottom of the river. The panicked meeting called by the local publicity department. The punches of calculator buttons to work out a compensation amount for families of the victims, a figure that will never be reported.
Secrecy over incidents like these is pointless. The fact a bus rolled off a ferry is hardly the local government’s fault. Unfortunately for the officials, it all comes down to statistics. They will probably be given black marks on their records because, according to the system, someone always has to take the blame, especially when it involves the death of around 20 people. When promotion opportunities arise, people with black marks are overlooked. One freak accident, multiple deaths. All it means to many officials is one black smudge.
There have been a few cases of Xinhua local reporters having to use their initiative in recent weeks. When 25 people were killed in an explosion at a karaoke bar in Liaoning at the beginning of the month, one Xinhua reporter adopted four different guises to speak to local residents who were afraid of being seen talking to the press. At a recent conference on the potential lifting of the ban on tiger parts in Harbin, the local reporter pretended to be a volunteer to gain access and be free from handing in her notebook full of freshly scrawled quotes so it could be given the once-over by the State Forestry Administration.
But why are local officials so scared of Xinhua reporters? Surely they are just cuddly little things who only say nice things about the Chinese government. Actually it seems local government officials are genuinely terrified of them, much more so than local newspaper reporters. A significant proportion - I have no idea of the figure - of Xinhua stories are for internal eyes only, passed up to the central leadership. Somewhere in Beijing, there must be rows and rows of filing cabinets containing stories written for senior officials by Xinhua journalists. One day these will all be made public and maybe then we can observe the true state of investigative journalism in China. For now, they have some serious dust-gathering to do. There is probably a whole drawer devoted to the brick kiln slavery scandal already. The consequences of these reports for corrupt local Party cadres are much more damaging than a local newspaper article could ever be. Often Xinhua reporters play the “I’ll tell on you” card to encourage local officials to start opening up. It is surprisingly effective.
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