Beijing Newspeak

I think I should do my bit to enhance the often rocky polisher-state media bilateral relations and save Xinhua a tiny bit of face. I don’t know if anyone has seen this snippet from the Financial Times (reproduced below via msnbc) regarding Xinhua’s reporting of the Three Gorges story that has gobbled up column inches around the world.

Observant China-watchers were given a brief glimpse of a failure in the Chinese propaganda machine on Wednesday when government mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency accidentally ran two stories in Chinese at exactly the same time by the same reporters on the same topic.

The problem was that one article quoted senior officials warning of an impending environmental crisis caused by the Three Gorges dam, while the other article praised the smooth and steady progress of environmental protection efforts on and around the project. Xinhua sources told the Financial Times that the negative story was intended for translation into English and distribution overseas to show the world that officials take environmental issues seriously; the positive story was meant only for domestic consumption.

The usually vigilant Chinese censor must have been in celebration mode for the mid-autumn moon festival on Tuesday night.

To me, this implies that the “Three Gorges could lead to environmental catastrophe” story was not intended to be released in Chinese. There must have been a misunderstanding here. The whole point of the story being published was that it comes just a fortnight before the CPC congress and it was carried, as planned, in Chinese newspapers the next day. According to a Xinhua reporter, China Youth Daily wrote a commentary saying that only after admissions are made can things begin to improve (logic that could be applied to many issues in China reported by state media).

As it turns out, the negative story was written first but due to article length and time constraints the writers deliberately missed off the positive side of events focusing on government efforts to address the problem. They then wrote a separate story with the positive angle believing that, to have both, they were providing their readers with balance. (Bizarre, I know). The editors then released both stories at the same time. The English version combined both stories.