Beijing Newspeak

My first shift after a week and a half back in the UK seemed to be sticking rigidly to the post-holiday cliché. Nothing’s changed. My sole colleague, who had been working in my absence to the tune of only his own head banging against the desk, had gone on holiday the previous day so again there was only one polisher for the department’s output. In fact, not even the news had changed. “Rescuers scrambling to reach 181 miners trapped in flooded coal mine” panted the headline of a story released just before I took my seat. What? Surely not another disaster involving close to 200 miners. There had been a tragic case involving a similar number of miners in two mines in Shandong on August 17.

Click on the headline. Relief and disbelief. It’s the same one, as was reported on August 20 with the headline “Hope fades for survival of 181 miners trapped in E China”. But if you took this latest report as a stand-alone story you would be led to believe rescuers were in touching distance of 181 alive miners. It appears the reporting of the event has turned into a distasteful show of heroic rescue efforts under which realism is buried.

But a brief flick through the stories released by Xinhua last week did throw up what may turn out to be a significant change, albeit conveyed in a curt four-line statement:

BEIJING, Aug. 30 (Xinhua) — China’s State Council, or the cabinet, on Thursday appointed He Ping as editor-in-chief of Xinhua News Agency to replace Nan Zhenzhong.

He Ping was Xinhua’s vice-president before the appointment.

The State Council also appointed Li Congjun as vice-president of Xinhua.

I think I would be pushing my luck to discuss this leadership issue in more detail so I’ll keep it brief. The appointment of Li Congjun to the number three spot behind He Ping appears to be the most significant in that he is widely expected to replace Tian Congming, who is set to retire, as president of the agency next year, thereby leap-frogging He Ping. Li Congjun was previously a deputy chief of the CPC’s Publicity Department, to whom Xinhua is answerable. I know absolutely nothing about the man but his political background doesn’t exactly inspire images of agency journalists brandishing mighty pens with new-found relish in the near future. But then what did I really expect?