Beijing Newspeak

The latest episode of Chinese news management, which began shortly after the Olympic torch relay protests in Paris, has made for fascinating viewing. Now it is nearing its conclusion, I reckon the time is ripe for un petit recap.

Back on April 6, on the icy streets of London, the Olympic torch relay mayhem commenced as anticipated. Xinhua, though, appeared unsure how to report the event, perhaps lacking concrete instructions from the Ministry of Publicity. Shortly after the torch limped onto Downing Street, the sports department released this grammatically handicapped story which ignored the presence of the pro-Tibet crowd and started like this:

The heavy snow in London exerted slim effect on people’s passion of seeing Beijing Olympic flame as large crowds lined along the street to greet the relay of torch on Sunday in the host city of 2012 Games.

Xinhua’s news department, however, released this report at about the same time, detailing the number of arrests made by the British police and expressing local people’s disappointment at the unruly scenes.

British police on Sunday arrested 25 persons attempting to disrupt the Olympic torch relay in London while many locals expressed indignation at the attempt and a Beijing Olympic official condemned it.

Coordination between departments has never been Xinhua’s strong point.

Its coverage of the following day’s debacle in Paris was much more sensible:

Spectators of the Beijing Olympic torch relay were greatly annoyed and angered by Tibetan separatists and their supporters attempting to disrupt the Monday event in Paris, the fifth leg of the flame’s global tour.

“We’ve come here only to watch the torch relay,” said a Paris student, who only gave his first name as Mark.

“What in the world does this have anything to do with us except for annoying us?” he added, pointing to Tibetan separatist demonstrators.

No explicit mention of soon-to-be wheelchair heroine Jin Jing being attacked by a lunatic though; the image of her repelling her assailant with a mixture of angelic dignity and sheer bloody determination seemed to be initially regarded as too embarrassing. This Xinhua report glossed over her bravery and even her identity, referring to the protestor who attacked Jin Jing as “another one (who) failed in his attempt to snatch the torch from a torchbearer”. (Presumably, the anonymous torchbearer was Jin Jing.)

A day later, a directive was issued by the Ministry of Publicity, according to the SCMP (behind paywall), calling on Chinese media to pull no punches in its coverage of the Olympic torch relay protests and emphasising the need for speed. The byline was given as “Staff Reporter” to protect the journalist and the sources:

Newspaper editors and television producers should produce reports more quickly. They should stick to the official line to better make China’s case to the world or, more importantly, domestic viewers, according to an internal circular issued yesterday by the powerful Central Publicity Department, the Communist Party’s propaganda arm.

A Beijing-based newspaper editor who saw the document said it referred to the ongoing Olympic torch relay as “our unprecedented, ferocious war against the biased western press”.

The ministry had clearly realised that the hesitation it had displayed - highlighted by official silence - following the Lhasa riots and the disruption of the torch-lighting ceremony in Athens had not looked good. The main aim of its propaganda had also shifted. The most pressing task was now to discredit the western media having already achieved, with a minimum of fuss, its priority of ”inciting patriotism and hatred of the Dalai clique” in light of the riots in Tibetan areas.

A couple of the SCMP interviewees said the directive allowed more freedom for the state media to improvise.

“We were told some contents of the old rule book could be thrown out of the window at this special time,” the (Beijing-based) editor said.

Later on in the article, a Shanghai-based newspaper editor said:

“In a nutshell, the entire media machine was asked to speed up its response, even though it could cause a potentially de facto decentralisation of censorship decisions.”

Any form of ”decentralisation” is rare for such sensitive times but then perhaps it demonstrates how little state media needed to be guided. The task was easy: they just had to report what they saw - the violent attempts at torch snatching didn’t need spin -, criticise the western media, which they had been doing already, and take a lead from popular opinion. By this time, the Chinese Internet was awash with indignation and rage at what had happened in Paris. Jin Jing had ascended to a virtual heaven and anger was being directed at the whole of France. It was time for the media to give the people what they wanted. And you don’t need the Ministry of Publicity to do that.

Xinhua latched onto Jin Jing and commentaries asked if it was a “human right to attacked a handicapped woman”. But as with any stoking of nationalistic sentiment, the target of the propaganda often became blurred. Under the influence of the anti-France furore on the Internet, lines slipped into Xinhua opinion pieces, which linked one protestor trying to wrench the torch from a disabled woman to the actions of the entire French government:

Chinese people are seriously disturbed and hurt by the chaotic scene in which an extremist tried to grab the torch from a weak disabled Chinese girl, named Jin Jing, in her arm wheels. Is this the civil French government’s behavior?

Inflammatory propaganda is never plain sailing. It is impossible to keep people’s ire centred on one target however much you try. When the media itself veers miles from the bullseye, the collective finger starts pointing all over the place. After the Lhasa riots, the Chinese audience was supposed to feel hatred towards the Dalai Lama clique. But many felt hatred towards the Tibetan people as well.

Whisked up by the media, ill-feeling bloomed - although it hardly needed assistance. Boycotts of French supermarkets gathered steam and the Chinese government prompted fresh anti-CNN diatribes by responding aggressively to antagonistic remarks by a certain CNN anchorman. Voices of reason - eg efforts by Grace Wang, an overseas student in the U.S., to mediate between pro-China and pro-Tibet groups - were treated with contempt.

People took to the streets, using branches of Carrefour as a platform for protest. The government became nervous, just as it did during the anti-Japan protests in 2005. Last Friday, Xinhua released a commentary only in Chinese appealing for a more “rational” approach from the people, an attitude the news agency itself finds difficult to grasp. The government was clearly concerned it was unable to control its netizens to the extent it would like.

“Patriotic zeal must enter onto a rational track and must be transformed into concrete actions to do one’s own work well,” said the commentary widely distributed in the Chinese media.

“Thirty years of reform and opening up have created a China miracle … But we must be crystal clear that for China that has endured so much, the future road will not be all smooth-going.”

“What happened in France showed that some French did lack true understanding of China, including the Tibet issue,” said Prof. Zhou Xing, with the College of Art and Communication of Beijing Normal University.

“But I think what we should do is to improve foreigners’ understanding about China. We had better not turn extreme,” he said.

When China is ever most connected with the world, it will have to deal with conflicts, said Zhang Xingxing, deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary China Studies. “Whether or not it handles them well affects the country’s future development.”

“Those disrupting the torch relay in Paris did not stand for the whole French people,” he said, suggesting that, as the Olympic host, Chinese first show their friendliness to win those holding bias against the country.

Their sage advice is enough to make Xinhua and the Ministry of Publicity turn the colour of the Chinese flag.

But the people weren’t yet done and protests for the weekend had been arranged. Thousands turned out at Carrefour stores in Wuhan and Hefei. Minor protests occurred near the French embassy in Beijing including one outside the French school in Sanlitun - one of the more unpleasant chants was reportedly: “Kill foreigners”.

This New York Times report said the government was doing little to temper the protests:

In a sign that the government was still allowing anti-foreign sentiment to spill over into rare street demonstrations, thousands of people rallied on Sunday in front of Carrefour markets in six cities, including two, Harbin and Jinan, where there had not been protests earlier.

And:

In recent days, the government has called on citizens to temper their fury at the West, but it has not acted to halt public demonstrations, which have been stoked by newspaper editorials, Internet postings and text messages sent to millions of cellphones.

This LA Times report (via Observer) took a different line, focusing on how the government was censoring the Internet to dim the people’s passions.

Chinese censors have quietly warned cyber-police and internet businesses to delete all information related to protests against Western policies, nations or companies that have proliferated in the wake of demonstrations surrounding the global Olympic torch relay and high-level calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the summer games in Beijing.

A notice issued last week by China’s ‘Internet Inspection Sector’ instructs recipients to reset the keywords used to block access to certain websites, relay the instructions through all internet distribution channels and then delete the notice in a timely manner. ‘Such information has shown a tendency to spread and, if not checked in time, could even lead to events getting out of control as they did with the 9 April incident against Japan,’ says the censors’ notice.

When the calls to boycott Carrefour were mounting at the beginning of last week, a friend of mine noticed that all the comments relating to the issue on leading Internet portal sohu.com had been deleted. It would appear the censors started early.

Policing of the protests also depends on geography of course. Olympic host Beijing is out of bounds as the LA Times points out:

A planned event to give away patriotic T-shirts near Beijing’s Qinghua University reportedly was halted by police.

One point that the NY Times story ignored was that the authorities were hardly in a position to call off protests outside Carrefour involving thousands of angry people even if they had wanted to. It’s a delicate balance: appeal for calm without showing signs of weakness that might irritate the masses. As a Chinese professor at a British university told me recently: “The Chinese government is tied to the nationalism of its own people”, a state of mind it has done so much to foster. It’s another major reason why China won’t tone down its rhetoric to curry international favour.

It is also difficult to restore public order when the government is not ready to make sacrifices. Its insistence on demanding an apology from CNN for Jack Cafferty’s comments is likely to have far more weight in people’s minds than any urgings for more measured acts of patriotism.

The protests will continue for a while but probably die down fairly quickly. Xinhua is reporting them as “demonstrations against Tibet independence” when really they are aimed at western media and ”the West”, particularly France of course, for their sympathies towards Tibet. It has been careful to quote the more reasonable beefs:

“Today’s activity is simply an awareness-raising activity, aimed at finding a way out for the patriotic emotions of our students,” said Wu Sheng, Xi’an resident and one of the organizers.

“We do not support a boycott of French companies because the economy is globalizing. We choose Carrefour front doors because we draw more attention there,” Wu said.

Some factions of the government can’t be over the moon to see such public dissent, albeit lauding the motherland, all over the country as the Olympic nears. Back to the LA Times and a quote from Li Datong:

‘These young people get very emotional,’ said Li Datong, former editor of the Freezing Point, an influential newspaper supplement. But ‘it’s unthinkable for the government to let demonstrations happen before the Olympics’.

Still, it can’t be too concerned. These protests do not even come close to the violent anti-Japan shenanigans that occurred three years ago and hardly constitute a threat to domestic stability. Anyway, it’s nearly time for a new episode.