The Asian Wall Street Journal: The Perils Of Speaking Out In China

8/12/2003

Having worked in China's state-controlled press for nearly three years, perhaps I should have realized that I was skating on thin ice by giving an interview to a U.S. radio station at the height of the recent SARS crisis. But never for a moment did I imagine it would cause me to lose my job, be forced to leave my apartment within 48 hours, and be blacklisted from working for related publications.

As one of a small group of journalists that helped launch the official Shanghai Daily in October 1999, I'd seen first-hand how tightly news is still managed on the mainland. Shortly after I joined the newspaper and while we were still producing trial editions out of cramped offices near Shanghai's historic Bund, a government-made CD-ROM was circulated among cub reporters that portrayed the Falun Gong movement as an "[slanderous word omitted]" -- a theme repeated in the mainland press ever since. After our official launch as mainland China's second English-language daily, which was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the founding of China's Communist leaders taking power, another incident reinforced the notion that this was no ordinary press environment. The Shanghai Daily ran an advertisement for a multinational soft-drink corporation featuring a map of the company's bottling plants in China which failed to include Taiwan "province."

According to a source close to senior management, the paper's chief editors were required to write self-criticisms for this "egregious" omission. But I'd been encouraged by the partial opening of the mainland media in recent years, as once taboo subjects like drug addiction and HIV-AIDS were given prominent space in the major dailies. True, the tone of the stories was invariably upbeat, emphasizing what a splendid job the Communist Party was doing in combating social ills. Stories about workers laid off from failed state-owned enterprises were spun into paeans to successful entrepreneurs or model volunteers. In profiles of elderly artists, writers and musicians, the Cultural Revolution is simply referred to as a "turbulent period" in which artists and their intellectual contemporaries were sent to work alongside peasants in the countryside. No mention is made of the way many were tortured, publicly humiliated or driven to suicide. More encouraging was the way the Shanghai Daily managed to avoid running the sort of anti-Western op-eds that still appear in other papers on the mainland (including its English-language competitor, the China Daily) by the simple expedient of not having an editorial page. It also entered into arrangements to carry news from international agencies such as the Associated Press and Bloomberg, thus providing a more balanced view of the world than Xinhua news agency's notoriously one-sided picture.

Then the SARS crisis brought home just how little had really changed. Like every other newspaper in China, the Shanghai Daily stayed silent as the epidemic spread fear across China earlier this year. The government-ordered news blackout on SARS was a deliberate -- some might say cold-blooded -- measure to preserve the appearance of social stability during the handover of power to incoming President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

Only after the cover-up was exposed in the international media did the government belatedly end the blackout -- signaling the firing of two top officials for underreporting the number of SARS cases, during an April 20 press conference in Beijing. That was the signal for the Shanghai Daily, like other papers in China, to begin covering the SARS crisis, even though much of the reporting remained one-sided, concentrating on extolling how frontline healthcare workers were waging a "heroic battle" to stop the spread of the virus.

In talks with local Chinese working within and outside the media, there was an almost complete lack of faith in the government's come-clean gesture. The editor of one popular Chinese magazine told me that the dismissals were simply "gestures to try to win back some face for the Party," and the sacked officials were bound to be given new posts in due course. Similar skepticism surrounded the new figures for the number of cases, especially in Shanghai, where authorities initially insisted there were only two confirmed cases out of a population of 16 million.

But woe betide anyone who dared express such doubts in public, as I discovered a couple of weeks later when I gave an interview to the U.S. broadcaster, National Public Radio on May 6. I gave Shanghai high marks for its handling of the crisis, noting that the city government had "gone to great lengths to be transparent." My only hint of criticism was to point out the undeniable truth -- that there was "a great deal of circumspection regarding the official numbers" being expressed by foreign journalists and people on the street.

In the days that followed, the newspaper's senior editors were tipped-off about the interview by e-mails from an anonymous reader and a former reporter with the paper studying in the United States. I was immediately called on the carpet by one of the chief editors, who expressed her displeasure with my actions, and was no doubt fearful that the incident would bring unwanted attention to the paper from above. That made it clear to me that I had no choice but to resign, especially because NPR had identified me as an editor associated with the Shanghai Daily, a title I'd used in an attempt to describe my job in terms more familiar to an American audience.

While that accurately describes what I, like all foreigners employed by China's English-language papers, do -- editing and rewriting copy to make it readable -- my official title was that of "foreign expert," a throwback to the early days of China's opening-up, when all foreigners employed by the state were described in this way. Had I not resigned, there was no doubt I'd have been forced out, such was the degree of anger over my interview. That was evident when, as soon as my resignation was accepted, I was given just 48 hours to vacate my sponsored apartment, further worsening what already was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. But my Chinese wife stood by me, knowing that what I had said during the radio interview was already common knowledge in Shanghai.

Nor did my problems end there. Shortly after leaving the Shanghai Daily, I successfully pitched a story idea to a new English-language newspaper -- the Oriental Morning Post -- a subsidiary of the same parent company as the Shanghai Daily and part of the giant publishing Wenxin United Press Group. But after submitting the piece, an editor phoned to explain, in the most apologetic terms, that he couldn't use it because my name appeared on a blacklist of journalists banned from working for state-run publications. When the new generation of Chinese leaders came to power there was a glimmer of hope that press freedom in the People's Republic would no longer be an impossible dream. President Hu Jintao's call for greater accountability throughout Chinese society offered some hope that real empowerment of the media was possible. In fact, some optimistic media observers even hoped the SARS crisis would act as a catalyst to bring Chinese reporting practices up to international standards.

But the reaction of the Shanghai Daily to my NPR interview underlines once again that, in China, any talk of an opening of the press at this juncture is totally premature. I am not the first foreign journalist to run afoul of China's media monitors -- and I am sure I will not be the last.