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Media stirs hornet's nest in
Guangzhou
By Sreeram Chaulia
At a time when there is a chorus to regulate and control the
news media in established democracies like the United
Kingdom and India, a converse drama is ensuing in
authoritarian China through a mini-revolt of journalists in
Guangdong province against excessive government interference
and skewing of reportage.
Unlike in free societies, where some sections of the media
are being accused of sensationalism, irresponsibility and
larger-than-life kingmaker roles in politics, the problem in
single-party ruled China is the classic one of a censorship
state that has never allowed print and audio-visual media to
express themselves honestly and objectively.
The unfamiliar sight of 100-odd journalists gathering in the
metropolitan hub of Guangzhou, holding banners and chanting
slogans denouncing the gagging acts of the local propaganda
chief of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), comes as a fresh
challenge to the new leadership under Xi Jinping.
The media persons who decided to take the courageous step of
marching in public and writing open letters demanding the
resignation of the censorship boss are well aware of the
risks to personal safety and security for locking horns with
authorities in a closed polity like China. But they were
driven to such desperate measures by subtle changes are
occurring in Chinese society, viz what the rebellious
Southern Weekly's daredevils have summed up as an "era of
greater openness".
China's economic opening up to the world, which is now into
its fourth decade, was bound to also engender hunger for
greater information and scrutiny of how wealth and power are
being distributed and exercised. The architect of China's
economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping, admitted this risk when he
warned that opening the windows will bring in not only
"fresh air" (ie avenues for economic growth and prosperity)
but also "flies and insects" (irritants to dictatorship).
The CCP's gamble with economic liberalization is whether the
state and its agents will be sufficiently in command of the
environment to swat the flies and to selectively leverage
the benefits of integrating China into the global economy.
Hence the elaborate paraphernalia adopted by the Party to
censor printed and aired news, build "Great Firewalls" on
the Internet, and weed out "unpatriotic" content that can
give Chinese people wrong ideas about living in a more
transparent system where criticism of power-wielders carries
no costs. But what if the "flies" metastasize into a swarm
of locusts or a ubiquitous netherworld where mockery of CCP
elites and their wrongdoings becomes so pervasive that it
could undermine the core legitimacy of the party?
The journalists who are enraged by crude attempts of
provincial CCP propaganda units to rewrite editorials that
even mildly and generically discuss flaws in the status quo
are young Chinese "netizens" exposed to the finest
traditions of international investigative and critical
reporting. They would have already scented some leeway to go
after incidents of official malfeasance following Xi
Jinping's opening speech as CCP general secretary last
November, in which he chided his party colleagues for a
culture of "taking bribes" and "being out of touch with the
people".
Although Xi is not a Mikhail Gorbachev who might open the
floodgates for a free press through a Chinese glasnost,
he is ruling a China that is a lot more
information-saturated, web-savvy and impatient about the
glacial pace of political reforms. Journalists have often
been the avant garde in using small windows of opportunity
to whittle away despotic forms of rule since they have the
training to probe deeper while the rest of the public can
only skim the surface.
The pioneering staff of the Southern Weekly are testing the
limits of a China that is today relatively freer than it was
before. They are also trying to exploit a perceived gap
between the central government's overall guiding objectives
and the unscrupulous behavior of provincial CCP bosses. By
appealing to Beijing to fire a propaganda bureaucrat in
Guangzhou who is stuck in a time warp, the journalists are
seeking a new China that is in sync with the worldwide trend
of pushing for greater accountability.
Will the fire lit by the conscientious media in Guangzhou
provoke nationwide agitation against the muzzling of the
press and spread of disinformation? Xi will not be amenable
to making major policy changes on the way the media is
governed following protests owing to fear that such
concessions would attract more uprisings.
When poor peasants in a village called Wukan (also in
Guangdong province) rose up to defend themselves against CCP-enabled
land-grabbing and corruption in September 2011, the crisis
was nipped in the bud at the local level through a mixture
of the symbolic removal of errant party apparatchiks, state
intimidation and co-option. The Chinese state has developed
a sophisticated crisis-response mechanism that deploys
sticks and carrots and contains unrest, both geographical
and ideational.
It would be naive to expect that China's close to rank
bottom standing in the global Press Freedom Index (published
by Reporters Without Borders) will improve in the near
future. It is currently placed at number 174 in a listing of
179 countries for media freedom, with only the likes of
Iran, Syria and North Korea faring worse. But the conjoined
nature of economic and political rights, and the
contradictions of a society where the former have advanced
while the latter lag, mean that China does not have to
languish forever as a journalist's nightmare.
The liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff posits that
"post-Communist oligarchies" like China and Russia are "are
attempting to demonstrate a novel proposition: that economic
freedoms can be severed from political and civil freedom,
and that freedom is divisible". The bold behavior of the
striking journalists of Guangzhou and their sympathizers
across China is effectively rejecting this divisibility
thesis.
The proverbial "bread" cannot be dissociated in the human
aspirational matrix from "freedom" precisely because we are
not mere physical bodies with material needs but also
spirits and souls that desire dignity and respect. China's
Fourth Estate is fighting for freedom, inch by inch, and
history may eventually reward its struggle.
Sreeram Chaulia is a professor and dean at the
Jindal School of International Affairs in Sonipat, Haryana,
India and the author of the forthcoming book, Politics
of the Global Economic Crisis: Regulation, Responsibility
and Radicalism.
(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.) |
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