54 China The Economist April 2nd 2022
No checks,nobalances
O
n a firstposting to China, two decades ago, Chaguan covered
a disaster that was as grim as it was revealing: an explosion
that killed 38 children at a school where pupils were assembling
fireworks to pay their fees. Reporting that tragedy in March 2001
was made possible by the courage of bereaved parents in Fanglin, a
remote village in the southern province of Jiangxi. To alert nation
al leaders to their plight they accepted interviews and identified
local officials and teachers who forced children as young as eight
to fit fuses to firecrackers in classrooms. Exposing this crime took
bravery by Chinese journalists, too, notably from risktaking,
commercially driven outlets that enjoyed a golden age in the 1990s
and early 2000s, protected by wellplaced patrons and by the pro
fits that their livelier content generated. “I have to go, a China
Youth Dailyreporter is here,” a grieving mother said during a tele
phone interview, naming one of the feistier newspapers of that
time. Locals smuggled Chinese journalists into their village, then
hid them from thugs sent to beat them. As for Chaguan, he was de
tained for “illegal reporting” at a police roadblock outside Fanglin.
An epilogue followed that would be unthinkable now. Days
after the blast China’s prime minister, Zhu Rongji, held his annual
press conference in Beijing, carried live on television. A Western
reporter asked if Mr Zhu stood by his earlier statement blaming
the disaster on explosives set off by a deranged villager. Mr Zhu, a
gruff economic reformer, acknowledged that foreign and Hong
Kong journalists doubted this account. Therefore, he had sent new
investigators in plain clothes to Jiangxi: a tacit admission that for
eigners might be more reliable than his own bureaucracy. They
found that schoolchildren had made fireworks two years previ
ously, but this practice ended before the blast, he said. Declining
further debate with “sceptical journalists”, foreign or Chinese, Mr
Zhu promised that children would be better protected in future.
Soon afterwards Jiangxi’s governor and police chief lost their jobs.
Jump to the present day and another disaster: the unexplained
loss of a China Eastern airliner carrying 132 passengers and crew,
seen nosediving vertically from cruising altitude into a hillside in
the southern province of Guangxi on March 21st. Public reactions
reveal a media landscape transformed. Journalists who rushed to
the crash site have been scolded by some internet users for gettingin the way, and chided to “wait for the official report” into what
happened. A press conference with bosses of China Eastern Air
lines was rendered all but useless by cautious questions and
scripted answers. A reporter from a foreign news agency, Reuters,
stood out for asking about practical matters such as the repair re
cord of the crashed Boeing 737. An airline boss intoned that inves
tigators would “carry out relevant tasks in an orderly manner”.
Today’s leaders do not give credit to foreign reporters for their
culture of scepticism. Rather, Western media are accused of in
venting reports about repression in Xinjiang or Tibet and of scour
ing China for negative stories to distract from chaos in America or
Europe. When floods hit the central province of Henan in 2021 offi
cials incited crowds of locals to report and harass Western journal
ists. Presenting thecountry as under siege by America, nationalist
commentators urge citizens to refuse interviews with foreign out
lets, rather than “hand the West a knife” to stabChina. Increas
ingly, foreigners are called a nationalsecurity threat. Cheng Lei,
an Australian who worked as an anchor for China’s international
television network, cgtn, went on trial in Beijing on March 31st,
charged with supplying state secrets to a foreign power. Austra
lia’s ambassador was barred from the closeddoor hearing.
Domestic journalists are under pressure, too. Once there was
public sympathy when reporters gave coverage to disaster victims
and their families, as they sought answers or redress. Doughty
Chinese journalists challenged official coverups after an earth
quake in Sichuan in 2008, a highspeed train crash in 2011, an ex
plosion in a chemicals depot in Tianjin in 2018 and the start of the
covid19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020. Now, the public is turning
on purveyors of bad news. After the Guangxi plane crash, an unre
markable if mawkish profile of some victims published by Renwu
magazine attracted a storm of hostile comments and was deleted.
In a blog post that went viral, a journalism student called Renwu’s
writer unethical for interviewing victims’ friends, before primly
concluding that disaster coverage should focus on rescue work,
not stories of the dead. Netizens condemn journalists and even
some victims’ relatives for dwelling too publicly on the tragedy,
accusing them of “eating steamed buns dipped in human blood”, a
garbled reference to a short story by Lu Xun (a champion of free
speech, Lu’s satirical target was actually ignorant superstition).The news is what the party says it is
Growing antimedia sentiment is driven by politics and econom
ics. Until about a decade ago, journalists at swashbuckling news
outlets talked openly of holding the powerful to account. Then the
Communist Party struck back, hard, neutering liberal publica
tions and purging newsrooms. To earn press cards today, journal
ists must take politics tests and attend 90 hours of training each
year, stressing their primary mission of “public opinion guid
ance". As an extra incentive to toe the party line, censors allow on
line nationalists to savage any journalism deemed unpatriotic.
Nationalist zealots hounding “liberal media” do not realise that
“what they are attacking is already dead,” says a veteran editor.
Meanwhile, commercial pressures drive highminded outlets
to compete with sensationalist “selfmedia” blogs and videos, to
the despair of surviving reporters. That taints the whole industry
and boosts the prestige of staidbutauthoritative arms of the state
like Xinhua, a news agency, or China Central Television. Today re
porters “are respected because they are the government, not be
cause they are challenging the government”, sighstheveteran.
The China of 2001 might as well be another country.nChaguan
A terrible plane crash prompts a revealing anti-media backlash