The greying of greenspeak? 103
The censorship is getting more sophisticated but we dance with it, play with it
and interact with it. We held a press conference last year to challenge China’s
biggest coal company’s practices. We had a full house. Chinese journalists
came to give their support, knowing too well that they would not be allowed
to report on the event. So, we used the opportunity to send the information
out to mobilize netizens
(ABC 2014)The coal company Ma was referring to was the state-owned Shenhua, the
biggest coal company in the world by production volume. Greenpeace took
Shenhua to task for its over-exploitation of groundwater and for the illegal
dumping of toxic industrial wastewater in Erdos in Western China (Greenpeace
East Asia 2014). Ma’s comments point to ENGOs’ capacity to engage in media
tactics, but they also make clear a number of sobering facts. First, they reveal
the Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde nature of the Chinese government on the issue of
environment. The tangled web of political and economic interests involving
both the government and big businesses represents the biggest obstacle to the
environmental cause in China. Second, although green NGOs might devise ways
of “dancing with” censorship, the fact remains that, for state media, especially
in relation to polluting practices involving state-owned businesses, censorship—
rather than active endorsement and support of greenspeak—is the de rigueur
response. In light of this, it is hardly surprising that Under the Dome was taken
off from China’s main video sites such as Youku and Tencent soon after it became
a “smash-hit” (Beaumont-Thomas 2015). While it may be true that ENGOs
in China to some extent practice “embedded activism”, characterized by their
informal, non-confrontational partnership with the government (Ho 2006), recent
research on the use of social media by local ENGOs in China suggests that such
DIY grassroots activism is limited, “temporary and fragile”, and has to navigate
complex and subtle relationships with the government (Xu 2014, p. 1374).
Consumer lifestyle advice
Focusing on controversial media formats and genres such as news—as I have done
so far—tells us what happens when political needs and market initiatives clash,
posing a potential threat to stability, but this is only half of the picture. The other
half, which runs the risk of being obscured by this focus, is equally if not more
important: It has to do with how the party-state authorities and the market work
together to ensure that the stability maintenance machine functions smoothly.
Contrary to what some may expect, the party-state and its media policy favor
diversity in terms of audience, function, medium, and format. This is because
diversity along these lines is considered not only desirable in terms of content appeal
but also, more important, a more diverse content is deemed by the government to be
more conducive to stability maintenance (Sun 2015). This commitment to diversity
was affirmed in the outgoing Party Chairman Hu Jintao’s work report to the 18th
Party Congress in 2012, when he says that “we must ensure that that our social and