Last night, at an entertaining dinner with the cream of the China tech/media blogosphere and technology press/dive instruction community, I said that China was a good place to be a foreign blogger because the country had no sense of irony. This was wickedly unfair, and I corrected myself moments later. China, in fact, has a fine sense of irony that is often wieldedby local bloggers and commentators. It is the government that has no discernible sense of irony, and thus makes such a spectacular target for lampooning and satire. Which makes it all the more sad that there is no tradition of political cartooning here.

On cue, and in glorious support of this thesis, is an article (subscription) from Mure Dickie of the Financial Times's Beijing bureau on Xinhua's (media/propaganda division) navel-gazing auto-reportage on Xinhua's (regulatory division) recent tightening of regulations affecting foreign news and financial information distributors:
Xinhua ignores critics of media controls

An attempt by China's Xinhua news agency to tighten controls on foreign rivals has sparked fierce criticism abroad and rumbles of discontent at home - but no trace of such negativism finds its way into the agency's own reports.

While international agencies such as Reuters have covered both Beijing's defence of the new rules and opposition to them from western governments, media freedom groups and the American Chamber of Commerce, Xinhua's reportage has remained unabashedly one-sided.

"Internet users resolutely support Xinhua's 'management measures for news and information dissemination by foreign news agencies within China'," the agency said in one of its few articles on the topic last week.

Xinhua's reluctance to report criticism is hardly an aberration; the agency is also a government propaganda organ used to establish a "correct line" on sensitive issues for other state media to follow.

But the monotone coverage does highlight the contradiction between Xinhua's propaganda role and its ambitions to become an internationally competitive commercial provider of news and economic data.

It is also unlikely to silence suggestions that the new rules, which ban foreign agencies from contact with their local customers and subject them to censorship, are aimed at giving Xinhua control of China's multi-million dollar market in financial news and information.

The Xinhua story touting the support of internet users failed to name even one supportive individual or website, and the views it attributed to "net people" were similar in phrasing to the statements of the agency's own managers.

Another story last week claimed "people in China's news sector" believed the new regime would promote "healthy and orderly" news distribution - but quoted only a handful of media academics to back up its headline.

Public comments about the new rules posted on Xinhua's website are indeed uniformly positive, but such unanimity is easily explained: all contributions have to pass a content check. Negative views do not make it on to the site.
So the organization that wants to be trusted as the conduit for all financial information in China is reporting on that very situation with lack of veracity that can only be described as eye-wateringly funny. Unless, that is, you are a Reuters, Bloomberg or Dow Jones client, in which case it is merely eye-watering. Xinhua may have no sense of Irony, but Mure Dickie pretty clearly has a healthy one.

This leads us to an important philosophical question: If a meteor full of space aliens was to land on the Xinhua office, would Xinhua report it?*

More importantly, if all your financial information was coming through Xinhua, would it be better to make the best of things and try to invest sensibly knowing that you were getting second-rate information, or simply blow all your investors' money binging on cocaine and KTV girls before committing suicide by dousing yourself in gasoline, setting yourself on fire and leaping from the top of Shanghai's Jinmao Tower trailing a big-character banner that read "Internet users resolutely support Xinhua's management measures for news and information dissemination by foreign news agencies within China!"?

Discuss.

Also of note today: 49 obsolete Chinese words (and part two) from the People's Daily Online. What a shame "Xinhua" isn't one of them.

*Well, obviously it wouldn't report it without seeking guidance from the Party propaganda czars. Not such a tough question, really.