Thursday, July 05, 2007 11:32 PM
by
will
Xinhua's declining relevance as an international PR organ
Here is an interesting post from Chris O'Brien's rock-solid Beijing Newspeak blog:
One reporter from the economics desk has started to ask me on a
regular basis if it is worth translating certain Chinese stories from
the domestic news desk into English. I am grateful for the consultation
as it saves everyone a lot of time. I only wish I could get more
excited about some of the topics but unfortunately 80.9 percent of them
are rejected out of hand.
Bombarded by bumf as we are, even a snippet of information that
sounds anything like news is a cause for a celebratory piece of dried
pork. “What about this one - 80.9 percent of all products made in China
for domestic consumption meet quality standards,” asks the journalist.
Er … yep that tickles something. As long as your lead is 19.1 percent
of all products made in China for domestic consumption do not meet
quality standards.
Chris goes on to write about the evolution of that story, how it was spun at by Xinhua's English service, and how the foreign media reacted to it.
What's interesting about the piece is that is reveals a great deal about Xinhua's self-perceived role as the gatekeeper between Chinese news and English speaking world. Thus, they debate which stories should be translated and how those stories should be worded to present China in the way they desire. (I phrase this carefully: Xinhua's English edition will publish bad China news as well, but subject to all the usual constraints on the government's desire to manage the news agenda.)
The question is: How relevant is this role today? Foreign correspondents in China are largely Chinese speakers and readers, and even those that aren't have Chinese speaking news assistants and researchers. Virtually all foreign news bureaus will comb the Chinese language news on a daily basis as well as the English sources. There are many barriers to foreign news gathering in China, but language is less of one every day.
The choices made by Xinhua's English service may have an impact on people who go directly to Xinhua's English site for their China news, or who read Xinhua's English articles syndicated overseas (this does happen). But as Chris points out, foreign news services have a way of getting the angle that will resonate with their own audiences, regardless of how Xinhua spins China news or massages Chinese coverage for the English service. They do this by nutting those angles out of Xinhua's English reports or by skipping Xinhua English altogether and going straight to the Chinese media across the country and even the original sources.
Technology has made this much more practical. Twenty years ago I would guess that a Beijing-based correspondent probably had a hard time finding out what was making news in, say, Gansu. Today virtually every Chinese newspaper has a website or gets syndicated on the big portals. China is also loaded with bloggers and forums that, despite the best efforts of Jing Jing and Cha Cha, gleefully circumvent many official reporting strictures. Add search engines like Baidu and Google China to that mix and Xinhua fades into the background as a gateway to China news. If you're looking at the impact of the Internet in China, this ability to let foreign news organizations easily see news and information from all over the country --even officially approved news-- may be an overlooked one.
Xinhua still has a role to play in presenting the Chinese government's position and outlook to the world, and there is value in doing that. Unfortunately, they seem trapped in a model that might have been effective twenty or thirty years ago, but is increasingly irrelevant in a China where there are hundreds of Chinese-speaking and reading foreign correspondents, or thousands if you include unaccredited journalists, bloggers and anyone else who can bypass the official selection and translation mechanisms. Why do you think foreign correspondents like ESWN and Danwei so much?
Fortunately, as Beijing Newspeak shows, Chris himself has yet to drink the Kool-Aid. For our reading pleasure, let's hope he never does.
Maybe she should switch to a career in editing?