XIAO QIANG is Executive Director of Human Rights in China, a monitoring and advocacy organization based in New York and Hong Kong.
But after 20 years of economic reform toward a market economy, commercial pressure is a primary factor behind the pluralization of the CCP’s “symbolic environment.” As a result, Chinese media has become more diversified and professional, a process that will deepen under new rules of WTO membership. While the government’s mechanisms to control the media are still firmly in place, they are increasingly challenged by market pressures and a growing sense of independence among the country’s media professionals.
The Internet has accelerated the transformation of China’s media landscape and is now helping to promote the increasing autonomy and diversity of the traditional media. Now, in addition to 2,000 daily newspapers and 900 television stations catering to more than 90 million cable television users, there are more than 350,000 websites in China. As people’s means of accessing information increase, they search further afield to locate alternatives to the information provided by official state media institutions. Even according to a government survey, approximately 64 percent of people online in China use the Internet to read news, and 40 percent of young users and 24 percent of adults regularly visit overseas sites, according to a government survey.
The state media is also beginning to go online. In 1993, the Hangzhou Daily launched the first electronic edition of a Chinese newspaper, and by the end of last year, 4,000 of 100,000 Chinese media organizations, including magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television channels, were online, according to mainland scholars’ statistics. Because online versions of official publications have more direct interaction with readers, rely on breaking news, and are under less stringent editorial control than their print counterparts, reporting in Internet publications is often livelier and more independent than in the traditional media.
As Internet users within and outside China develop creative new methods to circumvent government Internet blockades, PRC citizens have access to increasingly diverse and abundant sources of news from outside the country. While most of the major overseas Chinese-language news sites—including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Voice of America (VOA), and Hong Kong or Taiwan newspapers—are blocked by the government, the content of these publications still enters China through bulletin boards, mass emails to individual inboxes, and other online channels. These publications, such as alerts from the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, VOA news updates, and dissident newsletters, reach Chinese readers despite the government’s use of advanced filtering technology. Many books banned domestically in China are also available online, such as The Tiananmen Papers, Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, and the Bible.
Influencing Traditional Media
Commercial news portals such as Sina.com, Sohu.com, and Netease.com have become very popular among readers in China. Although they must get content from official news sources and lack the right to publish political news, their methods of collecting and presenting news are already changing traditional reporting in China, where editors and reporters must adhere to strict guidelines about what, how, when, and even if to report certain events. There are also increasing numbers of “self-media” (zi meiti) sites, run by individuals who use Weblog software to gather, organize, and spread news and commentary. The sites, such as no4media.org, blogchina.org, and hundreds of others, rely on readers’ participation to spread community-related news or fact-check official media reports.
When covering a sensitive story in China—like a natural disaster, a major industrial accident, or an official corruption case—print reporters must follow the lead of official sources before conducting interviews and publishing their result. Journalists now evade these guidelines by distributing and collecting information online, making it more difficult for propaganda bosses to silence sensitive stories.
A recent example is an exposé of corruption within the Hope Project, China’s largest charity, which is operated by the Communist Youth League. The story was censored by the Guangzhou weekly Southern Weekend, but a journalist sent the report to overseas Internet media, which distributed it online. Such censored stories are now routinely distributed through email, chat rooms, and other methods, and they eventually find their way back into China. Once the story has reached the public via the Internet, the official media often feels pressure to report the story themselves. Thus, due to increasing pressure from Internet sources, the traditional media has been more responsive in reporting sensitive stories.
By freeing the public from dependence on official sources, the Internet is also shaping public opinion. When a major news event occurs, such as the changes in the PRC leadership at the 16th Communist Party Congress, Internet users compare, analyze, and balance the information they get from different sources, including the foreign media and overseas Chinese press in Hong Kong and Taiwan. At the outset of the current Severe Acute Respitory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China, the PRC government attempted to mask the severity of the disease by instituting a reporting ban for domestic media and denying access to international health inspectors.
The cover-up provoked widespread international condemnation that reached the Chinese public through the Internet. While the official media remained silent on the issue, Internet users distributed independent reports on the spread of the disease, criticizing the government cover-up and debating issues of government accounability. China’s new leadership was eventually forced to acknowledge their role in the epidemic and take action against the disease.
The Virtual Public Sphere
Before the Internet emerged as a source of information dissemination, the Chinese media was not a forum for public discussion and debate. Now, the Internet facilitates discussion on public affairs, especially through online bulletin boards. The most popular Internet portals allow users to discuss current events by posting comments on bulletin boards or real-time chatrooms linked to specific news stories. Such discussions have become popular both in the private portals and on official websites such as People’s Daily’s popular Strong Nation Forum, which has more than 200,000 registered members. Normally, more than 10,000 users are online to participate in these discussions. According to an article recently posted on the Strong Nation Forum, the number of registered users for the top 10 bulletin boards, which focus on news and political affairs, range from 100,000 to 500,000, while the number of online users at any normal hour can reach 15,000.
