Reference Material: How China's Propaganda Machine Tries to Fool the World -- Part 3 in the "China's Propaganda Machine" Series

Joan Maltese

Special for NewsMax.com

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

(Clearwisdom.net) There are a few things CCTV-9 staffers do need to know. These are imparted once a week at a meeting headed by an executive producer and attended by all Chinese staff who are not on duty in the newsroom. Foreign Experts are excluded.

This is where the mission of making China look good is hammered in, where Dos and Don'ts are handed down from realms beyond, where the staff is told what to cover and what to cover up. It's a straight lecture session, no Q&A, no suggestions sought.

One Chinese writer surmised to me that it's a repeat of what the leader of the meeting himself would have gone through earlier at the hands of higher officials, who in turn had it from even higher officials, and so forth. The overall message driven in week after week is that because we are broadcasting to foreigners, there is only so much propaganda we can get away with. Therefore, we should discuss certain of China's problems and, crucially, show that China is handling them just fine.

That's how a mass poisoning case in Nanjing turns out to be all about the party's conscientiousness. "Authorities are doing all they can," we lead, "to save the food-poison victims."

"Upon learning of the incident," goes a follow-up story, "leaders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council demanded the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China and the provincial government do what they can to save the others. The victims have been sent to 10 hospitals in Nanjing, where over 500 high-quality medical specialists are taking care of them."

The story does not reveal that 42 people died.

There's another meeting, less regular, for the Communist Party division at CCTV-9. This is attended by those staffers who are party members, and sees action much more dire. The Dos and Don'ts are threats. Staff who have made mistakes are fined or otherwise punished. An especially bad slip-up and the party can get you fired. The most serious punishment of all is expulsion from the party, which means not only the loss of your job, but the loss of your career and personal ruin.

There were certainly no slip-ups during the second week of November 2002, when the Chinese Communist Party held its once-every-five-years National Party Congress, or NPC. This is the Chinese equivalent of electing a pope, marrying off the Prince of Wales or sending a manned mission to Mars.

You might remember the NPC as the week-long event that brought about the most recent leadership change in China, exceptional for its bloodlessness and unexceptional for its secrecy. Chances are good that you don't remember it at all; Western coverage mostly consisted of journalists standing around Tiananmen Square telling a camera, "We don't really know what's happening inside."

It's therefore a tad difficult to explain the urgency and obsessiveness that set the Chinese media ablaze and sent CCTV-9's writers, censors, producers and directors scurrying in all directions, hastening to change a word here or a comma there, imperiously issuing orders, and flying to TV sets with the volume turned up to the maximum to absorb every wooden minute of our coverage.

You would have thought it was a real newsroom, except that the propaganda reached such heights of crassness that it provoked some minor revolts among the Foreign Experts and served as the catalyst for my finally sitting down to write all this.

We're talking about an authoritarian government with a legacy of tens of millions of murders that claims it has always served the best interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people; it will later censor SARS coverage after supposedly coming clean about its cover-up and establishing information networks on the disease.

Now, during the NPC, it is anointing its new elite, with the commander-in-chief of the Tiananmen Square massacre in the field of candidates and an unspecified intention to drag 1.2 billion people headlong into its latest political experiment. Imagine the kind of press coverage it's demanding.

While the world was counting down to war in Iraq, the entire first block -- not just the first story, but the first block -- of every CCTV-9 broadcast was dedicated to the "profound historical significance," the "major event not only for China but for the rest of the world," the "significant landmark," that was the 16th National Party Congress of the Communist Party of China.

What was so pressing and momentous? What was the story that so desperately needed to be told? Well, that "Delegates interviewed all spoke highly of Jiang Zemin's Three Represents thought," that "Serving the people wholeheartedly is the aim of the Communist Party of China," that Chinese abroad "noted that as China's ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party is praiseworthy for its ceaseless efforts to keep the country stable and prosperous," and that "It was a proud moment for many overseas Chinese when President Jiang Zemin stepped onto the podium and began to deliver his report at the opening session of the CPC National Congress. The event kept them glued to their screens, their hearts beating in time with their motherland's."

If you're not sold on the significance of these carryings-on then you're in an insignificant minority, as CCTV-9 reported. "The CPC National Congress received congratulatory messages from world leaders including the Ukrainian President and the prime minister of the Cook Islands, as well as the People's Party of Cambodia, the Labour Party of New Zealand, and other major political parties in various countries around the world." Beyond all, "It was an open discussion of Jiang Zemin's report to world's media and delegates spoke open-mindedly and freely."

Does management miss the unintended humor here? Do they share none of the feelings of the Chinese staff who write this stuff?

I assisted a Chinese writer in creating one of our regular digests of foreign coverage of the NPC, a cherry-picking exercise meant to show that the outside world was trumpeting its admiration for these obscure and undemocratic proceedings. It was something like the old joke about movie ads--you know, Critic X says, "It was a five-star snooze" and the ad says, "Five stars from Critic X!!!" The writer wilted as we surveyed our Google hits. Every reputable news service centered on the one topic we were forbidden to discuss in any of our NPC coverage, the leadership change. She knew no one would be convinced when she wrote:

Associated Press gave a vivid description of the venue of the congress.

The Washington Post said Jiang Zemin opened the congress by cementing the party's shift away from China's dispossessed, which are disappearing in China, towards its growing middle class.

Another influential US newspaper, the New York Times, said the new party congress will set a political and economic direction for China in the years to come.

Hard Core, Soft Soap

CCTV-9 is gonzo journalism compared to what they do at the Chinese-language news channel, CCTV-1. Their stuff is meant for domestic consumption, and it's hard-core. None of this slipping in a few of China's problems to sop a savvy foreign audience. Every word, every pause, every comma is carved in stone. Doesn't matter if it's accurate or complete or even logical.

Unfortunately, because it's 100 percent safe, a lot of CCTV-1 content winds up in the English newsroom. We're ordered to translate and air it, using the same video and natural sound. It's only the Foreign Experts, trying to polish this stuff into acceptable news copy, who are irked that names and sources are missing or the rationales for new regulations aren't given. Statistics in particular are thrown about like confetti with no meaning or attribution.

And with China's population of 1.2 billion, you can get some pretty good raw numbers - quantity of cell phone users, amount of foreign direct investment - but it's always up to us at CCTV-9 to do the math if we want to set the numbers in a meaningful context. Even if we try to follow up, the organization lets us down. Although we're obligated to use CCTV-1 content, we can't get their reporters to return a phone call or fill in their swiss-cheese stories even though they're just six floors below us.

To worsen matters, CCTV gives all its press passes to CCTV-1, so we have to rely entirely on their coverage of such major events as a visit from President Bush or a ministerial-level news conference.

The exception is, say, the August 2002 visit from UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Mary Robinson; CCTV-9 was there to elaborate on the claim that she was "satisfied" with China's human rights record (for the opposite view see any western coverage of the visit), but CCTV-1 wasn't there at all and never uttered a word about the visit. Chinese viewers aren't to be told that human rights is even an issue in their country.

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