The Chinese trust their government media, but we distrust ours because they have, for so long, distracted us from important issues and lied to us about war. Lee Kuan Yew framed the issue around the Philippines’ media.
The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I’m telling you, that’s not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government. A Third World Perspective on the Press. R H Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Beijing subordinates freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, to the overriding needs of the integrity of China, but it more than makes up for any restrictions with the breadth and balance of its news coverage.
The Chief Sensor
Today’s Chief Censor, Wang Huning, is China’s leading public intellectual, as has been the case for two-thousand years. His rules apply to everyone, and become more stringent for anyone with over five thousand subscribers, customers, or social media followers:
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No infringing, fake accounts, libel, disclosing trade secrets, or invading privacy;
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No sending porn to attract users;
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No torture, violence, killing of people or animals;
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No selling lethal weapons, gambling, phishing, scamming, or spreading viruses;
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No organising crime, counterfeiting, false advertising, empty promises or bullying;
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No lotteries, rumour-mongering, promoting superstitions;
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No content opposing the basic principles of the Constitution, national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity;
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No divulging State secrets or endangering national security.
The Censor reprimanded the nationalistic Global Times for publishing surveys about reunifying Taiwan by force, President Trump’s election chances, and the release of a Tiananmen arsonist: “These surveys are serious violations of news discipline, sensitive issues likely to cause offence to foreign nations. They have created political fallout and publishers should learn from this and refrain from polls”. The Global Times publisher grumbled, “The Global Times is pro-government but it’s also market-based, not just State-controlled”.
His biggest headache is not national security but rumours.
A 2017 story about RYB Kindergartens torturing children wentNew York, landmark, facade, tower block, U, United Nations, league of nations viral, and the censor intervened, “Please prevent malicious hyping of the RYB Kindergarten matter. Social media accounts that exaggerate the situation should be closed on sight or have content deleted”. Investigators heard that a teacher had pricked children with a sewing needle and detained her, but they found that the accusations had been fabricated by parents who confessed and apologised. Wearily, the Censor concluded, “Public security organs will always thoroughly investigate and punish real illegal and criminal harms to minors in accordance with the law and also strictly handle intentional fabrication and dissemination of rumours. At the same time, we appeal to everyone to approach information on the Internet rationally and cautiously”. Too late. A class action lawsuit reduced RYB Kindergartens’ valuation on the New York Stock Exchange by forty percent.
In 2018, censor yanked a viral essay, Beijing Has 20 Million People Pretending to Live Here, explaining, “This essay polarises relations between prosperous Beijingers and the immigrants who sweep our streets and may thus inflame bad feelings towards these vulnerable people”.
Diversity
This year, twenty-five-thousand independent outlets will publish romances, pornography, intellectual journals, political, financial, and tomes on Swiss democracy. Seven-thousand periodicals, three-thousand cable channels, a thousand radio stations, and seven-hundred TV stations struggle to distinguish themselves in a cutthroat market where niches are worth billions. Says Alice L. Miller259,
Virtually every topic of conceivable interest to Chinese politics and policy students now has specialist periodicals devoted to it. This diversity includes publications on previously sensitive issues like foreign affairs and military issues. Since the early 1980s, previously-restricted specialist publications dealing with various aspects of international affairs–journals such as American Studies and Taiwan Studies–and new publications such as Chinese Diplomacy became openly available. In military affairs, the Academy of Military Science’s premier journal, Chinese Military Science, became available for home delivery to Western students of the PLA. In the 1990s, PRC media began routinely to carry opinion pieces by the growing community of foreign policy. National security specialists in China frequently offered competing–even clashing–perspectives on international issues, raising fundamental questions among Western analysts about what political authority to attach to them in Beijing’s policy process… The proliferation of websites hosted by news agencies such as Xinhua has given immediate access to streams of information and commentary far surpassing anything easily accessible by traditional means.
Public Acceptance
The notion that the Chinese people are being denied useful information to which we have access is fatuous. The average Chinese is far better informed about our society than we are about theirs.
Deborah Fallows found that eighty percent of Chinese want the media controlled and almost all of them want the Government controlling it. University students say the censorship is too strict, adults think it strikes the right balance, and older folk criticise its laxness, but few find it repressive. One graduate student even praised it, “Our Internet is already in chaos and the Chinese Government is not the only one having paid commentators, for sure. Western governments and others also hire people to create and circulate opinions about democratising China or colonising China again. They probably want a Chinese version of the Arab Spring. I believe censorship is necessary to resist some of these influences”.
After graduating from the University of Queensland, Godfree Roberts received his doctorate from UMass, Amherst. His newsletter, 'Here Comes China', reflects his fifty years' study of Chinese civilization. His book, 'Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom', re-examines everything we think we know about China–its government, its economy, its human rights and its soft and hard power–and demonstrates that our ‘knowledge’ is mostly nonsense, dreamed up during the 1950s and amplified over generations.
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