Phasing out the media control – the WTO column

(Very soon at Chinabiz)

The introduction of the internet, now ten years ago, has eroded the traditional ways to control the media in China in a spectacular way. Not only have the news agents changed from dealers in printed toilet paper to colorful contribution of the media scene, content has changed greatly too.
Taboos are still there, but they have been reduced to a few politicalsubjects, while journalists can take more and more freedom, although they often refrain from that. That is not a straight upward tendency, there are sometimes severe drawbacks, and the dinosaurs of the planned economy fight for their lives. The arrests and convictions of editors of the Southern Metropolis earlier this year were such a drawback, seen as a way of the dinosaurs to get even with the people who sounded the alarm over SARS in Guangdong and disclosed so many other scandals.
In a way the propaganda department looks like the famous neighborhood committees in Shanghai. Over the years they have been losing their tasks, they have lost their importance, but they are still there. When SARS raised its ugly head, the neighborhood committees revived and showed, much to the delight of the old ladies servicing them, their power in at random isolating their citizens. In a lot of ways the old system is still in place.

The release last week of Chen Yihong, one of the incarcerated editors of the Southern Metropolis, showed that also the old ladies at the propaganda bureau have their problems in misusing their power at random. Most amazing I found the second article of professor Jiao Guobiao of the journalism department of renowned Beijing University attacking the Propaganda Department. Gone are the days when academics could only criticize those powerful institutions behind the walls of their university, on the condition of anonymity.
Of course, his critical analysis was published in a Hong Kong paper, not in the mainland, but thanks to the internet, China is no walled garden anymore and those who are interested can read it.
Jiao’s arguments are rather logical. He maintains that the Communist Party will remain in charge, also when the Propaganda Department has been abolished. Media will have to stick to the law, just like in the rest of the world, and you do not need a third party to force media to do what is obvious, that they should obey the law, Jiao says.
His analysis of China’s past international academic and journalist achievements – almost zero – is pretty devastating, and Jiao blames the dinosaurs of the Propaganda Department for China’s backwardness.
Pretty amazing, since professor Jiao is educating all those journalists that will leave the university with a new look at those who should be controlling them. Jiao mainly discusses ways to phase out the control on the media: he does not see any alternative.

Does this also mean that the gates will open for foreign media companies to work on the mainland market? I’m less than optimistic about that. Even when legal restraints would slowly disappear, and they will, it might take another ten, fifteen years before there are chances to make a profit. That much time it took in manufacturing, that much time it will take in the financial services and there is no reason to expect that media will be different. It just takes time before stubbornness on both sides subdues for what is taught at business schools: a win-win situation.

Fons Tuinstra