Reframing the China story – the WTO column

(soon in Chinabiz)
Traditionally media use a few techniques to sell their stories to you, the audience. Although, technique is not always the right word, since much of this process happens unconsciously. One of them is the framing of a story. By repeating a story line and story patterns over and over again, people – including ourselves – start to believe it. Like the water drop that can break a stone.
By telling stories that associate migrants with crime, we start to believe that migrants are more criminal than non-migrants. The truth is often different. Migrants just get caught more often and offer the media a nice story that is seemingly believable for their audiences.
Africa is a poor country where nothing can go right, is another story line, which stops media from publishing anything that could even smell like a success in Africa. Special segments in media take care of events that do not fit the way we frame stories: they are presented as stories that are different from ‘normal’ stories, are there to entertain you, but will never change the main way how the main stories are being framed: those strange events are put apart.

China was traditionally framed as a poor, backward country where a communist government would use any kind of force to suppress its citizens, especially those who wanted freedom and democracy. For some people that picture still survives in its full glory. They want to send second hand computers to the Chinese, while we of course only want the latest technology. And they think that the internet is not a tool to improve personal freedom, but a tool for repression.
Only last month I entered into a discussion with an institute of a famous US university that wanted to investigate the so-called firewall, that officially should keep the Chinese internet isolated from the rest of the world. In my life on the internet I had just downgraded the firewall from a minor nuisance to virtual non-existent. That did not right away fit their agenda.
The discussion about poverty in China has been replaced by the question of the growing gap between rich and poor in China, and its effects. When you compare China with India, you see a much wider gap, compared to China no inclination to do anything about it, but since it is a tradition in India, it might be less of a problem. A different way of framing the same problem.

Journalists pass by in droves here in Shanghai and see that wealth is climbing fast, and personal freedom is unprecedented. They often are amazed, write it up, but find it very hard when they are back home not to fall back in the traditional way they used to frame the China story: backward and repressive. Stories about China’s jump into research and development, away from backyard production facilities do not fit in it. And when China claim to close 1,600 internet cafes, lazy Western media repeat the Chinese state media, because it fits neatly into the way we always framed China.
I do not want journalists to write a different kind of stories, but we should carefully consider how we frame those stories. The old way of framing is firmly outdated, a new one is not clearly in place. The influence of the government is disappearing very fast on major areas in the society, and bit by bit a civil society emerges to replace that vacuum. We should give a voice to those emerging players in the civil society, and not ignore them because they do not fit into our traditional way of framing China.
In the economy you see huge differences in how players get used to their new roles. The Chinese chambers of commerce are very far ahead in developing themselves as independent non-governmental organizations. The trade unions have not even started to think about it, but major changes are lying ahead.
I feel that we journalists should watch that civil society much closer, and use them more often as an angle for our stories. The painting is still ok, but it is time to change the framework.

Fons Tuinstra