The Chinese are now, in a sense, a mirror of our own politicized and corporate media selves — and the future of journalism, defined by principles of transparency and verification, is at stake.

China’s propagandists are learning from some unlikely sources in their efforts to burnish their image aboard. Following examples set by Tony Blair’s press secretary Alastair Campbell and George Bush’s spokesman Karl Rove, control of the message, and the tortured logic that results in the wrangling of public opinion, has been the new focus of Chinese Ministry of Information officials. The Chinese are now, in a sense, a mirror of our own politicized and corporate media selves — and the future of journalism, defined by principles of transparency and verification, is at stake. As David Bandursky, a professor of journalism at Hong Kong University recently told the China Economic Quarterly, China’s international media push amounts to the “commercialization of propaganda” for an overseas audience.

Paradoxically, even if it does mean managed news, competition and the greater openness of this tactic has produced some positive results for foreign reporters. The debut of a new attitude could be seen in the handling of the press during the Xinjiang riots in June 2009, where an international press center was established in Urumqi (site of the clashes between ethnic Uighur and Han) with daily briefings and access to the streets for foreign reporters. In stark contrast to the Tibetan riots a year earlier, the Ministry of Information was intent on giving at least the impression of unfettered access. One way Chinese officials are learning to appear more credible to the outside world is to report sensitive topics in the English-language press, rather than in the domestic Mandarin editions where similar topics (Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Muslim separatists in Xinjiang, and the like) are still sensitive. In the case of the Lhasa riots of March 2008, Chinese officials were stung with criticism of the news embargo they imposed. The issue of access, or lack thereof, was overshadowing their criticism of Western news organizations as “propagating misinformation and bias.” With Xinjiang things would be different. Once officials had allowed access and established facilities for foreign reporters, they could then more brazenly criticize Western coverage of the events in both foreign and domestic news outlets as being biased. Rather than the old route of suppressing information and blocking access, China’s leaders are on a new path of engagement through preemption and management of the news gathering done by foreign reporters.

In some respects, this tactic is reminiscent of the Reagan administration’s handling of the White House press corps, by adumbrating reporters with information that flowed in one direction, then turning the tables on the press, accusing journalists of a liberal bias at odds with the “silent majority” of Americans. This happened at the beginning of a media revolution in the United States that would see the advent of advocacy journalism from the far right, employing the tactic of “fair and balanced” among other slogans.

China’s press is among the most controlled on the planet, ranking 168 out of 175 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. But there is in China an unpoliced network operating via digital technology using Twitter (officially blocked on the mainland) and other tools of the internet (offshore servers, SMS technology, and the like) with mobile phones as the primary device to circumvent the Great Chinese Firewall and distribute reliable information from eyewitnesses: perhaps the greatest concentration in the world of online citizens, known in China as netizens. In 2009 we saw the power of this new medium to reach the average Chinese when the nearly complete CCTV tower designed by architect Rem Koolhaas was set ablaze by an illegal fireworks display on its roof during the Chinese New Year. Reports of the event in official sources were immediately pulled off the air and newspapers were instructed not to report the embarrassing conflagration. But the fire happened within sight of all Beijing and many thousands of cell phone users and amateurs posted eyewitness videos on the Web, undermining the state-run media’s credibility in a most public way. This network of alternative distribution for news and information is a check on the credentialed media, challenging whether the press retains the public’s trust.

There is in China, as in America, an ever-widening chasm between the credentialed media and alternative forms of information made possible by citizens using technology.

There is in China, as in America, an ever-widening chasm between the credentialed media and alternative forms of information made possible by citizens using technology. For state-run media to be believable it must bridge the ever-increasing credibility gap with domestic and foreign audiences between its version of events and those played out on mobile phones and the Internet. Chinese journalists working for the state must now compete with 400 million users online, via blogs, photo/video, Twitter, and other social media tools, and it must produce consumer-oriented news without offending Party censors. Editors can be removed from their positions for crossing invisible barriers or by giving offense to anyone from corrupt local officials with business interests at stake, to embarrassing the central government in Beijing, or for reporting that runs counter to the Party’s version of the truth.

By contrast, Michael Anti, a former Nieman Fellow using Twitter, the artist and blogger Ai Weiwei, and many others are the at the vanguard of information media in China. Hu Shuli, the founding editor of Caijing magazine, China’s leading independent financial news weekly is helping create China’s increasingly competitive media enterprise market, who even in her reporting in Mandarin has taken on topics long considered too controversial by the central government. Observers were stunned late last year when the magazine experienced a mass resignation after Shuli was forced to resign her post.

At the heart of this story are young Chinese journalists, for whom the challenges are enormous. The attrition rate for young reporters is staggering because rewards are nonexistent. A young reporter will likely become worn down and take a job at a corporate public-relations firm or at a company where she can make more money to fulfill the expectations of her parents for their only child. The average reporter’s pay is abysmal and the “red envelope” (hongbao) is the only way many will have of making ends meet with a family. There is also the career path, which in China privileges the editor rather than the reporter. Unlike in the U.S. where reporters are seen to be the guts and glory of a newsroom, in China almost no one wants to be a reporter for long, because there is no status, and no control of the story (a truth may be uncovered, but there is no guarantee that it will be published).

Unlike in the U.S. where reporters are seen to be the guts and glory of a newsroom, in China almost no one wants to be a reporter for long, because there is no status, and no control of the story (a truth may be uncovered, but there is no guarantee that it will be published).

A few of the best Chinese journalists now practicing in China were trained at Berkeley, where Orville Schell was dean of the Graduate School of Journalism until recently (he now heads the Asia Society based in New York City). Those student journalists have returned, and are making a difference in the reporting and editing of state and enterprise publications, especially in the use of digital technology; but they too, are under constant pressure to apply their skills to support the goals of the state. One can find the ideological spectrum in any nation’s reporting, but what good reporters and editors have in common is a duty to place journalistic truths in public spaces, regardless of the medium, and a desire to engage the world using principles and standards we recognize as relevant to open societies.

In many ways the Chinese people have been cheated by the intense ideological scrimmages they have been subjected to by journalists at home and abroad. If I err on the side of understatement, suffice to say, (here I echo the reasoning of James Fallows), that China is a more complex nation than it often seems from Western news reports, and a less hackneyed place than it seems from the point of view of China’s domestic propaganda. Part of my gift as a Fulbright Lecturer at Tsinghua University this past year was to see just how nuanced China can be, compared to monolithic representations of censorship, protectionism, and authoritarian control. Ideological oversimplifications dividing East and West have become a bore.