Officials will expand the use of government spokespeople, boost the overseas reach of state media, and further promote the use of microblogs to interact with the public, Wang Chen told reporters.

“In this new year, we will adopt an even more open attitude and even more forceful policies,” Wang said.

[...] Wang said news and information about government’s day-to-day activities as well as emergency responses would be expanded and systematized. Spokesmen would receive intensified training with an emphasis on obtaining first-hand information rather than simply passing on information from other departments, he said.

[...] Wang said the government would compel those opening new microblog accounts in Beijing and other major cities to use their real names and other information. The requirement would later be expanded to cover those with existing accounts, he said… “Our only purpose is to ensure the rapid, healthy expansion of the Chinese Internet,” he said.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet control, propaganda, transparency
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As the powerful Communist Party chief of Guangdong Province waited in an ornate conference room last week for the arrival of the new American ambassador, Gary Locke, the banter with his aides naturally turned to Mr. Locke’s Chinese roots. Mr. Locke had stopped in Guangzhou to talk to the party chief, Wang Yang, en route to a visit to his ancestral village.

Mr. Wang put a quick end to that topic. “He’s no hometown folk,” he told aides as they shifted in a reception line. “He should clearly realize he is an American.”

Just a few months ago, some Chinese media outlets were offering Mr. Locke as a role model for China’s stuffy political leaders — an American bigwig who flew economy class and shunned having a retinue of underlings, like those who attend to the needs of politicians here.

As Mr. Wang’s remark suggests, those days are over. Propaganda authorities, apparently worried that Mr. Locke makes Chinese leaders look out of touch, have imposed restrictions on media coverage of Mr. Locke, the former two-term governor of Washington State and commerce secretary, and the first Chinese-American ambassador here.

As the New York Times piece notes, the sometimes “lacerating” coverage of Locke in the Chinese state media continued this week with a Global Times report suggesting the diplomat has blurred the lines between his official business as a US government official and the commercial interests of his relatives.

See also ‘Why China Seems so Fascinated by US Ambassador Gary Locke,‘ on CDT.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: diplomacy, Gary Locke, Global Times, Guangdong, propaganda, Wang Yang
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On Sept. 1, 1944, a radio signal was detected and captured on the western coast of the United States. Datelined “Yan’an, Xinhua,” it travelled more than 12,000 km from a small cave in west China.

The message was soon handed to senior officials in Washington, who learned the latest happenings in the war against Japan in China and changed their views on the situation.

By sending its first long-distance English-language radio signal, the Xinhua News Agency successfully made its overseas debut and started to communicate with the outside world.

Sixty-seven years later, a draft of Xinhua’s first radio message can be found in the archives of the Federal Communications Commission in Maryland.

At the same time, in the New York Times Square, Xinhua has bought space on a prominent billboard, flanked by ads for Coca-Cola and Samsung. The billboard features a LED sign, 60 feet high by 40 feet wide, that advertises Xinhua’s news services to visitors in the square.

The 80-year-old agency has moved from the caves of Yan’an to modern buildings in China’s capital, serving up a 24-hour stream of multilingual news and information in a wide variety of forms.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: history, news media, propaganda, Xinhua
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Li Changchun’s speech signals again that despite all of the language this month about cultural innovation, advancement and refulgence, the Party’s fundamental attitudes and policies toward culture — and toward news media in particular — have not changed.

The media must “guide public opinion” domestically, and to the extent possible also internationally, while they continue to operate at profit-making enterprises creating products attractive to the masses, thereby contributing to overall GDP growth.

Li Changchun stressed that the sixth plenum of the 17th Central Committee of the CCP that just closed was an extremely important meeting taking place in the midst of a critical period in the comprehensive building of a moderately wealthy society and a key phase in the reform and development of culture. Study, propagation and implementation of the spirit of the meeting must be the foremost task of the journalistic front (新闻战线) at present, using deep and sound propaganda to unify the ideas of the Party, the nation and various peoples over the spirit of the meeting, cohering their intelligence and strength around implementing the [policy] programs of the meeting.”

See also coverage of new regulations requiring that more time and prominence be given to TV news, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: journalism, Li Changchun, news media, party meetings, propaganda, public opinion
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What’s the purpose of all this effort at putting the need for a uniform Chinese culture front and center now, at a major Party conclave?

One aim is that many officials want to put the Party back front and center in the lives of people—be that through revolutionary nostalgia or providing cultural guidance. An increasing proportion of Party discourse has taken note of the mental pressures of modernization and the concomitant decline in social morality. Some officials write and act as if a lot more guidance from the top is needed, and that cultural direction supplied by the Party will address moral shortcomings in society. More than a few cadres clearly believe that using “the greatness of Chinese culture” is one way back into the daily lives of citizens—that is, something that they think all Chinese can agree on and celebrate around, and therefore thank the Party’s brand of socialism for.

There was another agenda being pushed at the plenum: combatting the deepening influence of social media.

The speed and reach of micro-blogging–and the competition that Weibo and others now pose for the official media—worry many cadres who think that it is the public, and not the Party, that is shaping society. While Chinese officials cannot yet agree on how to move against those netizens who are nasty towards political authority, the more conservative in the leadership continue to push for a harder line. Phrases such as the “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in an editorial in People’s Daily last week (in Chinese) may strike some readers as the same old celebratory rhetoric. But these are, in fact, important keywords: a “national culture,” secured and delivered from above if hardliners have their way, could well be accompanied by a deeper crackdown on netizens.

An article in the Economist looks at the Central Committee plenum in light of the hit-and-run accident which killed toddler Yueyue in Foshan, which has ignited an outpouring of sorrow and condemnation among Chinese netizens:

This outpouring began even before the central committee wrapped up its typically secretive meeting. The furore thus created a problem for the party’s propagandists. The central committee’s resolution may have implied that China was lagging behind in the development of soft power, but officials certainly did not intend to signal that China was in a state of moral collapse. The party’s main mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, tried to rally enthusiasm with a commentary on October 18th saying the meeting had ended “victoriously” and that the party had already succeeded in “raising the ideological and moral qualities as well as scientific and cultural qualities of the entire nation”. Little Yue Yue’s mourners have begged to differ.

The Economist does mention one bright spot for “civic consciousness” in China: the online and real life effort to support Chen Guangcheng, an activist now under house arrest in Shandong. Yet the government’s harsh crackdown on activists and journalists who try to visit him, and the resulting international media coverage, does not bode well for their “cultural soft power” efforts either. As David Bandurski clarifies on China Media Project, the new focus on “cultural soft power” is not really about culture at all, but is about politics:

Given the fog surrounding this proclamation on the role and development of culture and creativity, it’s fair to say that China’s political culture is the real focus here. The point is that China’s political culture has now taken up the idea of culture in a big way.

Typically, when the central Party makes a big fuss about this or that new policy buzzword — they are called tifa (提法) in Chinese — everybody in the Party leadership, from the top down to the bottom, jumps on the bandwagon.

When Hu Jintao tossed out the term “cultural soft power” in his 2007 political report, he ushered in months of feverish creation — not by writers, artists, filmmakers or comedians — but by lower-level Party leaders scrambling to implement an abstract idea they scarcely understood. Even leaders at the county level across China were holding “mobilization meetings” to “accelerate the raising of cultural soft power.”

If there are aspects of this Party “Decision” that might have an appreciable impact on the creative industries, they remain to be seen. If changes in the media over the past two decades are any measure, the most interesting things we can expect are the unintended consequences of changes in the cultural sector as creative people try to push the political bounds and “hit line balls” in areas like film.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP Central Committee, Chen Guangcheng, external propaganda, propaganda, soft power
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A meeting chaired by President Hu Jintao on Monday called for the “mastering of new trends in cultural development” and for an emphasis on “Chinese characteristics” as part of the proposed overhaul, Xinhua news agency said.

Details of the draft changes to be considered by Communist Party leaders next month were not given, but analysts said they were likely to tighten Beijing’s grip on newspapers, television and popular social networking sites.

“All cultural controls have the essential political mission to shape the people’s mind to not directly challenge the party rule, to accept the status quo,” said Xiao Qiang, a media expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It highlights their nervousness and their awareness of the increasing challenges to their ability to control the cultural sphere.”

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: propaganda, Xiao Qiang
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In order to continue improving the professional quality of spokespeople and Internet commentators, actively address dynamic public affairs, and correctly guide public opinion, on September 8th the county Party committee propaganda department organized every work unit’s spokesperson and all the county’s radio hosts to undergo professional training.

The County Party Standing Committee member and the head of the Propaganda Department Zhou Liya gave a speech at the opening ceremony of the first class. She analyzed this county’s current situation regarding the press and Internet guidance. Zhou Liya pointed out that the increasing engagement of the masses, the spread of the media, and the increase of digitalization all represent information technology’s advance in leaps and bounds.

Diversification of news dissemination channels, especially the Internet, have already turned into mass media that is all encompassing, spreads quickly, with a prominent influence, and momentous growth. This has become an important battleground for ideology.

Facing the current situation, the increasingly diverse and complex nature of news announcements and Internet opinion guidance work require spokespeople and Internet commentators to constantly strengthen their sense of responsibility and mission; acknowledge good press is needed to publicize important policy decisions by the Party committee and government; extend openness to the outside world; improve the reputation of Xi Shui; advance the openness of government affairs; establish transparency within the government; and promote social harmony and stability.

To be explicit about professional responsibilities, spokespeople can improve five facets of their personal capabilities: First, the capability to raise and maintain the image of the Party and the government; second, the ability to take control of the work; third, the ability to respond to emergency situations; fourth, the capacity to lead public opinion and improve public relations; fifth, the ability to use and manage the Internet and enhance the level of press relations and Internet opinion guidance work.

At the end, Zhou Liya requires that all trainees seize this training opportunity, to study hard, to focus on gaining working knowledge on a daily basis, to apply this knowledge in practice in order to become top-notch news representatives, while guiding proper public opinion on the Internet and contributing to the harmony and stability of Xishui City.

During the training, Yu Chi, spokesman of Huanggang City Municipal News Department, and He Gefei, executive vice president of Xishui City Institute of the CPC, were invited to give lectures to the trainees. They spoke on topics of news broadcasting during emergencies, guiding public opinion on the Internet, improving communications with the media, and making proactive responses during emergencies.

After the training session, news representatives from sectors such as Education, Construction, Transportation and Health had a lively mock press conference, answering questions from the “reporters.” It was very effectively received.

© sandra for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fifty cent party, online public opinion, propaganda
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In the international press, China’s tensions with Tibet are often traced to the Chinese invasion of 1950 and Tibet’s failed uprising of 1959. But for the Chinese themselves, the story goes back much further—at least to the reign of Kangxi, the Qing Dynasty emperor, who ruled for sixty-one years (1661-1722) and, in the official Chinese view, incorporated many lands, including Tibet, into a glorious Chinese empire. One of the most important symbols of those events, moreover, lies not in Tibet but thousands of miles east in the city of Chengde, near Beijing. There, Kangxi built a hunting estate amid a cluster of lakes and jagged hills, and between 1767 and 1771, the emperor Qianlong, his grandson, built one of the more astonishing architectural monuments in China: a Tibetan Buddhist temple housed in a scrupulously detailed scale model of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the seat of Tibetan cultural and spiritual power. This Little Potala, as it’s called, was intended as an architectural expression of the great unity of China under his rule.

In recent years, the tourist authorities have used Chengde to create a sort of national monument to Kangxi, and, through him, to advance China’s contemporary position on Tibet. The site doesn’t seem to attract many foreign visitors, but it teems with Chinese, who arrive in convoys of cars and buses from all over the country, fill up the city’s hotels, and stream through the entry turnstiles at the major sites. I visited over a weekend in July, and there were so many people that the wait for an open-air bus to tour the outer reaches of the hunting estate was two hours. The bus tour offers several impressive vantage points, one of them of the city of Chengde itself, which, like most Chinese cities, bristles with construction cranes. Standing on the estate’s stone boundary wall, you can see across the valley to the massive, oxblood rhomboid that is the main feature of Chengde’s Little Potala.

Little Potala in Chengde

One of the great rulers of China’s long imperial history, Kangxi consolidated the Manchus’ rule over China proper and, using a combination of clever diplomacy, conquest, and divide and rule tactics, extended the country’s borders to what the Qing called “the outer lands” – a process of unification and expansion that reached its apogee under Qianlong. Kangxi’s achievement is celebrated in Chengde in an ultra-high-tech theatrical extravaganza called the Kangxi Ceremony that plays nightly in a vast open-air amphitheater about ten miles outside the city. The show begins with several dozen uniformed horsemen galloping across the turf in front of the audience and taking up positions in the suddenly illuminated hills that surround a large circular stage. Amplified drums and a throaty male chorus fill up the night air as an actor playing Kangxi, dressed in lustrous robes of yellow brocade, gallops onto the scene, his horse rearing, cheered on by dozens of surrounding horsemen.

In one scene, accompanied by a revolving, luminous model of the solar system, Kangxi learns astronomy from the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. In another scene, one of the show’s most lavishly produced, a huge procession of Tibetan lamas, marching to the music of rumbling bass horns and headed by the Dalai Lama, arrives to demonstrate their fealty to the Chinese emperor. Did these events actually take place?

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: history, Kangxi, propaganda, Tibet history
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In today’s China, lack of popular trust in officials has become a vexing problem for the government. Something happens, big or small, the government comments, and the public is incredulous. The public always assumes they are covering something up, they are lying, they are twisting the facts, or even destroying evidence. Online, suppositions fly, but all in the same general direction — thinking the worst of the government. When the government conducts an accident investigation, no matter how it is done, there’s no way to earn the confidence of the public. And so, in the case of every major incident, the truth is always, inevitably, regarded as incomplete or delayed.

We must confess, concerning truth and trust, that the China of the past and the China of the present are two different worlds [existing side by side], operating each by its own logic. Government officials in China have, with little preparedness, been thrust overnight into an age of explosive information and fierce communication. But the ideas in their heads are still mired in the past. They find it impossible to avoid feeling panicked, angry, at a loss, or even wronged [by public opinion] ….

It’s quite simple. In modern societies, no state or government is trusted. The era in which the relationship between the government and the people is like the relationship between parents and children is long gone. The mark of a modern society is how “modern” its sources and transmission of information are. This means, too, that people have changed.

Source: Trust in China’s new media era – China Media Project

© samuel wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: microblogs, news media, officials, propaganda, trust, trust crisis, Zhang Ming
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A knowledge economy operating at the frontiers of technology is incompatible with a one-party state.

‘If nobody can be safe, do we want this speed? Can we live in apartments that do not fall down? Can the roads we drive on in our cities not collapse? Can we travel in safe trains? And if there is a major accident can we not be in a hurry to bury the trains? Can we afford the people a basic sense of security?”

When a news anchor on China’s state TV feels he can say that on a broadcaster which has become the world gold standard for censorship and propaganda, you know that something profound is afoot. But it is not just the crash last weekend outside Wenzhou, involving two high speed trains that cost 39 lives and some 190 injured, that has appalled the country. It has been the Communist party’s attempt once again to try to close down the whole affair that has aroused passionate protest.

Read more about the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash via CDT.

© compco for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCTV, high-speed rail crash, Ministry of Railway, propaganda
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