The China Times (华夏时报) reported today that Chongqing Satellite TV, which suspended commercial advertising one year ago as part of Bo Xilai’s populist campaign of red culture, will re-introduce advertising on April 2. [Read our coverage of this issue last year here and here].
On March 15, the same day Bo Xilai’s removal as Chongqing’s top leader was announced, a brief advertisement for a liquor brand was broadcast following the 30-minute official local newscast, “Chongqing Central News Daily” (重庆新闻联播). This commercial, the first appearing on Chongqing Satellite TV since the station’s “red” makeover a year ago, drove speculation that a change was in the offing. But an official about turn on advertising or “red” programming was never confirmed by the station.
Today the China Times cited a representative from the chief editor’s office at Chongqing Satellite TV as saying employees at the network had been under strict instructions not to talk about the pending makeover.
Despite these supposed restrictions, however, the China Times noted that employees seemed quite willing to talk about the changes.

“Although Chongqing Satellite TV has officially been very secretive about the re-design, many current and former employees confirmed the guesses being made outside to the reporter from this paper.”

The “complete re-design” of Chongqing Satellite TV will reportedly take place on April 2, with the re-introduction of commercial advertising and a whole new line-up of entertainment programming.

China is now possibly, apparently, invisibly in the midst of political turmoil at the highest levels. In the wake of the public removal of Bo Xilai (薄熙来) last week as top leader in the municipality of Chongqing, there have been mounting rumors and hints, vague sketches of intrigue. Gunshots heard, say some, at the very heart of power. A mysterious black Ferrari, driven by an unknown man of possible consequence, crashing and burning on the capital’s outskirts (then the story swept under the rug of “harmony”). Finally, suggestions even of a thwarted coup attempt by China’s number nine, security chief Zhou Yongkang (周永康).
Of course, as several foreign correspondents have rightly remarked today, it’s impossible to say anything with certainty about what’s happening — and difficult, in fact, to say much of anything at all.
In other ways, though, the lingering uncertainty speaks for itself.
It’s simple enough, sure, to suggest that the more extreme plot lines are pure fabrication. But even if they are, the abiding sense of uncertainly and insecurity about what is happening at the top nonetheless exposes the volatility of Chinese politics.
Politics at the top in China, and in fact at every level, is still beyond scrutiny, three decades after Deng Xiaoping urged the need for political reform to avoid the kind of destabilizing fractures that could erupt into events like the Cultural Revolution.
The very fact that the rumors and curiosities this week have been “harmonized” rather than contradicted with facts will naturally lead many people to believe them, or believe at the very least that they are half-truths pointing to the same fundamental conclusion: that all is not well in Zhongnanhai.
The rumors might be easy enough to clear away. Who exactly was the man in the black Ferrari? And where is Zhou Yongkang, who appears to have been absent from the news for the past 48 hours?
Instead, there is a total information vacuum surrounding these apparent curiosities. They are left behind like spooky chalk outlines.
Continued traces of apparent political friction can be seen on Chinese social media, thanks to our colleagues here at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre, who have created an archive of select deleted (“permission denied”) posts.
Here, for example, is a deleted March 20 post from Lu Yong (卢勇), a public relations specialist for a company in Chengdu with more than 100,000 Weibo followers. Lu writes: “This is Chongqing right now, where people are still putting up banners like this one, and continuing to sing red songs.” The accompanying picture shows Chinese holding up a red banner with yellow characters that read, “The people of Chongqing love you, Secretary Bo [Xilai]!”

Other deleted posts, like this one from March 20 (removed yesterday), deal with the question of the mysterious black Ferrari that crashed on March 18.
Finally, this deleted post from prominent Chinese scholar Wu Jiaxiang (吴稼祥) may provide the most suitably crepuscular image for what we’ve seen in China over the past few days:

Hegel once said that wisdom was like an owl, and that it took flight only at dusk. But his was a nation of philosophy. Here in our country, we have no owls, only bats. Those bats are rumors, and they take flight after midnight from the microblogs that are their caves. These past few days the bats have been plentiful. Like talk of a “new Gang of Four” . . . The people playing these political tricks, they seem just like children trying to hoist 200-kilogram barbells over their heads. I worry for them.

[Frontpage Image: “Millions of Bats, Khao Yai“, posted by stijnbokhove to Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.]

As we’ve pointed out again and again at the China Media Project, one of the most interesting contrasts that can readily be seen in China’s media is between news treatment by Party-run newspapers and market-oriented newspapers.
In the vast majority of cases, these mass-circulation market-oriented city newspapers (都市类报纸) — let’s call them the C‘s — are spin-offs of Party newspapers (the P‘s) run by the top Party leadership at various levels of the bureaucracy. While the former rely entirely on advertising, the latter continue to receive Party support. Though financially self-reliant, however, these commercial papers are still tied in politically to the Party-run press bureaucracy — a legacy of the Mao Zedong-era principle of “politicians running the newspapers.”
Over the past decade in China it’s been at these market-oriented newspapers (and similar magazines) that we have seen the most interesting coverage — from relevant consumer content to hard-hitting investigative reporting. And the differences can be seen at a glance.
For example, consider this composite of four top Party newspapers today created by Old Media Wang (传媒老王), a Weibo user who regularly posts content and observations from China’s media. The paper’s are: People’s Daily, Economic Daily, Guangming Daily and Liberation Army Daily.

All of the papers have identical designs, the same top stories about official Party goings-on, the same image (of Party leaders, of course), etcetera. The top story is about China’s 13th National Civil Affairs Conference (第十三次全国民政会议), a meeting of China’s civil affairs-related departments attended yesterday by President Hu Jintao and other top leaders.
At commercial newspapers, the big story today is about rising fuel costs and related inflation concerns. Here is a composite of a number of major commercial papers, again created by Old Media Wang.

Here the top story is not the 13th National Civil Affairs Conference. Goodness, who wants to read about that?
The top story is oil. All of the front pages in the composite, from Southern Metropolis Daily at the upper-left to Jiangnan Times at the bottom-right, scream out with headlines about rising oil prices and their impact on consumers (hence the relevance). At top-center is Shandong Commercial News with the big black circle of a fuel (price) indicator at center and a headline that reads: “There is no high, only higher.”
So we can visualize the differences between these types of newspapers. But how can we visualize their relationships?
The critical fact to understand is that all publications in China need to have an institutional sponsor, if you will, a Party or government organ that vouches for it politically and can be held accountable if things go wrong. This is called the “supervising institution”, or zhuguan danwei (主管单位).
In the case of commercial newspapers, their “supervising institutions” are the Party papers, which in turn are “supervised” by the top Party leadership at that corresponding level.
To visualize the relationships, readers can try using our CMP Media Map to search the following groups of publications:
1. People’s Daily (人民日报) and Jinghua Times (京华时报)
2. Nanfang Daily (南方日报), Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) and Southern Metropolis Weekly
Go to our CMP Media Map and paste the Chinese characters for People’s Daily into the search field at the upper-right. Click GO. (This may take a minute to load). The edition that shows up at the top is the one you want. Click on it and you’ll see the registration information at the bottom of the page.
Notice that the supervising institution is given as the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (中共中央). That means this is a central-level Party publication overseen by the top Party leadership.
Now try plugging in Jinghua Times, a commercial publication. You’ll notice, when the registration information comes up, that the supervising institution is People’s Daily. This is what we mean when we refer to these publications as spin-offs.
You can think of these as the political family trees of China’s newspaper and magazine publishing industry. In fact, Party papers are also referred to in Chinese as “mother papers”, or mubao (母报), and their spin-offs are called “child papers,” or zibao (子报).
And there you have it. Arcane? Perhaps. But absolutely critical for anyone who wants to understand the basics of how Chinese newspapers and other publications actually fit into the political landscape.

According to a report by the official China News Service, a journalist in Hebei’s Baoding City was stopped by a local official when trying to film a major fire that broke out at a warehouse on the morning of March 19, 2012. The official reportedly said to the journalist: “The fire has not caused any death, and there isn’t much financial loss. There’s no news value here.” When the reporter then asked who the warehouse belonged to and what was stored there, the official shut his mouth and refused to respond. In this cartoon, posted by artist Shang Haichun (商海春) to QQ.com, a television news reporter attempts to film a blazing fire. An official stands angrily between the reporter and the fire, his hand thrust out, and shouts: “There’s no news value!”

The following post from the official Sina Weibo of the Beijing Evening News (北京晚报) was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 8am Hong Kong time yesterday, March 19, 2012. The Beijing Evening News currently has more than 118,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
The post dealt with a story that sparked a great deal of speculation on Chinese social media sites yesterday, the reported crash of a Ferrari in Beijing’s Haidian District at around 4am on Sunday. According to accounts on social media, the driver was killed in the crash, and two female passengers were injured. Authorities moved quickly to contain the story, leading to speculation that the driver had been a person of some political consequence, or the close relative of such person.
The post from the Beijing Evening News Weibo account follows. Our translation of the story in the newspaper is further down:

[Ferrari totalled, one dead two injured] Today around 4am a Ferrari driven by a male with two female passengers and heading from west to east on the Fourth Ring Road toward the southeast corner of Baofusi Bridge (保福寺桥) suddenly struck a barrier on the south end of the bridge and then struck a guardrail on the north-bound side. When the out-of-control Ferrari finally came to a stop the body of the vehicle had already seriously come apart. At the time the reporter filed this report, the accident had caused the death of the male driver at the scene, and the two females were injured. The cause [of the accident] is still under investigation. See the report in today’s edition of this newspaper.

The post was accompanied by the following photograph of the wreckage from the crash, taken by reporter Yu Xiang.

The original Chinese-language post from the Beijing Evening News (北京晚报) follows:

【法拉利粉身碎骨 当场一死两伤】今晨4时左右，一辆载有一男两女的法拉利由西向东行驶至北四环保福寺桥东南角时，突然撞到桥体南侧的墙壁上，随后又撞向北侧护栏。等失控的法拉利最终停下时，车身已严重分裂。截至记者发稿，事故造成车内男子当场死亡，两女重伤，原因仍在调查中。详见本报今日报道

For more discussion of this story, we refer readers to James Fallow’s blog at The Atlantic about an English-language from the Global Times newspaper, but caution that, in our view, the Global Times story is not “astounding.” English-language state media in China often do go further than their Chinese counterparts in reporting sensitive news — but this owes much to their role as public diplomacy vehicles (对外). They are meant, in other words, for foreign consumption, and work by an entirely different set of standards.
While such reporting by English-language state media is often seen as breaking through norms, it is probably more accurate to say that China has one norm for domestic Chinese-language coverage (“guidance of public opinion“), and a separate norm for public diplomacy (English Global Times, China Daily, CCTV English).
On March 19, the story of the Ferrari crash was covered by both China News Service — the country’s number-two official news service after Xinhua — and by the Beijing Evening News. The Beijing Evening News story follows:

Beijing Evening News
March 18, 2012
PG 5
Ferrari is totalled — one dead two injured
(correspondent, Yu Xiang/于祥)
Today around 4am a Ferrari driven by a male with two female passengers and heading from west to east on the Fourth Ring Road toward the southeast corner of Baofusi Bridge (保福寺桥) suddenly struck a barrier on the south end of the bridge and then struck a guardrail on the north-bound side. When the out-of-control Ferrari finally came to a stop the body of the vehicle had already seriously come apart. At the time the reporter filed this report, the accident had caused the death of the male driver at the scene, and the two females were injured. The cause [of the accident] is still under investigation.
A fire brigade from Shuangyushu (双榆树) arrived quickly at the scene after responding to a call. At the time [of their arrival] vehicle parts were spread all over the scene and a Ferrari sports car with its front end completely gone was stopped at the north end of the road. The engine stood in the middle of the road, having already caught fire and burned. There were three people originally in the vehicle, including the male driver, one male and two females, and all were thrown far from the vehicle.
A doctor from the 120 Emergency Treatment Center (120急救中心) determined the male dead at the scene, and the two females, who were in critical condition, were admitted to the hospital for urgent medical treatment. Meanwhile, the fire brigade set about extinguishing the engine fire. Two minutes later, the engine fire was completely extinguished, and the fire brigade and police began their detailed handling of the scene.
According to the original caller who notified the police said that as he was driving in the direction of the North Fourth Ring Road in the area of Baofusi Bridge, he saw the Ferrari with its front end already completely destroyed. [Photo by Yu Xiang].

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

On March 14, in what many in China have termed his “farewell speech”, Premier Wen Jiabao fielded questions at a press conference closing the annual session of the National People’s Congress. Answering two separate questions, one on political reform and the other on the Wang Lijun incident, Wen Jiabao emphasized the importance of reform as a turn away from the tragedies of the Party’s past, most importantly the Cultural Revolution.
Wen Jiabao’s remarks, and the announced removal the following day of Bo Xilai (薄熙来) as the top Party leader in Chongqing, seem to mark a concerted move against China’s left ahead of the leadership transition this fall. Bo Xilai was seen to have been carving out his own populist enclave in Chongqing through his “red songs” movement and his robust anti-corruption campaign spearhead by Wang Lijun.
The apparent unraveling of Bo’s political standing and prospects through the Wang Lijun incident has come with a renewed pro-reform discourse cast against the evils of extreme, Maoist populism.
In some ways, this is not unlike the carving out of the original consensus on reform and opening in the early 1980s over and against the political extremes of the Cultural Revolution. So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that we see Wen Jiabao (and now many media) returning to the issue of the 1981 Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the Republic, which made the link between sustained reform (including political reform), forward development and the avoiding of another calamity like the Cultural Revolution.
Just like then, this is not a real reckoning of the painful past. It is — at the moment, at least — the political exploitation of the past to gather consensus toward a political future, specifically continued and perhaps deepened reform.
A number of Chinese media have seized on Wen Jiabao’s remarks to throw the Cultural Revolution under the spotlight in a general sense. On March 16, the day after Wen Jiabao’s remarks, The Beijing News ran an editorial called “China Can Only Rely on Further Reforms, Not On a Return to the Cultural Revolution” (中国只能靠向前改革不能回文革). The editorial concluded:

The Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the Republic has already pointed out that intra-party democracy and the institutionalization and legalization of democracy in the politics, society and life of the nation are the only path to avoiding the recurrence of a tragedy like the Cultural Revolution. Only reform on the basis of democracy and rule of law can guarantee that momentum is kept and the objective is not lost. China can only move forward, we cannot move back or stand still. Moving forward can only depend on opening and reform.

In an editorial in today’s Economic Observer, Lei Yi (雷颐雷颐), a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, writes that a truthful reckoning of the Cultural Revolution is important, but cautions that rising social problems are also a factor driving sympathy toward China’s Maoist past:

In order to avoid the Cultural Revolution becoming a choice for China’s future, we must of course face history head on, honestly facing the truth and dealing with the problem of collective forgetting. But even more important is to deal with ever more serious social problems.

Finally, we turn to a piece in the March 18 edition of Southern Metropolis Daily, which repeats the argument that moving ahead into the future demands a reckoning of the past, but adds the insistence that this be a full reckoning — that victims and persecutors must all speak out with their stories of the Cultural Revolution.

“Those Who Experienced the Cultural Revolution Must Speak Out About Their Guilt”
Southern Metropolis Daily
March 18, 2012
Gu Zexu (顾则徐)
At a press conference after the closing of the Fifth Session of the Eleventh National People’s Congress, Premier Wen Jiabao (温总理) said: “After the breaking up of the Gang of Four (四人帮), our Party made a resolution concerning problems in its history and carried out economic reform and opening, but the impact of the errors of the Cultural Revolution and of feudalism have never been eliminated.” “Without successful political reform,” he added, “historical tragedies like the Cultural Revolution could possibly be repeated.” In my view, there are many reasons why there is a danger of again experiencing a Cultural Revolution, and one reason is that we lack “frank and honest” (坦白) from those who experienced [the Cultural Revolution] — a fair and factual account of the absurdity they personally experienced. Without “frankness and honesty” no lessons can be drawn. And if we do not draw lessons [from the past], absurd events become intriguing events, and there is a desire to play them out again.
After the Cultural Revolution ended, [the Party] established the complete rejection of the Cultural Revolution as a political principle. But this complete rejection was handled only in a simplistic manner (简单否定), and the facts [of the Cultural Revolution] were obscured. With the passage of time the question of exactly what the Cultural Revolution had been became increasingly muddled. The writer Ba Jin (巴金) raised the issue of creating a Cultural Revolution museum with the hope that those who came after would understand the real Cultural Revolution, draw lessons from it, and ensure that a Cultural Revolution could never happen again. But to this day China has not officially recognized museum to the Cultural Revolution.
But a museum to the Cultural Revolution is a material matter, and even more important than this is the question of language — an honest reckoning by those who experienced it.
The Cultural Revolution swept up every Chinese person at the time, whether man or woman, old or young — no one could escape it. Aside from a very few who could be said to have been either persecutors or victims, the majority of people were both. In the relating of events after the Cultural Revolution, victims spoke out more, but as the Cultural Revolution was only simplistically rejected (简单否定), both accounts were extremely limited, persecutors even more so than victims. Up to now, only a precious few who experienced the Cultural Revolution have had the courage to speak out about their experiences persecuting others.
In my view, while the experiences of victims are important to hear, the experiences of persecutors are even more important. Otherwise, the history of the Cultural Revolution will be about only victims, with persecutors missing from the picture. There would be no supporting testimony for the accounts of the victims, and subsequent generations might believe that these accounts were false. The more dangerous inclination is for the cover up the factual accounts of persecutors, for those who experienced [the Cultural Revolution] to be reluctant to talk about their past words and deeds, or even in the process of covering up [the truth] to portray themselves as heroes, twisting absurd events into happy ones and leaving those who come after with the impression that the Cultural Revolution had its beautiful side. For example, that beating, smashing, looting and public denunciation (批斗) might be characterized as the expression of ideals . . .
Indeed, there is no shortage of people who advocate greater reflection on the Cultural Revolution. But reflection in the absence of a reckoning of the facts has little meaning. Catholicism emphasizes confession, obtaining the forgiveness of God by owning up to one’s sins. [The idea is that] God will surely forgive one’s sins, but on the condition that one speaks them and owns up to them. The vast majority of those today who are around 50 years old and older all in fact have their own histories of sin [during the Cultural Revolution].
When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, I was just finishing primary school. And although I was only a child, and although I seldom did wrong because I was not a “good student”, I still managed to do wrong [against others]. I participated in the shouting of slogans at public denunciations (批斗会). I threw stones at the “four types” (四类分子) [of enemies in the class struggle, namely landlords, wealthy farmers, counterrevolutionaries and bad types]. I walked behind a widow racked with madness and heckled, “Wife of a landlord! Wife of a landlord!” When “educational revolution” (复课闹革命) was carried out, I wrote out my first character poster according to the directions of my head teacher. Perhaps I wrote mine quite smoothly, and she read it aloud before the class. I saw that as she was persecuted by my words, tears sparkled in her eyes, and to this day I cannot forget her trembling sound.
Of those who experienced the Cultural Revolution, even those who were only children then, how many did no wrong? Of course, many can brush aside their crimes by pointing to the vagaries of the times. People can say they had no way of resisting, and that they were just following orders. People might say that when all are guilty all are guiltless. But the precondition is that we speak, that we tell our children, that we tell the youth was the truth is. If we do not speak, if we don’t let those who come after understand the true Cultural Revolution, if we use florid recollections to talk about our own morals and ideals, making [the young] believe those were passionate and pure times, this is not just justifying one’s own conduct, it is committing another unforgivable sin.
It is largely because we’ve never had a reckoning, and because today some young people are “suffused with sunlight” [hearing only positive accounts], being deceived about the passions [of that era], that the conditions exist for a repeat of the Cultural Revolution. Those who experienced the Cultural Revolution have already grown old, or are nearing old age. For the sake of our future, speak out and say: I have done wrong.