Was it a “serious mistake” or a wilful and desperate act of protest against worsening press controls? This question remains unanswered one week after a headline news editor at the Shenzhen edition of Southern Metropolis Daily, Liu Cuixia (刘翠霞), was fired for her role in a peculiar media scandal — an incident that top political brass at the paper’s publisher, the Nanfang Daily Group, characterised in an internal release as “a serious matter of guidance.”

The scandal was prompted by the unfortunate — or defiant? — pairing of two headlines on the front page of the Shenzhen edition on February 20. The bold headline across the top of the page referenced President Xi Jinping’s “important speech” made the previous day in Beijing, in which he stressed the Chinese Communist Party’s supremacy over all media: “Party and Government Media are Propaganda Positions and Must Be Surnamed Party.”

Directly below this banner coverage — which all Chinese media were under orders to prioritise, along with a photo of the president’s tour of core central Party media — was a large photo of the spreading at sea of the ashes of Yuan Geng (袁庚), a key founder of the Shekou Industrial Zone. Yuan, an important local businessman and reformer, died on January 31 at the age of 99. The headline of this article read: “A Soul Returns to the Sea.”

The juxtaposition was either so canny or so casual few might have noticed at all. But once eagle-eyed Chinese internet users had noted a certain friction between the lines, the static energy quickly became electric. If the two headlines were read together vertically, people realised, the “hidden-head” message would be as follows:

媒体
姓党
魂归
大海

Media Are
Surnamed Party
Their Souls Return
To The Sea

The editors, it seemed, were suggesting that the severe controls on Chinese media Xi Jinping outlined in his February 19 speech were a death sentence for all semblance of journalistic professionalism — the last nail in the coffin.

In its statement, the Party committee of the Nanfang Daily Group suggested the editors had merely lacked “political sensitivity,” committing a serious error that had been “interpreted maliciously by others online.”

Staff at the Southern Metropolis Daily have suggested the editors would never knowingly have taken such risks. “It can’t have been deliberate,” one anonymous journalist told the New York Times. “It’s just very, very serious. And these days no one would dare to do something like that.”

Yes, these days indeed. These days are exactly the point.

Intended or not, the message about these days comes across loud and clear between the unfortunate headlines. Xi Jinping’s controls on “news and public opinion,” and in fact on all forms of expression and dissent, have become so draconian that to many the spirit of reform in China seems, like Yuan Geng’s ashes, to be slipping into the depths.

In his February 19 speech, Xi Jinping spoke of the need for “innovation” in the arena of media control, increasing the reach, influence and “infectiveness” of propaganda. During a visit to the People’s Liberation Army Daily back in December, the president described propaganda as a kraken-like monster, its arms twisting through the media-saturated lives of the public. “Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles,” he said, “and that is where we find the focal point and end point of propaganda and ideology work.”

But the kraken induces not interest or attraction, but terror. And if the kraken inspires “innovation,” it is defensive only.

For the nearest analogy to the preposterous level of panic and paranoia at work in the recent Southern Metropolis Daily headline scandal, we must return to the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, and to the very newspaper where China’s kraken-in-chief aired his comments last December on the “innovation” of control.

The “Black Box Scandal” (黑框事件)

It was early evening on July 8, 1974. One by one, the members of the Party committee of the People’s Liberation Army Daily — the official mouthpiece of the military and one of just three publications dominating China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution — received phone calls summoning them to the newspaper’s conference room for an unspecified urgent matter.

The senior editors of the PLA Daily crowded into the conference room. Finally, in walked the young deputy editor from the newspaper’s “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius Office.” From his leather satchel he withdrew several copies of the paper and said sternly: “Comrade Hu Wei (胡炜), chairman of the military commission’s Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius Office, has sent me here with instructions from the centre. Recently, leading central Party comrades received a letter from the masses pointing out that there is an overlap between the funeral picture of Mr. Lu Han on page two of the May 19 edition of the PLA Daily, and the picture on page one of Chairman Mao meeting with a foreign guest.”

“This is a serious political error,” the deputy editor continued. “The emergence of this problem is surely not an accident.” He read out a letter, dated June 25, from Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, in which she demanded a thorough investigation of this “serious political incident.”

An overlap? What could the young editor possibly have meant?

As it turned out, the PLA Daily had run, on page two of the May 19 edition, an obituary for Lu Han, the former Kuomintang general who had defected to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. As was customary, editors had included a photo of Lu bordered by a thick black box, which in China symbolises death.

Page one of the paper had featured coverage of Mao Zedong’s meeting with Makarios III, the first President of the Republic of Cyprus. In an image below the fold, Mao Zedong was pictured sitting in a meeting room with Makarios III.

Separately, the pages were fine. But when the newspaper was held up to the light, the black border around the page-two photograph of Lu Han became a black box around the image of Mao Zedong.

The following composite image is an approximation of what the reportedly scandalised PLA Daily readers would have seen as light filtered through pages one and two on the morning of May 19, 1974.

As in the case of the recent Southern Metropolis Daily incident, there was an immediate question of intention in what became known as the “Black Box Scandal.” Had the editors knowingly designed the paper in such a way as to curse the unassailable Chairman Mao?

Likewise, just as the political implications of the recent Southern Metropolis Daily headlines had to be teased out by Chinese on social networks, so had the “Black Box Scandal” been illuminated — ostensibly, at least — by “the masses.”

The above account of the “Black Box Scandal” comes directly from Wu Yongchuan (吴永川), a former deputy director of the PLA Daily who was on duty with another editor, Xue Zhen (薛真), as the May 19, 1974, edition went to press. Wu gave a detailed account of the event in the December 21, 2000, edition of Guangzhou’s Southern Weekly.

According to Wu, a full investigation was conducted into the incident and both he and Xue Zhen were compelled to make full and public self-examinations. The PLA Daily was ordered to make all necessary adjustments to ensure that such offences were not repeated.

And so it was, Wu writes, the PLA Daily became the first newspaper in China to set up a special “searchlight table” (探照桌), its top made of transparent glass under which could be placed an electric bulb. As the proofs were reviewed each night, editors studied pages one and two, pages three and four, and so on, ensuring there were no political violations — real or imagined. The process was called “searchlighting” (探照).

In his essay, “The Reputation of Millions Can’t Stand Up to One’s Man’s Ruin” (万人之誉不及一人之毁), Zhang Xinyang (张心阳), one of Wu Yongchuan’s former colleagues, tells us that “searchlighting” was eventually extended to the inspection of the Chinese characters appearing on the backs of photographs of Communist Party leaders. The editor responsible for searchlighting had to ensure that no words with negative connotations — like “death,” “overthrow” or “criticise” — appeared on the backs of such images. If possible infractions were found, the pages had to be scrapped and redesigned, even if that meant the edition came out late.

“Searchlighting” at the PLA Daily continued through the end of the Cultural Revolution. For Zhang Xinyang, the process was a grotesque anomaly — “a great invention,” he writes acerbically — highlighting the political excesses of that painful time.

Zhang writes: “It entirely surpassed conventional human thought, and innovated methods of reading the newspapers in ways not seen before or since, an entry in the annals of press history.”

But history, when not properly regarded, has a way of returning, kraken-like, from the depths. Xi Jinping’s fearsome “innovations,” should they continue, are likely to spawn new and yet oddly familiar absurdities — “searchlighting” for the 21st century.

The former PLA Daily deputy director, Wu Yongchuan, closed his December 2000 account of the “Black Box Scandal” by conceding that the political context of his experience must seem remote to his contemporary readers.

“I’m afraid,” wrote Wu, “that readers today would find it difficult to imagine such trials and tribulations in getting a newspaper out, or such a way of reading a newspaper.”

Ah, Wu Yongquan!

But these days. These days . . .

[This essay was originally published by CMP in March 2016.]

For the Chinese Communist Party, history is never in the past. It is a political text to be imprinted with a vision of power and its legitimation; a culmination in the present, gathering on the selective foundation of what has come before. It follows, naturally, that history is never simply written. It is drafted in consultation, making its way from one office to the next, approved and rejected, revised and re-revised, chiseled into being like a cathedral of rhetoric and representation — until what emerges is a monument to the Party’s image of itself at that concrete moment in time.

It is in exactly this spirit that we should understand “A Chronicle of Major Events Since the Party’s 19^th National Congress” (党的十九大以来大事记), the declaration of the Party and its purpose that today dominates most of the first eight pages of the CCP’s official People’s Daily newspaper. Like the communique released earlier this week, the “Chronicle of Major Events” is one of a number of official documents that we can anticipate in the run-up to the 20^th National Congress of the CCP, set to open on October 16.

The last such chronicle was released in the People’s Daily on October 16, 2017, two days before the opening of the 19^th National Congress.

This year’s “Chronicle of Major Events” comes with a special commentary marking the release, printed on page two, as well as a dry question-and-answer recounting on page eight, with an unnamed official from the Central Institute of Party History and Literature (中共中央党史和文献研究院), of the process and principles by which the document was formulated.

The attribution of the commentary to “a commentator from this paper,” or benbao pinglunyuan (本报评论员), marks it as an important staff-written piece representing views in the senior leadership. The commentary concludes with a packed paragraph of loyalty signaling that references the power of Xi Jinping’s guiding philosophy, or “banner term” (旗帜语) — which is expected to be shortened at the upcoming congress to the potent “Xi Jinping Thought” — as well as formulas like the “Two Establishes,” which is meant to seal the position of both Xi and his guiding ideas.

“The banner points the direction; the direction determines the path; the path determines destiny,” it reads, sending a clear message that Xi’s “thought” is the way of the future for China.

Drafting the Past for the Future

The question-and-answer article from the Central Institute of Party History and Literature is mostly uninteresting in its fawning restatement of CCP orthodoxy. The question is asked, not by a human being but presumably by the Institute itself: “Could you please talk about the guiding thought and basic principles in the preparation of ‘Major Events’?” The answer comes from the unnamed “responsible official”: “The writing of ‘Major Events’ adheres in its guidance to Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.”

Not exactly gripping or revelatory.

But the Q&A’s sketch of the procedural process behind the “Chronicle of Major Events” might be interesting to observers of Chinese politics. It explains that a series of internal CCP chronicles since the 19^th National Congress in 2017 laid down the foundation for the “Chronicle of Major Events” and that work on these documents “gathered experience and trained the team” at the institute. These official historical documents included “Major Events in 40 Years of Reform and Opening” (改革开放四十年大事记), released in 2018, and “Major Events in a Century of the CCP” (中国共产党一百年大事记), released in late June of 2021.

Early this year, in anticipation of the 20th National Congress, the institute defined the drafting of the “Chronicle of Major Events” as one of its top priorities, and formed a “drafting team” (编写组). The drafting process then involved numerous internal meetings to discuss various issues as they emerged. Once an initial draft had been produced, experts were organized to further discuss the draft and make suggestions. “The more than 500 entries were revised word by word, polished repeatedly, and drafted several times,” according to the Q&A.  

“It can be said that ‘Major Events’ is an important research result completed under the kind care of leading comrades of the Central Committee with the full effort of Party history and documentation departments, and with collaboration from other relevant departments,” the anonymous official concludes.

The nod to “research” aside, this is not the work of professional historians. What to include, and what to leave out? Whom to downplay and whom to emphasize? Such questions are too momentous to entrust to academic historians. The process must instead rely on those we might call, for lack of a better word, historiogrofficials — bureaucratic functionaries who shape the past through the political prerogatives of the present.

So what shape has the “Chronicle of Major Events” taken?

Visualizing the Past Five Years

It would be a mostly pointless exercise to delve into the 500-odd entries in the chronicle, but the consistency of these documents, in terms of form and process, as they are released every five years provides an excellent opportunity for comparison. And one crucial indicator we can observe is how frequently the chronicles mention the Party’s top leaders, the seven men on the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

Comparison is feasible not just because the process, as the official from the Central Institute of Party History and Literature explained, is a highly formal one. The chronicles released in 2017 and 2022 are also nearly identical in length, the former coming in at 49,949 characters, and the second at 50,800 (being just 16-20 lines longer).

If we search full-text versions of both chronicles for the names of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, and then plot the number of mentions for each name, a clear pattern emerges.

The rise in mentions of Xi Jinping in this year’s chronicle (268) represents just over a 25 percent increase over his mentions in the 2017 chronicle (222), clearly reflecting his growing profile within the official account of the past five years.

As for the remaining members of the Standing Committee, the total mentions of all have fallen in real terms, despite the very slight increase in the length of the chronicle. Premier Li Keqiang, the second-ranking official on the PSC after Xi, received 66 mentions in the 2017 chronicle. This year, Li received just 44 mentions, a significant drop of one-third.

Drops for the rest of the PSC members in this year’s chronicle are similar to that experienced by the premier. For example, the third-ranking member in 2017 was Zhang Dejiang (张德江), who had 24 mentions in the full text.  In the chronicle released today, the third-ranking member, Li Zhanshu (栗战书), has just 16 mentions, a drop again of one-third.

This yawning gap between Xi and the rest of the top leadership, and the shaping of history around his person and leadership, is not exactly a surprise, of course. It recalls what we saw back in November 2021 with the release at the Sixth Plenum of the CCP’s third resolution on history, the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the Major Achievements and Historical Experiences of the Party’s Hundred-Year Struggle (中共中央关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议).

That decision announced a new direction for the CCP and reconsolidated its claim to legitimacy under Xi’s leadership in the “New Era” (新时代). And it was certainly no accident that Xi’s decade in power, a period covering just 10 percent of the Party’s entire 10-year history, dominated more than one-half of the resolution.  

No one can yet say with a great deal of certainty what the 20^th National Congress of the CCP will bring. But in the version of the past offered by today’s “Chronicle of Major Events,” we can certainly see glimpses of the very near future.

As anger flared across Chinese social media yesterday following the deadly crash in Guizhou of a passenger bus transferring positive Covid cases, Gao Yu (高昱), the deputy executive editor and head of investigations at Caixin Media, posted a reflection on the tragedy to his WeChat friend group that was subsequently shared outside the chat.

In his post, Gao urged an end to China’s zero Covid policy, which he argued was unscientific, pursued out of unnecessary fear, and out of step with the rest of the world. “We must wake up! We must return to normalcy!” he wrote.

As the post was shared more widely on the internet, censors moved quickly to stamp it out. An archived version is still available from China Digital Times.

Our translation of the post follows.

________

For someone to be afraid of Covid is completely normal, and something understandable. When I stand and look down from the third floor, I feel fearful too. But what is not normal, and what is not understandable is to hold 1.3 billion Chinese people in bondage because an extremely small number of people could contract Covid and die.

Right now the entire world is declaring that the Covid pandemic has ended. But in this huge country still, an entire building of people can be dragged away to quarantine because a single person is positive, and an entire city can be forcibly locked down. Entire countries are living normally. But still there are people [here] holding their copies of the People’s Daily and saying that China’s epidemic prevention and control policies are the most scientific, the most humane, and the greatest.

China’s population is huge, [they say], so even if the number of deaths is at just one in ten thousand, then out of 1.3 billion Chinese there will be 130,000 who die. Can’t you be responsible for those 130,000 people? Sure, but the number of people who die each year in car accidents is far greater than the number who die of Covid. And why don’t you prohibit the driving of cars?

So far in Guizhou, not a single person has died of Omicron. But the fear of the possible spread of Omicron has put six million people under lockdown and has resulted in the forced removal of 30,000 people to quarantine facilities, of which some 10,000 have been distributed to other cities.

And now, 27 people who were possibly infected have been killed in an accident that happened during transport [to a quarantine facility outside the city]! Just look at this doomed driver who doesn’t know what’s even happening, and he wearing a hazmat suit and two layers of masks, and senselessly he’s wearing goggles too, and probably two layers of protective gloves. And for the entire journey, he was prohibited from using the air conditioning. And it was 2:30 AM. This is the foggy trance in which this bus was driven toward death.

We must wake up! We must return to normalcy!

Resolutely oppose PCR testing of the whole population!

Resolutely oppose zero Covid!

Resolutely oppose the lockdown of the country!

A long-awaited report released yesterday by the United Nations on the human rights situation in Xinjiang concludes that China’s actions in the region “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” The report, published along with a strongly-worded “state response” from China, was seen by international human rights groups as a vindication, and as “groundbreaking.” “We can breathe a sigh of relief,” one rights researcher wrote.

How have media inside China responded? With blistering silence.

A search for “Xinjiang human rights report” (新疆人权报告) in the WiseSearch database, which covers hundreds of Chinese-language newspapers as well as related websites and wire services, turns up 101 articles today. But just one is from mainland China. This is a post to Toutiao by an economics professor from Chongqing University of Technology, who dismisses the report as a “smokescreen” with “no credible evidence.”

“As we all know,” the professor writes, “Xinjiang has developed rapidly and made great achievements in recent years under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the government.”

Surely China’s major news services must have responded? Or People’s Daily Online, perhaps, the website under the CCP’s flagship newspaper? If all else fails we can surely expect a few words — and harsh ones at that — from the ever-faithful Global Times?

Cricket sounds.

The only results returned at all are a pair of articles from the official China News Service, the first about how US hegemony is harming “digital human rights” globally, the second mentioning “the West’s manufacture of rumors about so-called human rights [problems] in Xinjiang.”

It is safe to assume that the Chinese Communist Party is loading its propaganda blunderbuss, and the next 24-48 hours should bring a torrent of commentaries — including one, perhaps, from “Zhong Sheng” (钟声) in the People’s Daily.

But while we wait, it might be a helpful exercise to look at how China has been talking about human rights in recent weeks and months, and what this reveals about how China engages on human rights issues through international institutions like the UN.

The Civil Society Front

As the focus at China News Service suggests, one of China’s primary tactics on human rights is to attack the record of the United States and its allies in the West.

In December last year, state media widely reported on the release by the China Society for Human Rights Studies (中国人权研究会) of a report called “Politicization of Human Rights by the United States Undermines the Foundations of Good Human Rights Governance.” In April this year, another report, “Anti-Asian Racial Discrimination Rises to the Surface to Confirm the Nature of Racist Society in America,” laid out instances of anti-Asian discrimination. The report was once again prepared and publicized by the China Society for Human Rights Studies.

Most recently, the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily reported along with other state media in early July that the China Society of Human Rights had released a new report called “US Commits Grave Human Rights Violations in the Middle East and Elsewhere.”

Who exactly is this group, the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS)?

The CSHRS refers to itself as “the largest national non-governmental organization in the field of human rights in China,” and “a national academic organization in the field of human rights in China.” It notes in an introduction on its website that it “enjoys a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and is a member of the United Nations Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations (CONGO).”

The group is “active in human rights studies,” and it “endeavors to popularize human rights knowledge in an effort to raise the awareness of the importance of human rights throughout society.” The introduction also explains that CSHRS funding comes mainly from the China Foundation for Human Rights Development (中国人权发展基金会), or CFHRD.

CFHRD calls itself a “public foundation.” But it also states unambiguously in its formal charter from 1994 that “the business unit in charge is the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (Information Office of the State Council).”

These organizations have sought to present themselves as being broadly representative of an alternative vision of human rights, one supported by Chinese society and to be taken seriously in the field of human rights studies. They have inserted themselves into international human rights governance, trading on their supposed status as “non-governmental organizations.” But their direct connection to the Central Propaganda Department, the heart of the CCP’s perception machine, underscores the fact that they are little more than a civil society front for the CCP’s global human rights agenda, meant to distract from criticisms of China’s human rights abuses.

We should expect to hear from them at any moment.