As we edge closer to the 18th Party Congress and its important leadership transition, one of the most crucial things to watch is how the debate over “political system reforms”, or zhengzhi tizhi gaige (政治体制改革), shapes up in China’s press. A key related issue, of course, will be the fight against corruption.
During his July 1, 2011, speech to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, readers may remember [Qian Gang’s analysis here], President Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) said that the Party needed to fight corruption seriously and effectively, or risk losing the support of the people.
But Hu’s speech itself showed an abundance of caution. He offered no concrete answers, not even new political buzzwords — suggesting no one in the leadership had the upper hand and that the battle lines were silently being drawn. He made no mention whatsoever, for example, of the issue of officials reporting their assets (even internally), which has been tossed about for years. He made no mention of the role of press supervision, or “supervision by public opinion” (舆论监督), in holding officials to account.
Throwing up one more for the political reform debate file this year, the Global Times ran an editorial yesterday called, “Fighting Corruption is a Crucial Battle for Chinese Society”. The editorial essentially argued that while corruption is a key issue and should be fought aggressively, the Chinese public should manage their expectations, understanding that thoroughly eliminating corruption is impossible.

[ABOVE: The May 29, 2012, lead editorial in the Global Times addresses corruption and political reform.]
Re-posting the editorial yesterday, major web portals, including QQ.com, rewrote the headline of the Global Times as: “China Must Permit Some Corruption, the Public Should Understand“.
The altered headline itself prompted a great deal of debate on Chinese social media. “QQ.com has spoken the true import of the Global Times editorial,” one user responded.
Addressing the issue this morning, Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin (胡锡进) wrote on his own Weibo account:

The headline for yesterday’s Global Times editorial was, “Fighting Corruption is a Crucial Battle for Chinese Society.” In reposting the editorial, QQ.com maliciously changed the headline to, “China Must Permit Some Corruption, the Public Should Understand”, misleading readers. The Global Times can be criticized, but if this sort of arm-twist editing is encouraged and imitated, this would be to the detriment of public opinion in China. I hope all web editors across the country to not err in opposing this way of doing things.

[ABOVE: The Global Times editorial appears on QQ.com with the altered headline.]
I encourage readers to make their own judgements about the Global Times editorial. A full translation follows:

“Fighting Corruption is a Crucial Battle for Chinese Society” (反腐败是中国社会发展的攻坚战)
Global Times
May 29, 2012
Yesterday it was announced that former railway ministry chief and ministry Party secretary Liu Zhijun (刘志军) has been formally expelled from the Chinese Communist Party. He is suspected of crimes and has been transferred to judicial authorities for handling according to the law. This news has once again rattled the public sensitive nerves on the issue of corruption. Nationally, news about the fall of corrupt officials has come out again and again, giving people the impression that there is wave upon wave of corrupt [officials]. The government arrests corrupt officials, but they keep on coming. So what is going on here?
China is clearly in the midst of a period of high corruption, and the conditions for entirely removing corruption are not in place. Some people say, all we need is to “democratize” and the issue of corruption can be resolved. This view, however, is naive. There are many “democratic countries” in Asia, such as Indonesia, the Philippines and India, where the problem of corruption is more severe than in China. But China is perhaps the country in Asia right now where “the pain of corruption” is felt most keenly.
This has to do with China’s political moral code of “serving the people”, which is lodged in the hearts of the whole society. But in fact, the market economy has upset the implementation [of this moral code], and officials that shrug it off or even betray it continue to emerge through various cracks in our system. China is a country where globalization runs deep, and the high standards of clean [governance] of developed nations have already been acknowledged by the Chinese public. Under the forced compression into the Chinese public opinion environment of this information stemming from different times and contexts, there is no way of release from the pain and entanglement.
There is no way in any country to “root out” corruption. Most critical is containing it to a level acceptable to the public. And to do this is, for China, especially difficult.
In Singapore and Hong Kong salaries are high, and in the United States most candidates [for public office] are wealthy. Generally, after someone comes to office they gather a reputation and resources that enable them to take various “revolving doors” after they have left office, cashing in on these resources. But in China all of these roads are closed off.
Public opinion in China would not support a general raising of official salaries. And the system does not permit the use of personal influence and connections to make major money after an official finishes serving. And allowing the rich to serve as officials would cause people to feel something is amiss. The legal wages of Chinese officials are quite low, and a number of local officials use “unspoken rules” (潜规则) to enrich themselves.
The entire society in China has to some extent today become “ruled by the unspoken” (潜规则化). Doctors, teachers and others involved in public welfare industries are also working by “unspoken rules.” Many have legal wages that are low, but earn “grey income” (灰色收入).
It is not clear where the boundaries of these “unspoken rules” are. This is one of the reasons why corruption cases are so numerous. There is a popular saying now that, “The law cannot be enforced when everyone is an offender” (法不责众). Once an official takes this idea to heart, and believes that “other people are doing the same thing,” then he becomes extremely dangerous.
We must severely crack down on those who are corrupt, never appeasing them. This will substantially raise the dangers and costs of corruption, and serve the necessary deterrent role. The government must make mitigating corruption it biggest governing objective.
The public must firmly increase supervision by public opinion [i.e., monitoring of power by voicing views, particularly through the media], raising the impetus in pushing forward with the fight against corruption. But the public must also understand, on this great road, the objective fact and reality that China has no way of entirely suppressing corruption without sending the whole country into pain and confusion.
In saying these things, we don’t at all mean to suggest that fighting corruption is not important, that it can to put off. Quite the opposite, we believe that the fight against corruption should become the chief problem to be addressed by political reform in China, and that it is a common pursuit of the whole country.
We also believe that fighting corruption is not entirely something that can be “fought”, nor is it something that can be entirely “reformed.” It’s resolution relies at the same time on “development”. It is a question of individual officials, and a question of the system — but that’s not the entire story. It is also a question of the “overall development level” (综合发展水平) of Chinese society.
Fighting corruption is a difficult task in China’s social development. But its victory relies at the same time on the elimination of other obstructions in other areas of battle. China can’t conceivably be in a situation where it is a country behind in all other areas, but where its officials are really clean. Even if that were possible, it would not be sustainable. Fighting corruption is a point of breakthrough for China. But this country ultimately can only “move forward in a comprehensive manner” (综合前进).

The following post by Lei Yi (雷颐), a well-known Chinese historian with just under 108,000 followers, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 1:32am Hong Kong time today, May 30, 2012. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
Lei Yi’s post, which refers to the Chinese Communist Party simply as “it” (它), criticizes the suggestion that China is unsuited to “democratic politics” (民主政治) because the “character” (素质) of Chinese people is too low.

More than 60 years ago, it firmly avowed that the character of Chinese people was already suited to democratic politics. Several years later, it grabbed hold of political power. Now, it firmly avows that the character of the Chinese people is too low, that democratic politics cannot be carried out. The facts avow that its more than 60 years of rule has sent the character of the Chinese people into a downward slide, to the point that disqualified from exercising democratic politics.

Lei Yi’s original Chinese post follows:

六十好几年前，它坚决承认中国人民的素质已经可以实行民*主政治。几年后，它夺取了政权。现在，它坚持认为中国人的素质太低，还不能实行民*主,事实上承认，它执政的六十余年，使中国人民的素质下降了，至少下降到无资格实行民*主政治的水平。

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 May 28, 2012, new management regulations took effect for Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular social media sites, as part of an intensifying government crackdown on social media in the country. According to the regulations, users logging more than 5 posts of “sensitive information” would be prevented from posting for 48 hours and have the relevant content deleted. Further, those users posting “sensitive content” with “malicious intent” would be prevented from posting for more than 48 hours and face the possibility of having their account terminated. As of May 29, Sina had recruited close to 6,000 “community committee members” who would be tasked with monitoring posts and determining punishments. The English-language Global Times quoted Beijing lawyer Wang Zhengyu as saying the committee lacked legitimacy: “Only the courts, not microblogging service providers, have the right to judge the authenticity of the content and decide what online behavior infringes on others’ rights or are in violation of Chinese laws.” In the above cartoon, posted by artist Kuang Biao (邝飚) to Sina Weibo, a distressed Chinese internet user prepares to feed a “post” by hand into his computer as a sharp blade hovers at the top of the screen, ready to fall.

The following post by Shenzhen Old Cui (深圳老崔), a Chinese media consultant with more than 60,000 followers, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 1:18pm Hong Kong time today, May 29, 2012. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].

I hear this person has recently become red hot again?

Shenzhen Old Cui’s post responds to rumors now spreading — and rapidly disappearing — on social media that Chinese starlet Zhang Ziyi has been prevented from leaving China due to her alleged relations/connections with fallen political star Bo Xilai. So far this “news”, which has been reported by the US-based Boxun, has not been confirmed. Zhang Ziyi’s name so far remains searchable on Sina Weibo.
The following picture of Zhang was included with Shenzhen Old Cui’s post.

Shenzhen Old Cui’s original Chinese post follows:

听说这位最近突然又红起来了？！

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 May 28, 2012, new management regulations took effect for Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular social media sites. According to the regulations, users logging more than 5 posts of “sensitive information” would be prevented from posting for 48 hours and have the relevant content deleted. Further, those users posting “sensitive content” with “malicious intent” would be prevented from posting for more than 48 hours and face the possibility of having their account terminated. Ever since August 2011, China has targeted the so-called “online rumor” in a bid to cleanse its domestic internet of harmful information. The campaign intensified in March 2012, as rumors on domestic social media suggest there had been a coup attempt in Beijing. In this cartoon, posted by the state-run online television network CNTV (part of China Central Television), users cower before a computer screen as another user, the proverbial online malicious gossip, gabs away, his words becoming a pair of hand grenades labeled “online rumors”.

We’ve written a great deal in recent weeks and months about how Chinese of all stripes — from journalists and lawyers to academics and the curious hoi polloi — have used social media to share information and perspectives on human rights, international affairs, propaganda and public diplomacy. But while we emphasize the importance of microblogs as a popular and personal means of communication, we should not forget that they are also important tools for organizations and agencies — including those with a vested interest in controlling and spinning information.
On May 24, People’s Daily Online Public Opinion Monitoring Center released a list of China’s top influential microblogs operated by public security offices at the provincial and sub-provincial level in China, determined on the basis of confirmed followers (认证粉丝数), follower activity levels (粉丝活跃率), original posts, average shares and comments and other criteria.

[ABOVE: An image shared by the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau on its official Weibo account on May 29, 2012, showing Guangzhou police in action. A Sina Weibo button on the photo slideshow allows users to share photos on their own accounts with a click of the mouse.]
According to the center’s study, the top public security microblog in China is “@GuangzhouPublicSecurity” (@广州公安), the official police Weibo in the city of Guangzhou in China’s southern Guangdong province. Number two and three on the list are the official accounts of the Jinan and Harbin police, “@JinanPublicSecurity” (@济南公安) and “@PeacefulHarbin” (@平安哈尔滨).

[ABOVE: A list of China’s top ten official police microblogs, from top to bottom: “Guangzhou Public Security”; “Jinan Public Security”; “Peaceful Harbin”; “Changsha Police Matters”; “Xiamen Police Online”; “Xi’an Public Security”; “Peaceful Taiyuan”; “Fuzhou City PSB”; “Peaceful Nanjing”.]
What sort of information are these official microblogs sharing?
The report from the People’s Daily Online Public Opinion Monitoring Center cites one example from April this year in which Guangzhou police printed and distributed a deck of cards with 54 local most-wanteds, hoping members of the public would provide information. One of the suspects (The “King” card) surrendered to police in late May, after news of the deck was reported in local media. The story of the suspect’s surrender, shared through the official microblog of the Guangzhou police, drew participation from close to 100,000 internet users, according to the Online Public Opinion Monitoring Center.
Subsequent news shared via Weibo of the capture of the “Seven of Spades” in the Guangzhou deck attracted 333 shares and 108 comments.

The following post by Dong Mian Xiong Ge (冬眠熊哥), a user with more than 21,000 followers, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 2pm Hong Kong time today, May 28, 2012. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
The post pokes fun at China’s recently released report on the human rights situation in the United States, which said the US was “to a certain degree a tyranny.”

All one-party nations have bitterly criticized the United States for being a multi-party dictatorship. Oh Yeah!

The post includes a photo strip showing five world dictators, past and present, with red captions that say: “The US is a tyranny!”

Dong Mian Xiong Ge’s original Chinese post follows:

所有一党民主国家都痛斥美国是多党专制国家。噢耶！

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.

The following post by Chen Zufang (陈祖芬), a well-known Chinese artist and writer, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 2:33am Hong Kong time today, May 25, 2012. Chen Zufang has just under 43,000 followers, according to numbers from Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre].
Chen Zufang’s post includes responses from other Sina Weibo users, separated by “//” and marked by @ below:

Oh, unscrupulous and moronic leaders!! // @//@ReadingBetweenTheLines: 1.6 billion yuan spent [for these institutes] in a single year? I’m shocked. // @FengXincheng: Under the sign of “promoting Chinese internationally”, how much tax money do these Confucius Institutes spend every year? The budget in 2008 alone stood at 1.6 billion yuan. After that it was bigger and bigger every year. Over a period of 20 years, Project Hope [a government-run education charity in China] pulled together just five billion yuan. We’re spending so much money to do education overseas, but we can’t see fit to spend a bit of money on education in our own mother country?

Chen Zufang’s post is a response to an earlier post — now also deleted — by Chinese IT expert Jiang Zigang (蒋子刚), who remarked on a directive by the U.S. State Department this month stating that Confucius Institutes had to “obtain American accreditation in order to continue to accept foreign scholars and professors as teachers” working in primary and secondary schools.

A big thanks to America for tearing away the mask of the Confucius Institutes. http://t.cn/zO1sMYR

Chen Zufang’s original Chinese post follows:

无德弱智的掌勺者！！//@弦外之意-H:一年16亿？[吃惊] //@封新城: 以“汉语国际推广”为招牌的孔子学院，一年耗费多少税款？ 2008年光预算就高达16亿。此后更是一年更比一年多。希望工程历经20多年，也才募集50来亿。这么大把撒钱到国外去搞教育，怎么就舍不得花点钱在自己祖国的花朵上?

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.

In recent weeks, China has emitted glints of intensifying anti-Western xenophobia. Last week, following the announcement of a three-month crackdown on foreigners without valid visas, CCTV anchor Yang Rui (杨锐) encouraged police to “clean out the foreign garbage”. Yang seemed to revel in China’s recent decision to expel Al Jazeera reporter Melissa Chan (“that foreign shrew,” he called her), the first case since 1998 of a foreign journalist kicked out of China.
Like the last wave of populist anti-Western sentiment to hit China back in 2008 (remember the “Cafferty Affair” and the controversy over the Olympic torch relay?), these recent remarks — including a number of editorials in state media — stem from a foundational sense of victimization at the hands of the West. And Western media, once again, are bearing the brunt of the attack.
This root sense of victimization is enforced in China through education and propaganda, for Party leaders an important part of building and maintaining legitimacy. The phenomenon is what Chinese historian Yuan Weishi has called “growing up on wolf’s milk,” or chi langnai zhangda (吃狼奶长大).
In a 2006 piece published in the journal Freezing Point, Yuan discussed how Chinese history textbooks vastly oversimplified historical episodes like the destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing by Anglo-French forces during the Second Opium War to bolster the narrative of national unity against the ever-looming threat of foreign aggression. He wrote:

At the end of the 1970s, after experiencing the three great tragedies of the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution people realized with great remorse that one of the roots of these tragedies was that, “We grew up drinking wolves milk.” More than 20 years have passed, and as I flip through our middle school history books I am shocked to discover that our youth are still drinking wolves milk!

[ABOVE: A drawing by Emile Bayard depicting fighting during the Second Opium War of 1856 to 1860, superimposed with a Chinese flag. Flag photo by “nist6ss” shared under Creative Commons license.]
This constantly reconstructed and reinforced sense of national victimization also underpins official thinking on China’s strategic remaking of its international image — its concerted push for global press-tige (i.e, positive news coverage) and “soft power”.
Since Chinese President Hu Jintao defined “soft power” development as a key national strategy in his political report to the 17th Party Congress in 2007 — and outlined the media “going out” strategy more explicitly in his June 2008 speech at People’s Daily — China has spent billions of dollars expanding its global “transmission capacity.” The basic premise: China is in the midst of a zero-sum “global struggle for public opinion”, and in order to grab its share, it must beef up its soft power arsenal. Otherwise, it will continue to be “victimized” by Western media.
It’s a soft power push conceived in the hardest of terms. Which also means, of course, that it’s a hard sell.
China has expanded and re-outfitted Xinhua News Agency bureaus worldwide, launched multi-language editions of China Daily as well as an English-language edition of the Global Times, linked to the Party’s official People’s Daily. And this year it launched CCTV America, a 24-hour international news channel broadcasting from Washington.
And yet today, almost exactly four years on from Hu Jintao’s June 2008 speech that offered his boldest strategic response to China’s international media woes, it seems China has little “soft power” to show for its global media deployments.
This year, just as Chinese leaders are bogged down with domestic social and political concerns ahead of a crucial (and somewhat troubled, apparently) leadership transition, China has suffered a spate of stories with erosive consequences for China’s official “soft power.” Wang Lijun. Bo Xilai. Chen Guangcheng.
In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who introduced the idea of soft power to the world, said that China was “once again torpedoing its soft-power campaign” by failing to protect basic rights, and by strangling the emergence of a vital civil society that would otherwise showcase diverse, creative and attractive voices. “No amount of propaganda can hide the fact that blind human rights attorney Chen Guangcheng recently sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing,” Nye wrote.
Chinese strategizers have conceived of China’s soft power deficit as the country’s “third affliction,” the idea being that while China is now economically and militarily strong (having thrown those afflictions off) it is still demonized by a hateful West.
In fact, the narrative of victimization is itself one of the root maladies from which China’s soft power campaign suffers. The ideological conviction that Western media and culture must be the tools of Western political power blinds the pundits of Chinese soft power to the very mechanisms by which credibility and attractiveness are created.
The most salient symbol of China’s official failure to grasp the game rules of soft power and credibility is in fact Melissa Chan, the Al Jazeera correspondent China sent packing earlier this month.
Launched in the late 1990s and broadcasting 24 hours a day only since 1999, Al Jazeera was feted by many Chinese officials and scholars as the act to follow, a new international channel that was non-Western but could gain a high degree of credibility for its coverage.
Back in 2009, Yu Guoming, dean of the journalism school at Renmin University of China, and a consultant for China’s media push, told Singapore’s Straits Times that a new 24-hour television channel would have to adhere to “objective, professional international practices.”

Take Al-Jazeera. They operate like the BBC but reflect an Arabic voice. So we can hope China’s effort will reflect China’s, and Asia’s, voice.

By ejecting Chan and forcing the closure of Al Jazeera’s Beijing bureau, China has effectively admitted the impoverishment of its hopes of building a credible international news channel. Whatever its ambitions may be, it is determined to control the “voice” of China — as though it were not the product of the full complexity of China’s culture and ideas, but rather a megaphone to shout over the heads of international audiences.
I’ll close these lengthy musings with a translated portion of an article run yesterday on People’s Daily Online that shows quite clearly how observations — which of course should be the basis of policy and strategy — can be horribly wrong-headed when they are colored by ideology. The piece apparently took three scholars from the China Institute of International Studies, including its director, Qu Xing (曲星), to write.

“Understanding How Western Media Manufacture a Blackened Image of China” (解密西方媒体如何塑造抹黑中国形象)
2012年05月23日 11:07:01
People’s Daily Online
In recent years, as China’s comprehensive national strength and international influence has steadily risen, reports from mainstream Western media about China have increased.
This article carries out research on the mechanisms behind Western reports about China, with the goal of deepening understanding of the shaping of China’s national image in international public opinion, in order that it may benefit the process of public diplomacy.
Western Newswires Interact to “Manufacture” the Image of China
There are four key stages by which Western media “manufacture” China’s image.
First, there is the selection of journalists. Journalists selected [for reporting China] must have views that conform with mainstream Western values, and cannot have the subjective tendency to “speak for China.”
The second stage is the determination of story selection. Journalists stationed in China determine topics on the basis of the interests of their media audiences. Western media have noticed that their audiences like seeing negative news about China, and they work to accommodate their audiences. On the question of China’s image, this creates a vicious cycle with domestic audiences [in the West], so that the image of China being portrayed is further and further from the truth.
The third stage is the work style of journalists on the front lines. Journalists posted to China place particular emphasis on cooperating with Chinese research institutes, think tanks and universities. As it is not easy to obtain official views on many issues, journalists frequently decide to have close conversation with scholars with good official contacts.
The fourth stage is the grasp [of a story] by the rear headquarters (后方总部). The editors responsible behind [a story] principally use the following methods to take hold of propaganda effects concerning China. First, prioritizing timeliness and the organizing of in-depth reports on major events. Second, holding on to the right to prepare headlines. Third, using accompanying photos, layout and other methods to effect the influence of the report.
Western governments use hard and soft hands to control the media
On the question of “China’s image”, the relationship between Western governments and the media is extremely complex. On the surface, Western media are independent of the government, and the relationship between the media and the government is one of monitor and monitored. But in fact, governments use a series of hard and soft methods to exercise control over the media, and media are quite complicit with governments.
Governments can employ hard measures such as judicial and administrative means to strengthen management of public opinion. Governments can use the set up of public opinion and propaganda instruments to release government information. Aside from hard methods, governments can exercise non-coercive means to steer public opinion. First, governments use spokesperson systems to cleverly control public opinion. Next, governments use the provision of massive “information subsidies” to influence public sentiment. Third, political figures can directly set the media agenda. Governments use important figures to transmit information to the media, leading the public to pay attention to a topic. Fourth, [governments can] use economic leverage to manipulate the media. Fifth, governments can place special consultants within various large organizations that enhance the government’s effectiveness.

[Frontpage photo: A drawing by Emile Bayard depicting fighting during the Second Opium War, superimposed with a Chinese flag. Flag photo by “nist6ss” shared under Creative Commons license.]