Kevin Schoenmakers: How did you become an environmental reporter?

Hongqiao Liu: I majored in journalism and communication as an undergraduate, and I always wanted to become an investigative journalist and cover conventional investigative topics like corruption. When I joined Caixin as an intern, I was assigned to the environment and science desk. It wasn’t my first choice but I stayed.

I left Caixin — and journalism — after four years, in 2014, and started working for non-profits, think tanks, and freelancing.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Why did you decide to leave journalism?

Hongqiao Liu: The media environment was never ideal but at that time I really felt I couldn’t continue working as an investigative environmental journalist. I’d seen enough stories get killed in the newsroom and I didn’t want to repeat that. I also felt powerless, that being a journalist and uncovering stories alone wasn’t sufficient to solve any problems.

So I decided to work with non-profits who actually talk about issues directly with stakeholders such as the government, investors, and the business community, and who propose solutions and bring about change. I still occasionally wrote long-form articles. For example, I covered wildlife trafficking from northern Vietnam into China.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How much, would you say, do Chinese media companies invest in their environmental coverage and how has this changed over time?

Hongqiao Liu: Back in 2010, environmental news was an emerging beat in Chinese newsrooms. Outlets like Southern Weekly, Caixin, and Caijing, as well as many commercial local media, had dedicated pages and reporters. I think that time was the heyday of environmental journalism. There was a lot of interaction between journalists and civil society to bring some environmental crises to the attention of the public and onto the policy agenda, which would push the government to make substantive changes.

For example, in 2012, we wrote about tap water quality for my first cover story in Caixin, “The Dirty Truth of Tap Water.” Our primary source was a survey of China’s water quality conducted by a government-affiliated research institute which had never been made public. At the same time China had set itself a deadline to meet a new, strict standard for drinking water quality. We examined how far away we were from meeting this standard, and illustrated the public health consequences of drinking contaminated water.

That was probably the only magazine that Caixin has ever had to reprint. Every outlet in China, from official media to city media, picked up this story and questioned local governments about their water quality. Civil society groups started to demand transparency and government accountability. Soon after that, the ministry in charge of water quality talked with an official outlet and addressed some of the questions we had raised in our coverage — without naming us. They later invested heavily in improving urban water infrastructure.

So at that time, in 2012, there was still a relatively healthy ecosystem for journalists to do their jobs. Experts supported their work, civil society and other media would pick up their stories, and the government would, to an extent, address the issues they raised. In 2014, when I left my job, that relatively healthy environment had worsened rapidly.

That was probably the only magazine that Caixin has ever had to reprint. Every outlet in China, from official media to city media, picked up this story and questioned local governments about their water quality.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Has there been any change since 2014?

Hongqiao Liu: Media devote less space to environmental reporting. There is also a widespread shortage of specialized staff. This mirrors the general [worsening] media environment. It’s almost unheard of now to have a single story trigger a wave of responses in the way our tap water quality story did.

In terms of support, let me give you an example. For quite a long time, Chinese newsrooms have barely sponsored any coverage of the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, because they don’t have enough funds or don’t think it’s an important enough issue. Environmental journalists have to rely on outside funding, such as grants. Besides foreign correspondents from state media — who aren’t specialized in this topic — Chinese journalists have long been largely absent from these events.

And then there are investigations within China, where a reporter spends weeks or even months on the ground like I did with my colleagues at Caixin for a series on cadmium-polluted rice. Starting from before I joined, the environment desk spent three to four years following that story very intensively. This is barely imaginable these days. I don’t see any stories of this scale or length in Chinese media. But that doesn’t mean such issues are gone.

Even on climate change, coverage is mostly sponsored by foundations or corporations. They mostly fund popular science-type articles on climate change or articles that promote corporate innovations rather than reporting in the field, telling stories about climate refugees or looking into sources of emissions.

Even when I was at Caixin, in cases when they wouldn’t support this type of story, I would apply for external reporting grants. But gradually such grants have gotten much more sensitive, because their funding comes from outside of China.

I don’t know if it’s even accurate anymore to describe the media environment in China as an ecosystem. It’s long gone.

Kevin Schoenmakers: What about reader interest in environmental stories? What is the trend there? A study from 2019 showed that Chinese people aren’t as interested in climate change compared to people in other countries.

Hongqiao Liu: I don’t write for the Chinese audience anymore, so I’m not really in a position to answer that question.

There are different surveys showing Chinese people are actually very concerned about climate change, but their understanding of what climate change is and how it could impact their life varies. A recent study among university students showed that they are concerned about climate change, that they would like to change their consumer behavior, but that they are not well-informed on the issue.

I don’t know if it’s even accurate anymore to describe the media environment in China as an ecosystem. It’s long gone.

Because the Chinese government has made climate change a top policy priority, we don’t see as much climate skepticism in China as elsewhere. We do see a different, quite popular narrative that goes, “Climate change is real, but we are an emerging economy that has the right to develop, and climate change is an excuse used by hostile western forces to limit our development.” It is challenging to unpack climate change, an abstract phenomenon, for a Chinese audience in this particular media environment.

Kevin Schoenmakers: My impression is that last year’s Zhengzhou floods, during which extreme rainfall resulted in the deaths of close to 400 people, were a wake-up call for China. Has that led to more coverage of climate change?

Hongqiao Liu: Zhengzhou was a wake-up call. The floods affected people’s lives to an extreme degree, and they impacted food supply and nationwide logistics. Social media also played a role. It broke through the wall of information control, allowing people to directly see how destructive and serious the floods were, rather than just reading statistics about the number of deaths. An average person sitting somewhere in an air-conditioned room could still experience and empathize with this tragedy caused by climate change-amplified extreme weather.

So in a way, it was a wake-up call, but we had been building up to this moment over the last few years. Before Zhengzhou, in 2020, there was also a series of floods in the south of China, but they didn’t get as much coverage at that time, immediately after the start of the pandemic.

There are more media resources now for covering climate change, but less so for other environmental issues. Ten years ago, we covered a lot of issues relating to air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, and food safety. Those issues are still there, but they are more expensive and more difficult to cover. So, right now, climate change is the go-to topic.

For example, “The Intellectual” (知识分子), a non-profit media outlet that is very popular in China, has hired a dedicated journalist and editor just to cover climate change. Caixin has started an ESG channel that also picks up a lot of news on the environment and climate change. [Note: ESG stands for environmental, social and corporate governance, and is a set of standards applied by socially conscious investors to study potential investments.]

However the challenge is still that the media is not an attractive industry for professionals and investors. News coverage of climate is not profitable. You have to find alternative ways to finance it. There is no ecosystem to support — relatively — independent journalism. From the government to companies, they all have a demand to “strategically communicate” their positions on climate change, be that national policy or corporate strategy, but a crucial link is missing, which is journalism. We need media organizations to fulfill their role of the fourth estate, to ask the uncomfortable questions and to hold parties accountable, especially in China. But newsrooms are much weaker today compared to 2010.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Over the past decade, the Chinese government has become much more concerned with solving environmental issues — for example, they have made their climate pledges, and they have done a lot to reduce air pollution and water pollution. At the same time it seems that reporting on environmental issues has become more sensitive. What explains this apparent contradiction? You might think that if it’s so important for the government to solve environmental issues they would also welcome more reporting.

Hongqiao Liu: Back in 2010, when I was assigned to cover environment and science, I was told — and I also thought to myself — that it was a relatively safe choice, compared to other more traditional investigative beats.

One of my first big stories at Caixin, when I was 20 years old, was about villagers who had set themselves aflame in resistance to a local government-led land grab. After spending a few minutes on the rooftop of the family’s house, where the incident had occurred, I immediately realized that I was followed and had to drop everything and escape. It was traumatizing. [Note: This was the now-famous Yihuang self-immolation case, seen for a number of years as a sign of the power of microblogging platforms.]

Compared to such experiences, environmental journalism at that time was safer in terms of personal security. I was able to carry out most of my investigations smoothly, if discreetly, and with some luck. I was able to push issues like cadmium-polluted rice, and other heavy-metal issues, onto the public agenda and trigger policy changes without exposing myself to much risk.

Back in the early 2010s, environmental reporting played a crucial role in informing the public about pollution’s effects on their own health. According to political scientists, people’s desire for a cleaner environment created mounting pressure on the government and challenged the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule. It was a defining moment in China’s environmental movement. Ultimately, this was the main reason why Xi Jinping decided to invest so much in tackling climate change.

Journalism at that time enabled social change. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. That’s not because the function of environmental journalism has changed, it’s because journalism’s ecosystem has deteriorated a lot in China. The government has made reporting in general much more difficult. Journalists have to follow the script.

At the same time, the government and the party have made the “ecological civilization” drive and the climate pledges their top agenda priorities, and Xi Jinping is personally invested in promoting these issues. Questioning the implementation of these policies, or debating certain policy or technology choices, have become much more sensitive.

Journalism at that time enabled social change. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Besides dealing with censorship, are there any ways in which environmental reporting in China is different from environmental reporting in other countries?

Hongqiao Liu: The issues are different, the national circumstances are different, and there is not much exchange and support. There is no network of environmental journalists in China. There used to be informal groups.

Elsewhere, for example in Southeast Asia, there are a lot of independent environmental journalist networks and initiatives where journalists cooperate across borders to tackle issues whose impacts go beyond one country’s territory. We don’t see that much in China anymore. That is crucial. China’s environmental issues have expanded beyond its own territory along with China’s foreign outbound economic activities, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. But coverage that tracks issues beyond China’s border is dominated by journalists based outside of China. That’s a pity, I think.

There is also not much exchange of investigative techniques, tactics, or tools. When I go to events organized by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), the investigative methods they discuss aren’t compatible with the Chinese context. We have our own Google, our own Twitter. And our skills, tactics, and experiences of conducting investigations in China are often not acknowledged by the international journalism community either.

There is this huge training gap for younger generations of Chinese journalists. In the rare cases they decide to pick up covering the environment, there are very few resources to help them develop their skills, to grow, to develop, and also to take care of their mental health.

Kevin Schoenmakers: In your early career you reported in China for Chinese readers. Now you’re writing about China for foreign readers. Why did you decide to make this change?

Hongqiao Liu: I returned to journalism in 2021, and spent one year at Carbon Brief. After seven, eight years working with a number of non-profit organizations, I realized that what is most lacking today is not research, campaigning, or strategic communication but independent journalism on China’s environmental and development challenges.

That was just a few months after Xi Jinping made his pledges. And since then I had read a lot of misinformed coverage by international media. On this specific topic, which is very technical and complicated, the shortage of expertise and the dominance of politicized narratives are big problems. For me, climate change is the most important issue of our century. It is an issue the rest of the world cannot figure out without China. I felt I had to fill that gap, to explain the logic behind China’s policies, the dynamics within China’s system, and to give credit and criticism where they are due.

I care about China. I care about climate change. I hope climate change will remain an area of cooperation between China and the rest of the world. I know from my own experiences how powerful journalism can be. We have to use it wisely to enable the green transition to happen.

Trying to Convince

Kevin Schoenmakers: When we talk about influence campaigns on social media, what are we talking about? What forms does it take and what are usually their aims?

Hannah Bailey: Influence operations can take a wide variety of forms, including diplomats and state-owned media posting on social media, or Chinese citizens, whether within China or abroad, appearing as themselves and trying to convince international audiences to support a particular narrative put forward by the Chinese state.

It can also be these kinds of more nefarious, inauthentic social media accounts, trying to convince audiences incognito. Traditionally, when people think of influence operations, they think of bots operating en masse to try and convince people, but that’s not always the case. Academics are divided on what the term bot even means and how common these are.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is the boundary quite murky between influence operations that most people would agree are fair game, and those that people would say are not?

Hannah Bailey: Different people would have different opinions on what is and isn’t fair game, and some could argue that the social media space is a neutral playing ground where anyone can try and convince other people to support their own arguments. But the more nefarious activities are those that involve social media users misrepresenting themselves — users that are pretending to be someone else, or networks of accounts that are just run by one person — with the aim of appealing to a particular genuine audience. We call these kinds of activities inauthentic, and that’s the kind we tend to be more concerned about.

Kevin Schoenmakers: What kind of inauthentic social media influence operations are used by Chinese actors?

Hannah Bailey: I can list a couple instances of inauthentic activity that we’ve found. That’s not to say that it’s the whole list of activities that are happening out there, because there’s probably a lot of things happening out there that we can’t detect or don’t know about yet.

My team and I recently uncovered a network of inauthentic accounts that were amplifying the tweets posted by Chinese diplomats. The Chinese diplomat would make a tweet, and all these accounts would rush to retweet, like, and comment on these posts to try and game the algorithm to make it reach more audiences, and to try and make it seem like this post had genuine support.

We also zoomed in on the case study of the UK. Oftentimes, these accounts will pretend to be people in the UK. In their bio, they say stuff like, “I’m a Londoner,” or that they support UK football teams. This is the kind of inauthentic activity that we have uncovered.

There are other organizations that have also uncovered similar campaigns related to Xinjiang and other issue areas of concern to the Chinese state. These are suspected to originate from the Chinese state — because we can never really confirm the actor behind the screen. In our reports, we were very clear to say that we’re not ascribing this behavior to any individual or organization, because we don’t have the data to be able to say that a particular person or organization is behind these influence operations. We can only say who or what they are promoting.

Oftentimes, these accounts will pretend to be people in the UK. In their bio, they say stuff like, “I’m a Londoner,” or that they support UK football teams. This is the kind of inauthentic activity that we have uncovered.

We believe from the takedowns that Twitter and Facebook have reported that they have access to more data that allows them to figure out who are behind these operations.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Do Chinese state media use Western social media in inauthentic ways?

Hannah Bailey: We haven’t researched this ourselves but I know from other people’s research that similar inauthentic amplification activities are happening or have happened in the past, and there have been releases by Twitter to that effect. We’ve also seen Western YouTubers and other influencers apparently being paid by Chinese state media to amplify their content, or to discuss Chinese state media content on their platforms.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is there a particular timeline for these kinds of efforts? Did they start or ramp up at some point?

Hannah Bailey: We often say that, compared to Russia, China is very new to the internet game. And it’s kind of been playing catch-up in that sense. But we really saw a rapid escalation from virtually nothing to an awful lot of activity in the wake of the Hong Kong protests. I think this was really the spark that made the Chinese state realize, “Oh, wait, international audiences are seeing this happening within our country, they are becoming increasingly critical of us, and they have a negative perception of the way China governs. We should try and rectify that by pumping out favorable content on these international social media platforms.” And ever since then, we’ve just seen an escalation and also a migration away from Hong Kong to other issues that the Chinese state particularly cares about.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is that maybe also in a way, admission of sorts that what they were previously doing to try and convince foreign audiences of the Chinese viewpoints wasn’t really having enough of an impact?

Hannah Bailey: It’s hard to read into that. It could mean a number of things. It could be an admission, it could be just a sudden recognition that this was an activity that lots of other states partook in and that they, as a large nation state with an image problem, should also partake in. Around that time, there were also a number of polls coming out that showed international audiences had very negative perceptions of China.

And, of course, it’s only in recent years that public awareness of these influence operations has emerged. So you can say that they were just kind of a little bit behind, but generally following the trend of countries and also businesses and media organizations jumping on this bandwagon of conducting influence operations.

The Russia Comparison

Kevin Schoenmakers: It sounds like most of what Chinese actors do, or what you suspect they do, is to try and convince foreign audiences of Chinese viewpoints. Do they ever aim to destabilize, like Russia did during the US elections and also the Brexit referendum?

Hannah Bailey: This is a very good question, because it’s hard to say for any fixed period of time that we know exactly what China is doing and why they’re doing it. But initially, in the first couple of years that China was conducting these kinds of operations, we really saw them focus on issues that had domestic relevance, that were threatening their domestic sovereignty, essentially — issues like Hong Kong, Xinjiang and territorial issues like the South China Sea. We assume that the Chinese state wanted to reassure international audiences that they had a handle on these issues, but also potentially to convince domestic audiences via this international messaging that they had the confidence of international audiences, and that domestically, this would all be taken care of. This is broadly in line with a lot of other strategies where we’ve seen China prioritize its domestic sovereignty.

Russia cares an awful lot more about destabilizing Western democracies rather than projecting a positive image of itself. So initially, there was this real dichotomy between the Russia approach and the China approach. But in the last year or so, especially with the emergence of COVID-19, we’ve really seen China shift tack a little bit towards not necessarily trying to destabilize but criticizing Western democracies and particularly the US. This could be for a number of reasons. But predominantly, I think it’s to appeal to a domestic nationalist sentiment. By criticizing the West and the US, they can say, “the West is doing really bad at dealing with COVID-19,” or, “the West is doing this wrong and that wrong and we’re a better governance system.” That’s still a slightly different approach to that of Russia.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Does China do any destabilizing of Taiwanese democracy?

Hannah Bailey: Yes. Particularly surrounding Taiwanese elections, there have been a number of studies that have found very significant evidence of influence operations. I’m not sure how much evidence there is that those actually worked. And I don’t think they were very successful from the studies that I’ve read. But yes, those exist.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is there any indication whether any of these influence campaigns have any effect?

Hannah Bailey: So there’s a short answer and a longer answer. The short answer is no, we don’t have any evidence that they do. But that’s not to say that they don’t. The caveat is that it’s hard to study the effects of messaging on social media audiences, particularly as an academic. Because it’s a real world setting with real world people you’re dealing with, and they are heard to measure. It’s not like in a laboratory experiment where you can expose someone to a particular message and ask them what their answer is. And even if you did such an experiment, you might not have findings that are necessarily representative of people’s real life online experiences.

But broadly speaking, we see that the messaging put out by Chinese state-backed media, Chinese diplomats, and these influence operations that we’ve uncovered so far really hasn’t had the engagement pick-up that you would expect of a successful influence campaign.

The influence operation that we uncovered recently didn’t seem to be receiving an awful lot of engagement outside of their own little network. That’s not to say that they won’t in the future. An important element of social media influence operations is that there’s a very quick feedback loop. Unlike with traditional print news, where you might nog necessarily have feedback on whether propaganda you published was successful, you get instant feedback on social media. So it’s easy for state actors to better tailor their messaging toward international audiences. So I think we’ll see a lot more of that in the future.

Broadly speaking, we see that the messaging put out by Chinese state-backed media, Chinese diplomats, and these influence operations that we’ve uncovered so far really hasn’t had the engagement pick-up that you would expect of a successful influence campaign.

Kevin Schoenmakers: And outside of China, is there evidence that other countries or other groups have been effective at these kinds of campaigns?

Hannah Bailey: I’m not a Russia expert, but according to a large literature on Russian influence operations, typically surrounding elections and promoting populist narratives, they have been slightly more successful at that.

U.K. Case Study

Kevin Schoenmakers: You just mentioned your recent research project during which you found a network of Twitter users boosting the tweets of UK-based Chinese diplomats. Could that have any effects even if there wasn’t a lot of engagement by users outside the network of boosters?

Hannah Bailey: It’s hard for us to say that few or no users saw it. We have a certain number of things we can measure, like retweets. And then we use these to quantify engagement. And so I can say that there was not a lot of engagement with these networks. But at the same time, these networks also served to artificially inflate the profile of the particular diplomat. And then this could have gamed the Twitter algorithm to think, “Oh, this person’s very popular so we should show this tweet to more people.” And so it’s hard for us to know exactly the ramifications of this influence operation.

Kevin Schoenmakers: When I read your report and saw the somewhat uninspired way they went about faking engagement I couldn’t help but think, could it be that they have some kind of social media outreach goal from the Foreign Ministry back in Beijing that they need to meet, and this is how they go about it?

Hannah Bailey: That’s another hypothesis, that this is kind of a self-promotion tool to signal to their bosses and their higher ups that, “I’m doing really well at my diplomatic job. The domestic audiences love me, and they’re engaging a lot with my content. And so I’m a good diplomat.”

What Can Platforms Do?

Kevin Schoenmakers: You looked at Twitter. Have you done research or do you know of research into other social media, such Facebook or YouTube?

Hannah Bailey: We did use Facebook data in the first report, but there’s a limit to how much Facebook lets you dive into their data. Twitter is far more transparent, allowing researchers more access to more granular data. So yeah, we would have loved to do more Facebook analysis, and see if there were similar influence operations networks on Facebook. But unfortunately, we couldn’t get the data. And we’d love to do future research on TikTok and all these other social media platforms. But data access is always an ongoing problem.

Kevin Schoenmakers: I suppose TikTok is a very unique case in that it’s the only worldwide social media platform that is Chinese.

Hannah Bailey: How much it still is Chinese or not Chinese is up for debate. But obviously, it operates very differently from other forms of social media. So if there were to be influence operations on that platform, I’d imagine they’d be behaving in a very different way to what we’ve seen on Twitter and, to a lesser degree, Facebook.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Twitter from time to time announces they’ve taken down groups of accounts that purport to be people who they are not. Are such cleanups effective at countering influence campaigns?

Hannah Bailey: I don’t know exactly what methods or tools they use to identify these accounts. When we alerted Twitter to the accounts that we discovered, they took almost all of them down. But it would be nice if the response was less reactionary, and more proactive.

We’ve found in research before and after our report that these networks tend to pop up pretty instantaneously. You take one down and another pops up. And they seem to be pretty widespread. Despite these kind of takedowns by Twitter, they’re still very prevalent on the platform from what we’ve seen. So maybe there’s scope for Twitter to expand their detection operations.

When we alerted Twitter to the accounts that we discovered, they took almost all of them down. But it would be nice if the response was less reactionary, and more proactive.

Kevin Schoenmakers: What are some of the other countermeasures that social media platforms, and Twitter in particular, take to combat inauthentic behavior?

Hannah Bailey: Last year or so, Twitter and Facebook have started putting labels underneath particular users to make audiences more aware when they’re consuming content by a particular state actor. And so we, as part of our analysis, looked at how effectively these labels were being applied to users that we knew were Chinese diplomats or Chinese state-backed media outlets. And we found that they weren’t as widely applied as we might have hoped. Some of the accounts that we identified and flagged as being not labeled were then labeled after our report. But that’s quite concerning if this is one of the measures that these social media platforms are taking to inform users when they’re consuming content by state and state-owned media outlets, and that these labels are not being well applied.

Broadly speaking, any way of informing audiences when they’re consuming content by a particular actor can better allow them to digest that information properly. So they can say, “Is this information trying to influence me and should I trust this information?” So we would hope that these labels will be more widely applied in the future

Algorithms Are Everywhere

Kevin Schoenmakers: To start with a refresher: What are algorithms and how are they used both inside and outside of China?

Rogier Creemers: Essentially algorithms are mathematical rules that derive a product from a series of inputs. They can be static, where it’s almost like making pancakes. You need this many eggs, this much flour, this much milk, and it all combines and the output is pancake.

They can also be dynamic, and this is what we call artificial intelligence machine learning. These are algorithms that can change by looking at patterns in your behavior. They are often used online to learn about what people like in order to then make decisions about them, most often related to advertising or to content recommendations.

Spotify will know what music you’ve listened to, what other people who listened to that same music also like to listen to, and then recommend that to you. The algorithm then looks at whether or not you like that suggestion and learn from that. Similarly, in advertising, algorithms will look at what product websites you have gone to, how much time you spent there, which links you clicked, and so on. On the basis of that it will then recommend certain products to you.

Kevin Schoenmakers: In late August, the Chinese government published draft regulations for algorithms. What were some of the headline rules in those regulations?

Rogier Creemers: Essentially, they’re saying that in a number of spaces there will now be limits on what you can do with algorithms.

In the workplace, especially at parcel delivery and food delivery services, algorithms are used to monitor how people work and then optimize their efficiency. But the problem is Amazon warehouse-type practices where people are timed to the second and put under severe strain. The government doesn’t want that.

When it comes to recommending content, the regulations are partially about opening up space for propaganda authorities to be able to make sure politically desirable content is being pushed to people, not just entertainment-related content.

Another aspect is consumer protection by preventing addiction. In the West, we know how social media use algorithms to increase engagement by pushing increasingly extremist content. This can suck people down a political rabbit hole. That’s less of a concern in China, but the consumer rabbit hole is.

When it comes to recommending content, the regulations are partially about opening up space for propaganda authorities to be able to make sure politically desirable content is being pushed to people, not just entertainment-related content.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How will these regulations prevent people from overconsumption? Why is that a concern?

Rogier Creemers: The Chinese government is treading a narrow path here. One element of its economic development strategy is to broaden consumption. But it’s careful about debt build-up. Alibaba and Tencent both have financial arms and credit rating systems. They make money not just by selling their products and services, but also by facilitating loans so people have the money to buy them. There is a risk that people start buying stuff with money they do not have.

We very often forget the extent to which China looks abroad. And one of the things that it has seen, most notably in countries like the United States, is that a little bit of consumer credit is good, but that a lot of consumer credit destabilizes your economy.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Another section of the regulations say algorithms may not be used to create fake user accounts, fake likes, etc. What does that refer to?

Rogier Creemers: You can train algorithms to create a whole bunch of fake user accounts on websites, which you can then use as a sort of almost a firehose to either upvote or downvote people or companies. This can be used, for example, to vote for contestants in television talent shows or to boost the ranking of your restaurant on a review website.

Effects on Media and the State

Kevin Schoenmakers: Will these regulations affect news aggregation apps? Is there some way in which these algorithm regulations will make it easier for government departments to, for example, tell Bytedance’s news aggregation app Toutiao to push this or some other article?

Rogier Creemers: The document says algorithms should take into consideration the political quality of content. So in essence it opens that door. But that doesn’t necessarily make it a lot easier for the state to do that, because it was already fairly easy for the state to intervene. It’s just that there is now a clear and non-negotiable process.

News apps will also need to offer non-algorithm-based pages, and a way for their users to gain insight into what goes into the algorithm. What are the keywords that are part of the algorithm? How are you being tracked?

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is this the first time that China has moved to regulate algorithms? For example, I remember that Toutiao had previously been told to adjust their recommendation system.

Rogier Creemers: It is the first time that we get a comprehensive piece of regulation about algorithms. There have been rules before. For instance, the 2019 consumer protection law requires that in any case where online services were offered on an algorithmic or automated-decision basis, the consumer should have a choice to switch it off. In the same way that, on Apple, we now have a don’t-track-me option, the consumer should always have an option to not be targeted for advertising on the basis of algorithms, for example.

In the content control system, there have been both all sorts of general rules and also fairly specific limits on who gets to produce content. But we now live in an age where information is abundant. And that changes the rules. When you operate under scarcity, you operate under completely opposite constraints from when you operate under conditions of abundance. That means the whole information management landscape is no longer just about removing content from public view or producing propaganda, but also about gatekeeping and information prioritization.

There has been — and presumably still is — a constant stream of communication, often just by phone, between media organizations and propaganda authorities, and sometimes other authorities such as public security organs. They don’t just say how media organizations are supposed to deal with a particular topic, but also what content they have to prioritize.

What we’re seeing under Xi Jinping is that the Communist Party wants to — as the official term goes — comprehensively rule the country according to the law. And so they need a legal basis for all of this. This isn’t to constrain the state, but motivated by realizing centralization, discipline throughout the government bureaucracy, and a certain amount of transparency, as well as by populism.

Kevin Schoenmakers: So there are no restrictions on how the government can use algorithms, for example in facial recognition technology?

Rogier Creemers: Not in these regulations. There are limits on, say, which government departments can install them, mostly regionally. China very rarely creates general rules — rules that are going to be applied to everyone, regardless of who they are. Chinese rules are always or nearly always purpose driven, and therefore they tend to be fairly micro-managerial. In Europe, on the contrary, privacy is a fundamental right enshrined in constitutions. A European resident has the right of privacy against everyone — be it individuals, companies, or governments — because this is a rule of principle, not of purpose.

Chinese rules tend to be rules of purpose. You try to achieve a particular outcome, rather than establish a general principle. The outcome they’re trying to achieve is make the digital economy work better in response to claims by the population.

Chinese rules are always or nearly always purpose driven, and therefore they tend to be fairly micro-managerial. In Europe, on the contrary, privacy is a fundamental right enshrined in constitutions.

The Great Rectification

Kevin Schoenmakers: What are examples of the populist aspect to these regulations? What are examples of protecting consumer rights?

Rogier Creemers: Because Chinese tech companies are so powerful, sometimes even operating as monopolists in their sector, they can essentially foist conditions on consumers and on platform traders. Across the board, these regulations seek to put much more power in the hands of individual consumers and platform traders.

Unless a product or service needs the algorithm to function, you should be able to switch it off. And the company cannot then deny you the use of a product or service. You get to monitor and change the keywords on which algorithms are based.

Another aspect is competition on platforms. If I search for a particular product on Alibaba and there are 10 people offering it, the ranking of those 10 people will obviously impact their business. So how do you do that fairly?

This also ties into what we’ve been seeing with the unfair competition regulations that have been coming out where the government is telling companies they can no longer block, for example, e-commerce retailers from being active on a competitor’s platform.

The regulations also include something about price discrimination. This is referred to as “using big data to kill the mature” (大数据杀熟), which isn’t really directly translatable. It’s something that you see fairly regularly, where algorithms are used to identify a consumers’ willingness to pay. People who are new to the platform or people who have demonstrated less willingness to pay get a cheaper price for the same product as people who are more willing to pay, in a manner that isn’t transparent to the individual consumer.

The limits on how companies can use algorithms to govern workers fit into the overall drive by the Xi Jinping administration to move away from a development program of “GDP at all costs” to a more broad-based approach where the government looks out for people’s welfare, including that of ordinary people who may work as delivery drivers.

But it’s not just the content of the rules that’s important. It’s also the signal that is being sent. Beijing is telling all of these companies that the days of them being able to operate as largely unregulated monopolies or oligopolies are over. They are no longer special, and will now be treated like any other company. I call this “The Great Rectification.”

It’s no coincidence that we suddenly get the Supreme People’s Court essentially saying “996” working hours are illegal, that they have always been illegal, but that now we’re going to come down on you like a ton of bricks. There’s a substantive element to these regulations and also a performative element.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How do these regulations fit into “The Great Rectification”?

Rogier Creemers: What my Chinese interlocutors told me three, four years ago is that the Chinese government didn’t want to regulate too much out of a fear they’d smother their emerging economy. But that there would come a point where the economy is mature, where there is a lot of money, and where these companies would be robust enough to withstand regulation. And that, by that time, the government would know what it is they’d want to regulate.

And because the Chinese government regulates according to purposes and not to principles, it can actually be more agile. It can say: “This wasn’t a problem when these businesses were relatively small and serving 100 million people. Now, these businesses are really big and serving a billion people. So the game has changed, and we now need different rules to deal with this situation.”

On the one hand, you might say this is a centralized campaign. On the other hand, you might say that the stars have aligned — that political conditions are now so that it is logical for all these bureaucracies to intervene because the problems are just getting so big.

The People’s Bank of China is looking at the financial stability risks that emerge from having unregulated money creation through Ant Financial’s services. The Cyberspace Administration of China is looking at the fact that suddenly you have smart cars with lots of sensors, generating all kinds of data. And then you have a situation where if one ministry does something the others don’t want to be seen to be doing nothing.

Another aspect is that for several regulators, this is actually an opportunity to raise their profile. They can raise their bureaucratic standards, get bigger budgets, bigger staff allocations, more prestige, and so on. All of these things are factors. It’s all part of that complex witch’s brew.

Kevin Schoenmakers: I would assume that the algorithms within apps like Didi or Taobao are terribly complex. Won’t that make it difficult to enforce these regulations?

Rogier Creemers: People often assume the Chinese party state is all-powerful. And in very many ways it’s not. What is probably going to happen is that this is a sort of warning that this is what the law is going to be.

These regulations do contain punitive provisions. They are relatively light, because they have to be. Under Chinese administrative law, it is impossible for a ministry to issue rules that set a fine of more than 30,000 yuan ($4,600). For a company like Alibaba, 30,000 yuan is pocket change. The CAC might exploit a loophole by saying 30,000 yuan per infraction. So if you’ve done something that affects 10 million customers, suddenly you’re talking about a lot of money.

People often assume the Chinese party state is all-powerful. And in very many ways it’s not. What is probably going to happen is that this is a sort of warning that this is what the law is going to be.

But what I foresee is that these rules will be brought into legislation in the not-too-distant future, maybe through a revision of the consumer protection law. The Chinese government very often starts out with having rules at the ministerial level where punishments are low. That is a clear warning for companies to adjust their business practices. And then at some point, they will be brought into legislation, as we’ve seen with data protection, for instance. Then the fines and punishments can be huge.

Global Effects

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is there any in which Western tech companies will be affected by these Chinese regulations? Will LinkedIn have to make changes to how it works in China, for example?

Rogier Creemers: Probably. This is also where we need to think broadly about what a Western tech company is. Does McDonald’s count because of its delivery services?

Whenever we think about algorithms, we immediately think about the big tech companies. We’re not wrong to do so, because they cover the majority of the markets where algorithms are used. However, they are, by far, not the only players.

Airlines do price discrimination. They usually don’t do it on the basis of algorithms, but they might. So they need to demonstrate some degree of compliance, or at least that they are not breaking the rules.

There are only a few Western companies that are big in China in tech, and the only one that really offers online services is Apple. They will have to adhere to these regulations. For example, in their app store.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Is the way these regulations cover so many industries a reflection of how widespread the use of algorithms has become?

Rogier Creemers: There are three big trends: “The Great Rectification,” in China, but also ongoing in Europe; “The Great Normalization,” where tech businesses are no longer special and are now being treated like normal business; and “The Great Integration.” The last of these means that whatever you want to regulate in the world — be it labor conditions, food safety, supply chain tracing, whatever it is — you’re essentially going to be regulating tech. Tech is inseparable from pretty much any economic or social process.

Once upon a time we had tech regulation and real-world regulation. Increasingly, everything is going to be tech-infused, which means that it’s going to be less and less informative to talk about tech regulation.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How do these regulations compare internationally? Are there similar regulations in Europe or in other countries?

Rogier Creemers: Yes, there are, and more are coming. Not in the United States. That’s where the tech companies are, and that’s where they strongly believe in having unregulated monopolies. That may change in the future. But that’s not really where the action is. The action at the moment in the U.S. is more on anti-trust and on Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act], which says social media providers cannot be seen as publishers, and therefore bear no editorial responsibility.

In many ways, what the European Union is trying to do, especially in terms of consumer protection, is not far removed from what China is trying to do.

A couple of years ago, the European Union issued a whole bunch of rules on online consumer protections, and algorithms are part of those rules already. But what we’re seeing in the digital markets and services package that’s working its way through the Brussels legislative process, is that there’s going to be a lot more.

In many ways, what the European Union is trying to do, especially in terms of consumer protection, is not far removed from what China is trying to do. And the reason for that is that it’s the same problem, and there are only so many different possible solutions.

Bridging the European Knowledge Gap

Kevin Schoenmakers: How did you become a correspondent in Europe?

Wang Qing: I want to help China and the rest of the world understand each other better. After I graduated from a master’s program in the Netherlands, I first worked for a Dutch outlet where I basically explained China to foreigners. Then, in 2016, Trump’s election and Brexit happened. These two events had a major impact on young people, intellectuals, and other liberal-minded folk in China. As I’m sure young people in Europe did too, they suddenly began to wonder whether these are things that ought to happen in Western democratic systems. I was shocked too, and decided to switch my career direction to instead explain the West to Chinese people.

Before, Chinese people of my generation — born in the 1980s and ‘90s — would have a certain yearning for Western political systems. We’d respect them, and think that China could learn a lot from them. But after these two events, I sensed a general disappointment among Chinese intellectuals. At the time, I’d lived in Europe for five years. I knew that the American election and the Brexit referendum are just two forms of democracy, and that there are so many other versions. In France, for example, the far-right Le Pens have been active in politics for many years, but never made it to the presidency. Then there’s the German system, and the still different systems in eastern European countries.

I realized at the time that there are so few news reports about Europe in China, especially compared to how much we do hear about the United States. If a Chinese journalist is stationed abroad, then the chances are they’ll be in the U.S. Chinese people are more interested in America, and more people of Chinese descent live there. So there’s a long history of Chinese people writing about the U.S. And even though it’s a big place, people speak English, so a journalist can cover the entire country. But Europe is a different story. I felt like there was a big information gap.

Chinese readers are interested in Europe, but not that interested. They know some things about Europe, but also not a lot. So I figured I could become a kind of pan-European correspondent, writing from the perspective of a Chinese person living in Europe and explaining to a Chinese audience what I see and experience, and what European society is like. That’s how I ended up doing what I do now.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How does your outlet define your beat?

Wang Qing: My title is Europe correspondent. One part is covering large political and economic events. Another is to report on Chinese-European interactions, including diplomatic ties but also Chinese diaspora, Chinese overseas students, and Chinese people working in Europe.

In short, I write about European stories important to Europeans, and European stories important to Chinese people. These two sometimes overlap but they’re not always the same.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How do you keep up with the news of an entire continent? How many countries do you officially cover?

Wang Qing: In theory, I cover all of Europe, but that’s not really feasible in reality. The European Union has more than 20 member states by itself, and then there are non-members at the edges of the continent. So I cover more than 30 countries, which sounds kind of ridiculous. But, first of all, I’m not by myself. We have an editorial team in China doing remote reporting, and a network of freelancers around Europe. So sometimes when there’s some breaking news or something worth covering, it’s my job to commission an article.

When I cover something, my philosophy is to provide a pan-european perspective, which means I don’t just look at what happened in a particular European country, but also why those events are important to the continent. Some international outlets might have the resources to have one correspondent per country, allowing that journalist to have a deep understanding of that country. But there is no way I’ll be able to do that. I can’t master more than 20 languages in my lifetime. But I could look at these countries using a pan-European framework. This way, regardless of whether I’m writing about Germany, France, or the U.K., I can explain to Chinese readers what Europe is.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Are there any stories you would personally like to do but that you can’t get approval for from your editors?

Wang Qing: I work in a commercial outlet, so we have slightly more leeway than official state media. The limit is more often how much my organization is willing to invest in a particular pitch. Sometimes it’s not that you want to write something but can’t, it’s that you reported on something and want to follow-up with a more in-depth article, but that the organization doesn’t have the time and resources. In my impression, this is more likely the case when it comes to smaller European countries.  There might be something interesting happening there, but Chinese readers might not know the country that well so there’s only scope for something short.

Of course, besides that, there are some sensitive topics when it comes to international relations that a Chinese outlet will be very careful with.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Because of the pandemic you’ve been in China for some months and you’ve been writing more about domestic topics. Have you noticed any difference in sensitivity of national and international news? Do you run into such issues less when reporting on other countries compared to reporting on China?

Wang Qing: When I speak with friends who also work in international news, many say they initially wanted to move in this direction because there are fewer restrictions. As long as the news is unrelated to China, you can mostly write whatever you want. But if a topic touches on China, there will be restrictions.

As for domestic news, I don’t do investigatives stories but write mostly about social and cultural issues, and there aren’t usually tight restrictions on such topics.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How many Chinese journalists are there in Europe? How many of them are, like you, correspondents for commercial media?

Wang Qing: I’ve never seen an accurate figure for this, but I’d say that there are fewer than 10 Europe correspondents who work for commercial Chinese media. The overwhelming majority of Chinese journalists in Europe work for state media. They have enormous teams. I’d estimate that more than ten state media outlets have offices in Brussels, for example. Some of those might just have one or two people, others have dozens.

At the same time, the number of correspondents for commercial media is shrinking, and most of them are financial reporters who live in London. On the European mainland there are a few in Paris and in Berlin, but they might not all be on full-time contracts.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Why is the number of correspondents working for commercial media shrinking?

Wang Qing: On the one hand, state media have grown bigger both at home and abroad, and there is less space for commercial media. In the past, such media could do hard-core investigative reporting, but now that’s gotten harder.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting the rise of self-media in China. I believe the difference between state media and commercial media has gotten smaller in recent years, and the new division in the Chinese media landscape is that between self-media and institutional media — which includes both state media and commercial media. Self-media means people or organizations who most commonly post content on social media like WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin, and who are increasingly blurring the line with writing news. They adhere to different standards though. When they write about Europe, they might find a few articles in English media, aggregate them, and write it up in a dramatic and eye-catching way. Self-media have quickly gained a lot of traffic, influence, as well as advertisement. But institutional media can’t work like this.

Commercial media have also experienced a brain drain, and advertising revenue is declining every year. They’re fighting for survival. So the disappearance of correspondent positions at commercial media is a reflection of their crisis at home.

In the past, such media could do hard-core investigative reporting, but now that’s gotten harder and harder.

Growing Mistrust and Hostility

Kevin Schoenmakers: Have you noticed anything from the worsening China-West relations? For example, in China many western journalists say it’s becoming more difficult to find interviewees. Have you noticed anything similar?

Wang Qing: In general, my experiences in Europe have been positive. European society has better civic education, so people understand the importance of news media. But there have been a few incidents in the past two years. Sometimes people refuse to be interviewed because I’m a Chinese journalist, even saying, “I can’t trust a journalist from a Chinese news outlet.” Explaining the reporting you do or the kind of organization you work for won’t put them at ease.

When I first started as a reporter in Europe about eight years ago, I was never refused an interview because I’m a Chinese journalist. It might be because there is much more China coverage in Western media now. In the past only people in the so-called China-watching community would pay attention to the country, but now regular people in the West are also increasingly interested in China. But their interest was piqued by negative news stories. It’s not because, for example, they traveled to China and thought it was a fascinating place.

Hostility toward China is on the rise in both the United States and Europe. People like us, whose role is in between China and other countries, will notice such changes the earliest.

Kevin Schoenmakers: What kind of people will sometimes deny your interview requests? Just regular people, or companies and governments?

Wang Qing: All three you mentioned will sometimes deny interview requests, but people at companies or governments have received PR training so they won’t directly tell you it’s because you’re from a Chinese media outlet. Only regular people will.

I can think of an example of when I went to Greece to do a story about China buying a port there. Because the port itself is considered a scenic spot, someone offered tours on AirBnB. I thought this was very interesting, also because it mentioned China. So I wanted to join the tour and interview the person behind it. But because I explained who I was he didn’t even allow me to join the tour, saying that he thought Chinese media would distort his words.

The opposite also happens. When I went to report on Brexit I discovered a lot of English people who supported Brexit were eager to talk to Chinese media. They figured that after Brexit, the U.K. would need to become friends with countries outside the European Union and that China would be a good country to be friends with, so they were willing to speak with Chinese media.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Do interviewees sometimes question your motives because they assume your outlet is a propaganda outlet?

Wang Qing: Yes! The international perception of Chinese journalists has changed a lot in the past two years. I often get asked what it’s like to be one. I think, in the English-speaking world, there is a subtle bias toward Chinese journalists, where people assume that you need to create propaganda. But Chinese journalists are a varied group of people, including more and more Chinese nationals now working for international media. I have some friends who work for official state media, and their work isn’t all propaganda either. Within the limits placed on them, they too do work that I think improves Chinese and Western people’s mutual understanding.

Chinese journalists aren’t so different from journalists in other parts of the world. The motivations they have and the training they receive are broadly similar. But I do think they are treated differently. A South Korean reporter, for example, is much more easily trusted in the West than a Chinese reporter, even if the articles they end up writing are broadly similar.

Kevin Schoenmakers: And, the other way around, has the perception of Europe changed among your readers?

Wang Qing: First of all, Chinese people’s interest in Europe is not as great as their interest in the United States. Then, their perception of Europe is split into two. They look up to Europe but also look down on it, and these two contradictory viewpoints exist at the same time.

They want to see the good sides of Europe and regard it as having a more advanced market, governance, and society that China should learn from. This includes things such as Europe’s education, health care, and pension systems. Recently, China allowed three children per couple, but young people in China don’t really want to have children and people wonder why that is. Perhaps Chinese society doesn’t support and subsidize women and families enough when it comes to having children? So people look to Europe to see what they do. What kind of welfare do single-parent families receive, for example? How do governments support sending children to day care or to school? Chinese people are very interested in this aspect of Europe.

One the other hand, Chinese people look down on Europe, thinking that even though Europe was very civilized and advanced in the past, it has more recently been plagued by terrorist attacks, refugee crises, demonstrations, riots, and other chaos — casual readers love to read this kind of news. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, this second perception has become stronger. Many believe that China controlled the pandemic better than Europe, where it caused a lot of chaos. People increasingly feel like Europe isn’t as good as it used to be, or even that it’s become a complete mess and that China is better now.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Journalists who write about China are often criticized either because they are too soft or too harsh in their analysis of the country. Are you ever accused of being one or the other about Europe?

Wang Qing: Yes, I’ve encountered both. Refugees are a topic that easily causes controversy on Chinese social media. When I tried to explain some of the complexities behind Europe’s refugee crisis, readers who might not be very familiar with Europe and saw the refugee crisis as a major disaster thought I was being too soft.

At the same time, some friends have told me they think my analysis of Brexit is too harsh, that I overestimate the impact it will have on the U.K. But based on my interviews I judged at the time that its impact will be quite serious.

I think my situation is a bit different compared to Western journalists in China, however. If you work for an established international media outlet, your analysis will have an impact on government policy. Even though sometimes people in government or academia might read what I write, what I write is mostly for ordinary Chinese readers. So its impact on policy is small. This is the case for many reporters working for commercial media, and this probably is a reflection of the status of media in China.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Are there any misconceptions about Europe that stand out, about which you cannot convince your readers or editors otherwise?

Wang Qing: One example that I find quite interesting is about Europe’s attitude towards regulation. The European Union has introduced a lot of digital regulation in recent years, which is a source of discussion in China. From a Chinese perspective, Europe is doing this because it doesn’t have strong internet companies like Facebook or Alibaba.

Some people — not me — think Europe’s economy and status have slipped because there is too much regulation. This idea is widely shared by my fellow Chinese journalists who do financial and economic reporting. I will try to explain to them that the so-called decline of the European economy isn’t actually because they overregulate, or that this regulation is necessary and might also be adopted in China. [NOTE: In August 2021, China passed what one article in the National Law Review called “the world’s harshest data privacy law,” with stricter data security requirements some experts found to be opaque.]

I think the larger context of this is that Chinese intellectuals, after experiencing China’s marketization drive in the early ’90s, have formed a consensus that less oversight promotes economic development. So they don’t understand why Europe would choose to implement more regulations.

As for misconceptions among the wider public, I can take my mother as an example. When the yellow vest movement damaged the Champs Elysées, the Chinese internet was overflowing with fake news about how Paris had become a hell on earth. So my mother will think that Europe is total chaos. Sometimes due to the time difference, when I wake up, my mom will have already sent me 10 different articles she saw online about how Europe is a mess, and ask whether I shouldn’t consider moving back home.

Navigating the Shrinking Space of Weibo

Kevin Schoenmakers:  You’re quite active on Weibo, where you have more than 75,000 followers. Do you consider this part of your job as a journalist, to build an audience?

Wang Qing: I don’t really have a detailed strategy for my Weibo. But I want it to be a personal thing, a channel through which I engage with what is happening in China. I know many foreign reporters will use Twitter to promote their work. I sometimes do that, but only when I think that what I wrote is relevant to what is already being discussed on Weibo at that moment.

Weibo might be the only public space left in China. Even though its scope is shrinking too, there is still a lot of discussion on Weibo every day, and the topics are very different from what foreign media report on when it comes to China. What is talked about on Weibo isn’t of national importance, but it’s still meaningful to me. People talk about gender issues, consumerism, and other things that young Chinese people are concerned about. I want to engage in these discussions.

Sometimes I will bring a European perspective. One time, a Chinese rental platform had some funding issues that caused its young customers to suddenly have no houses to live in. This sparked a discussion on whether it’s better to buy or rent an apartment. I shared my experience renting a house in Europe, and explained why young people in Europe don’t seem to be in a hurry to buy a house because there are policies that protect tenants.

But I won’t write daily posts about what happened in the EU today. I don’t want my account to be a press release machine.

Kevin Schoenmakers: In recent years, discussion of China on Western social media is at times very black-and-white — you’re either in favor of or against China. Is the discussion of Europe on Weibo similar?

Wang Qing: There is such a trend. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic and the worsening international climate, Chinese social media users have become more antagonistic toward Europe and the U.S., or the West in general. Fewer people are willing to understand the complexities of the world, or they no longer speak up and are drowned out by more radical voices.

The fact that European countries made mistakes in how they handled COVID-19 only adds to this. Chinese social media users will think, “Why can’t we criticize them? Why do we have to agree that Europe is a nice place? Why do we need to be nuanced?” I don’t think this is something particularly Chinese. All around the world people seem to have lost their interest in and patience for understanding another culture’s complexity.

Kevin Schoenmakers: On Twitter, female journalists say they face constant harassment. Is this also an issue on Weibo?

Wang Qing: Yes, there is a lot of harassment aimed at women on Weibo as well. It’s not necessary because they are journalists, but just because they are female. I think an important context is that on Weibo, gender issues are very actively discussed — far more than any other topic. It might be one of the few issues that can still be discussed publicly on the Chinese internet to the same degree it is discussed internationally. Usually there are people in strong support and in strong opposition to certain gender issues, and as a result women will face a lot of attacks by patriarchal users.

I recently posted something about the Kris Wu rape case that got tens of thousands of comments. Many people agreed with my point of view, but I also got a lot of hateful responses, including private messages, saying “Why do you want to turn this into a gender thing?” They think feminism in China is going too far. People who have grown up in East Asian cultures may not be accustomed to women speaking out in public. So when you do speak up, a lot of people will attack you for your gender.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Do people ever send abusive comments because you are a journalist?      

Wang Qing: That happens as well. I think because journalists and other public intellectuals have become stigmatized in China. In the past, say five or ten years ago, when you said that a person is a public intellectual, it was a compliment. Everyone would think such a person is very knowledgeable, that they have a critical perspective, and are doing something good for society. But views have shifted to public intellectuals being people who don’t want the country to do well. So people with these identities are attacked a lot. But still, I mostly receive abusive comments because of my gender.

Podcasting Through the Pandemic

Kevin Schoenmakers: How would you describe your podcast? Who are your co-hosts? What do you talk about?

Wang Qing: I started the podcast together with two friends who are former journalists at the end of 2019. We began because we’d often talk and when media people talk they mix their private stories with things that are in the news, and we figured conversations like that can be quite interesting. So we thought about how to present this to an audience and turn it into a podcast.

We named it TheWeirdo (in Chinese: 不合时宜, meaning to be out of step with current thinking) because we believe that in Chinese society there are a lot of people like us who feel like they may not be in line with the mainstream of the era, who are independent but still interact with society. We hoped to bring people like this together through the podcast.

We talk about domestic and international current affairs, but also issues that young Chinese people are concerned with such as education, buying a house, and having children.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Podcasting took a while to take off in China compared to the West. Why do you think that is? Have you noticed your podcast’s audience has grown a lot recently as well?

Wang Qing: I saw an industry analysis that said many American podcasts are made by institutional media who have experience with making radio, such as NPR. But Chinese podcasts are almost all very grass-roots. Podcasters might be journalists, like us, but there is no institutional support. I don’t have a radio background either, I’ve mostly done written journalism. There are very few Chinese media companies that are systematically making podcasts.

One reason podcasts are gaining popularity is that across Chinese online platforms, the quality of the content is decreasing. Because, depending on whether you want to write an article for 100,000 or 1 million people, your approach has to be very different. For the former, you can write in a very refined way that only highly educated people might understand. For the latter, you have to write in a way so it is very easy to understand. So with other content decreasing in quality, podcasts have become something that highly educated people enjoy.

One reason podcasts are gaining popularity is that across Chinese online platforms, the quality of the content is decreasing.

Podcasts really gained attention in China during the pandemic last year. Lots of people had to stay at home and wanted good content to pass the time. Our audience also grew during that period. When we began in late 2019, we had no idea we’d grow this much, or even be successful at all. But our conversations resonated with listeners. It’s more important than anything for a creative to find an audience that understands your content. It will really boost your morale. So when we grew our audience and they responded with writing letters and whatnot, it was very inspiring to us and made us keep going.

For example, during the pandemic last year when a lot of flights were cancelled and many students who wanted to go abroad were unable to go. Lots of people were wondering whether China would be cut off from the world. We talked about studying abroad in an episode, and I said that because of the worsening international climate in which every country is isolating itself, people who can form bridges across borders should go abroad more than ever. Afterward some listeners said that they had abandoned their study abroad plans but because of us they had changed their mind. A year later these people are on their way to foreign universities. Stories like this inspire us to keep at it.

Kevin Schoenmakers: How big is your audience?

Wang Qing: We have about 500,000 subscribers across all platforms. Popular episodes are downloaded up to 700,000 times, less popular ones fewer than 200,000 times.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Some people say podcasts are popular in China right now because they are quite loosely regulated. Would you agree?

Wang Qing: I think the restrictions on certain topics in place on other platforms are also there for podcasts. The difference lies in the audience. Podcasts listeners are relatively highly educated and liberal minded. And when you listen to a podcast, you need to spend an hour to listen to an entire episode, so that means you can deal with a lot of nuance and won’t get furious when you don’t agree with someone’s argument. This gives podcasters more space, but they still have to adhere to certain limits on content.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Have any of your episodes been taken offline?

Wang Qing: Yes, they have. When you discuss something that’s closely related to a recent news event that’s a hot topic, that episode is at a higher risk of getting taken down.

Kevin Schoenmakers: I listen to some Chinese podcasts, and I’ve noticed none of them run ads. Do you know why that is? Have you been contacted by companies to place ads?

Wang Qing: Commercialization of podcasts is a hot topic right now. We regularly have people from our audience who work at some or other large company and contact us to ask whether we’d want to join their promotional campaign. But the way advertising is done in Chinese podcasts isn’t the same as in English-language podcasts. Rarely will there be ad reads before the start of an episode. The format is more commonly that a company has something to promote and the podcast will create content based on that. But as far as I know, Chinese podcasts, especially those with large audiences, are very selective. When choosing an advertiser you have to make sure it fits your brand to keep your audience happy.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Have you placed such ads?

Wang Qing: We have created some content for brands, mostly regarding gender topics.

Kevin Schoenmakers: What kind of brand?

Wang Qing: I won’t name them, but we mostly work with brands that promote ideas rather than products, and these ideas need to be in line with our values. One of them was a relatively large Chinese e-commerce brand. They had a report about consumer behavior and had noticed men were buying more yoga mats and women were buying more boxing gloves. This is against stereotypes, so we thought it was an interesting phenomenon. They hoped we could make an episode about gender stereotypes and we felt this fit our podcast.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Lastly, I’d like to discuss one of your episodes that was was about what it’s like to be a woman, a journalist, and a person living abroad. In China or at Chinese media outlets, what is the difference between being a female journalist and a male journalist?

Wang Qing: Female reporters in China face many different stereotypes. One is that, when there’s some big news event, female reporters are just there as eye candy or to fulfill a quota, and not because of their ability.

And, though the number of female reporters within media organizations is pretty big, the executives are men. In journalism school there are also way more women than men, but the decision makers are mostly men. Male reporters have higher salaries, have more opportunities to make a name for themselves, and are given more on-camera appearances.

The professional life of female reporters in China is generally quite short. Unlike in other industries, as a journalist you have to be on the frontline. But a woman in her 30s will have to think about having children and taking care of her family, making it hard to do on-the-ground reporting. In other professions, your 30s is a time when you have finished your training and you enter a golden age of productivity. But as a female journalist, you will find that there are fewer opportunities for you because you have your family responsibilities.

In addition, in the past two years there have been a lot of reports of violence against and sexual harassment of female reporters. These incidents have always existed, but because of the gender movement, this has been getting wider attention and has thus become more visible.

Kevin Schoenmakers: Would you say more women are moving into positions of leadership within Chinese media?

Wang Qing: I think a very interesting change is that the rise of self-media is providing women with more opportunities. I think gender-wise there has been no change in institutional media. They’re part of the establishment, so men dominate editor-in-chief or CEO positions. But because we now have self-media, many women leave institutional media and start on their own path that is outside the establishment and doesn’t have the same historical baggage. They become their own bosses, and they do really well creating fresh content and valuable brands.

So self-media has had some impact on the traditionally male-dominated media industry, which I think is a positive development. Women have another source of opportunities, and they’ve discovered they are no worse than men, that they can be media directors, and that they can have a family while also working on their career. There are many female media professionals around me who have successfully started their own businesses.

Kevin Schoenmakers: In the episode I mentioned you say that younger women who are considering a career in news media often message you asking for advice. What do they ask you and how do you respond?

Wang Qing: People want to know what it’s like to be a female reporter and a foreign correspondent; how to enter this career; what the career path is like; and what the opportunities and challenges are.

I think a big reason they reach out to me is that I’m on Weibo, and they sooner believe advice from a person than from an organization. There is also a trend in China called “girls help girls.” People are more aware now of the power that connections between women can have. On Weibo this atmosphere is now very noticable. If a younger woman is looking for advice, she’ll reach out to another woman rather than a man, because he’s not facing the same situations.

I don’t really directly give advice, because everyone’s circumstances are different. But I will describe my situation, the challenges and problems you will face as a female journalist in China, and how these aren’t always things you can solve through your own efforts.

If you are going to be a reporter in China, one of the questions people will often ask you is: how long do you plan to do this? Careers in this industry seem very short. It’s not as in international media where there is a track from junior reporter, to senior reporter, to some overseas postings, to an editor position, and a chief editor position. In China, this might exist in official state media, but in commercial media, the path forward isn’t very clear.

When I look in front of me, it’s difficult to find a role model whose career path I can follow. As we discussed in the episode, when we were young there were some female reporters who we could take as our role models, but they have all left the industry. This is very dispiriting, and makes it hard to know what your next goal or your next stop could be. But perhaps this is something that the current generation of female reporters should do. Because the people before you didn’t create a path, you have to look for one yourself.

I had my doubts in previous years, but I’m more determined to go on doing this for as long as I can. But being a journalist might not be my one and only job. I might start some other projects, but always carry the journalistic mindset and mentality with me. I might not be in a media company but be more flexible. Social media has brought many new opportunities and spaces that didn’t exist before. If you asked me now what I would do if I could go back to the beginning. Then I think I would still choose to be a journalist.