China Central Television, or CCTV (央視), is often likened to “the BBC of China.” But the comparison is a very imperfect one. While both take public funding, one has its editorial independence guaranteed by a royal charter, while the other is an unabashed mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party. Day to day, both are motivated by different answers to the question of what journalism ought to be: is it holding power to account, or serving power?

For all its imperfections, however, Vivien Marsh teases interesting observations from this comparison. In her book Seeking Truth in International TV News China, CGTN and the BBC, Marsh draws on three decades of experience as a BBC global news editor, reporter and writer, to think about what makes China’s English-language, international-facing news coverage different — and what that says about the political system it serves.

To learn more about what sets these two worlds apart, where they’re drawing closer, and where they’re drifting further apart, CMP Managing Editor Ryan Ho Kilpatrick asked Vivien Marsh about what she found out.

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: You’ve written about how the way CCTV-News and CGTN news are organized and presented is totally different from what Western viewers would expect of the news. Can you give some examples of this?

Vivien Marsh: It comes down to the different conceptions of the role of journalism in Western and particularly Anglo-American societies when compared with the Chinese state. It’s the difference between holding elected (and other) power to account, and acting as an arm of the state or — if viewed more charitably — an interface between the leadership and the people. 

It’s not a specifically Chinese thing to attempt to appropriate the power and reach of national news broadcasters; in Britain, politicians talk of the cultural soft power of the BBC World Service, for example. However, China’s expansion of its foreign-language international media was intended specifically to use them to improve its “discourse power” on the world stage.

In 2003, Beijing’s propaganda chief even spoke of turning CCTV’s English-language news into “a Chinese CNN” on the assumption that CNN was a propaganda tool of the US government. Such an approach involves the imposition of editorial “red lines” that jar not only with Western viewers but also with many Chinese journalists I interviewed. One CCTV-News producer told me that they reluctantly took the decision to lead their program with a routine visit by Xi Jinping outside Beijing rather than the breaking news of the beheading of a hostage by the Islamic State group because they knew that, if they led with the hostage, the lead would be switched by CCTV’s political editors in any case. 

When in my book I contrasted the reporting of the 2015 Yangtze River capsizing by the BBC and CCTV-News, I found that BBC journalists focused on the human cost of the disaster and the search to find the cause of the sinking, while CCTV-News spent much time on the heroics of the rescue operation in order to justify the decisions of the state. Interestingly in 2019, CGTN journalists were able to report more freely on the impact of a chemical explosion in Yancheng in Jiangsu and the safety concerns that preceded it. However, I observed that the trajectory of imputed blame stopped at or before the provincial level, which appeared to be deemed “fair game” for reporters as it was not a threat to Beijing.

RHK: How successful has CCTV’s international arm, CGTN, been in imitating what you call the “televisual grammar of the West?”

VM: This is one area in which CGTN has made great strides. The product looks much slicker than did that of CCTV-News when I first started studying China’s anglophone television in 2013. Ways of storytelling that are familiar to Western viewers, such as the choice of strong pictures or the foregrounding of the reporter with a walk-and-talk or piece to camera, gradually found their way into China’s English-language TV news output. 

In my PhD thesis, I conducted a visual comparison of the opening sequences of the news bulletins of BBC World News, CCTV-News, and CCTV’s flagship daily Chinese news program Xinwen Lianbo. The BBC and CCTV-News were very similar pictorially with their focus on impactful headlines of world events, whereas Xinwen Lianbo emphasized the primacy of the two newsreaders with no visual distraction. CGTN’s Chinese reporters are also much more fluent in English than most of their predecessors at CCTV-News, which gives them the confidence to conduct live two-ways, or “crosses,” with the studio while on location. 

For a journalistic culture that regards reporters as the lowest element of the food chain, the editorial elevation of the individual has been a significant change. But as one of CCTV’s journalists told me during my research, the objective was to “learn from the West [and] use their way to report stories so [Western viewers] accept China’s image.” Many of my Chinese interviewees from CCTV-News and CGTN talked of their aspirations to journalistic professionalism. This appeared to refer to clarity and technically proficient presentation rather than editorial attributes such as due impartiality or balance.

RHK: China’s understanding of soft power is, you note, different from how it was conceptualized by Joseph Nye. What makes it distinct and has deviating from things traditionally thought of as soft power like culture and history been an effective strategy for them?

VM: CCTV-News, the forerunner of CGTN, was given funding to expand during the Hu Jintao era, and its output frequently featured soft power vehicles such as calligraphy and Chinese-language learning. This was in line, superficially at least, with Nye’s conception of achieving national aims through attraction rather than coercion. Hu himself spoke in 2007 of the importance of enhancing cultural soft power. 

However, Chinese scholars had long viewed China’s soft power as having a more robust edge, involving its technological and economic prowess along with a pragmatic foreign policy. This has been reflected in the news programs of CCTV-News and CGTN, in that they have foregrounded Chinese innovation, China’s economic rise, overseas investment, and participation in multinational peacekeeping or medical initiatives. There is nothing particularly Chinese about this approach; everything comes from somewhere, and every organization that deals with news will deliver a view of what it deems to be important from its vantage-point on the world. 

Whether CNN intended it or not, for example, it conveyed the full impact of the United States’ global dominance to international viewers when it showed cruise missiles hitting Baghdad in its live coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Where Beijing’s perspective on soft power differs from that of other countries appears to lie in the increased prominence in its foreign-language media of China’s ideological positions. Even in Nye’s narrower conception, soft power can be derived from the attractiveness of a nation’s values – and under Xi Jinping, the values of the Chinese state are increasingly being publicized as alternatives to Western perspectives. This is part of the discourse power that China has striven for over the past twenty years. 

However, the mere transmission of a national viewpoint through international media does not guarantee that it will be received sympathetically. Simply explaining Beijing’s position on what it calls “vocational education and training” centers for Muslim minority citizens in Xinjiang does not airbrush Western reports of mass internment out of existence. Didacticism in news programs does not sit well with the notion of winning over foreign hearts and minds.

RHK: In Taiwan, we’ve noticed a trend in PRC propaganda away from positive stories about China — which are regarded with a high degree of suspicion — and toward stories undermining confidence in Taiwan’s democracy and its allies, particularly the United States. Have you noticed this elsewhere as well?

VM: This has been a feature of CGTN’s news output in recent years, particularly, as you say, with regard to the United States. I analyzed a cross-section of CGTN news output in 2023 and found a preponderance of news items on US shootings, US police violence, and perceived US economic instability. The treatment of these stories was journalistically even-handed although the topics themselves appeared to have been selected for the negative light in which they showed the United States. I’ve also noticed negative reporting on Britain and other European countries by CGTN from time to time — the rise of the far right, the Brexit debacle, and so on. 

It isn’t always easy to determine when negative coverage becomes an agenda. Topics such as US gun laws and Brexit should be covered thoroughly by the media of the countries concerned in any case. If they aren’t — and they sometimes aren’t, particularly in the case of Brexit — then factually accurate alternative coverage should be welcome. Of course, China itself has long accused Western news outlets of negative coverage. Constrained budgets at Western news organizations since the 2008 global financial crisis, along with Beijing’s increasing restrictions on foreign journalists, have certainly made it difficult for Western media to cover a broad range of China topics. Only the most newsworthy or, let’s face it, most straightforward stories tend to be treated — and if these involve the coronavirus, Xinjiang, or the South China Sea, it’s easy to perceive this as intentional negativity.

For its part, CGTN does not appear to suffer from undue constraints on the scope of its commissioning where the United States and Western Europe are concerned, although its African news seems to have taken a budgetary hit in recent years.

RHK: On a similar note, we’re also working on a piece right now about the strange allies Chinese state media have made among fringe, extremist Western influencers. It often feels like they have given up on winning hearts and minds among the general public in their target countries and helping audiences there to better understand China, and are now purely concerned with winning “discourse power” and using it unapologetically. Is this something you’ve observed as well?

VM: This switch in approach became very evident after the re-brand of CCTV-News as CGTN on the last day of 2016. Interestingly, this re-brand erased the word “news” from all programming; the N in CGTN stands for Network, and its programs News Hour and News Update were replaced by Global Watch and The World Today, respectively. 

Where CCTV-News minimized the importance of negative China news in its output or ignored it altogether, CGTN has consistently sought to proclaim the Chinese state’s version of events in China and denigrate Western journalism in the process. This was most noticeable when reports emerged of detention camps in Xinjiang. After a flurry of damaging Western news features about the camps, CGTN sent one of its most fluent and confident Chinese presenter-reporters to the far western region to “tell China’s story well” — to use Xi Jinping’s words — and to sow doubt about Western narratives. 

CGTN also used its YouTube channel for pithy explainer-like videos that tackled Western accusations head-on, such as a video entitled “Are Uygurs being tortured in China?” The channel’s reporting made plenty of pro-China assertions but did not engage directly with the substance of the Western reports, with the exception of one case I studied in which it misrepresented the facts. Subsequently, when the Western world was searching for the source of the coronavirus pandemic, CGTN used its social media accounts to discredit Western reporting, point out a lack of US leadership in the crisis, and praise Beijing’s response. 

CGTN has certainly been moving closer to RT of Russia in promoting an alternative worldview through undermining trust in news media in general, and this must be uncomfortable for the many foreign journalists who joined CGTN to do what they consider a professional job. There is certainly space for different perspectives on news around the world, but disinformation benefits no one and will not enhance any country’s discourse power, no matter how loudly it shouts.

RHK: Finally, I enjoyed your coin of phrase “small acts of journalism,” which reminded me of my interview with Emily Chua and her concept of “the ethics of efficacy.” Can you unpack what you mean by this and give some examples you’ve noticed?

VM: The phrase “small acts of journalism” is a nod to the book Small Acts of Resistance, which chronicles the microscopic ways in which citizens have, over the years, demonstrated their opposition to authoritarian rule. “Small acts of journalism” represent, in my view, the unspoken ways in which journalists at CCTV-News and — very occasionally — CGTN have gotten round excessive editorial controls to produce a more comprehensive journalistic job. 

As you note, Emily Chua’s interview is very relevant here in that she talks about how Chinese journalists have to navigate and manage a whole network of relationships and situations. My “small acts of journalism” relate in particular to state media’s China news rather than news about other countries. As I discuss in my book, political control of China news tends to be far stricter. Additionally, control is more often exercised in the early stages of a news story. During the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, for instance, CCTV-News journalists went from not being able to talk about the protests at all to, eventually, interviewing anti-government protesters. This was once it became clear to Beijing that the protests did not represent an existential threat. 

Examples of “small acts of journalism” that I have unearthed include the continued presence of the CCTV-News ticker across the bottom of the TV screen giving details of the 2014 Kunming railway station stabbings, even though the news story itself had been withdrawn for several hours. It may have been the management’s decision to hold off the story until further political guidance was received, but presumably, no one had issued specific instructions to remove the news ticker.

A more striking example of a “small act of journalism” was a CCTV-News report from Shanghai shortly after the 2015 Yangtze cruiser sinking, in which some distraught relatives of the missing were seen falling to their knees and sobbing while others besieged the offices of the shipping company demanding information. The report was not shown again, and subsequent news items performed an editorial pivot to concentrate on more positive or hopeful elements of the rescue and retrieval operation. It was noticeable that the images in the Shanghai report were far stronger than suggested by the script. CCTV-News political editors were supposed to view pictures as well as words but it is not known if they always do so. 

Finally, it could be seen that the more experienced Chinese journalists at CCTV-News — and to a much lesser extent CGTN — were able to broach sensitive subjects through a delicate dance along the red lines of what was deemed politically acceptable, where newer recruits are not able to tread. My content analysis uncovered CCTV-News features about China’s ghost cities and about belated justice for the relatives of a man who was wrongly convicted and executed. Such journalists no longer have such a high profile at CGTN, and the emphasis on “telling China’s story well” overshadows the undoubted instances of balanced reporting on the channel.

Once a regional beacon of press freedom, Hong Kong’s media landscape has become barely recognizable under the harsh limitations imposed by the national security law (NSL) in 2020. And while journalists in the city have struggled to adjust to this new normal, there is a fresh chill on the horizon as the government looks to implement Article 23 of the territory’s Basic Law later this year with a more wide-ranging law on national security.

To learn more about the rapidly changing situation for the press in Hong Kong, CMP Managing Editor Ryan Ho Kilpatrick recently caught up with Professor Francis Lee at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communications. 

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: You said recently that media in Hong Kong have reached a “new balance” in how they operate under Hong Kong’s national security regime. But now it feels like that newfound balance is already being thrown off yet again by all the uncertainties around Article 23. Do you think that’s the case?

Francis Lee: That’s the difficulty of speaking about these things. When journalists ask me these questions, I say that this is only what applies at 11:52 A.M. on February 15th. Don’t quote me on this one month later. Any equilibrium is bound to be short-lived.

If you’re living in Hong Kong day in and day out, I think this is part of the social psychology of adaptive resilience. Something happens and then you feel bad for two weeks and you don’t know what to do and then after two or three months you kind of adapt to the environment. After a few months, it seems like you can do certain things. It seems like you are not getting yourself in trouble. You look at your peers and they are also doing OK.

At that moment, you feel like maybe there is an equilibrium. Right now in Hong Kong, we all know deep down that any so-called equilibrium can be thrown off-balance tomorrow. No matter how you feel, that sense of being in equilibrium is something that you develop after the fact, after six or nine peaceful months.

Right now, of course, it’s very different, because you don’t know what the law will be. It depends on how you look at it. Like a lot of things these days in Hong Kong, it’s about expectation management. I think that’s how a lot of organizations in Hong Kong have been doing things since 2020. It depends on how experienced and how well-established these news or civil society organizations are. The more systematic, more well-organized and more well-established organizations immediately do an internal risk assessment to study the stipulations as soon as they come out and then compare it with their own work to assess where the risks are, whether certain adjustments are needed, and so on.

RHK: So this is a process media organizations will likely be going through right now with Article 23?

FL: For me, the most dangerous law for the news media is not necessarily Article 23. Like before, in the past two years, we had the NSL and then we have the common law offense of sedition. I think the general idea among a lot of journalists and a lot of media organizations is that they have been worried much more about sedition than the NSL.

It’s not easy for journalists to run afoul of the NSL as long as you stay away from Hong Kong independence and foreign funding, and follow a few other simple rules. That requires a bit of self-censorship, but at least there are ways for you to stay away from that. But sedition is different because anything that arouses hatred against the government can potentially be seditious. And basically, that means that whenever the news media tries to perform its watchdog role, it’s potentially in the gray area already. Of course, the sentence for sedition is at most two years in prison, which is nothing compared to NSL. But at the same time, it’s much easier for the news media to run afoul of.

When [these laws] are established, Hong Kong media just have to do the risk assessment again. There might be additional lines of self-censorship that they have to implement, but I believe they will find some way to survive. I think the legislation more journalists will be worrying about — or have been worrying about — deals with “fake news laws,” which the government has said they are studying but which we still know very little about. [State secrets] might require you to, again, to self-censor on a number of topics, but you can still avoid it. But disinformation, depending on how it’s defined, could be much harder to avoid.

RHK: You just spoke about how there’s this constant process of risk assessment and management and you yourself have been trying to advise people on how to manage that process. Probably the best example we have of how not to do that so far is the Foreign Correspondents Club, which scrapped the Human Rights Press Awards after, they say, lawyers advised it would be risky, and they decided they had a responsibility to avoid risk. But isn’t some degree of risk unavoidable for journalists in Hong Kong now?

FL: I tell people that my legal advice is not to seek legal advice. When you ask for legal advice, a responsible lawyer will tell you that the safest way is not to do anything. In a sense, they’re doing their jobs and I respect that. The problem is that the answer [to whether it’s perfectly safe to do something] is always going to be “no.”

The tricky thing about risk assessment and risk management [from] my own research in the past two or three years on news media and also civil society organizations is, first of all, that risk assessment in contemporary Hong Kong can be very idiosyncratic. You assess the risk in your own way. Different organizations assess the risk in their own ways. It depends on the organization’s background and the backgrounds of the people inside the organization. What a certain organization or a certain individual can do in terms of risk management may not be feasible for another organization or for another person.

The problem now is there is a gray area and that gray area is huge. It’s really huge. So can you really stay away from it? What it means to stay away from the gray area now is to listen to your legal advisor and do nothing. What would it mean if we, as the School of Journalism and Communication, were to completely stay away from the gray area? You cannot have everyone completely staying away. You need people to step inside the gray areas so as to show other people that this is actually possible. At this moment, it’s still OK. It gives a sense of security to other people. You have to try to… not to push the boundary, but at least reclaim that small part of the gray area.

Now, of course, the gray area also varies by gradation. Light gray is different from dark gray. You can still make that distinction. I can totally understand why people would stay away from the dark gray area. I’m not going to step inside the dark gray area for too long. But you cannot stay completely away from even the light gray area. Ultimately, of course, it’s also individual. It depends on individuals’ personalities and how exposed they are to economic pressures and threats to their assets or family in Hong Kong.

When a lot of people talk about risk, it’s not actually legal risk. The clearest example is school teachers. For primary and secondary school teachers, their imminent risk is to be reported by students or parents to the Education Bureau, which will then take away their job and their license to teach. That is the real risk — not that they’ll be grabbed by the national security police. For civil society organizations engaging with issues like social service provisions or homelessness, they have to collaborate with a lot of other parties. The real risk for them is that if they become too outspoken, they might be criticized by the government or the leftist press, and then others will stay away from them and they can no longer do their work.

Something I’ve come to realize more and more is that the risk that people are facing is, mostly, not legal. For most people, it’s basically about their jobs. That’s why people have to stay away from expressing anything on Facebook. Your boss is watching. Your colleagues are watching. We have so many cases of people losing their jobs because of what they wrote. That is the real risk.

RHK: All this talk about how professionals in Hong Kong need to think about political risk and work around it reminds me of another interview we did recently with Emily Chua at the National University of Singapore. In The Currency of Truth, she makes this distinction between the ethics of truthfulness — the traditional journalistic ideal that’s all about uncompromising truth-telling — and what she calls the “ethics of efficacy,” an alternative ethics she observed among journalists in mainland China that accepts a certain level of compromise and self-censorship in order to continue doing their work and also write meaningful stories. Are we seeing something similar emerge among media workers in Hong Kong?

FL: That’s a good way of conceptualizing it. In the mainland Chinese system or in some organizations, if you are a trusted worker in the organization, you can have much better ways of dealing with [the censorship apparatus]. Many years ago, I had a friend in a state media organization. He was a commentary writer for state for that state media organization. I still remember I was asking him, “You’re very liberal — why would they ask you to be a commentator?” And he said that they needed someone who is relatively liberal to balance out their really conservative commentators. He told me his way of working as a commentary writer in state media was that he would try to push the boundaries. Of course, he had a sense of what was absolutely impossible and he wouldn’t touch that. But then on any topic, he would try to push that topic to maybe nine [out of ten], and then, typically, it was struck down. So he would dial it down to an eight and then maybe strike it down to seven. That was how things worked during the Hu-Wen era (2002-2012), at least. 

In the Russian context, we also talk about ethical self-censorship, which refers to when you self-censor in order to protect your sources or prevent your colleagues or your organization from getting into trouble. I think this is actually quite typical in authoritarian settings because you are not working in an environment where freedom of information is well protected.

In the early years of the NSL, a lot of people were still willing to talk to the media. There were still a lot of outspoken people in Hong Kong who were willing to criticize the government on certain things. And sometimes journalists would actually have to tone down their criticisms [to protect them]. They’d have to say, if I write directly what you said, you will get into trouble, so I’ll tone it down. I think that’s also the kind of scenario that gives you the sense of being in equilibrium.

I did a very lengthy interview with a news organization on a sensitive topic and they let me read the whole article before [it was published] even though I didn’t request that. I never request that because if I have any concerns about an interview I say no, and I’m careful to say what is on the record and what is not. I read the whole thing and I suggested deleting two sentences — not because of my own words but because I had mentioned another news organization, so I told the reporter, “Maybe we should just kill those two sentences — we don’t want to put that organization out on the table, right?” And she agreed. You could say that’s ethical self-censorship. I told a colleague who’s a veteran journalist about this and they were shocked. In a normal situation, this whole interaction would’ve been so strange. But what do you expect? This is the nature of the time.

RHK: I’ve done the same for sources in Hong Kong over the past few years, actually. In journalism school we were taught to never do this — to let your interviewees screen what you would and wouldn’t publish — but I also think we owe a duty of care to the people we interview, and that has to come first if the work we do might put them in danger. 

FL: Frankly speaking, we need to rethink the whole ethics thing. Back in school, when we talk about how journalists should not allow interviewees to dictate what they write, we normally talk about interviewees who are more powerful than us. You’re dealing with power. But what if you are dealing with vulnerable people?

Consider another example. Let’s say you’re dealing with a MeToo case and the victim wants to be interviewed. Then they say they want to retract something. What do you say? Yes, I think — you have to say yes in that case. Basically, I think we are now applying the rule for dealing with vulnerable people to interviewees speaking on sensitive topics. If they are still inside an authoritarian country, we have to see them as a vulnerable group.

[Hong Kong] society is undergoing an extremely challenging and difficult period for people who uphold certain values of liberty and democracy. It’s not in the early years of the [1997] handover when you could heavily criticize the government. These days, it can be very risky. So you have to adapt. You have to try to feel where the red lines may be. But you still have to try to do something. Even though the situation is very difficult, people are trying to cling to their values, to cling to their beliefs, to hold them dear, and try to do something.

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick: Here at CMP we try to highlight the exceptional work of Chinese journalists and push back against the perception that there isn’t meaningful reporting being done in China. In your book, you warn that too much emphasis on journalistic excellence can lead to the motif of “pockets of exceptional journalists” that stand above the rest. Why is this problematic and how do you push back against it?

Emily Chua: What you focus on really depends on the kind of question you’re asking. If you’re interested in a specific kind of journalistic practice, like investigative or environmental journalism, then it makes sense to go look at the people who do that. But as an anthropologist trying to take up the question of news in China and the practice of journalism in China, I didn’t want to go in with a preconceived definition of what news is. I mean, it’s a discipline-specific thing. 

Anthropologists try to understand what things are like in the field we’re investigating, which we assume will be different from anywhere else. I think that’s a difference between a media studies or political science approach to journalism and an anthropological one. With political science, it may be important to go in with a definition of journalism, but with anthropology we think that news is shaped by context, and can be different things in different places — it’s completely shaped by the context.

I wanted to go in with an openness to exploring what news meant in China. If I only looked at people who are doing a very specific kind of journalism, then I’d be missing most of the picture. I wanted to do an ethnography of the non-heroic journalists, the mainstream ones that don’t get highlighted and, as a consequence, are often assumed to just be cogs in the machine.

RHK: You observe that even these “non-heroic” newsmakers, the so-called cogs in the system, also exercise agency in their daily work. What are some of the ways they do this?

EC: Agency is a complex subject that gets theorized in a lot of ways. In the context of Chinese journalism, I was trying to push back against the way that agency tends to get conflated or even confused with something much more specific — basically, politically independent public speech. That’s a form of agency that’s closely associated with journalistic practices in the West. 

In many Western contexts, that’s the whole purpose of journalism. But if your objective is to understand how news can be made and thought of and lived with differently in other places, then it’s important to broaden our sense of agency.

Everyone who’s done any study of Chinese journalists has said that journalism in China is complex. Everyone talks about how complex it is — and it’s true. That’s something I wanted to convey. 

Even being a very ordinary, un-famous unheroic journalist actually takes a lot of work because of this complexity. All of them are managing these very dense and intricate and shifting political and commercial considerations and networks and relationships. I think their agency is really shown in the decisions they make about how to navigate and manage those demands, how to live with and make the most of and nudge those relationships in different directions.

Even the decision to comply with a censorship order at any given moment isn’t necessarily a lack of agency. It can be an agentive decision that’s based on calculations about what the costs and benefits are, what one’s long-term objectives are, and whether it makes sense to compromise in the short term in order to keep working towards a long-term goal that one believes in. Agency is everywhere once we broaden our conception of it.

RHK: Perhaps this can take us to what you call the ethic of efficacy. What do you mean by this and how does it differ from the ethic of truthfulness?

EC: The ethic of truthfulness is the way I label the established ideas of what journalistic ethics should consist of and what the role and purpose of journalism are: truthful representations of reality that inform and empower the public. The ethic of efficacy is the term that I use to try to conceptualize the alternate way in which the journalists I worked with went about their practice. Instead of thinking that because they weren’t subscribing to an ethic of truthfulness they therefore had no ethics, the goal was to try to conceptualize this alternate ethic that they had.

At one level, the ethic of efficacy is the ethic that governs the use of news as currency. But if we put that aside for a minute, it is an ethic that I think emerges in an era where the classical business models of the news industry no longer apply. The ethic of truthfulness — and the idea that journalists can and should simply focus on delivering truth — was historically enabled by a certain business model in which newspapers had a monopoly on an audience’s attention.

They use that attention to generate advertising revenue, and that steady stream of income enabled them to pay for journalists to do what they believed they should. Marketing and editorial work were completely separate. The revenue keeps coming in. The journalists keep doing their work.

That business model is in crisis all over the world, not just in China. The ethic of efficacy is something that I personally think of as a globally emergent contemporary phenomenon.

I’m not an expert in journalism anywhere else, but I don’t think it’s entirely exclusive to China. It’s an ethic that governs journalistic work in an age where the old revenue streams just aren’t there anymore. Journalists now have to think about survival, about the survival of their newspaper, about their own survival in the industry. And when they have to think about survival, then they can’t be focused entirely on truth, on delivering important truths. So journalists now have a multiplicity of objectives that they have to achieve with their articles. 

Efficacy is the term that struck me as useful to convey the goal of the journalists I worked with who wanted to be effective in using their news articles to survive, to contribute to the survival of their news-making practice, which meant both their own careers and their newspapers as a business.

But at the same time, they also drew limits. They didn’t want to go to the point of treating news only as a means to make money. They had colleagues whom they felt were mercenary that way, or whom they considered to be going beyond an ethically acceptable limit in the way they used their news articles to achieve instrumental ends. So it’s trying to maintain this ethical balance of being practical but not being grossly instrumental and vulgar and selling your practice out completely.

RHK: Let’s walk back a bit to the concept of the currency of truth. What do you mean by that and how do you see it as a product of the digital news era?

EC: In the classical news model, when we assume you have an audience and a monopoly on their attention, you can call that “the public,” and you can think of “the public” as a stable thing that’s just out there receiving the messages you send to it.

But in a digital era, where there’s a lot of content competing for attention, publics aren’t just sitting around waiting for you to give them some information. It comes down to the kinds of business models that newspapers need to come up with under conditions like this, where you don’t have an audience that’s just waiting to pay for and read your content. The argument is that news articles in a moment like this don’t necessarily reach a public.

They have the potential to garner public attention. I call this their publicness. This possibility that this might become an object of public attention gives a news article a certain kind of value. Businesses with products and shares to sell and government and party officials all have an interest in this publicness. So the potential of a news article to garner attention makes it a kind of currency for people in political and commercial networks.

The goal of that analogy was to explore how newsmakers work in a context where news has this quality, and where news articles circulate in this way. Being a newsmaker in such a context involves transactional relationships and a certain kind of strategizing, but it also gives rise to different kinds of ideals and ethics.

RHK: I want to unpack another interesting turn of phrase that you use, which is turning the Communist Party from a main character in the media landscape to background noise. What do you mean by that?

EC: I was trying to push back on what seems like the dominant tenor of a lot of discussions of news in China, where the automatic assumption is that if you’re talking about news in China, the main character is the Party. But it depends on what question you’re asking. If you’re a political analyst who’s interested in the Party, then it makes sense for you to make the Party your main character. But that’s really just one of the facets of the practice and culture and life of news and journalism in any place, and in China in particular.

Ethnography has the capacity to bring out ground-level perspectives, and everyday life and reality on the ground is so much richer and more complex and in a way more chaotic and less mechanical than you’re able to appreciate when you start out with this main character, the Party that does what it wants and gets what it wants. The process of getting there is actually much more fraught and complex and contingent and in a way fragile than we necessarily see.

RHK: Another interesting way you characterize the media landscape in China is as a jianghu world reminiscent of wuxia novels. And is that because of the chaos and the confusion that you saw there, and was that different from what you expected to find?

EC: A comparative literature scholar, Petrus Liu, has written extensively about Jin Yong’s novels and their handling of the notion of jianghu. Liu calls Jin Yong’s characters “stateless subjects.” Reading him, I came to think of jianghu as a term that captures the relational quality of social existence. It’s an imaginary that focuses on the weight of relationships as opposed to the weight of the individual will. 

Building on that, I try to use jianghu as a counter concept to Charles Taylor’s idea of the modern social imaginary that underlines all our modern institutions. This is the image of a world made of free, autonomous, equal individuals who voluntarily come together to form societies. When that’s your imaginary, it makes sense to think of the newspaper as something that people voluntarily come together to do, to benefit individuals, collectives, and societies.

But if you start out with the jianghu as your social imaginary, then you don’t imagine autonomous individuals voluntarily getting together to form a society. Instead, you start out with the idea of these binding relationships and everybody being born into and having to live within these networks of binding relationships, which are shifting and contingent, but also asymmetrical. 

The book’s experiment was to approach journalism from the perspective of this very different imaginary. I found myself observing the weight of these relationships at the newspaper and the way an individual newsmaker, in their day-to-day actions, was not forced to do one thing or another but always had to consider the implications of their actions on the networks of relationships that they were embedded in.

The jianghu analogy tries to bring out the question of what it means to be an ethical subject in this social world. What is it to have ideals in a context where you are constrained not simply by censorship orders and commercial considerations, but by these relational obligations, these imperatives and responsibilities that come from the specific interpersonal relationships that one had with others.

RHK: So much has changed in the media landscape in China since you did your fieldwork in the early 2010s. Whereas the ethics of efficacy might have meant killing one story to do another meaningful one in a few months back then, now it could be a matter of years until they get to do something they find meaningful. How do you think these dynamics are different now?

EC: That’s a really good question and a tough one. I would agree with you completely that it seems to have pushed that horizon so much further. And you really have to have faith now. I think everyone recognizes that a lot of people have left the profession — and for a very good reason. The horizon is so far into the future that you really don’t know if it’s going to happen within the lifespan of your active career.

At the same time, I think that the usefulness of thinking about an ethic of efficacy rather than just looking at a lever of control that goes up and down, is being able to see that if and when things change, there is a whole world of people and ideas and relationships and practices that are there, that are going to respond to these changes. 

It’s a pretty heavy-feeling industry. There’s not a lot of immediate excitement about imminent change. But at the same time, there are these deep channels of potential and thoughtfulness that it’s important to see.

RHK: I wonder if even it’s possible now to do the fieldwork you did back then.

EC: No, I don’t think so. It was a moment where people were a lot more relaxed and open. This is not the case anymore. I’ve spoken to people trying to start ethnographic projects around news in China and they don’t get anywhere. Even people I spoke to then are more guarded now, more careful.