The Currency of Truth

Front matter

P EMILYH.C.CHUA

CHINA UNDERSTANDINGS TODAY

Series Editors: Mary Gallagher and Emily Wilcox

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix CHAPTER I. Introduction I CHAPTER 2. A Contested Medium 28 CHAPTER 3. From Propaganda to Publicness 46 CHAPTER 4. An Ethic of Efficacy 70 CHAPTER 5. News as Currency 96 CHAPTER 6. The Newsmakers’ Jianghu II7 Epilogue 144 Notes I51 Bibliography 157 Index 173

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12573170

Acknowledgments

Preface

Ten years into the rule of China’s unflinchingly authoritarian president Xi Jinping, five years into an acrimonious US-China trade war, and four years into a world-changing global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus first discovered in Wuhan, geopolitical relations between China and many other countries—particularly those of the proverbial West—are tense. China’s political, economic, cultural, ideological, environmental, diplomatic, security-related, and space-related affairs all seem to be matters of smoldering international contention that are constantly threatening to boil over into open conflict.

One issue around which these simmering tensions are consistently though indirectly manifest is the news. Under Xi’s presidency, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has tightened its controls over the press and become more forceful in its measures to silence those who would write critically about its governance, whether these be local or foreign, or professional or citizen, journalists. International media outlets have responded to this and other top-down aspects of Xi’s rule by more frequently reprising the image that was first painted in the Mao era of China’s news media as a mass communication machine that works formidably and relentlessly to mold the minds of its citizens and keep their outlooks and opinions tightly aligned with the Party’s agendas.

Closer to the ground, of course, the realities of China’s sprawling, heterogeneous, and unevenly regulated news industry necessarily become more complex. Rather than a monolithic entity whose workers are uniformly focused on advancing the Party’s objectives, China’s news sector at this level presents itself as an industry where many more heterogeneously positioned and motivated actors are engaged in the pursuit of many more concrete and local objectives. Journalists, editors, newspaper managers, advertising execux PREFACE tives, company bosses, and low- and high-ranking local and central Party officials strive to achieve a diverse array of personal, professional, political, and financial goals. They draw, in the process, on their formal roles and informal relationships, on their access to private information and their claims to public attention—engaging one another in various forms of alliance and rivalry, collaboration and betrayal. These activities inform and shape the truth-claims that circulate in the news, but are not themselves reported.

This book seeks to deepen our appreciation of the complexities and contradictions that characterize China’s contemporary news media by bringing its readers into the lives and worlds of journalists, editors, and executives at one newspaper—a Beijing- and Guangzhou-based weekly that I call The Times. In a media industry saturated with self-interested pursuits, my ethnography explores the practices and experiences of journalists who aspire to write news articles that will benefit and empower their readers. I look at how The Times’ journalists nurtured and pursued this ideal in and through the shifting networks of relations that their own lives were embedded in and with which their sense of their present identities and future prospects were entangled, to ask what the endeavor to be a good and worthy newsmaker comes to look like in such a contemporary milieu.

In constructing a counterimage to the portrait of China’s news media as a tightly controlled and internally coherent mass-messaging system, the aim of this book is not only to offer a different perspective on news in China but also to propose the more general argument that the contemporary institution of news can no longer be analyzed as though it were governed by the modernist social and political imaginary of a collectively reasoning public. In an age of briskly evolving communication technologies, changing media business models, and production and consumption practices that draw an ever-wider range of actors into their networks, I argue that the imaginaries now shaping the news are far more various and disparate than the notion of a public— whether in its socialist, liberal, authoritarian, or democratic variants—allows for. Rather than treating the news in any contemporary context as an extension of the political and ideological systems that are associated with it, it is necessary to ask how the news’ truth-claims are being shaped by the culturally particular ideas and sensibilities that orient its producers, distributors, and consumers to their worlds. At a time of intensifying geopolitical tensions, the hope of this book is thus to contribute to more thoughtful and nuanced ways of engaging with news both in China and beyond.

Introduction

As a journalist for the Politics desk of a Beijing- and Guangzhou-based newspaper called The Times, Zheng Wen! often feels doubtful about the value of his work. The Times is a weekly current affairs and business and financial newspaper with a website, a mobile app, and a print edition that runs an official circulation of over four hundred thousand. Started in the mid-2000s by a Guangdong provincial state-owned enterprise, the newspaper is targeted at China’s growing pool of “societal elites” (shehui jingying) or “white-collar” (bailing) professionals and entrepreneurs. Its mission, according to the newspaper’s official self-description, is to provide this influential segment of society with timely and accurate information that will aide them as they drive China’s socioeconomic progress and development. With offices in Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai, The Times generates sizable annual revenues for its parent company, which plans to become a publicly listed media conglomerate. Yet, despite the newspaper’s large ostensible following and considerable commercial success, Zheng Wen does not feel that his work as a journalist has the kind of impact that he wants it to have. He aspires, as he has told me, to produce news articles that provide The Times’ readers with insights into current affairs that are “useful” (vouyong) and “valuable” (you dian jiazhi). His hope is that such a news service will empower this stratum of China’s society to become a more effective counterbalance to what he sees as the overweening dominance of the country’s Communist Party government. Yet the reporting work that Zheng Wen mostly finds himself doing hardly achieves anything like this. Reflecting on the subject over tea at his apartment, one muggy afternoon in 2014, he told me:

Being a journalist, you sometimes really feel incapacitated (wunai). Nobody approves of what you do. The [Party] leaders (Jingdao)* are always suspicious of you because they think that you’re out to make trouble for them. And news readers don’t trust you, because they think that you only say what the leaders want you to. Why should readers trust you, really? They know that you write news for your own sake and not out of concern for them. This is your rice bowl, after all. You may not be happy about the leaders’ demands, but you’re still going to write as you're told to because you cannot afford not to.

The close involvement of Party officials and the top-down control that Zheng Wen’s comments allude to are well-known features of the news media in China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) large and powerful Publicity Department (xuanchuanbu)* systematically stipulates what the country’s newspapers can and cannot report. This arrangement dates back to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, when the newly established CCP government, with its charismatic chairman Mao Zedong at its helm, brought the nation’s printing presses under its control and designated them the political and ideological mouthpiece, or “throat and tongue of the Party.” While China’s post-Mao marketization policies later broadened the range of topics that newspapers were permitted to cover and created more room for newsmakers to circumvent and even “push back” (Hassid 2016; Repnikova 2017) against the Party’s press restrictions, the conditions that journalists work under today remain highly restrictive. Although there are now a large number of entirely market-oriented non-Party newspapers, all news outlets are to some degree still governed by “the Party principle,” which demands that they accept the Party’s guiding ideology as their own; publicize the Party’s programs, policies, and directives; and abide by the Party’s organizational principles and press commands (Y. Zhao 1998, 19). Compared to his predecessors, China’s current president, XiJinping, has enforced this principle with renewed vigor. He has emphasized that the media should serve as “propaganda fronts” of the Party (Associated Press 2016); created new administrative offices whose mandate is to tighten the censorship of online news and social media (Repnikova 2018; Brady 2017); and overseen a dramatic reduction in the press sector’s scope for critical and investigative reporting (Tong 2019; K. Li and Sparks 2018). Under such politically constrained conditions, it is not surprising that Zheng Wen’s journalistic aspirations were more often frustrated than not.

Yet, besides disgruntlement over the news’ Party-controlled command structure, Zheng Wen’s reflections on the state of his practice also expressed something subtler. His invocation of imagined news readers who neither trusted nor approved of his reporting work cast China’s news media as purveyors of texts that failed to persuade or even engage the publics they addressed. Against the backdrop of our prior conversations, his reference to the journalist’s “rice bowl” seemed to imply that many newsmakers treated their work merely as a means to make a living and were less concerned to engage their readers than to meet their bosses’ demands. Zheng Wen’s mention of Party leaders who were leery of journalists making trouble for them suggested that China’s officials were similarly oriented primarily by their own interests, and were more focused on using the news media to protect their own political careers than to advance the Party’s values and vision. China’s news media from this angle collectively appear to be an institution that is dominated by the Party but does not work simply to propagate the Party’s views. The frameworks that are conventionally used to analyze news in China, as elsewhere, see the news as an institution that works to shape the outlooks and opinions of the people or publics who read it. In the portrait that Zheng Wen’s comments paint, however, the news seems like a medium of texts whose readers know better than to take at face value, and whose producers and regulators are less interested in shaping public opinion than in using their positions in the industry to do various things for themselves. This book is an ethnographic exploration of newsmaking in China that looks not only at how Communist Party politics constrain and shape the news, but also at the novel conceptions and sensibilities that are emerging in this digitally mediated late-socialist context around the more fundamental question of what the contemporary institution of news is becoming. Although the CCP government continues to describe the news sector in Maoist terms as its political and ideological mouthpiece, scholars have shown that the media industry’s evolving commercial and technological conditions have changed the way that newsmakers and newspapers in China work. Newsmakers’ professional ideals are shaped not only by Party doctrines but also by Western news theories and models, as well as by ideas that derive from contemporary reprises of China’s Confucian intellectual traditions (Polumbaum and Xiong 2008; Nyiri 2017; de Burgh 2003a; Simons, Nolan, and Wright 2017; Pan and Lu 2003). The marketization and the digitalization of the post-Mao press sector have created opportunities for newsmakers to pursue these ideals, while also drawing them into new kinds of relationships with business-minded executives (C.-C. Lee, He, and Huang 2006; C. Huang

2000), hard-bargaining advertising clients (Pan 2000), and traffic-watching web editors (Guo 2020). Far from simply functioning as the Party’s trusty and reliable mouthpieces, these various news industry actors pursue a range of different goals and objectives—some of which involve creatively circumventing Party press orders (Hassid and Repnikova 2016; Svensson 2012; Tong 2007), while others consist in selectively and strategically collaborating with local and central Party officials (Repnikova 2017; Tong 2010).

While many discussions of China’s news media have focused on how the truth-claims that it generates shape and inform public discourse and opinion, this book sets out with a different question. It asks how newsmakers in contemporary China think about the texts they produce—how they understand these texts to work, or what they think the news’ articles can and should do; and how they therefore endeavor to conduct themselves in their practice. My ethnography finds that The Times’ journalists commonly regarded their news articles as texts that worked less to influence the opinion of any public than to mediate the myriad agreements and transactions that the news industry’s numerous players were constantly brokering with one another. A journalist, for instance, might write a news article that met an editor’s demands in order to earn the editor’s favor and cultivate a relationship that might benefit the journalist’s career later on. A managing executive of a newspaper might have an article written and published in praise of a local Party official to demonstrate allegiance to the official, who might later reciprocate by providing the newspaper (or the executive) with some form of political protection. News articles in The Times’ milieu were texts that could be made and used by industry players to foster and shape the relationships that connected them.

I draw on these findings to develop the argument that news articles in contemporary China are often regarded and engaged with as texts that work not as a form of mass communication so much as a kind of currency—that is, as texts that are produced and circulated less for their impact on any public than for the private transactions and relationships that their circulation can engender. These are texts whose truth-claims are shaped not only by the propaganda agendas of the ruling CCP but also by the efforts of the many other actors who are involved in producing and publishing them, to gainfully manage and navigate their connections with one another. They are texts that present their readers with certain reports on reality while in the meantime creating new arrangements and relationships, or realities, that their reports do not cover. News, in this contemporary construction, is a medium of truth-claims that are always doing more particular things for more particular actors than they let on.

Social studies of news in contexts across the world are interested in how contemporary newsmaking practices are transforming the institution of news—drawing it away from its normatively imagined role as the public’s provider of truthful and important information, and seeding new notions and sensibilities about its value and veracity. In places as diverse as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Venezuela, and India, the competitive logic and pace of online news is found to be producing young cohorts of newsmakers whose professional identities are grounded more in the new notions of speed and interactivity than in the older journalistic principles of objectivity and balance (Usher 2014; Boyer 2013; Peterson 2015; Boczkowski 2010; Nadler 2016). The computer programs and metrics that news companies now use to measure and optimize their online traffic place journalists in the service of virtual publics represented by “clicks” and “views” rather than readers and opinions (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2013; Boczkowski 2004). News agencies, aggregators, and social media platforms meanwhile operate as powerful “digital intermediaries” (Nielsen and Ganter 2017) that play a decisive role in determining which stories gain attention and which stories do not (Gursel 2012; Munger 2019). These developments are changing what news readers expect and accept from professional journalists (Waisbord 2018; Carlson 2018), as well as what professional journalists expect and demand of themselves (Anderson 2013; Broersma and Peters 2013; Deuze 2007).

Faced with these multiple and far-reaching transformations, media scholars have called for studies that move beyond lamenting the news’ failure to perform its “rightful” public function, to engage, as Matt Carlson puts it, in “a more fundamental rethinking of what news is” (2017, 3). My exploration of the news’ currency responds to this call by describing a world where professionally published news reports are not held to create a “public” whose members come together to pursue the common good, but instead are understood to extend the particular and often particularistic relationships and interests that connect people in their private and personal realms. I explore The Times’ newsmakers’ experiences of working in such a milieu to think about the new kinds of social and political imaginaries that contemporary news practices are contributing to create, and about what the endeavor to be a good and worthy newsmaker in these emergent circumstances is coming to consist in.

THE TIMES

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of newspapers in China. The minority are party-state organs, such as People’s Daily and Xinhua News Agency, which are directly funded and managed by high-level Party and government offices, while the majority are commercialized news companies that are registered under and at least partly owned by a (lower level) Party or government organization, but run as for-profit enterprises.* The Times belongs to the latter category and, like many such newspapers, fashions itself as a provider of “mainstream” (zhuliu) news—a term that serves as shorthand for news that is informative, authoritative, and in line with the overarching goals of the CCP government, without being reducible to mere propaganda. The newspaper’s headquarters in Guangzhou occupies a whole floor of a downtown office tower and houses a team of close to one hundred staff members. The Times’ glossy full-color annual reports describe it as an “archi-

“u tect of China” that provides the country’s “elite” (jingying) and “influential” (you yingxiangli) stratum of entrepreneurs and professionals with knowledge and insights that will shape their outlooks and decisions. Behind this official description of the newspaper’s collective vision and purpose, however, The Times is run by a team of newsmakers who are known by one another to be motivated in their work by very different interests and goals.

At the top of The Times’ organizational structure is the general manager (zong jingli) of the state-owned enterprise that owns the newspaper. When I began my fieldwork in 2010, this position was held by a man in his early fifties whom everyone addressed as Manager Tang (tang zong). A career bureaucrat who had risen to his position through the ranks of various Party offices, Manager Tang was regarded as an official (guan) and, as such, a leader whose main objective was to have the newspaper abide by the regulations and fulfill the directives that the Party authorities issued. While Manager Tang was keen to have The Times become a commercially profitable enterprise, his primary concern was to ensure that it did so while staying in line with the Party’s political and administrative orders.

Second in command to Manager Tang was The Times’ editor-in-chief (zong bianji), a man in his early forties named Huang Tao, whom the newspaper’s staff members addressed as Chief Huang (huang zong). While Manager Tang was formally and in principle The Times’ highest leader, it was in practice Chief Huang who managed the newspaper’s day-to-day operations and who had the most direct say in how the organization worked. Chief Huang was known to have been headhunted and poached by Manager Tang from another Guangzhou newspaper, not for his editorial expertise but for his reputed flair for “pulling in advertising revenue” (la guanggao). It was said that Chief Huang’s employment contract pegged a portion of his annual salary to the amount of advertising revenue that the newspaper generated, and that he would be given a sizable bonus if he succeeded in bringing the newspaper to profitability. Indeed, Chief Huang consistently presented himself to his staff members as “an entrepreneur” (qiye jia) who was at The Times “to do business” (zuo shengyi). While Manager Tang’s role was to grow the newspaper ina politically cautious manner that stayed in line with all official regulations, Chief Huang’s role was to focus on the newspaper’s commercial performance and to boldly drive up its revenue.

Below the manager and the chief were The Times’ two deputy editors-in-chief (fuzong bianji). The first was a man in his late thirties named Lin Youpeng and addressed as Chief Lin. He was described by the staff as a literati-type figure (wenren) who disliked Chief Huang’s vulgarly commercialistic approach to running the newspaper and who was only biding his time until a more attractive job opportunity came along. The second was a woman in her midforties named Guo Aiguo, who was known to be actively cultivating relationships (guanxi) with Party officials at the Guangdong provincial Publicity Department—partly, it was said, to secure political patrons for the newspaper and partly because she believed these connections would help her advance in her own career.

Together, these four leaders oversaw the operations of The Times’ seven news desks—Politics, Economics, Culture, World News, Opinion, Real Estate, and Automobile—as well as various supporting departments that included Marketing, Operations, Layout, Accounting, and Human Resources. Each of the seven news desks comprised a team of journalists and editors, led by a head editor (zhubian) who reported directly to Chief Huang. Each of the supporting departments had a staff of three to eight members, led by a department head (zhuren), who worked mainly with Chief Lin and Chief Guo.

Alongside the formal positions and roles that this clearly delineated organizational structure assigned to each staff member, however, The Times’ journalists, editors, heads, and chiefs were also variously connected to one another by informal personal relationships that ranged from alliance, mutual respect, and collegiality to mutual disparagement, rivalry, and hostility. These relational dynamics played a significant role in shaping the way the newspaper operated. Its editorial, commercial, and organizational decisions were almost always the product of an amalgam of factors that included both the formal positions and responsibilities of the newspaper’s staff members and the informal arrangements and relationships they maintained.

The account of The Times that I offer draws on twelve months of continuous fieldwork that I conducted as an intern reporter for The Times’ Politics desk, working out of its offices in Guangzhou and Beijing in 2010; and on follow-up interviews and visits to the newspaper in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2018. I was first introduced to The Times by a person who was friends with a senior journalist at the newspaper and who knew that I was interested in writing an ethnography of a Chinese newspaper. Whereas most of the studies of journalism in China that I had read were based on shorter research visits to multiple news organizations, my objective was to immerse myself as deeply as I could within a single newspaper to see what alternate perspectives might be afforded by a more sustained and embedded engagement with a fixed group of newsmakers. The senior journalist introduced me to the head editor of The Times’ Politics desk, aman named Chen Ming. I explained my research interests, and Chen Ming, who was curious to see what a fully bilingual US university-based graduate student might be able to contribute to his section, allowed me to join the paper as an unofficial and unpaid intern.

I found that my commitment to working at the newspaper (rather than merely observing its workings) had the advantageous effect of prompting many of my new colleagues to try to help me cut through the official-speak that surrounded it and understand how the newspaper “actually” (shiji shang) worked. While I made it clear that my objective was to produce a work of academic research on journalism in China and not to build a career in Chinese journalism, my colleagues insisted that the only way for me to understand the object of my study was to learn about what their work processes actually involved. Treating me as a regular intern, they therefore offered me practical advice and insights drawn from their own experiences on how to best handle the work of being a journalist—how to satisfy one’s editor’s demands and abide by the Publicity Department’s press orders, even when one did not agree with them, for instance; how to put together a publishable news article even when one had not managed to gather much material; and how to more generally pace oneself in one’s practice in order not to burn out. This mode of interaction enabled me to gain a far more nuanced view of the journalistic profession in China than I would have gotten had I relied only on the kind of formal interviews I had conducted during my preliminary research period, which tended to yield mostly general reflections on the state of journalism in China and conjectures on how it compared to newsmaking in the United States.

I worked most closely with three journalists at the Politics desk—Zheng Wen, Liang Yong, and Fan Xiaofei, all of whom had been at The Times for one to two years when I joined and spent a great deal of time together outside the workplace, as friends as well as coworkers. The three journalists framed themselves as newsmakers who—in contrast to many of their bosses and colleagues—wanted to use their positions at the newspaper not only to advance their own interests but also to produce something of value and benefit to news readers. Whereas many news industry players were entirely focused on creating and pursuing various business and career opportunities for themselves, the journalists said that their goal as newsmakers was to “say some true words” (shuo dian zhenhua) and “do some real work” (zuo dian zhenshi). They wanted not only to market The Times as an authoritative and impactful newspaper, but also to produce, and provide its targeted readers with, the informative and insightful news reports that it promised.

In my capacity as an intern, I followed the journalists on their beats—to visit news scenes and gather information, conduct interviews, attend press conferences, and network with government and industry figures. I often worked alongside the journalists while they drafted their news articles, assisting them by doing tasks such as transcribing interviews, gathering background information from online sources, and summarizing “the foreign media’s” (waimei) perspectives on the issues they were writing about. I was part of the Politics section’s online chat group and attended their regular online and in-person meetings. Beyond The Times’ Politics desk, I also conducted interviews and engaged in informal conversations with journalists and editors from the newspaper’s other units, particularly its Economics, Culture, and World News desks, its sales and marketing department, and its executive-level leaders. I attended countless staff meetings, meals, and karaoke singing sessions, where I was immersed in the newsmakers’ world of intermingled personal and professional relationships. To garner a sense of the broader news industry in which The Times was situated, I also conducted interviews with journalists and editors from a range of other newspapers and news websites in Guangzhou and Beijing.

My interactions with my interlocuters and the access they granted me to their lives were shaped partly by the ethnic and cultural identity markers that I carry as a Chinese Singaporean—markers that led many to regard me as someone who was foreign to China’s political context but familiar with

IO THE CURRENCY OF TRUTH their social and cultural norms. While my interlocutors were always informed of my position and objectives as a foreign researcher, this sense of cultural commonality brought an air of openness and candidness to our interactions. Being a junior colleague close in age to The Times’ Politics journalists also allowed me to form social relationships with them that went beyond the workplace. I shared apartments with Zheng Wen for varying periods of time in Beijing, and stayed at Liang Yong’s family home while working and later visiting the journalists in Guangzhou. I was brought into the personal realms of the journalists’ lives, forming friendships with their spouses, parents, and, later, with their own young children. Whereas many studies of news engage with newsmakers only on the subjects and in the spaces of their professional expertise, the friendships I formed with the Politics journalists enabled me to become attuned to the numerous ways in which their outlooks and actions as professional newsmakers were embedded in and connected to their broader social lives and worlds.* The perspective that I offer in this book emerges from the understanding that I gained of the journalists’ efforts not only to produce good and worthy news articles, but also to be good and worthy people in China’s briskly changing social milieu.

THE CULTURAL MEANING OF THE MEDIUM

While many discussions of news are premised on a liberal conception of the press as a guardian and pillar of democracy, and an institution whose function is to enable the members of a public to exercise their rights as citizens, anthropological studies of journalism have shown that newsmaking is thought of as different things in different contexts. While all journalists “report the news,” the diverse environments in which they do so constitute news reporting as different kinds of practices. Newsmaking can be a practice of serving politicians (Hasty 2005; Roudakova 2008), voicing the grievances of the people (Samet 2019; Jusionyte 2015), shaping international opinion and foreign policy (Bishara 2013; Nyiri 2017), or creating engaging digital experiences (Usher 2014; Anderson 2013).

Rather than setting out with a preconceived understanding of what the news’ rightful function is, I follow anthropologists in approaching news as a discursive institution whose character and significance are constituted differently in different contexts. Literary and social theorist Michael Warner

Introduction II has argued that a discursive institution is shaped not only by the contents of its texts but also by the ideas and sensibilities that its writers and readers have about the nature of the texts themselves—or, in Warner’s terms, by the “cultural meaning” (1992, xi) of the medium. In The Letters of the Republic, Warner traces the emergence of the liberal notion of the press as the site of a democratic public sphere to the culturally particular conceptions of printed (as opposed to handwritten) texts that became dominant in eighteenth-century America. He shows how printed books, letters, pamphlets, and newspapers came to be regarded and engaged with as texts that were “impersonal by definition” (38)—or that people could only properly participate in by suspending the social and economic relationships and interests that concerned them in their personal lives, and entering into a mode of reasoning that was “categorically differentiated from [their] personal modes of sociability” (39). Among the literate and politically engaged strata of society, printed texts were construed as documents that demanded to be engaged with from a standpoint of “rational and disinterested concern for the public good” (42). It was on the grounds of these culturally constituted “assumptions about texts, speakers, addressees, and ‘the public’” (xi), Warner finds, that the notion of a political public sphere existing in the printed mass media gained purchase.