Propaganda and Media

Ground Zero

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Tianjininterview

Everything feels like a déjà vu of the 2011 high-speed train wreck.

On Aug 16, four days after the devastating blast in the coastal city of Tianjin, local officials once again turned their daily press conference into a national spectacle, not for its brilliance, but for its jaw-dropping level of confusion. In front of live broadcasting cameras from all over the world, the city’s chief propaganda official could not answer the basic question of “who’s in charge of the emergence response?” In previous occasions, they had also dodged questions in utterly clumsy ways, such as abruptly walking out while journalists watched in disbelief.

The scene is reminiscent of the press conferences after two high-speed trains collided in Wenzhou four years ago. In the aftermath of the accident that killed 40 passengers, the nation was incensed by the arrogant and smart-ass comments from the spokesperson of the Railway Ministry. His notorious comment that “no matter whether you believe it, I believe”, instantaneously became a joke on the internet.

But the two events resemble each other on a deeper level. The chaotic governmental response in the initial few days of the disaster, which dealt another heavy blow to the government’s (remaining) credibility, betrays the fundamental lack of unity in the Chinese officialdom which often tries to project the image of a tightly clenched fist. And in both cases China’s societal forces make use of that precious vacuum to pierce into the territory with determination. The impact of such small breakthroughs, after years of retreat, is yet to be seen.

From the authority’s side, the difficulty with handling the Tianjin blast, as with the Wenzhou train wreck, lies with the structure under which the different administrative jurisdictions are organized. The accident happened in Tianjin, in a GEOGRAPHICAL sense. Administratively speaking, it happened within the bailiwick of the Tianjin Port Group, a state owned entity that falls under the “dual management” of both Tianjin and the Ministry of Transportation. And in that administrative enclave, the different regulatory responsibilities are divided like puzzle pieces among the Tianjin municipality, the Ministry and the Port Group. Fatefully, the permitting schemes relating to the storage of explosive chemicals and the fire department in charge of the port are run by the Port Group under an authorization from the Ministry, not by the municipality.

With the train accident, the Railway Ministry was ultimately responsible for what happened on the rail track, but since it also happened geographically in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, it made the local authority unavoidably involved. The tension between the Railway Ministry and the Wenzhou local government flared up in the initial stage of the rescue work, when the latter disagreed with the plan to remove the car from the track before confirming that nobody was still alive inside it. It put the Railway Ministry, and the entire official communication effort on embarrassing defense mode for five days, until Premier Wen Jiabao came to the rescue.

Official communication after the Tianjin blast was even more disastrous. An evaluation conducted by a think tank affiliated with the People’s Daily accused the six post-blast press conferences as “producing secondary communicational difficulties”, a sophisticated way of saying “they did more damage than good.” Instead of dispersing doubts, officials actually created more of it by acting completely clueless in front of the press. Censor did not help either: “Cutting the broadcasting is only counter-productive in this era of smart phones.”

While some were quick to ridicule the seemingly incompetent bureaucrats, others offered an alternative explanation: these officials, who invariably came from the municipal government, were meticulously following a clear bureaucratic logic. They did not want to second guess the intentions of their colleagues who were actually responsible for the incident. Neither did they want to cover somebody else’s back. Unlike their Wenzhou counterparts who made that tension explicit for everyone to see, the Tianjin authority took a much more passive approach. The theory goes that it is likely they really did not know what was stored inside that warehouse and had no authority to decide who should be in charge of the rescue work.

The apparent lack of mandate and coordination from the government side had a more far-reaching side-effect: its complete loss of the ability to set the agenda. Yes, the self-valorization is still there, but it was quickly muted by waves of to-the-point questions. The aftermath of the blast saw the return of the 24-hour news cycles that the Chinese society had not seen for a while. They were propelled by social media platforms such as Weibo, which fed new raw materials into public attention on a real time basis. Yet it was ultimately the more market oriented media outlets that had been driving the evolution of the discussion and the news agenda. After the initial shock by the magnitude of the explosion, it was the media that quickly drew the public’s attention toward the massive loss endured by the firemen who first responded to the accident. Southern Weekly’s decisive Aug 13 exclusive interview with a survived fireman, who told the newspaper on record that they were not informed of the hydro-reactive nature of the chemicals in the warehouse, set the tone for an intensive round of public questioning of the authority’s liability. The Paper rode on that tide and interviewed the fire department’s spokesperson at the central government level, who incidentally revealed the fact that those first-responding firemen did not fall under the official fire-fighting system, but were “hired hands” employed by the port itself. Caixin immediately followed on that lead by digging out the exact three teams that first showed up at the site and were instantaneously devoured by the explosions. Yet their sacrifice had not been accounted in the official death toll released to the public. The bitter irony of “unequal death” has since then become a commanding mood of the Chinese internet.

The Southern Weekly-Paper-Caixin news relay was impressive, but it was just one thread that the Chinese media were persistently following through. Simultaneously, other bold outlets, including a new Shanghai-based digital platform called Jiemian.com, were trying to uncover possible corruption behind the string of green lights that the warehouse owner (supposedly a private company) managed to obtain before setting up a deadly time bomb in the vicinity of a densely populated area. Clues led journalists to the management and shareholders of the company, including Zhi Feng, its General Manager, who happened to share a very rare surname with a former vice mayor of Tianjin. This line of investigation culminated at the end of the Aug 14 press conference where officials had to exit the venue under the bombardment of one single question: “Who is Zhi Feng?”

Four years ago, the train tragedy defined Sina Weibo as the no.1 social media outlet that had the potential to replace traditional market-orientation media as China’s agenda-setter. The Tianjin blast seems to have catalyzed the re-invention of the traditional media. The perfect storm of media inquiry this time excites a veteran observer into saluting his former colleagues: “In the past few days, most of the first-hand media coverage with added value all came from the familiar bloc of Beijing News, Southern Metropolis Daily, Southern Weekly, Caixin and iNewsweek. Despite the increasingly suffocating and difficult environment, you guys are still charging ahead. Stay safe!” It indeed looks like a renaissance for which those news organizations have been saving up. Almost overnight, they unveiled to the world the formidable arsenal they have accumulated: WeChat live broadcasting, 360 degree panorama photography, and HTML5 aggregation of information. All of a sudden, drones seemed to have become a standard piece of equipment in a journalist’s backpack. And the images that they produced within hours of the incident stunned the world. Many of those news organizations probably have become substantially stronger after this battle: viewership of their materials on digital channels exploded, which almost certainly translates into a larger follower-base online.

A widely read blog by a young journalist who ventured into the core area of the explosion epitomizes this “charging ahead” spirit, showing that the “renaissance” likely goes beyond an instrumental level. Without even carrying a bottle of water, he sneaked into ground zero that was sealed off by the police and stayed in the war-zone for a full day to capture first-hand images of the event. These were heartbreaking documentations of the broken Chinese dreams. The most surreal pictures were the debris that was blown out of the apartment buildings: cash, a Teddy bear and a bouquet. “Everyone’s life is like a pottery jar with lots of stuff in it. But it’s too fragile. Shake it, and it’s broken.”

The metaphor is not new, nor is the sentiment. What’s interesting is how naturally a journalist’s eye-witness account of a blast scene turns into a sort of elegy for the vulnerability of middle class life. It is a resonance reinforced by almost every memorable mega-events in recent years, from the 2011 train wreck to the 2012 Beijing flooding to the Shanghai stampede earlier this year. The plight and insecurity of the Chinese urban middle class are part of what have fueled the pointed questioning and fearless investigation of the Chinese media. Just like what a survivor wrote after escaping from his expensive Vanke apartment building hundreds of meters away from the epicenter: “This high-end neighborhood is only two-hours of driving away from the Tiananmen Square. It’s full of foreigners and multinational corporate executives. Yet only a few banging noises rendered it an empty war zone. Who can imagine that nearby this ‘little Europe’ something equivalent to a tactic nuclear weapon has been installed?”

The familiar motif prompted an influential Weibo commentator to pull out a four-year-old post written at the wake of the train accident on what he termed “corruption terrorism”:

“At the early stage of corruption terrorism, the middle class does not have to worry too much. You are not the ones who work at coal mines or production lines. But when it further exacerbates, most of the population can’t stay out of it, as you cannot avoid taking a train, driving a car or going across a bridge. Your apartment may have a quality problem, so is the food you buy from the supermarket. In its most advanced stage, even the privileged cannot escape from it.”

It seems that after four full years, the country has arrived at the exact same spot. Just as his predecessor did after the Wenzhou train collision, Premier Li Keqiang’s belated arrival at the blast site brought certain order to the post-disaster disorientation. And one of the first things he had to say publicly was the commitment to equal treatment of firemen who lost their lives in the mission, a direct response to an item high on the media agenda.

Some were pessimistic. To them, there is little sign that the iron curtain shielding the corrupt politician-business bond, which is probably the real culprit of the explosion in the first place, is letting loose even a little bit, despite “almost half of Beijing’s best journalists concentrating their efforts on Tianjin.” But for other observers, the mushroom cloud over Tianjin might have changed something permanently: “After Tianjin, the Chinese public’s NYMBY (“not in my backyard”) protests against industrial facilities will almost certainly become unstoppable.” Be it a legacy or a spell, this sounds like the most plausible post-Tianjin scenario that the country needs to face. We may still be circling around our Ground Zero, but something is definitely growing out of it. At the moment, we can’t tell if it’s going to be beautiful or ugly.

Titanic on the Yangtze

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Oriental Star

There are no deadly icebergs on the Yangtze. But the river can be as treacherous as the capricious Arctic Ocean. At around 21:30 on Jun 1, the Oriental Star, a triple deck Yangtze River cruise ship, reached its tragic turn of fate in the middle of a section of the river that was barely 750 meters wide. Amid what was supposed to be an extreme weather event which may have involved a violent tornado, the huge ship, with 456 passengers on board, was instantaneously overturned. When people around the country woke up to the shocking news the next day, what they could see was the ominous sight of a completely belly up ship floating on the river, like the body of a dead whale.

A high profile rescue effort not unlike the one surrounding the sunken Korean ferry MV Sewol quickly ensued. Up to this moment, after 9 days of intense search, 8 passengers remain missing. The death toll on the other hand has reached 434. Only 14 have been successfully rescued.

Much can be said about navigational safety, crew judgment and the execution of the rescue mission. But the one thing unique that emerged from this disasters is the confirmation that disaster communication in this country has thoroughly morphed into a kind of grand “mood management” exercise which involves state control as well as the negotiation within the society itself. The fundamental questions that are being asked by those watching the unfolding of the tragedy are not “what happened” and “why did it happen”, but “how should people feel about it” and “when is the right time to feel about what.” You see debates about whether it is right to be skeptical about government conclusions of the accident, or whether it is appropriate to feel proud of the country when so many people are still under water. You also see strong reactions to the authority’s attempt to downplay the sorrow of the victims’ relatives, and the official media’s overwhelming emphasis on the greatness of the state rescue efforts. Deep down, people seem to believe that how their countrymen FEEL about the disaster matters a lot on a substantive level. No wonder that on the second day of the accident, official news outlets called on the public to “suspend their questioning” and “empty out a virtual highway for useful information to pass”, as if in their mind, people’s sentiments could actually block the passage of imaginary informational ambulances that need to somehow “get” to predestined places.

Part of it can be seen as an old tug of war between the state and the society, where the former, out of social stability considerations, often tries to divert public sentiments towards “desirable” directions, sometimes using utterly clumsy methods. For example, in a widely ridiculed report, the Xinhua News Agency’s Hubei provincial branch opened the article with the nauseating cliché that “the river is merciless but the human world is full of love”, referring to the “grandiose national rescue action.” The online world responded to it with merciless mockery. Shrewd observers see patterns in such behavior, identifying two common strategies of state “mood control” efforts: “national muscle flexing”(兴邦) and “empathy shifting.”（移情） The former refers to a framing that highlights national strength and unity, so as to divert attention from more unsettling details of the disaster. The latter is a technique to have the public focusing on sympathy-worthy figures: the victims, their sons, mothers, wives, who bring out the warmth of human tenderness rather than the coldness of facts. None of the two strategies are coercive. They are achieved by allowing journalists and commentators broad freedom to pursue these tracks, while creating subtle hurdles in the way of hard-core truth-finding. Time is also a factor: digging up facts and details can be time consuming, but interviewing rescuers or survivors is not.

The Chinese web society responded to the above tactics with its own increasingly sophisticated antidote: sarcasm and parody. Almost overnight, people’s WeChat walls were filled with funny, spicy spoofs that make fun of what they saw as silly propagandist maneuvers. One viral article named and shamed “the 10 most disgusting news headlines of the Yangtze ship wreckage incident”, while another one pretended to be a journalism textbook instructing journalists about how to write “moving” pieces about disasters happened in China.

That said, the Chinese society’s obsession with the emotional dimensions of a disaster cannot be entirely reduced to a state/society dynamic. There is a genuine collective struggle about how to come to terms with a tragedy, and the debate about “what to feel” represents the bewilderment of a hurt community. For instance, when truly heroic figures appear, is it right to express gratefulness and offer compliment? Weird as it may sound, this was the key discussion around Guan Dong, the scuba diver who saved two passengers from the bottom of the river.

Guan was among the dozens of divers who were sent down into the muddy, torrential river to save the hundreds of passengers trapped in the ship. It was a dangerous task to say the least (remember, two divers died in the rescue mission of the Korean MV Sewol). Weather conditions remained terrible for the days after the incident and visibility under the water was close to nothing. It was in such extreme circumstances that Guan managed to pull out two survivors. To save them, he let them use his own breather. When he emerged again on the surface of the water, his nose could be seen bleeding due to under water pressure.

His feat soon became the focus of media attention and online bickering. While nobody denied the nature of Guan’s heroism, the suffusing sentiment of feel-good celebration made some wonder if it was a bit over the top when hundreds were still dying under the water and their relatives were in a state of tortured despair. This was where a divergence of opinion occurred. One group deemed the celebration premature and should wait until the rescue mission was completed. The other considered it legitimate as a way to boost the morale of rescuers who were enduring extreme pressure. “He could die in his next shift. Should celebrate him when he’s still alive,” said one commentator.

The search for decency in the treatment of their diseased fellow-countrymen seems to have become a recurring theme in disasters like this. In 2010, thousands on thousands of Shanghai residents lined up in the streets to offer flowers to those who lost their lives in the big fire that devoured a residential building in the middle of the city, a defiant act that was deemed “the renaissance of civic spirit” in China. In the Yangtze case, the local residents of Jianli, the town closest to the sinking, again touched people’s hearts and minds through their selfless support to the victims’ relatives and journalists.

One thing that people do repeatedly after such disasters is turning to other countries’ experiences for reference. Japan once again became a source of inspiration: a Weibo post about how Japan responded to and commemorated a similar incident in the 1950s resonated strongly within the Chinese web sphere, even though some felt repelled by that country. You can’t say such resonance within the society is futile. After all, it was sentiments like this that gave birth to China’s first national mourning period for ordinary people, the tens of thousands of victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

The disaster reminded people of the Titanic. They thought of the graceful captain who sank with his ship, after arranging the evacuation of the children, women and the elderly. It became a sort of shared imagination of naval decency which led people to feel angry about the fact that the first one rescued from the Oriental Star was the captain. The resentment was so strong that it warranted a serious explanation: as the ship was overturned in a matter of minutes, there would have been no time for him to act as gracefully as the Titanic captain. And when rescuers saw him in the river, they couldn’t just ignore him.

All Taboos Are Created Equal. But Some Are More Repulsive.

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BiFujian

If an event finds its way onto the dinner table of my parents-in-law, it means it’s turning into a phenomenon. More so if their own social groups, made of retired former state-owned company employees, who are otherwise immune to cyberspace chitchats, are discussing about it vigorously in their WeChat circles.

The recent misfortune of (former) CCTV variety show host Bi Fujian, falls under this category. On Apr 6, a video clip showing a drunken Bi chanting a modified version of a cultural-revolution-era Peking opera at a private dinner party appeared on the internet and quickly turned into a mega-cyberevent. It was not so much the drunkenness but rather the adaptation that got him into trouble. In the playful and somewhat vulgar adaptation, he referred to Chairman Mao as “that son of a bitch who caused us lots of suffering” and the People’s Liberation Army as “just bluffing.”

Bi’s tremendous fame surely is a definitive factor in the blow-up. He is the host of a prime-time CCTV variety show that promotes grassroots performers. His popularity, especially among a middle aged female audience, wins him the privilege to host the annual CCTV spring festival gala, and the nickname “national grandpa”.

But other elements surrounding the video, the fact that it was leaked from a private party, the reference to Mao, and his communist party membership, played out in a more significant way that shapes the online debate.

Is this just one of those “hot mic” moments where celebrities inadvertently reveal their “real” thoughts? At least the Global Times thinks so. In its Apr 7 editorial, it puts this event in the context of a “globally common phenomenon of leaking celebrities’ private utterances onto the internet”, and places the responsibility squarely on the shoulder of Bi himself (“He has only himself to blame”). In terms of the key elements involved, the incident indeed resembles scandals such as Donald Sterling’s (owner of the NBA basketball team LA Clippers) PRIVATE comments to his girlfriend that he did not want her bringing African Americans to games or taking pictures with them, which led to a big controversy in the United States and Sterling’s removal from the league.

Yet liberal commentator on Weibo still can’t let go of the “private” nature of Bi’s chanting. Some of them see the development as a horrifying infringement of freedom of speech. As scholar Cui Weiping puts it, “We thought in a post-totalitarian era, everybody can say anything in private. As long as you don’t broadcast it, it’s ok.” Some of them go even further by saying that “the bottom line is: speech cannot be punished; thought cannot be policed. If you violate these rules, you are anti-civilization and anti-human.”

Really?

By pushing the issue hard as a battle for freedom of speech (in private), liberals provide ammunitions to their criticizers online (who cite the Sterling case as a slap on their faces), and also risk missing the true point of the whole thing: policing a lingering political taboo in the Chinese society.

That’s exactly what the Maoists are trying to do. From the very beginning, their attack on Bi’s denigration of Mao has been politically loaded. “As a CCTV host, Bi’s insult of our founding father, his mockery of the People’s Liberation Army and the Communist Party is flabbergasting. He himself is a party member and an army veteran. Such a betrayal of one’s faith is thought provoking.” An Op-Ed on the Communist Youth League’s official website goes even further by making it explicit that Mao is the ultimate “political bottom line”: “Mao Zedong is a giant of his era. He is the founder of the People’s Republic… Even if it’s a private party, even if it’s a private space, not everybody, everything can be mocked and satirized like this.”

Dealing with the legacy of a previous leader has always been a thorny issue for an authoritarian regime. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev probably knows it the best when his 1956 secret speech lambasting Stalin unleashed political shock waves all across Eastern Europe. Fully aware of this, China has been very careful in its handling of Mao’s postmortem reputation, even though many of those post-Mao leaders (including Deng Xiaoping and President Xi) had personally suffered from Mao-era political persecutions. It’s within this context that President Xi made his famously dialectic and Newspeakish comment that “we cannot use the past 30 years of history (opening and reform) to negate the party’s 30-year rule before that; neither can we use the previous 30 years (Mao era) to negate the later 30 years.”

By charging aggressively to enforce the political taboo on Mao, conservatives also inadvertently triggered a backlash that is only barely short of an online referendum. It is very clear that many reactions to this incident have been stirred up by the memory of Mao-era horrors. As an 80-year-old college professor writes on his Weibo, “for us old persons, that comment of Bi is just plain truth.” Others invoked the “culture of tattling” that was a feature of Cultural Revolution tragedies where wives tattled on their husbands, and sons tattled on their fathers, just to show their loyalty to the revolutionary cause. One of the posts was sneaky enough to bring the elder Xi (President Xi’s father)’s own experience to the attention of the netizens: “Xi Zhongxun was tattled on by his communist colleague in Shaanxi, and all of a sudden he became an anti-party, anti-Mao element to be banished from power for the next decade.” If comparing a leaked video to Mao-era tattling is a bit far-fetched, the hard-liners’ vituperative diatribes on social media only reinforced the mood. The ultimate moment came when Bi Fujian made his public apology on Weibo on Apr 9. Comments, as many as 100,000 at one point, flooded under his post. And before they were being deleted, a great number of them were in SUPPORT of him. If left untouched, it could easily become an incomplete yet revealing polling of the public’s real take of Mao’s legacy. All the tens of thousands of comments were deleted in a matter of hours.

It is one of those rare occasions when you need to appreciate the restraint shown by official media outlets such as the Global Times. In its signature anti-climax tone, the above mentioned editorial contains passages like this: “If we only use this video to make judgments on Bi’s political leaning, it is obviously unsound. This is not something that should be encouraged after decades of opening and reform… It is also not encouraged to release a celebrity’s private utterances online without his or her consent.” This is where some less melodramatic reading of the event starts to converge. As one coolheaded commentator puts it: “No, this is not going to affect YOUR freedom to say anything at a private party, cuz you are not Bi Fujian. Even if you call the police and tell them you said so, they won’t give a damn. Bi is a state-owned TV station employee and a party member. He is subject to an employee’s code of conduct and party discipline.”

If taboos and political correctness are universal checks against freewheeling speeches, and their very existence does not constitute an infringement of personal rights, then is this Bi controversy much ado about nothing? Maybe not. Not all taboos are equal. And (interestingly) an economist most accurately summarizes the difference:

“In the U.S. you can mock the President in every each way as you like, but never caricature disadvantaged communities such as African Americans. In China, it is ok to say whatever denigrating things about migrant workers or the disabled, but don’t say anything negative about the leaders. If you think this is the same, I have no further comments.”

The latest news says that CCTV has suspended Bi Fujian and has removed his name from the catalogue of CCTV hosts on its official website.

China’s Most Dangerous Woman Meets Her Most Dangerous Rival

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HuShuli  Guowengui

The event of the week is roughly the Chinese equivalence of this: the Huffington Post carries an in-depth story revealing that Donald Trump has built his business empire with the help of corrupt high-level officials at the NSA, who used illegal surveillance methods to crush his business competitors. Trump shoots back with a tweet accusing Arianna Huffington of adultery with his main business competitor and using her website to smear his name for the sake of her lover. He even asserts that Huffington and the man has a son out of wedlock and published the kid’s Social Security Number.

Now, replace the Huffington Post with Caixin Weekly, Arianna Huffington with Hu Shuli, and Donald Trump with Guo Wengui, the billionaire who owns Beijing’s landmark Pangu Plaza, and you get the picture. But to fully comprehend what’s going on, you need to have the mind of a Frank Underwood.

Guo Wengui is a name that was unknown to most people in China until the end of 2014. At that time, a nasty dispute between him and the former CEO of the Beida Founder group regarding top management appointments escalated into a mutual tattling that led to the latter’s arrest a few weeks later. Guo remote-controlled the fight from abroad and had thence forth stayed outside of China. According to Chinese media reports, this fight was a prelude to the downfall of a Deputy National Security Minister, who was a mutual friend of both of them and had used his special power in the security apparatus (a department that deploys China’s secret police) to protect their business interests.

These events put this otherwise low-key billionaire under the spotlight and arouse the interest of daring investigative journalists, including Ms. Hu Shuli’s Caixin team.(See their coverage of Guo Wengui in English)

Caixin Weekly, a leading news magazine in China, is known for its in-depth coverage of the country’s most hefty political and economic issues. Hu Shuli, the founder of Caixin, is considered the “female Godfather” of Chinese journalism and “the most dangerous woman in China.” She treads the fine line between truth-finding and China’s boundaries for freedom of expression, a tricky business of which she is a master. Under her leadership, Caixin has become the go-to place for authoritative reporting of all aspects of the Chinese society. Some also believe that her success so far is in large part due to her personal connections well up to the highest echelon of the Chinese leadership, a network that she cultivated back in the early 90s when she was a reporter for one of China’s earliest business newspapers. One of those contacts is Wang Qishan, then a reform-minded party upstart, and now President Xi’s anti-corruption tsar. (See Evan Osnos’s 2009 profile of Hu for the New Yorker)

Over the past one year or two, along with the intensification of the administration’s anti-corruption campaign, Caixin’s exclusive coverage of those fallen under the campaign’s hammer and anvil has won it applause and also a bit of disdain. Those applauding consider Caixin the standard bearer of journalistic professionalism in China. Those questioning it muse about the extent to which it is being used by one faction of the party against another. Its now legendary coverage of Zhou Yongkang, former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest ranking official being charged so far, exemplifies these competing views. The report (an unprecedented full-volume coverage that amounts to a mini-biography) came out minutes after the official announcement of Zhou’s disgrace. On the one hand, the thoroughness of its investigations (a year-long process) immediately inspired a sense of awed respect among media observers all over the internet (later the lead journalists won awards for this report). But on the other hand, the seemingly unusual access enjoyed by Caixin journalists to sources surrounding one of China’s most sensitive political figures also brought questions regarding Caixin’s “special” role in the anti-corruption campaign.

Such mixed perceptions played out in a very big way last week, when Guo Wengui launched his nasty personal attack on Hu Shuli from abroad. The open letter he released through his company’s Weibo accounts (now deleted) asserts that Hu has ulterior motives in doing the investigative piece about him, namely to smear his name in order to benefit her “lover” the Founder group CEO currently under investigation. Furthermore, the letter goes sensual in detailing the “sexual relationship” between Hu and her lover, their “secret son” and even Hu’s sexual appetite. Besides that, he also accuses Hu of using her magazine as a tool to blackmail other enterprises in exchange of expensive advertisement contracts.

It is interesting that Guo picked Hu as his target, as Caixin was not the only media outlet that did investigative stories about him lately, nor the first to do so. Both Tencent’s Prism, a WeChat-based outlet for in-depth original stories, and Caijing Magazine did similar stories about Guo’s rise from a nobody in rural Shandong province to one of China’s richest business tycoons. All these stories depict Guo as a cunning, ruthless “street fighter” who builds up his wealth by crushing anybody in his way. He has torn down minister-level officials using secretly taped sex videos, and his partnership with high level officials in the national security apparatus was a key to his success.

Knowing Guo’s style, one probably would not be surprised by his move against Hu. After all, if his purpose is to stir up a controversy, Hu proves to be a more suitable target than lesser known journalists. And his tactic to play into voyeurism, the basest instinct on cyberspace, also seems to have paid off. Hu’s sympathizers were upset by how happily netizens are willing to spread the defamatory letter, even with stated “doubts”. Guo also tapped into another dark side of the Chinese cyberspace: its cynical attitude toward truth in general and the resulting disregard for the relative weight of evidence. In other words, many Chinese netizens tend to treat any given information with the same level of (dis)trust. Anything could be true or false, no matter what evidence you present. And this makes a fertile ground for character assassination. In 2012, a prolonged online campaign to discredit popular writer Han Han in effect pushed him out of debates on social affairs, even though the attackers produced no solid evidence to buttress their claims that all his previous writing was done by shadow writers. Hu’s supporters were quick to point out the outrageousness in Guo’s accusations, especially concerning she having a kid with the so-called lover. As a public figure constantly in the spotlight, it is pretty unfathomable that Hu could be pregnant at the age of 50 (based on the identity card information Guo disclosed of the “kid”) without catching the attention of the public. Many Hu’s defenders, among them are prominent editors and journalists, were disheartened by how gleefully even some media operatives spread this piece of junk.

But the apparent ridiculousness of Guo’s accusations led some observers to wonder if a distraction is actually all that he wants. If Guo is indeed a shark fish in China’s muddy water as the media have suggested, why did he present something that is so blatant a lie? Maybe he has a message to send to someone else, one commentator bemuses, and maybe his actual target is not Hu but the person behind her. He is sending a coded warning to her patrons in the leadership that he is in possession of damaging materials not of her, but of them.

This leads some observers into believing that this fight is just the surface of much fiercer power struggles deep underneath. And it is in a way linked to the above-mentioned perception of Hu as being somehow protected or even “fed” by much larger forces that are currently driving the anti-corruption campaign. There are also speculations about who is actually behind Guo. But no matter whether such conjectures are true, one effect of this Guo-Hu feud is the further perpetuation of the public perception that the anti-corruption campaign is merely a factional struggle for power. For the leadership, such a perception can be damaging, as it undermines the legitimacy and moral high ground that the campaign occupies. That’s why until very recently, official media outlets such as the pro-Xi WeChat account under the People’s Daily have been pointedly rebutting claims that the campaign is a selective purge of political rivals. They argue that the campaign has actually indicted Xi’s previous colleagues and subordinates in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, something that’s overlooked by the Western media, particularly the New York Times. But they never clarify whether the purge is of a different nature, where the line is not drawn along personal connections, but between those “born red” and the “hired hands”. (See Evan Osnos’s most recent article “Born Red” for more details) As long as such doubts are not quenched, the campaign may always be seen by cynical bystanders as a grandiose dog fight.

Hu Shuli never responded to the controversy directly[1]. Her stellar reputation within China’s media establishment ensures that plenty of journalistic heavy weights come to her defense voluntarily either out of personal affection or out of a sense of solidarity. On Mar 30, one day after Guo’s open letter appeared on the internet, she quietly posted on her own Weibo account the links to the original Caixin report, without a single word of comment, as if to say: let the report speaks for itself.

[1] Although Caixin the company did send out a statement on Mar 30 saying they were initiating legal actions against Guo’s company for libel.

For Party Propaganda, a “New Normal” Is in Play?

mtj828 Propaganda and Media , ,

The air over the Great Hall of the People these days feels qualitatively different from a few years ago. If you’ve been in China long enough to remember the “twin sessions”[1] under the previous administration, you may be struck by the re-connection between what’s being discussed within the walls of the Great Hall and what’s being talked about on the street, concrete or cyber, today.

It wasn’t like this a few years ago, especially at sessions where there were no leadership changes. We Chinese call these sessions “small-year sessions” just to highlight the inconsequential nature of such gatherings of two rubber-stamp institutions. In those “good old days”, two distinctive conversations happened in parallel: the one within the Great Hall was stubbornly boring and hollow, the one outside was marked by smart-ass cynicism. The cleavage between the two was so wide that it can be seen from space. For many years what dominated media and internet spaces during such sessions had been so-called “silly proposals” (雷人提案) and pictures like this:

twinsessions

The shift to a new pattern happens like taking an airplane: you don’t feel too much when it takes off, but the next moment you look outside the window, you are 8 miles above ground.

It all started with the CPPCC opening press conference last year (can anyone still recollect one single CPPCC opening press conference under the Hu-Wen administration?). At that occasion, CPPCC spokesperson Lu Xinhua responded to a question about rumors concerning former Politburo member Zhou Yongkang by famously saying “you know what I mean”(你懂的), an expression popular on social media. This clever, delicate response to a question that people actually cared about marked that initial hand-shake between the two separate universes.

If in the future, books are to be written about this administration, its decisive re-invention of party propaganda should definitely be a key component of the bigger story. We can debate about whether it is a blessing or curse for the Chinese society. What’s indisputable is its formidable ability to focus and shape public opinion for its own purposes.

We’ve briefly addressed this topic in a previous post. But at the twin sessions this year, things get clearer for us to see how orchestrated a party-led PR campaign can be. Once again, Lu Xinhua plays forward for the team. Since the CPPCC session always opens first, his opening press conference occupies a unique spot that can set the tone for the coming two weeks. And he doesn’t disappoint. Resorting to yet another social media catch-phrase, this time he describes the party’s anti-corruption campaign as “capricious” (任性), and indicates that no one enjoys impunity. Such head-line-friendly sound-bites are almost like a reservation for newspaper and website front page spaces. Soon, they ushered in the actual dinner guests. Barely one hour had passed since Lu’s cute statement when the military’s leading website released information condemning fourteen high-level military officers on corruption charges. The national press corp struggled a bit in recognizing some of the obscure names (some even mistook one officer for a different person). But they did not fail to recognize Major General Guo Zhenggang, the son of a former deputy chairman of the Central Military Committee.  If we stick to the dinner metaphor, what happened next was a national feast on the bodies of the poor father and son. There are playful allusions as expected. But more prepared media outlets quickly handed out dense investigative pieces about the fallen general, his wife and their shadowy businesses. These articles appeared literally minutes after the official announcement, prompting some observers to complain half-jokingly that “I cannot write such an investigative piece in five minutes.” You know what I mean.

If this is fishery, whoever is behind this campaign is not baiting but rather bottom trawling public attention. Tai Kung Pao’s website is more explicit about what is going on: “In previous twin sessions, based on some kind of ‘stability” considerations, they would often try to deflect attention from any particular issue. But under the anti-corruption campaign of the current administration, they would rather warm-up the issue beforehand, then use the twin conference to stir up a focused and heated discussion, in order to align the thinking and consolidate the consensus.”

What’s more revealing is the fact that even when people talk about show business representatives this year, (celebrities such as Jackie Chan, who attend the sessions as “political advisers”), their focus is still on corruption. It used to be the case that these celebrities add “flavor” to a hopelessly dull meeting. Now they are fully integrated to an overarching grand narrative. Plenty of spotlight has been thrown on the fate of star comedian Huang Hong, who made his name from popular comedy sketches at the annual Spring Festival Galas.  As he sat inside the Great Hall this week, news came that he was dismissed as the head of the People’s Liberation Army Bayi Film Studio. It fueled speculations about his entanglement with fallen leaders of the military. The faded luster of former A-list singers such as Song Zuying and Tan Jing, both CPPCC members, also becomes a source of curious amusement. A brilliant treatise on-line ventures a theory linking the leadership’s new propaganda ambitions with the decline of previously treasured propaganda singers. It argues that:

“The top leader needs to establish his authority in a range of areas. He will not tolerate a long-time situation of crumbling party discipline and crass party art. Revitalizing the art and propaganda apparatus so that more political songs can be accepted by the general public is certainly part of his agenda.”

Until more evidence emerges from behind the scene, we can’t really tell if what we are seeing now is truly well-choreographed communication maneuvers or just events that coincidentally bumped into each other. A West-Wing-style comms team serving the current leadership might just be a fantasy. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that the evolution of party propaganda into more sophisticated forms, sometimes unrecognizable as propaganda, is happening. The sleeping elephant is waking up and wants to reclaim the room now.

 

P.S. “Under the Dome” is now officially censored, even though the discussion about it is still lingering in a big way on the internet. Is it being seen as a distraction to the twin sessions? Only THEY will know.

[1] “Twin sessions” refers to the annual National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) sessions, a two-week event stretching from early to mid-March every year.

Tiger-hunting, Season 2

mtj828 Propaganda and Media ,

The new administration of President Xi is known for being communications savvy. Previous social media stunts, including the “surprise visit” to a dumpling place in Beijing and the mysteriously viral animation introducing the Chinese political system, all mark an important departure from the Party’s rigid, hard-sell style of official communications.

But this week, the Central Disciplinary Committee makes people wonder if the administration went too far in the riddle-laden playfulness of its anti-corruption campaign, by releasing an article on its official website lambasting a corrupt Qing Dynasty prince regent who died more than a hundred years ago.

Ever since the President declared that the campaign would spare “no tigers or flies”, many have fallen prey of the anti-corruption apparatus. These include a former Politburo Standing Committee member, a deputy chairman of the Central Military Committee and former President Hu Jingtao’s chief of staff. All “big tigers.”

Observers have summarized the communications “ritual” of the “hunting” process after Zhou Yongkang’s downfall: first, government-controlled media release peripheral information, then they allow rumors to spread on social media without much hindrance, so that the public is fully psychologically prepared when the official news comes out. No surprise or wild speculations.

Such a sophisticated manner to “massage” the public psyche to avoid destabilizing speculations has won the President and his anti-corruption czar Wang Qishan (who was said to be a big fan of Netflix’s House of Cards) admiration for their abilities to have things under control. Therefore, it is no surprise that when the Feb 26 article appeared on-line, the public was automatically cued to ask: is the next tiger already within the hunter’s range?

Some immediately tried to decipher the code through the name of the accused prince regent. As he’s dubbed “Prince Regent Qing”, was this an allusion to someone who may also has that character in his name? Clever netizens were virtually giggling when they thought they had identified the alluded figure, former Politburo Standing Committee member Zeng QINGhong, who was said to be closely associated with the disgraced Zhou Yongkang. But phonetics seems to be too cheap a trick that the Committee could play. More learned commentators dug deeper into the article and summarized interesting facts about the Prince Regent: He was a prime minister, and a favorite of his boss (the country’s de-factor ruler, Empress Dowager Cixi); He deposited a considerable asset in foreign banks and even the Western media at that time considered it disgraceful; he was good at handling scandals, and was able to come out of big scandals bruiseless; He was keen in cultivating his patronage circles. These clues led netizens to believe that the article might be targeted at some other heavy-weights, say a former Prime Minister.

But could the enthusiastic observers be over-interpreting that article? There is at least some evidence that the article might be just part of a routine effort to educate the Chinese officialdom using historical anecdotes. For a moment, observers might have mistaken the author, a Mr. Xi Hua, for a pseudonym representing the President’s team. After all, hiding behind pseudonyms to attack political rivals has been a political tactic since as early as the Cultural Revolution. But a few mouse clicks reveals that Xi Hua is an actual person who just happens to share the same surname with the President. As a mid-level official who worked within the Party Disciplinary system, Xi Hua has a reputation for writing about corruption-related stories of the Ming and Qing dynasties, apparently using his leisure time. His talent has attracted high level recognition, which might be attributed for his article’s appearance on the Central Disciplinary Committee’s official website.

There are people who don’t buy that this is just another random educational article. “(Wang Qishan) never plays random. The fact that the Committee has released such an article means that Zeng has already been “locked on”. Now it’s time for some public opinion warming up.”

Official media determined to be elusive. Xiake Island, a Wechat account run by the International Edition of People’s Daily, published a “cute” article pretending that the editor was interviewing the Prince Regent face-to-face. In the interview, the Prince Regent defended himself against the accusations made by Mr. Xi Hua using somewhat flawed arguments. The intention of this interview? Nobody knows.

Finally there are those who are tired of the hunter’s game. “Wasn’t Prince Regent Qing’s accumulation of power and wealth the result of the Empress Dowager’s favoritism and the political system of that time? The relevance of his personal dispositions almost had nothing to do with it,” said one disillusioned commentator.

Another tried to come to term with the Committee’s riddle with an allegory, “The great writer Lu Xun once described the wickedness of a cat. After it caught a mouse, it did not devour it immediately but teased it until it exhausted to near death. And now it wants us to guess who the mouse is.”