China Pop by Jianying Zha

Author:Jianying Zha [Zha, Jianying]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595587565
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2011-09-08T05:00:00+00:00

IN THEIR pursuit of the average reader, many papers are testing the new boundaries the government has staked out. The average reader is apparently tired of “hard news”—the kind of stories found in the official print media that go on and on about Party congresses, production rates, and ideological education but remain silent about political oppression and abuses of power. How much more inviting is gossip about movie stars and millionaires! Look at those colorful photos, sensational titles, lurid tales! Readers are sure to gulp it down. With the new formula, the papers have begun to support themselves, attract advertisements, and relieve the government of its financial burden, but only at the expense of the official papers. Once-dominant organs—such as People’s Daily and Guangming Daily—still arrive in the offices of all state enterprises nationwide; but few look to them for interesting coverage of popular events. They can’t compete with what’s on the newsstands.

Some frown at the vulgarity of it all, some criticize the degrading fact that most Chinese journalists now take fees or bribes from the people they report on, and some think that all this “soft news” is the new opium for the masses, intended to distract them from harsh realities. “I’m deeply disappointed by our reporters,” said the prominent dissident journalist Dai Qing. “They are totally corrupted by commercialization.” Another noted magazine editor hissed, “All these noises they’ve made, and you can’t find even one paper of a quality and weight that’s comparable to World Economic Herald”—referring to a Shanghai-based reformist paper that the government shut down around the time ofTiananmen Square. (A good number of dissident journals that had been quietly building up semiautonomous bases within or on the margin of the official press were also either suspended or purged, destroying almost overnight the scattered yet lively pre-Tiananmen growth of a Chinese version of “civil society” structures. Dai Qing herself was jailed for a year, and her reporting is still banned in China.)

Chen Xilin, the young director of the weekend edition of the sober and serious China Business Times, is impatient with such criticism. “Don’t talk to me about Tiananmen; it gives me a headache. Those elites have done a good job of enlightening us. They taught us a lesson. But their time is over. Tragic, yes, but that’s history. The new elite is a lot smarter, and one thing is certain about the future of China: it belongs to smart people.”

With his reputation for having created the first Chinese paper for whitecollar professionals, Chen is typical of China’s post-Tiananmen elite; he works hard and plays hard. He edits by day, frequents expensive restaurants and karaeoke bars in the evening with visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan colleagues (who pay the bill), and stays up late with pots of coffee to draw editorial cartoons for his paper and to dash out short essays that bring him extra income. By shunning harsh political propaganda and focusing on the economy and lifestyles, his paper embodies a brand of journalism that is smart, slick, and politically moderate.

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