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Marie is kindly letting me reprint an essay she just wrote on Thomas Friedman’s coverage of China in his New York Times columns. She gave a presentation on this last Friday in one of her Beida (PKU) classes.
My quick two cents: especially in the light of the hot tempers Western coverage of China often inspires here, I only wish columnists’ views of the Middle Kingdom could be put into such neat graph form as in Marie’s figure 2 below … but if they could, they probably wouldn’t be very good columns. I’ve also a feeling that a lot of Chinese might disagree with that upwards turn in positive reporting she finds in 2007-8.
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China’s image in Thomas L Friedman’s reports
Introduction
What has been China’s image in The New York Times in recent years? This study attempts to explore the answers to that question by examining China’s image in Thomas L Friedman’s coverage from the years 2005 to 2009.
During these five years, in covering China, Thomas has written more than 150 articles. I choose 36 from these, the most representative coverage of China, try to analyze the content and locate the reasons behind it.
The data is from the New York Times database in the digital library of Peking University. By inputing the key words: AU(Thomas L Friedman) AND GEO(China) AND PDN(>1/1/2005) AND PDN(<4/30/2009), all news which contain China in its headline, or its subject, or its leading paragraph were extracted from the database.
These news items have been classified according to their subject matter, such as Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, etc. Then they are decoded according to their tones, i.e, positive, negative, or neutral.
1. The overall picture
As is shown in Figure 1, during these five years (2005-2009), in covering China, Thomas L Friedman carried nearly as many articles on the neutral side as on the negative and positive sides combined. Table 1 shows the relative importance of various topics in the picture.
Figure 2 demonstrates the changes that the image of China goes through in these five years. It can be seen that positive reporting has experienced an upwards turn in these years.
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Figure 1 China’s image in Thomas L Friedman’s reports (2005-2009)
Table 1 A breakdown on subjects
Figure 2 The trend of China reporting (2005-2009)
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2. Chinese politics
About China’s political system, especially Chinese Communist Party leadership, all reports are negative.
For instance, the building of Tiger Leaping Gorge is a huge project in China. Such a thing was interpreted by Thomas L Friedman as a means of “a still heavy-handed Communist Party”. He wrote that “China’s rigid political system leaves these farmers, who are still the majority in China today, with few legal options for fighting it. That helps explain why China’s official media reported that in 1993 some 10,000 incidents of social unrest took place in China. Last year there were 74,000.” The Chinese Government was depicted as “a tightly sealed political lid”.
Lack of democracy was another theme. One example is the lack of transparency, as he mentioned in another report about environmental protection in China. “It requires a freer press that can report on polluters without restraint, even if they are government-owned businesses. It requires transparent laws and regulations, so citizen-activists know their rights and can feel free to confront polluters, no matter how powerful.”
On the other hand, Thomas L Friedman praised Chinese leaders “because their abilities to meld strength and strategy — to thoughtfully plan ahead sand to sacrifice today for a big gain tomorrow.” He pointed out “many of China’s leaders are engineers, people who can talk to you about numbers, long-term problem-solving and the national interest”.
3. Chinese economic conditions
There were so many reports about China’s boom, enough to impress the American readers with the “staggering economic progress” which China has made. This coverage is the least negative. For instance, Thomas L Friedman wrote “The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.”
For all the achievements, economic problems remain serious in China, such as the problem of rural development, environment pollution, etc. Thomas L Friedman thinks that “Chinese officials still put their highest priority on growing G.D.P. — their bottom line. But for the first time, the costs of this breakneck growth are becoming so obvious on China’s air, glaciers and rivers that the leadership asked for briefings on global warming”.
On the other hand, the Chinese awareness of existing serious problems and their efforts to remedy the problems also found their way into Thomas L Friedman’s reports. The following coverage are good examples: “Postcard From South China”, “China’s Sunshine Boys” , “China’s Little Green Book”.
4. Olympics
The coverage of the Olympics is the most positive. It is perhaps the only major subject about which the positive news greatly outnumbers the negative news.
“China has far outpaced United States in growth during last seven years since it has been preparing for Olympic Games.” He said that wealthy areas were more interesting, advanced and sophisticated than wealthy parts of United States, and attributes this to focus on building infrastructure.
He argued: “US could learn that big, long-term infrastructure projects require intense focus and followthrough(from China)”.
5. U.S.-China Relations
Through Thomas L Friedman’s coverage, we can find that when China’s economy was on high speed of development from 2005 to 2009, U.S.-China relations were very close. He insisted that China would become a “responsible ‘stakeholder’ in the international system.” He hoped that “China and United States can build partnership to address urgent issues of energy and climate change, which affect both countries.” In addition, he points out that nowadays is a “teaching moment” for both of the two countries, which are learning from each other.
Conclusion
This analysis clearly shows that Thomas L Friedman hasn’t been demonizing China. Apart from some sort of distortion of Chinese politics, his reports about China from 2005 to 2009 were more and more balanced.
U.S. domestic politics and culture are different from those of China. How Americans view these differences contributed to how China was portrayed in Thomas L Friedman’s reports. China has embraced the whole world nowadays. I am confident that if Thomas L Friedman really focuses on how ordinary Chinese people live, work, and worship, he will understand China more deeply, even Chinese politics.
Another interesting chat I had on May 4th was with my one of my teachers at Peking University. I was curious what a Beida teacher (who teaches Chinese to foreign students) would have to say not just about May 4th spirit today and PKU students, but the possibilities of discussing contemporary Chinese politics with her wards from overseas.
Here are the more interesting of her answers to my questions. On May 4:
- The new way of thinking after May 4th 1919 (democracy and science) was a bigger break from the past and did more for China’s progress than the Communist Party and its revolution achieved.
- “Protest is not the best way to solve problems now.” Also, because of the Chinese hobby of ‘watching the fun’ (kan renao), protests make small problems look bigger than they really are.
- She noticed the news story (in Chinese, Danwei coverage here) of Wen Jiabao visiting students in his alma-mater, Tsinghua University. As she heard it, Wen encouraged them to “join their ambitions with those of China … go to the countryside and work for China’s development”. She disliked the idea of students being told to think about serving the CCP’s interests above (she felt) their own.
On modern Beida students:
- “New [Beida] students think of work prospects. Before, they thought when will the foreign powers leave China.” [This again echoes what students told me themselves; it’s an opinion I’ve heard from more than one teacher and administrative staff worker in Beida.]
- “[Beida] students now are satisfied with the Chinese government. As for me and my generation, I’m not so satisfied.” [In class, before our conversation, she had grumbled about the one child policy, and used China’s wealth gap and corruption problem as examples with which to illustrate grammar constructions!]
On the freedoms she and her colleagues have to discuss such political and historical matters with foreign students:
- She thinks of herself as different to her colleagues who only discuss these topics in private. She believes in free exchange of criticism and opinion between China and the West. [is the West represented by students like me?! No pressure.]
- [I press her further] “No freedom” for teachers of foreign students to say whatever they like. The reason she gives: if a student’s opinion is their own, fine. If it’s received from their Chinese teacher, then the teacher could get in trouble.
Finally, a little postscript of my own: I attend a weekly lecture class at Beida for foreign students learning Chinese, called ‘Chinese culture’. Topics range from ‘tea’ to ‘China’s disabled population’ (see my second bit and bob here), to last week’s ’60 years of development in China’s countryside’. Any political discussion is all very open: the lecturer in that last one even mentioned the infamous ‘flying the airplane‘ torture – that link is unsurprisingly blocked in China.
However, I couldn’t help but feel a little propagandized on a couple of occasions (and patronized … ‘patrogandized’?). Nothing big: mostly the lecturer drawing attention to China’s overwhelming domestic problems and emphasizing how party policy is solving them in the right way. True as that might be, I think the role of a teacher is to give the facts, analyze them, but leave it to the student to make up their minds for themselves.
- The China Beat blog today republished my post about the Model UN, introducing this blog to their readers. Thank you China Beat!
- So Huang Yueqin, the director of the National Centre for Mental Health, has said that 100 million people, or 7% of China’s population, is mentally ill. That’s funny: in a recent Beida lecture aimed at foreign students, my teacher told us the total figure of all kinds of disabilities was 6.3%. Get your story straight. (And a response a Chinese friend wrote me on facebook to that 100 million statistic: “Let’s put another zero and it’s not far from the truth, hoho”.)
- I couldn’t resist putting up this clever illustration, from a Japanese blog:
 Beida students arrested in the aftermath of the May 4th protests, 1919 It being the 90th anniversary of the May 4th uprising, I spent my lunchtime today sitting in the heat on Beida’s (PKU’s nickname) campus, chatting with students to see if they felt May 4th spirit was still alive in Beida today. I arrived just in time to see two men on a ladder unfurl – with distinct lack of pomp and circumstance – a banner reading, in Chinese, ‘Peking University commemorates the May Fourth movement’s 90th anniversary’. Besides them and a dozen lazing security guards, noone seemed to care.
Here are two representative comments from a young guy and girl (respectively) I talked with:
“Nowadays, students want to earn a lot of money, live a better life … gain knowledge to make themselves famous and rich. They’re not concerned too much for their country. Now society’s advantage is in harmony with individual advantage. If they fight for themselves maybe they will also benefit society.”
“Now, on the one hand because of economic development, on the other hand because of control of speech and failure in 1989, college students pay less attention to politics, are more individualistic, and pay more attention to their own career … I think [May Fourth] should be celebrated more publicly, but it is treated with indifference.”
This, remember, is the very campus where the May 4th movement was born (we won’t let technicalities like the fact that the university switched location from downtown Beijing to the far North-West in 1952 bother us, right?). Beida students – even a brief stay here backs up their self-diagnosis above – have changed from the likes which produced the politically outspoken activists of 1919 (as in the picture) and 1989. There is more to lose than ever before from shouting, more to gain from silence. The class of ’09 will be changing China from within its system, not from outside it with a banner in their hands.
Ben is the first entrepreneur I’ve met who’s never heard of the word ‘entrepreneur’. True: his English isn’t too hot, let alone his French. Also true: the New York Stock Exchange along with many others wouldn’t count an online clothing store reselling sweaters from a factory in Guangzhou as a company. But I was curious how a graduate from a no-name university in Shanxi got his own business running in a county still – on the tin at least – the ‘C’ word.
The answer? Good ole dad. His father – a salesman – gave Ben 20,000 RMB (£2000) when he graduated from university to try his luck in Beijing. It’s a gift which Ben has – unasked – ‘repaid’ roughly half of. A very Chinese act from a culture which values filial piety and regards supporting your parents when they’re old a crucial duty. So what has this 20,000 turned into, a year and a half on? Between 70,000 and 80,000, Ben tells me. That’s the communist spirit!
I asked this question especially in the light of the rising figures of graduate unemployment – expected to be 7 million next year and growing. Those 7 million will include less from Beida and Tsinghua than from the likes of Ben’s old university, but it’s a curve on a graph which will likely be on the minds of soon-to-be-graduates across China, especially in an economic crisis (which is discussed by students as much here as it is in the West).
One upshot of this: there’s more for a student to lose from any kind of political activity. That’s yet another reason to add to the bucket-full of why there isn’t and won’t be any outspoken sympathy for the Tian’anmen movement over its current twentieth anniversary.
By the way, that Economist article I link above mentions a new government loan of 50,000 RMB – £5000 – for graduates to start their own business. Ben had heard of it but thinks it applies only for Beijing students, not those from a countryside province like his. True or no, I think that speaks volumes for how those from the countryside view the prospect of big government in Beijing helping their little capitalist endeavours. And as a point of comparison, I guess that an English graduate in Ben’s position would have thought of a bank loan as his first option…
The following is an essay written by Jack, a Chinese friend of mine, who studies at Beijing’s Foreign Affairs University and will soon begin a career in China’s Foreign Ministry. He recently translated my father’s book Free World into Chinese (Ziyou Shijie) – which you can now find in Xinhua bookstores.
I will only preface the below with one comment. I believe that the majority of Westerners – even those with little to no knowledge of China – would regard Seeing Clearly‘s comments not as seeing clearly at all, but as hyperbolic mouthing off. There are valid arguments on both sides of the fence to be made on the issues raised here, but loud minorities like Seeing Clearly (or his Chinese netizen equivalents) should most certainly not be the ones to make them.
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A China in the eyes of a Chinese
My friend Alec asked me to write an article on China. As a matter of fact, in this highly globalised world, there is still a lot of misunderstanding between China and the West. So I am writing this article to hopefully help our western friends know more about China.
About three months ago, the shoe-throwing incident against Wen Jiabao at Cambridge engendered a hot debate online. I followed the debate closely and read comments of some western friends who believed that they knew a lot about China. But their biased comments made me realize that the information they received was very distorted, thus giving them a wrong impression on China. In the following are comments made by a netizen called ‘Seeing Clearly’ after the show-throwing incident on the website of Christian Science Monitor. His views are what I think shared by some other western friends. I have responded to them one by one with the purpose of showing a true China to our western friends.
‘Seeing Clearly’ has the following comments on China:
- To all those zealots so keen to rush to the defence of the Chinese leader, did it ever occur to you that in China anyone who attempts to protest either ‘disappears’ or is stalked for months by the secret police there?
- Do you know that Google colludes with the Chinese government to censor internet content there?
- Do you know that Nike and other sportswear manufacturers contract out production of their goods to vast ‘enterprise zones’ in China and other far eastern countries, where workers live in shacks or converted Pigstys, and have to work up to 16 hour shifts in vast temporary warehouses for a few cents/yen a day, because they are not allowed to have a union represent them?
- If they try to set up a union, all those involved are instantly dismissed, meaning they’re likely to become homeless and end up begging? If anyone persists in unionising, the contractor (i.e. the multinational making out the orders, whoever they may be), cancels the contract, dismantles the warehouse and goes off to another ‘enterpise zone’ in another country, leaving the workers jobless.
- Did you know that any visitors to China wishing to do media coverage of the area have to get offical (Ed: sic) permission to do so, their coverage is vetted by the government and they are tailed wherever they go by ’secret’ police?
- Did you know that any Free Tibet protests within China are mercilessly crushed not only by the police but by the military, and anyone thought to be an organiser of said protests is imprisoned and tortured?
- Did you know that the religion Fulun (Ed: sic) Gong is outlawed in China and practitioners are persecuted?
- I have absolutely no gripes at all with the citizens of China, and I am no racist, but you have to face facts, China’s goverment (Ed: sic) does not believe in free speech in the way that we do, whatever PR they happen to be putting out at the moment.
- In fact, my comment on this article in China would probably result in my arrest and disappearance.
As a Chinese, I really feel that our western friends should come to China and learn more about this country, instead of being misled by some questionable sources and materials.
To the questions raised by ‘Seeing Clearly’, which I believe show, to some extent, the biased views held by some western friends, I would like to respond one by one.
First, if we attempt to protest in China, we will not either disappear or be stalked for months by secret police. What matters is the way we protest. For those who take violent means like burning shops and hurting or even killing innocent people, they will be prosecuted in China, as in any civilized nation, simply because they violate laws. However, if we take civilized ways to make our voice heard, the government will listen to us and get the problem solved. For example, there was a famous incident in recent years, called PX incident in Xiamen city, where many Xiamen citizens organized a ‘big walk’ in protest against a government’s decision to establish a PX factory there, because that would be harmful to the environment. These people informed each other of this activity through short messages and internet bulletin boards, and walked together with slogans calling for stopping building this factory. As a result, the government listened to their appeals and stopped the factory which was expected to create billions of dollars for the locality. Many incidents like this have happened in China. The way that the Chinese government handles them has been changing for the better, and the civil society in China is also learning to carry out more acceptable and effective campaigns to express their views. As a result, the interaction between the government and the civil society is becoming better and better.
Second, censorship used to be, and to some extent is, a problem in China. But the Chinese government has been relaxing its regulation on the society and making itself more transparent. It would be a more reasonable and objective way to look at a country by taking account of its history, tradition, culture and status quo. As Wen Jiabao put it, we are encouraged to ‘see China in the light of her development’. Feudalist society was in place for thousands of years in this country, and regulating the idea of the public for the sake of social stability has been a normal practice for Chinese rulers, be it right or wrong in the eyes of western democracies. Recent years have witnessed dramatic changes in this aspect, particularly after SARS incident in 2003. Censorship has been relaxed faster than many Chinese expected. The coverage on Wen Chuan earthquake and Beijing Olympic Games was so transparent that helped China earn applause of the whole world. In addition, CCTV news at 7 p.m., which has been the official and most authoritative news for the Chinese people, broadcast the whole footage of shoe-throwing at Wen Jiabao at Cambridge. If we do some research, we will find out that every country has censorship. Governments ban contents that are in violation of laws in their countries. For example, the Chinese government has been banning pornographic websites and websites doing propaganda of Tibetan secession. This kind of censorship has won great support from the Chinese people. Freedom is not absolute or without limits, so the key point is to strike a balance. And this is the direction that we are moving toward.
Third, ‘Seeing Clearly’ depicted a grim picture of the Chinese labor, but the fact goes in the opposite direction. On the one hand, labor-intensive industries are what China needs at the current stage, largely due to employment and education considerations. China has a population of 1.3 billion, and urbanization is an irreversible trend, meaning more and more rural residents are migrating to urban areas. But due to lack of educational resources, these people don’t have high enough education, and many of them even haven’t finished high school. Labor-intensive industries could provide jobs to these less-educated people. When these people get jobs in cities, they need to start from the scratch, resulting in poor living conditions. And the government has been carrying out measures to accommodate the needs of the migrant workers, for example, setting up affordable residential areas for them and providing accessible education to their children. On the other hand, the Chinese government enacted a very strict labor law in recent years in an effort to eliminate acts harmful to the interests of migrant workers, such as delay of payments. As a result, some multinationals are leaving China, simply because the cost of labor in China has been unaffordable. We can find a lot of such examples in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shandong, as well as many other provinces which used to be heaven for multinationals to build manufacturing centers.
Fourth, unionizing is a trend in China in recent years. For example, union members in Walmart negotiated with the company on their payment. Many companies in China are having strong unions to represent the interests of workers. In addition, the media and the civil society have been doing a better and better job to help the vulnerable and disadvantaged workers. For example, a group of university students from Hongkong revealed the bad labor conditions in Nine Dragons Paper company, a leading paper-making company in China. This company has been under severe criticism and forced to make changes.
Fifth, journalists don’t need to get official permission to report in China, nor will they be vetted or tailed by anybody, according to a provision issued on Jan. 1st, 2007. If we ask our western journalist friends based in China this question, I believe they will tell us how big the changes are in recent years.
Sixth, on the question of Tibetan protesters, echoing my first point, we need to differentiate among the protests. Protests without violence are allowed in China, as in the rest of the world, for example, the Xiamen PX incident, Chongqing taxi incident. However, violent protests, as what happened in Tibet on March 14th, are outlawed, which is the same as the rest of the world. Criminals must be prosecuted, simply because they burned houses and hurt people, for example, some protesters even beat Jin Jing, a handicapped girl in wheelchair, to grab the Olympic torch during the relay in Paris. These people must be criminalized, because their acts are against human conscience and violate laws.
Seventh, Falun Gong is not a religion. Their leader Li Hongzhi used techniques to make fake pictures, in which he was sitting in a lotus like a saint. He didn’t allow practitioners to take medicine, because practicing FaLun Gong would be enough to cure their diseases. However, records showed that Li Hongzhi himself went to hospitals when he was ill. Lies like these are numerous. Some practitioners even killed themselves in order to find the so-called ‘Falun’, meaning a sacred circle in Chinese, in their bodies. China bans cults that lead people to commit suicide and make them perverted, but we respect real religions. In China, there are over 100 million religious believers. As an Olympic volunteer working for the Kenyan team, I was able to see that even the Olympic village has a religious center, providing service for athletes and officials.
Last but not least, we will certainly not be arrested or disappear due to making comments. China recently adopted its Human Rights Action Plan, which clearly protects the right of comments.
Generally speaking, I admit that there is still a long way to go for China in all aspects. We welcome criticisms which can press us to move forward. But criticisms should be based on sources which reflect the real condition in this country. A big problem I am finding in western countries is that many western friends are criticizing China based on totally wrong information, and this will make our misunderstanding even worse. Dear ‘Seeing Clearly’, as well as other western friends who are holding similar views on China, you may not know as much as you thought or see as clearly as you expected. Please come to China and see this country with your own eyes, you will find that many of the views or images that you once held on this country have been wrong. And I’m sure you will like the real China.
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