Abstract
In China as elsewhere, netizens have made new demands upon government and challenged conventional media to respond to popular concerns. Established approaches to controlling the media may be otiose; Party leaders are stressing the value of cooperation rather than confrontation and calling for a new relationship between media and authority. This article examines how the department of a city government traditionally tasked with controlling the media and shaping opinion is seeking to come to terms with the calls from the centre and, in the process, think up a different kind of relationship with the media. From dealings with press officers over four years, the authors identify a reflective and dynamic response to the present challenges. The respondents speculate that arrangements being put in place to deal with the new media environment may change fundamentally the relationships between authority and citizen, and the authors evaluate this.
If you go on YouTube today and type in ‘My father is Li Gang” you will find a rap song and many pictures, to say nothing of gigabytes of comment. The story ‘My father is Li Gang’ must be every parent’s worst nightmare. A young man is driving his father’s car on the campus of his university; he’s been drinking, and he knocks down two girls; one is killed, the other seriously hurt. He tries to get away, but he fails when the car is surrounded by angry students who call the police. Far from being contrite, when a policeman comes to nab him he is alleged to have said: ‘You can’t touch me! My father is Li Gang!’ 1
Li Gang was a senior policeman and, before the internet, the son’s boast might have worked. Less so now. Such behaviour is mercilessly publicized and taken note of by the media. Today people protest and the central government logs the protests as legitimate manifestations of grievance; people sue, and sometimes they win; people publicize through the internet what the offline media are too constrained to broadcast or publish, and the authorities are obliged to accept the popular verdict. So in this, changing, China, people were furious about the policeman’s son.
The Li Gang case illustrates how the media are changing the law, or pushing for it to be implemented (Liebman, 2011: passim). Three cases, all of which came to a head in 2007, show this most clearly. With the Xiamen paraxylene plant case netizens mobilized public opinion against a proposed development and stopped it. Because of their success it is possible that people affected by such proposals in future may be consulted and their permission sought. Familiar around the world is the Chongqing nailhouse case, in which a family of victims of urban development held out over three years for greater compensation for the loss of their home. A picture of their house, sticking up like a nail in a cleared building site, was posted on the web and moved millions of netizens before becoming an icon all over the world. The nailhouse dwellers eventually won the compensation they wanted.
In the matter of the Shanxi brick kilns, netizens exposed the collusion of civil servants and police with employers to exploit and enslave child workers in brickmaking. Their activism forced the authorities to deal with the issue.
And the offline media? To an extent they appear to be reacting to the bloggers and tweeters, who help set the media agenda. This study is of the efforts of a local ‘branch office’ 2 of the Propaganda Department to adapt to this new environment, in which the roles demanded of them contrast with what they are used to.
The power of the Central Propaganda Department
There is a presupposition widely adhered to in the Chinese polity that the media must be supportive of authority and that it is one of the duties of government to use such media as are at its disposal to educate and inform the public as it sees fit.
This approach has a number of facets which can seem to outsiders, at least to those from the Anglosphere, remarkable. For example, every city government will have a section responsible for spiritual development and civilized comportment, which will promote cleanliness, courtesy and good behaviour among citizens, through campaigns, competitions and public events. Communist media theory aside, officials who are as attentive to detail as this understandably also regard it as their duty to ensure that opinions are guided and that information that is subversive of interpersonal morality or good administration is excluded from publication. Because of the legacy of Communist organization, regulating public communication is tasked to the Central Propaganda Department (CPD) of the Communist Party of China (CPC) (McGregor 2010: ch. 8).
As an illustration of the power of the CPD it is relevant to note that, in early 2011, when it was widely reported that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had visited petitioners at the State Bureau of Letters and Calls to show his concern that petitioners against injustice were not being treated appropriately by many local authorities, Chinese observers reported that the CPD had criticized the Prime Minister for so doing, a surprising but not unprecedented revelation. 3 The year before it had been reported that parts of Wen’s speeches had been censored on ‘at least four occasions in recent months’ (Moore, 2010). These incidents give an idea of the authority attributed to the CPD.
Quoting a Party publication, Shambaugh comments that its definition of the CPD:
means that virtually every conceivable medium that transmits and conveys information to the people of China falls under the bureaucratic purview of the CPC Propaganda Department. This includes all media organs, all schools and educational institutions, all literary and art organs and all publishing outlets. (2009: 107)
The CPD is responsible for (1) issuing instructions on content, (2) the professional development of content managers (editors, publishers) and for (3) monitoring the content of communications to ensure that they do not transgress the official line on topics that the Party considers important. It has units at every level of administration, of which local newspapers and broadcasting channels must take account. The CPD answers for the network (xitong) of information and cultural institutions to the most powerful decision-making body in China, the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPC.
It guides and supervises the xitong members (Perry, 2001: 27–8), which include: the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the State Administration of Press and Publication, the State Council Information Office, the Ministry of Culture, Xinhua News Agency (New China News Agency). It shares with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) the task of filtering and monitoring the internet. Each of the organizations will have provincial and local branches.
How control has worked
In the CPD a small group discusses what matters are to be emphasized in the media during the forthcoming week and how current issues may be treated. Once a decision is made, the group calls in editors for ‘synchronization meetings’ and then issues weekly guidelines. In the case of sensitive subjects of which the Party is leery, special instructions will be issued to publishers and editors as to what subjects cannot be covered (and what should be). The angle to be used in covering certain stories will be specified.
Television documentaries and major newspaper features may be submitted for pre-publication review, but the most common means by which control is exercised is post-publication, at the regular meetings when publications are analysed and evaluated, giving editors and their staff guidance as to how to handle themselves in the future. The CPD carries out its monitoring responsibilities by using teams, often of retired officials, to read, watch and listen to all publications considered relevant.
From time to time managers in the media industries will be obliged to attend awaydays at which they will be guided as to the Party line on current issues and how to deal with issues. 4 There are many cases of editors being disciplined. 5
As far as the internet is concerned, there is monitoring of online dissent and, from time to time, punishment; government employees with disguised identities post anonymous commentary online; users of BBS websites and major web portals must register their real names and computers at schools and internet bars have software installed to prevent access to websites with politically sensitive, or religious, or pornographic material.
Responding to the new environment
Since 1978 the CPD has been faced with a number of challenges. In the 1980s it became clear not merely that people no longer believed in the state ideology but that few of the traditional methods of mobilizing support or the values so forcefully propagated in China worked after the Cultural Revolution. By 1989 journalists were demonstrating in the street for freedom of information, ‘freedom not to lie’ (Polumbaum, 1990).
After the Tiananmen Massacre of 4 June 1989 the leadership of the Party was shaken. In its analysis of the causes and repercussions, it decided that much of the blame lay with a failure by the Party to remember that thought work is the basis of everything (Brady, 2007: ch. 1). This had permitted pernicious ideas to take hold, in particular the fraudulent concepts of democracy and freedom of the press that were advocated by the USA and others. In those countries only the rich enjoy democracy and freedom to speak and advocating them for China is a weapon in their battle to divide the Chinese people and bring down China. Those who have been seduced into echoing this foreign line need re-education. Thus journalists and culture workers were told to go down to the factories and villages to learn from the people. They should remind themselves that the media serves the Party, for the Party is the authentic representative of the people; western freedom is a chimera.
The tone of speeches from senior leaders was uncompromising; not only was ideology to be returned to as the bedrock, but the CPD was to have powers and authority enhanced. Li Ruihuan told the media that their job is to promote stability, provide less politics and more stories that attract the interest of ordinary people, inspiring them to work towards China’s economic development. 6
By the 14th Party Congress in October 1992 those against the planned economy had won the argument, with China now officially designated a ‘market economy’, but there was no one advocating anything other than stricter political control of the media. The slogan was flexible economy, inflexible polity. The system of briefings, monitoring, ideological development and rewards was revamped (Ding, cited in Brady, 2007: 49).
At the 16th Party Confress in 2002 President Hu Jintao and the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, broke with recent preoccupations by acknowledging the concerns about the expanding gap between rich and poor, and the fact that the welfare of the masses had been put low down the list of priorities during the preceding period, when economic development and marketization had mattered above all. The following year Hu called on the media to be more realistic, to find out what was really happening. Investigative reports into social issues and corruption were to be encouraged.
According to A, a senior decision-maker in Hangzhou Press Office, much emphasis was placed upon accountability and transparency at the 17th Party Conference in 2007. President Hu wanted ‘to guarantee that the powers vested in us by the people be used to the benefit of the people; to guarantee that powers are exercised correctly, authority should be exercised in the open’ (A). Because the people have ‘the right to be informed, the right to take part, the right to express opinion and the right to supervise, we need decision-making and implementation to be public, accountable and credible’. It was important to have efficacious mechanisms of discipline and inspection that could deliver.
Theory has therefore evolved continuously in the same direction; towards seeking ways of increasing participation and making authority more accountable while maintaining the right to control content. The media are seen to play an ever more necessary part even as the old idea of the media as the mouthpiece of the Party is abandoned.
In the 1990s, the media had been made largely economically independent of government, driving them more and more towards satisfying their increasingly demanding audiences. The private sector not only grew as proportion of the economy but also as an influence on life generally, providing new models of organization and values. New information and examples entered China as the country opened up to foreign trade and investment, sent hundreds of thousands of students abroad to study and sought to internationalize courses at home to encourage foreign applicants. And then there was the expansion of opportunities for communication brought about by digitalization: the internet, text messaging, social networking. How has the CPD and its related agencies dealt with these changes?
In a convenient analogy, Brady likens the hold of the propaganda xitong in China today to that of the medieval Church in Europe (Brady, 2007: ch. 2, passim). Its high mandate is to attend to things spiritual and normative, to guide the minds of the people into the right paths and, in particular, to ensure that its emissaries, those employed in the media, deviate not. We might add that the Church provided a parallel structure of authority much as the CPC does. But whereas in Christendom the Church’s authority has withered away, Brady argues that, far from being an organization whose usefulness, in the era of the market society, has passed, the propaganda xitong has become ever more important. It is so because the Party has understood that it is not by force but by persuasion that it must now exercise power, and because the system itself has adopted advanced theories and modern techniques in order to influence attitudes and behaviour. She also notes that, from 1992, the CPD has ranked ahead of what was previously the most powerful body in China, the Central Organization Department (Brady, 2007: 23).
The battle being fought by the xitong today is a different one to that fought before 1989. Instead of seeing political subversion from abroad as the main threat, or instead of seeking to uphold a socialist ideology, the xitong is seeking ways of coping with the new activism. What steps has it taken?
First of all, the media are permitted an expanded repertoire of topics, in fact very few areas are out of bounds and these are well known. Exposure of failures, corruption, problems as yet unidentified by the government that were in the recent past mainly confined to the Restricted Circulation Publications; more and more of these kinds of revelation have found their way into the public media as investigative journalism has been encouraged (Tong, 2011, passim).
Opinion polls are regularly conducted at both national and local levels by the Public Opinion Office of the CPD and its lower-tier equivalents. The results feed into policy making and sometimes into the media. Starting with the Strong Country Forum website, the CPD began to use the internet to set agendas, marshal opinion and direct discussion.
In the 1990s, the government introduced ‘open government’ programmes and also had officials examine foreign examples, with a view to China creating its own equivalent of freedom of information legislation.
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In January 2007 the State Council published a decree on Government Information Openness:
formulated for the purpose of safeguarding the legal access to government information by citizens, legal persons and other organizations, improving the transparency of government work, promoting the administration according to law and giving full play to the role of government information of serving the people’s production, living and social and economic activities.
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More than 40 municipal-level governments subsequently promulgated rules of the same kind. 9
Vice Minister Zhang Qiong of the State Council’s Office of Legislative Affairs explained, in introducing the (Open Government) Regulations at a press conference, that they are aimed at safeguarding ‘the public’s right to know, the right to participate and the right to supervise’ 10 and are intended to ‘help curb corruption at its source, largely reducing its occurrence’. 11
Finally, since 2002, the government has introduced and refined a ‘Briefing and Spokesperson System’ by which all government departments at all levels are expected to appoint, from their career officials, people who will become specialists in dealing with media and public requests for information and comment from their organizations. The system of public spokespersons is now well organized (Dong, 2007; Li, 2007) and there is extensive training of them in their domestic responsibilities and functions by Tsinghua University School of Communications, and in their understanding of and skills of dealing with international media by the University of Westminster’s China Media Centre. In an interview on the subject, Minister Zhao Qizheng explained:
The spokespersons themselves are senior officials who may attend the high-level meetings of their departments or local governments, so they know clearly what the organizations are considering and what policies they are making. From this information they select what should be brought to the public soon. The spokespersons must also follow the interests of the media and the public to make sure that the information is responsive to their interests. The spokespersons should keep in contact with the media after the press conferences, remaining easily accessible to give them more information while acquiring feedback.
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The study: local adaptation to national priorities
It is relatively easy for a government to pontificate on how its apparatus should adapt to new circumstances, but much more difficult to ensure execution. For this reason it is interesting to examine how the local officials, intended to implement the policies of the centre, adapt their thinking and behaviour.
Hangzhou: system and situation
For simplicity we will refer to the Hangzhou propaganda xitong by its informal name of Hangzhou Press Office (HPO), but readers should not imagine that the, formally named, International Communication Office affiliated to the Propaganda Department of Hangzhou CPC Committee is merely a press office in the Anglo-American sense. Overall, it is responsible for internal and external communications and the internet.
The institutional structure for the execution of these functions is referred to as a ‘Five + Two Structure’, indicating five offices and two associations: the International Publicity Office takes the responsibility for coordinating foreign journalists and promoting the city’s brand abroad, promoting the ‘Going-out’ policy and implementing the ‘opening up’ policy; the International Communication Office is responsible for promoting international cultural exchanges; the Press and Coordination Office is responsible for establishing the spokesperson system for both Hangzhou government and CPC Hangzhou Committee, including making administrative rules, organizing and implementing communication training, in particular spokesman training, press handling, promoting media literacy, and research into government communications; the Internet Publicity Office takes responsibility for monitoring online opinion and setting the public agenda online, a more ideological function; the Internet Regulation Office is responsible for news website registration and supervising illegal internet sites.
According to respondent B, the Hangzhou International Cultural Exchange Association and Hangzhou Internet Culture Association are affiliated to the HPO. Hangzhou Internet Culture Association is the first association in China to take responsibility for ‘promoting online culture’. The Hangzhou government is aware that a large number of online websites (nearly 150,000 websites) are based in Hangzhou, but that only 50,000 are legally registered with the government, making it difficult for government to regulate them. Hangzhou officials notice that:
those illegitimate websites quite often do not follow administrative rules. For example, they fail to colour the website in grey when reporting deaths as a result of earthquakes, and they post illegal online publications. Such websites, being unregistered, cannot receive internet virus monitoring reports from the government. (B)
To deal with this, the HPO has organized the Internet Culture Association, which aims to decrease the gap between government and the websites. The Association has organized several offline events to attract website entrepreneurs to become members, such as ‘success experience sharing seminars’ and meetings to promote investment opportunities.
Administrative rank employees from the HPO underwent briefings about the operations of their UK equivalents in 2007 and 2011. There was also a preliminary orientation session in 2010, at which interviews were conducted. The briefings were comprised of the same elements, though in different proportions and with different emphases:
overview of Anglophone media cultural background
overview of UK media system
government–media relations
theory and practice of media handling
problems and case studies
discussions with UK counterparts.
In 2007 the main concern of the authorities was to prepare media handlers to deal with the western media in preparation for a huge influx of foreign media personnel expected for the Olympics. In the programme managed by Tsinghua University and the University of Westminster over 2007 alone, 344 spokespersons took part in training exercises, of which the main purpose was, according to the debrief report:
to equip Chinese state and enterprise media handlers with understanding of and trust in British concepts of media functions and journalistic professionalism, and improve their skills and practices and lay the foundations of a new profession. (Zeng and Li, 2008)
In the debrief interviews press officers noted a number of issues and these were reported (with extensive quotes in the original) as follows:
Many Chinese press officers consider themselves as part of the authority system of the society. In another words, they regard themselves as ‘officials’ rather than ‘communicators’. This programme emphasizes that the role of press officers is to serve the media by supplying public information from the government as well as delivering skills and techniques of media handling in practice. It is hard fundamentally to change the participants’ perceptions on [sic] the role of government press officers and media handlers.
Further what they are facing is how to balance the two roles of the press officers of professional officials on the one hand and communicators to the media and the public on the other. This should be paid attention to in future projects.
Chinese participants are generally pragmatic. They regard the training on the practical skills as more useful than theories. Government officials indicated that they have more or less heard of western theories on media or journalism, but have very few opportunities to be practically trained.
This programme is to provide an opportunity for the government media handlers to know media constructively and systematically. Only if they understand the values, functions and game rules of journalism can they learn how to boost relationships with the media. Many participants affirm the contribution of the programme on this point.
Never think about transforming participants. This programme or future similar projects might be influencing rather than transforming Chinese officials. Again, it is hard to persuade them to trust British concepts and skills of media handling, but it can be affirmed that many participants took on board new ideas about British politics, academic theories and media through the workshops in China and the visit to London especially. That must facilitate the cultural proximity and respect of the Chinese media handlers for the UK ideas. (Zeng and Li, 2008)
Generalizing from the report overall, the 2008 evaluation revealed the spokespersons to be ‘officials’ rather than ‘communicators’ who ‘told’ rather than ‘discussed’. These respondents felt there to be a contradiction between their roles as friend of the public and as official; they knew and discounted western theories on media or journalism but felt that they needed to understand the self-image and game rules of foreign journalism even while they lacked trust in ‘foreign’ concepts and skills of media handling. In general, they framed themselves (in 2007) as defending a different system against foreign subversion.
By 2010 the focus was less on the foreign media and more on working out how authority might cooperate with both the domestic and foreign media to realize common objectives – good government and the resolution of problems. In a series of interviews, the respondents showed that they were aware of the new situation:
the media environment is changing dramatically. Both the government and CPC officials are living ‘naked’ with their work and life exposed to the public. Therefore, the officials have to get used to these changes and improve their capability of handling media. Meanwhile, in the new media environment, the traditional newspapers which are regarded as the organ of CPC are generally losing their credibility. Meanwhile, there is a growing number of journalists trained using western journalism handbooks. We have seen more critics of government in the media than before. Yet, the government and CPC officials have learned very little from western governments’ media handling experience. (A) The Hangzhou government is willing to hear critics from media, but what journalists should do is to criticize government rationally rather unjustly. Normally, irrational criticism of government appears when the journalists adopt rumours when they do not have access to sources, or it happens when there is misunderstanding between government and journalists when they do not share information. Therefore, [HPO] is hoping to make the criticism of government more rational. In order to do so, [HPO] has several plans, for example, to launch administrative rules on information transparency and to establish a set of news release procedures. If these are done, the journalists might make criticism rationally rather than adopting rumours. (C) In 2009 Vice-president Xi Jinping mentioned the importance of improving media literacy in his speech given in the Party School of the CPC Central Committee as one of the six capabilities officials should improve. President Hu also mentioned ‘media literacy’ as part of officials’ administrative capabilities when he visited People’s Daily. (A)
For the officials, these new circumstances pose the greatest challenges where there are natural disasters and demonstrations. Other than that:
we have to plan carefully for eventualities connected with sensitive memory dates, price or tax rise announcements, major public policy changes or large-scale construction projects. (A) It is at these junctures that the strains in our system can become apparent because, whether the government is capable of communicating effectively with the public, could make a great impact upon social stability, government image and the cost of administration. (C)
One respondent used
a metaphor to explain the importance of the work of the government press office: the image of the government and the brand of a city are as fragile as a ceramic vase; once broken, you cannot put the pieces back. (A)
According to the same respondent, Hangzhou had a very bad experience with ‘the 7 May traffic accident’, after which the image of a ‘Safe Hangzhou’ had gone completely. 13 In a sarcastic reference to the old saying that Hangzhou is ‘like heaven on earth’, netizens were suggesting that those who want to go to heaven should make for Hangzhou since the journey will be quick. The cost of trying to counter the bad press caused by the failure to defuse the 7 May accident was (according to A and G) huge and included millions of pounds worth of vouchers to induce tourists to return, as well as spectacles and events
Respondents revealed that, although the concept of the ‘spokesman’ is now well established, the role is interpreted in very different ways and there are no clear guidelines as to the post-holders’ authority or responsibility such that both government and CPC officials are quite often ‘not given the chance to speak’ or ‘are afraid to say anything’ (E). Since the spokesmen have often not mastered an effective method to monitor online public opinion they are unclear as to what is going on. When they want to respond, moreover, spokesman can get little support from colleagues to gather background information and fact checking. All in all, the spokesman can easily lose his/her first opportunity of announcing news and lose government authority.
Another concern was that the problems are compounded by the quality of the personnel. There is no clear standard to apply in identifying who can be a spokesman, and there is no clear assessment method. There is no systematic training design. Most of the officials who are in charge of media handling work have been offered training opportunities; the so-called training consists of speeches delivered by senior officials or seminars given by academics rather than systematic training on a regular basis (F). 14
Thus in 2010 the solutions to the problems were to establish basic qualifications for spokespersons; clarify the chain of command and authority of the spokesperson; lay down crisis handling procedures, improve the general level of media literacy among government employees; provide briefings on comparable systems. In 2010 the matter was framed as an issue of enlightenment and education.
2011 – a new paradigm?
Just before the briefings of 2011 the respondents spoke of engagement not suppression; of transforming emotion into reason; of dealing with the negative; accepting the right of the media to investigate (‘Netizens have every right to criticize’); and ‘What we want to learn is how to create participation and conversation, how to avoid confrontation.’
Freeing up information is a way to enhance public trust in the government. We are perceived to have failed to curb land seizures or to enforce proper compensation for those affected by urban planning. [Colleagues] are perceived to have mismanaged information during the SARS crisis, the Songhua River and the Dried Baby Milk scare as well as other occasions. (C)
The matter was now framed as a matter of theory as well as practice, albeit a major one: how to change from confrontation to sharing information and participation.
The most striking aspect of the response to the 2011 briefings was the preoccupation with social media. ‘Social media will completely change our relationships with the citizenry’ was a typical comment. The respondents had found out that western governments pay attention to social media in order to find opportunities for engagement with citizens and to predict trends. These are the things they highlighted in feedback discussions.
Social media has exploded in China and criticism is everywhere. One official likened ‘social network sites such as MySociety.com as the European equivalent of our tradition of petitioning’ (J). He suggested that he and his colleagues are learning to live with the kind of no-holds-barred investigations that in Chinas are called ‘flesh searches’, rendering the subjects of inquiry ‘naked’, but in the belief that the motivations of the searchers are sincere, though often their facts are wrong, and in the belief that there is good faith on both sides: ‘what we want to learn is how to create participation and conversation, how to avoid confrontation’ (J). Another was very interested in the way in which some UK organizations find positive uses for social media.
We know that some European organizations involve outsiders in shaping the organization and its reputation in collaborative ways. We know that you pay attention to social media in order to find opportunities for engagement with citizens and to predict trends. These are very valuable lessons for us in attempting to change our model of communication from authoritarian to collaborative and consultative. (B)
He had learnt that a local government leader (of Barnet Council, in London) used Twitter to gain support for a new medical facility; how West Midlands police check tweets about forthcoming demonstrations and meetings in order to ensure that they have enough resources and also to explain to the citizens what they are doing; how commercial brands use social media for R&D, specifically Starbucks has solicited ideas to develop its business, Pepsi’s ‘Refresh the World’ gets people voting on corporate social responsibility ideas, and GE has a project called eco ideas, soliciting ideas which can then be turned into businesses or solve problems (B).
One of the main lessons learnt was that social media are very good for talking in detail to a narrow audience but those with whom you are talking are not necessarily representative of more than their own small conversation group. People gather around interests and concerns and can become influential communities simply because they have particular grievances (K). The participants realized that to defuse tensions aroused among these groups they needed ‘to interact in an equal way’ (B), sharing knowledge and pointing towards commonly acceptable solutions.
By way of contrast with preceding years, we might say that the respondents had left behind the authoritarian model – at least in the mind if not in day-to-day work – and were almost exclusively interested in social media and how to interact and collaborate with them. The briefing confirmed extant notions of what they should be doing. The briefings consisted of an introduction to the spokesperson system in the UK; the collection and use of opinion data by government; dealing with interview requests; organization of a press conference; effective message delivery; city branding; the use of social and digital media in government communications; public awareness campaigns; crisis management; communicating with pictures; presentation skills (Zeng and Trafford, 2011).
The impact of certain sessions was considerable, because they connected most closely with the participants’ deepest concerns. One put the matter succinctly: ‘In the past we told people what to think; now we think things through together’ (B). What she appears to have meant were two things. Whereas in the not so distant past, misapprehensions on the part of the public or deviations from the official line would have been dealt with through propaganda campaigns or re-education, the officials now believe that they must engage with the ideas and not necessarily refute them. New skills are called for. Second, the officials are now aware, as they discussed in meetings with global communications companies in the UK, that they are no longer divided into ‘them’ and ‘us’ but are in a ‘complex stakeholder ecosystem’.
The officials accepted the right of the media to investigate; they also agreed that the netizens have every right to criticize. What they worry about is that, from ignorance or maliciousness, people get worked up about the wrong things: ‘We want to accept the investigation by the media but we have to teach the media how to ask the right questions’ (J).
There are two key issues that their time in London helped them to identify as issues. First, how to transform emotion into reason. The officials believe that critics need to be helped to reason:
When there are emergencies and crises, the netizens become so sensational, get very emotionally involved. Thus media inaccuracy and sensationalism are major issues. (A)
Second, they believe that they have to work out how to respond to negative stories, whether to respond to all negative stories or just some, particularly when factually inaccurate, and, in particular, whether it is best to put things right one-to-one with journalists or publicly correct them.
As soon as we discover some explosive revelations on the web we check the facts with the department concerned; if the revelation is verifiable then we take immediate steps to put right the problem; if not we right away issue a press release setting things straight. We have learnt that the only way to deal with issues raised on the web is to be totally candid. So our aim is ‘Online problem raised, offline problem dealt with’. We try to verify the facts. (K)
However some felt still that they lacked the skills to deal with these matters. They also lacked a theoretical understanding of how popular sentiment and popular opinion come about; how to introduce facts and reason into issues in order to guide popular sentiment; and how to use the internet effectively in order to put the authorities’ case.
They were impressed by what they saw as the mutually supportive relationships between UK spokespeople and their organizations’ decision-makers. They decided that relationships with the decision-makers are crucial. If their advice is respected by the decision-makers, whom they may advise to tell the truth and not dig deeper holes, then they can confidently deal with the media and earn mutual trust. If, on the other hand, they are betrayed and used as fall-guys then they will never have the necessary confidence.
They also favourably contrasted the professionalism of the UK spokespeople with the ad hoc manner of dealing with media issues they considered to be typical in China.
The spokesperson systems should not boil down to the personalities of the individuals. For example in the case of Yunnan Province’s Media Spokesperson when he held an internet press conference it was a case of a personal, daring initiative. (N)
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Conclusion
Since 2007, officials’ perceptions of their roles have been changing. It is unlikely that the briefings abroad alone could have brought about such changes; the daily circumstances in which officials find themselves, undergoing questioning from the conventional media and criticism – and worse – on the internet, readied them to be receptive to lessons from abroad, as did the pronouncements of the national leaders, quoted above, on the need to change the style of communication.
Participants have begun to think that freeing up information may be seen as a way to enhance public trust in the government. They are well aware that officials in general are perceived to be too prone to corruption and ineffective in protecting rights, particularly when they have failed to curb land seizures or to enforce proper compensation for those affected by urban planning. ‘Officials like us’, they admitted, are perceived to have mismanaged information and suppressed potentially justified criticism.
In discussions about transparency, participants were aware of the advantages of the involvement of citizens with regard to the quality of decision-making. Officials, they consider, will be more accountable and opportunities for corruption curbed, the image of government will improve and management of resources may be better. In the back of every official’s mind, several respondents remarked, are the riots and demonstrations which are regular occurrences throughout China.
It is widely accepted by China scholars that the CPC has been successful in adapting to, and leading, the extraordinary changes in China that have brought it leaping out of backwardness to become the world’s second largest economy in a few decades. The development of the thinking of the local officials speaking here is perhaps an illustration of the apparent adaptability of the Party’s functionaries and representatives today, as they grapple with the new media and information environment.
Nevertheless, given the Party’s ultimate power over the means and the content of communication, and the determination of senior leaders to use that power when it suits them, the ability of well-meaning officials to build the new relationship that they predict may be limited.