REVIEW INTERVIEW

 

CHARTING former Chinese journalist Qian Gang's career is equivalent to tracking the ups and downs of China's media over the last 30 or 40 years.

 

Mr Qian, now 57, became a fully fledged reporter in 1979. But his journey towards journalism began earlier, during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

 

In December 1968, at the height of the Red Guards frenzy, Mao Zedong began the "down to the countryside" programme to move young people to the country to contain the disruption the Red Guards were causing in cities and urban centres around the country.

 

The young Qian Gang, then a junior middle school student, signed up for the programme. But at that time, relations between China and the then Soviet Union were tense and the Chinese government began conscripting younger men into the People's Liberation Army (PLA). A few months short of 16, Qian Gang was conscripted into the army instead.

 

"The day I wore my uniform (March 2, 1969) was when the fighting started," he recalled. However, as a new conscript, he did not go to the battle front, but instead joined the internal security forces, the precursor of today's armed police. Qian Gang became a prison guard in Shanghai.

 

The educational level among the PLA's foot soldiers was low, and Qian Gang, young as he was then, was among the better educated. So he was put in charge of his unit's "blackboard" news bulletin, on which he wrote the news of the day and drew his own illustrations.

 

"I wrote about the good people and good deeds of our unit," he recalled, a little wryly.

Then in 1971, Lin Biao, designated successor to Mao but who allegedly tried to seize power, died in a mysterious plane crash as he was trying to escape to the Soviet Union – and the political atmosphere became less tense almost overnight.

 

Intellectuals, shunted aside and persecuted through the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution, began to come out of the woodwork.

 

One of them, from a Shanghai publishing house, came to teach writing to the soldiers, Qian Gang among them.

 

With some training under his belt, Mr Qian was seconded to a magazine as an editor. In that capacity, he went to Tangshan in July 1976 when an earthquake devastated the industrial city in Hebei province.

 

The result was his award-winning book, The Great China Earthquake, published in 1986, 10 years after Chairman Mao's death, when a much freer political atmosphere prevailed.

 

In 1976, "I could not write the real stories", he said. "In my head, there was a propaganda department; in every one of our hearts, there was an inspector."

 

He continued working in the PLA's cultural section in Shanghai until 1978, when his roommate's friend, a reporter with the PLA Daily newspaper in Beijing, visited. This reporter chanced upon his diary while he was out, read it, thought that he was reporter material and got him moved to the newspaper.

 

Mr Qian remembers that those were heady days as China had just embarked on Deng Xiaoping's programme of opening up. All of a sudden, reporters were allowed material from overseas, local compilations of the best foreign news reports and foreign reference books on journalism.

 

"During mealtime, between bites of our sweet potatoes (which supplemented scarce rice), we would discuss American news reports," he recalled with a laugh.

 

That was the beginning of his transformation – and perhaps that of many other Chinese journalists of that time – from a propaganda writer to a news reporter.

He hated the false and empty articles that were written.

 

"We wanted to change, to tell the truth," he said in an interview last Sunday with The Straits Times. He was here to give a talk on the Chinese media.

 

What followed the first reforms was an invigorating period of intellectual ferment – and relaxed censorship – particularly in the mid-1980s.

 

"In some areas, the media of that era fell short of today's, but in o

thers, they were ahead," said Mr Qian.

 

On the one hand, journalists today cannot write about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake the way he did about the Tangshan quake in 1986.

 

On the other, the free discussions on the Internet today are something he would not have dared to envisage then.

 

Journalists of today "are much better than we were, they see more than we did. They see the West, the changed Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Hong Kong. So they consider things in a more comprehensive way".

 

That 1980s era of openness ended in June 1989 with the Tiananmen massacre. Just before, in April 1989, the dissident editor Qin Benli was sacked and his World Economic Herald closed down.

 

Mr Qian sent a telegram to the editor to express his support, rendering his own position at the PLA Daily untenable.

 

He was moved to a small specialist publication in the earthquake department.

He transformed that obscure publication into the periodical China Disaster Reduction Press.

 

The post-June 4 period was filled with oppressiveness. Then the unexpected happened. Patriarch Deng Xiaoping made his southern China tour in 1992. That restarted reforms and changed the landscape for the media again.

 

In 1994, Mr Qian was invited to start the Sanlian Lifeweek, which went on to become an influential magazine but failed to take off under him.

 

He was then sought by the China Central Television director of River Elegy, the documentary series of 1988 that was seen as a source of the Tiananmen demonstrations. Mr Qian joined CCTV and went to work on the new investigative news magazine News Probe, which exposed corruption, miscarriages of justice and the proliferation of Aids, among other subjects.

 

On the strength of his track record, he was hired by the publishers of the Southern Weekend newspaper to be its managing editor in 1998.

 

"Of all the media outfits I've worked at, Southern Weekend was the most important to me. It was like a school (to me)," he declared.

 

It was the most open and daring newspaper of its time and was also "dogged by misfortune", he said. Started in 1984, it focused on exposing corruption and criticising the ills of society.

 

"The young (reporters) were very courageous and my job was to get them to calm down, to keep safe," he recalled of his time at the paper. He also emphasised more diversified content and started the science and history pages.

 

He persisted for four years, enduring criticisms and warnings from the authorities until 2001, when he was forced to step down after having offended the local government.

He returned to CCTV for a short time before going to Hong Kong University (HKU) in 2003 as a visiting scholar.

 

He has stayed at HKU since and is now director of its Journalism and Media Studies Centre's China Media Project, which researches Chinese journalism.

 

Through its visiting fellowships, the centre provides mainland Chinese journalists with a free environment in which to research, write, exchange ideas and "to recuperate before going back to do battle".

 

Asked about the current state of Chinese media, Mr Qian said that there was now more free space despite continued government control because of various factors.

To begin with, the Chinese people seek truth to protect their interests. The media have been partially commercialised and those that have to make profits compete with each other to get to the truth of things – such as the issue of fake milk powder. The new media have also created room for free speech despite government efforts to tame the Internet.

 

And finally, the Chinese Communist Party's own reforms have meant relaxation of certain aspects of media control.

 

Mr Qian thinks the Chinese media are making progress, stagnating and going backwards – all at once. For there to be press freedom, the CCP needs to reform the political system first.

 

"Although I am not brimming with hope, I have hope that the CCP will reform," he said. There are many corrupt people within the party, but also many with ideals, he noted.

"The reforms of the 1980s were started by the CCP itself," he reminded this reporter.

 

Asked about the current state of Chinese media, Mr Qian said that there was now more free space despite continued government control because of various factors. To begin with, the Chinese people seek truth to protect their interests. The media have been partially commercialised and those that have to make profits compete with each other to get to the truth of things – such as the issue of fake milk powder.

 

 

Courtesy of The Straits Times, 3 June 2010.