When the tide goes out, the rocks are revealed: media barons claim that the foreign press can help bring democracy to China. Yuezhi Zhao tracks the paper tigers lurking in their rhetoric

New Internationalist, Sept, 2004 by Yuezhi Zhao

As I flicked through my local paper--The Vancouver Sun--on an October morning in 2002, a headline jumped out to grab my attention. 'Playboy's Interest in China Rises', it said. Is this the type of press freedom that the media thinks will help bring democracy to China, I wondered, as I ate my breakfast?

In April this year, The New York Times brought news that Britain's bawdy 'lad mags' FHM and Maxim are planning China editions. And--as The Times editorialized--because foreign magazine content has to be tailored for Chinese tastes and standards, these titles will need a major overhaul before they are distributed in China. A feature such as Maxim's 'Vote For Hometown Hotties' may not only be 'too tasteless for Beijing's censors. It's probably too democratic.'

It's a far cry from News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch's bold prediction that international media penetration of China--in his company's case through the spread of satellite television--would undermine authoritarian governments everywhere. But then again, Mr Murdoch has himself resiled from this position--a prudent but self-serving commercial move designed to curry favour with the Government (see NI 333 for a fuller report). Just last October, when he was a guest speaker at the Central Party School in Beijing, he cajoled top Party bosses to liberalize China's media market while reassuring them that market openness is compatible with the maintenance of the political power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Still, the mainstream view holds that China's WTO entry and the opening of its media system to foreign owners will inevitably undermine the CCP's authoritarian control and facilitate press freedom. In the US debates leading to the congressional ratification of the US-China WTO accession agreement in 2000, industry lobbyists, mainstream media commentators and politicians--Republican and Democratic alike--all proclaimed that opening China's communication and cultural markets 'will make it virtually impossible for Beijing to control freedom of communications in China'.

The underlying assumption has been that because state media control in China is incompatible with the free global media marketplace, the activities of transnational media corporations in China will have an inherently democratizing effect. At the heart of this assumption, democracy is linked to the marketplace, citizens' freedom of expression is (wrongly) equated with the freedom of transnational media corporations to do business everywhere; while freedom itself is equated with the free circulation of commodities. Former Vice-President Al Gore went even further: 'As awareness of environmental problems and labour rights is spread through free communication, the pressure within China for improvements will naturally increase.'

Though such notions are less explicitly articulated in China (for obvious political reasons) liberal Chinese media analysts have also more or less internalized this view. They use foreign media entry as a rhetorical device to champion press freedom, seeing it as an integral part of China's economic integration with global capitalism. The thinking behind this is clear: since press freedom and capitalism go hand in hand in the West, global capitalism will bring press freedom.

Their wishful thinking extends to the fond hope that the WTO would force the Chinese State to accept internationally acceptable 'rules of the game' in media regulation.

Profits and democracy

The idea of being in the vanguard of freedom and democracy serves as an effective political and moral justification for transnational media corporations eyeing the huge Chinese market. It reflects the aspirations of the Chinese liberal elite for a stable and more open form of intra-elite bargaining in Chinese politics through a more open press. While there is no denying that the entry of foreign media may lead to some new openings, this hope is ultimately misplaced for a number of reasons.

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First, it underestimates the clout of the Chinese Government in negotiating the entry of transnational capital into the Chinese market while maintaining censorship. For example, the Guangdong provincial cable authority--a State-owned entity--censors politically sensitive content. One of the three principles that governed the entry of Time Warner/AOL and News Corporation's Star TV to Chinese-language satellite channels in Guangdong was the continuing right of the provincial cable network to block information they deem undesirable from going out during transmission. In the past when sensitive items during the transmission of news programmes were blocked, a blank screen would confront the viewer. Now, viewers get nice pictures.

Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal has stated, not only have transnational media barons such as Rupert Murdoch 'found out that he had much less leverage than he thought' in dealing with the Chinese Government but 'when big sums of shareholders' money are involved, it can be difficult to resist the impulse to self-censor'. The simple fact is that transnational media corporations are in China to make a profit, not to promote free expression among the Chinese citizenry. Instead of being 'messengers of democracy,' media analyst Chin-Chuan Lee has predicted, 'global media companies will be as "politically correct" as many US companies that have advocated reductions in labour costs and more restrictions on labour rights in China.'