The Second Danwei Plenary Session

The Session begins

Danwei's Second Plenary Session took place last week at Song in The Place in Beijing.

Two Chinese journalists who blog and make podcasts sat down with senior journalists from The Guardian and Channel 4 News to discuss the state of Western media reporting on China, and the Chinese media.

We set the topic long before the riots in Tîbet started, before the rise of tension in China about Western media reporting on Tîbet and the Olympics.

This is what we had set out to discuss when we planned the event in January:

In the run up to the Olympics, Western news coverage of China has become a topic of controversy both within China and abroad. Is Western news coverage fair? How biased is Chinese news coverage? What effects are new media such as blogs having on TV news, newspapers and other traditional media?

The speakers:

Flypig is an editor at Sohu.com, but best known as half of the duo that produce Antiwave (反波), China’s most intelligent series of podcasts that focus on foreign and Chinese media.

Jaime A. FlorCruz is CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent. FlorCruz has studied, worked and traveled in China for thirty years and reported extensively on the country as a journalist since 1980.

Raymond Zhou is a movie critic, blogger, columnist for various newspapers and the author of essays and several books about film, media and society.

Lindsey Hilsum is International News Editor for Britain’s Channel 4 News and the current China correspondent. She famously covered the Fallujah assault in Iraq in November 2004 and has extensive experience as a print and broadcast journalist in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

The speakers will be introduced by Danwei’s Robert Ness and the discussion will be moderated by Jeremy Goldkorn.

Raymond Zhou, Lindsey Hilsum, Goldkorn, Jon Watts, Flypig

Jonathan Watts of The Guardian kindly agreed to take Mr FlorCruz' place, which was natural since he was one of the speakers Danwei wanted at future events, and he had just returned from a reporting trip, trying to get into Tîbet.

As the moderator and one of the organizers of the event, your correspondent was rather worried the day before. Mr FlorCruz's cancellation, the poisonous atmosphere on the Chinese Internet and the English language blogs about China (including Danwei), the new tension between Chinese people and foreigners — even long time China residents who love living here; none of this boded well.

But about 150 nice people showed up to the event, and it went smoothly. The audience, like Danwei's readership, was about 30% Chinese with the rest being foreigners — Americans, Brits, Australians, Poles, Italians, Israelis etc. After a discussion amongst the four panelists, we opened to questions from the floor.

I am happy to say that we had a thoroughly civilized evening: the discussion was, I believe, balanced, and the panelists and audience expressed both wariness of the Western media's tendency to stereotype China misleadingly, and the very real problems that journalists of Western media organizations are experiencing right now: in particular, that they can't get access to Tîbet to find out for themselves what is going on.

Two bloggers have written thoughtful posts related to some of the issues raised at the Session:

Cam of Zhongnanhai: The journalism divide: discussing the roles of east and west
Jeremiah Jenne of The China Beat: The Chinese Response to foreign media coverage of the 3.14 unrest (and also this related interview with James Miles of The Economist who was in Lhasa at the start of the riots:

From Zhongnanhai:

... an audience member asked a question regarding the use of the word "crackdown", and more specifically why western journalists use this word in relation to Tibet, but not in relation to the semi-recent riots in France...

... I generally feel "crackdown" doesn't necessarily come with negative connotations. For example, a Chinese "crackdown" on DVD piracy is generally believed to be a good thing (well, unless you like stocking up at the Lido). The problem, we felt, is that "crackdown" reminds people of the non-event in a big square in Beijing in 1989. To western minds, I would submit, a "crackdown in Tibet" conjures up images of peaceful monks praying for a modicum of freedom and peace while big, burly Chinese military officers come in to crack some skulls. If this is the perceived notion, then journalists should be careful when using the word "crackdown".

Jonathan Watts, the correspondent for the Guardian newspaper (who was filling in for an absent Jaime FlorCruz from CNN), said that he has struggled to use the correct terminology in his stories. Are the Tibetans rioters or protesters? Are the Chinese "cracking down" or "restoring order"? He said that he's used nearly all the terms, and makes a judgement call based on that individual situation. I believe that's as best as can be asked.

What vocabulary do we use to discuss China today? This is not only a fundamental problem for journalists, it's also a problem for the Chinese government. This is from a blog post by Lyndsey Hilsum written after the Danwei event:

It's hard to write about language when you're lost in translation, but even those of us who don't speak Chinese have noticed the extraordinary vocabulary used by the Chinese government since unrest broke out in Tibet.

The terminology has its origins in the Cultural Revolution, the era in the late 1960s and early 1970s when China tore itself apart with ideological fervour. Zhang Qingli, the Communist Party Secretary in Tibet, and widely regarded as a "hardliner" is the master of it.

"We are in the midst of a fierce struggle involving blood and fire, a life and death struggle with the Dalai clique," he said in an editorial in the Tibet Daily last week, going on to describe the Dalai Lama as "a jackal dressed a monk's robes, an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast."

Below are photos, and a Youtube video of part of the panel discussion. The photos are by Marie Wennberg, the video is by Shaan Khan. We'll have more video of the event on Danwei soon.

Photos by Marie Wennberg

Dror Poleg, and...?

Li Shan, Dan O'Brien

Li Shan, Schokora, Ness

In vino veritas

Bill Zhang; the east is red

Video of Q&A by Shaan Khan

UPDATE: Beijing Today published a story about the Plenary Session.