Foreign Press and Beijing

Back in action after my brief holiday last week. Was interested to see the announcement that the government was indefinitely extending special Olympic rules for foreign journalists in China. The rules, which were set to expire on Friday, essentially say that a foreign reporter can interview anyone in China as long as they had the permission of the interviewee. Previously, we had to apply to the Foreign Ministry for all reporting trips. The new rules are sometimes fairly notional when it comes to actual on the ground situations; think the Tibet riots in March, after which the whole region was sealed off to foreign reports more or less until now. When it sees the need, the government simply blocks us from reporting in areas it considers too sensitive. But the extension of the new rules is certainly a good thing as reporters in China need all the help they can get on issues like this. Actually, I think it’s an interesting reflection of the way, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, that foreign reporters actually function as an aid to central government efforts (or perhaps I should qualify that even further and say efforts by some parts of the central government in Beijing) to control the excesses of provincial and local offcials in areas such as corruption, the rape of the environment etc. Beijing is always play a complicated and delicate game with both its own media and the foreign media. In this case, I think they’d rather not have had the criticism which might have accompanied a decision to revert to the bad old days. But I don’t think that was a major factor: if it was really important, as they have demonstrated on many occasions in the past, there would have been no hesitation in going back to the old days. But I think on balance, it was calculated that as foreign reporters are an unavoidable evil, they might as well be put to some use. Like everything in China, there’s much dispute about the extent the central government’s reach in the provinces, but there’s little doubt that local officials have huge powers of their own and often completely ignore directives from the center, particularly when they have to do with slowing down economic growth (the environment) and corruption (local officials main source of income). The Chinese media has long been playing a role in exposing local malfeasance, with out of province papers and TV stations leading the way in investigating the causes of disasters, particularly rank corruption cases, land disputes etc. But they are very much still subject to discipline from above, particularly as no party official particularly wants the party secretary from the province next door shouting down the phone about the activities of reporters from his patch. With these greater privileges to snoop around, foreign reporters are another tool the central government uses to try and exert some control over the worst excesses of their wayward local charges. I don’t want to exaggerate our role here. Just say that I believe this utility is one reasons the rules were extended.