Abstract
The death of so many local newspapers in China has left swathes of the country reliant on staterun propaganda, writes
Readers pre-ordered copies at a newspaper kiosk in the city’s Dongcheng district. The kiosk owner, 56-year-old Chen Zhonglin, noted down dozens of names and phone numbers for the orders. “It reminded me of newspaper’s golden days six or seven years ago,” Chen said.
However, the sad truth was that it was the paper’s last edition. Founded in 2004, Legal Evening News had to close because of competition from internet-based media and stricter government censorship.
It was not the only one. In the last week of 2018, at least 10 local newspapers announced they were to close. Many of them, including Legal Evening News, used to be among China’s most well-known titles.
“I read only Beijing local newspapers because the stories are more relevant to my life,” said Chen. “If local newspapers all died one day, how could our common people’s troubles be heard? Who would be our journalists?”
The motto of Legal Evening News was “a newspaper closest to your life”. The paper used to have at least one reporter in charge of almost every single block in Beijing; if reporters missed important news in their “jurisdictions”, they would have their salaries cut. The newspaper also provided free legal services to people in need who had no money. At its peak, the paper printed 700,000–800,000 copies each day.
However, since 2013 print newspapers have been losing advertisements and readers to internet media. The remaining titles are shrinking their print runs, from two dozen or so pages to just a few. In 2015, retail sales of local newspapers declined by 50.8%.
A friend of mine, Chuchu, left a job at the Southern Urban Daily newspaper in 2015. When she joined the paper as a young investigative reporter two years earlier, Southern Urban Daily and its sister titles were admired as the pioneers pushing for media freedom in China. However, by about 2015, the majority of the most experienced journalists had left for the PR industry or to work with the internet media.
“Everybody kept saying traditional newspapers are dying,” said Chuchu. “Then you start to panic and question what’s the point in persisting?”
Wang Yongzhi, content chief of Tencent, a Chinese internet company that owns one of China’s most popular internet news outlets, has said that the print media industry should consider how to die with dignity rather than how to weather the storm. Wang believes the time is coming when all newspapers are going to die, but he has been only half-right: the dying titles in China are only the local newspapers, as government and communist party propaganda mouthpieces have never been threatened.
China had no independent newspapers after 1949 when the communists took power. All media were owned and controlled in one way or another by the party and the government. But after “reform and opening up” began in 1978, economic development and interaction with the outside world required real information rather than just propaganda.
Local newspapers appeared, under supervision by the communist party, as did government-owned papers, which followed political guidelines from the party but which were given more freedom when it came to digging into corruption, revealing injustice and giving a voice to the grassroots society. They reserved reasonable space for local news which would have had no chance to make it into national papers. They took on more of a watchdog role, although in a compromised way.
A mother cradles her baby after the Wenchuang earthquake in 2008. Local journalists rushed to crisis areas immediately and were first to criticise governments for poor-quality school buildings
CREDIT: Aly Song/Reuters
Local newspapers enjoyed their golden days during the first dozen years of the 21st century. They tried to find loopholes to report sensitive topics before orders to delete arrived from the authorities. It was local newspapers that first reported the Sars outbreak in 2003 that killed hundreds of people, and after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake it was the local newspaper that rushed to the ruined areas immediately and criticised the local government for constructing poor-quality school buildings. From time to time, local newspapers even published op-ed pieces advocating political reforms and calling for the respect of basic human rights.
Since President Xi Jinping took power in 2013, local newspapers have been hit by tougher scrutiny from the ruling party. The party demanded “loyalty” from all media, and the “mischievous” ones, such as the Southern Urban Daily, were purged. Editors were forced to leave and all newspapers now have to follow the Communist Party line closely. In April 2018 Legal Evening News was forced to shut down its in-depth reporting department and make a change to its management team.
“It’s a global journalism crisis that traditional media are declining. Here, the decline has Chinese characteristics. The local newspapers run by entrepreneurs are dying while the party newspapers are safe and sound,” said Fang Kecheng, a former journalist at Southern Weekly. “The Chinese government pours money into the party propaganda papers. What’s more, to gain a kind of political protection, businesspeople like to put advertisements in party propaganda papers.”
This crackdown on the “misbehaving” newspapers overlaps with the soaring development of internet media. Technology is crushing old-school journalism and makes local newspapers even less likely to survive. People read news on their phones and have stopped buying print. Advertisements are disappearing from the print media.
Wang, of Tencent, who believes that machines might be able to take on 90% of the work currently performed by human reporters, said: “Online news platforms, which rely on computer-generated recommendations, have much larger readerships than traditional outlets and are better positioned to offer readers an experience tailored to their interests.”
A man reads a newspaper in Shaoxing, China. The older generation worry about the decline of local newspapers
CREDIT: Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images
Today the most popular news app in China belongs not to a news company but to a tech company called Jinri Toutiao. It relies on an algorithm to figure out what people like. Readers are no longer reading what they should know, but are fed with what they are expected to enjoy.
Independent publishing channels, or “self-media” – the most popular being the platform provided by Wechat’s “public account” function, which works a little like Facebook’s public pages – are also picking up advertising and readers. Most of the media are driven by clicks. Even the media that care about social issues have to be careful to not touch sensitive topics, as they don’t have permission from the government for that sort of reporting.
It has been difficult for the new media to take over the social responsibilities from the dying traditional local newspapers.
“The fact that the traditional local newspapers belonged to the party and the government gave them limitations, but at the same time also a kind of protection. The media run by [others] could be shut down so easily,” said Fang, the former Southern Weekly journalist.
Meanwhile, charges of “illegal reporting” and defamation can be used easily on private media owners. One incident happened in the spring of 2018 when a doctor was detained without charge for three months after describing a traditional Chinese medicine wine as “poison” in his Wechat blog – offending the manufacturer, which had a close relationship with the government.
But despite that, Chuchu is not entirely pessimistic. She remains hopeful about the internet, as it provides accessibility for more people to have their voices heard.
“Journalists used to be the only people who were out there revealing the problem – the only ones who determined what was worth being reported and what was not. The internet makes it easy for everybody to speak out and be the supervisors,” she said.
However, Chuchu’s hopes might not be realised. Every time I visit my uncle in a northern Chinese village, he and his friends make tons of complaints to me about what is happening: the corrupt village chief, the pollution from the paper factory, and the way in which village land is being sold. But there isn’t a local newspaper, and the only “journalists” are a few young women working for the governmentcontrolled TV station, which only announces the officials’ decisions and praises how well the government is doing. It is the same in all of China’s small towns and villages.
I have asked them why they don’t write about their concerns on the internet, but none of these old people know how to use the internet properly, and they are worried that government or party loyalists would take revenge.
And that leaves them with the little power to challenge the authorities, and that is probably how the authorities would like it.