[Views expressed here are my own, not those of the Department of Defense or any other organizations of the U.S. Government]

Mr. Chairman and members of the Commission:

I am pleased to have this opportunity to share my views with you on this vital subject. Your letter of invitation to this hearing indicates that four issues will be addressed here today. They include 1) the scope of media control and censorship in China; 2) U.S. Government and private sector efforts to bring alternative sources of information to the Chinese public; 3) the PRC Government and media’s reaction to the SARS epidemic; and 4) whether the SARS crisis will have any long-term impact on transparency and media control in China. While I plan to address these issues as a whole, I will spend more time focusing on the long-term impact on transparency and media control, as other panelists with respective areas of expertise will undoubtedly discuss other issues on the agenda in greater details.

OVERALL ASSESSMENT OF SARS’ IMPACT ON CHINA’S MEDIA CONTROL AND GOVERNMENT

Before I attempt to address the question of whether the SARS crisis will have any long-term impact on transparency and media control in China, I would like to point out one fundamental fact about the People’s Republic of China: media control and censorship in China is TOTAL. The absolute seriousness with which the Chinese government takes control and censorship of the media has a symbiotic relationship with regime survival. The CCP leadership believes that news reporting serves one purpose only, to function as the mouthpiece of the Party. While China is rapidly moving toward economic diversification, ownership and editorial control of media outlets remain strictly in the hands of the state. Whenever any slight deviation away from the Party line by any media outlets occurs, the Party has the unquestionable power to punish the media outlet with a wide range of methods, from firing the reporter or editor involved to outright closing down of the outlet, and even imprisonment of the reporters.

Consequently, China has been among the worst offenders against the freedom of the press in the world. Each year, more journalists are jailed in China than in any other country. In 2002, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders evaluated the level of media control among 139 countries. While North Korea ranks at the bottom (139^th), China, by a small margin, is ranked at 138^th.[1]

It would therefore require an enormous institutional overhaul, or regime change, to replace the systemic mechanisms that cause such offenses. Since regime survival requires absolute control over the press, that control will not be relinquished voluntarily simply because of a SARS scare.

Therefore, I seriously doubt that the recent love-fest about "truthfully reporting SARS realities" will bring any substantial trend inside the Chinese government for a fundamental change to the way the government handles media. Whether the Chinese government is up-front concerning one particular disaster or not is much less relevant than the Party’s absolute insistence on controlling truth-telling.

The truth-telling about-face was ordered by the Politburo on April 20. It is precisely that–an order. The Party maintains a firm grip on truth-telling and the Party alone decides when and how to report what is going on. When the Party senses the crisis is under control, it can easily order all news media to strictly toe the Party line and go back to the usual business of arresting journalists and jailing Internet opinion makers, as events in China in the last couple of weeks have clearly indicated. [2]

PROMISING FALLOUTS OF SARS CRISIS ON MEDIA AND GOVERNMENT

While the SARS crisis may not bring fundamental changes to the Chinese government’s media control mechanisms, it has resulted in several phenomena that have great potential in changing Chinese society as a whole. I will attempt to sort out the salient htmects of these new phenomena arising out of the SARS crisis.

1. THE PRESTIGE OF FOREIGN MEDIA AMONG ORDINARY CHINESE HAS SKYROCKETED AS A RESULT OF THE SARS CRISIS. Never before in its history has the PRC stopped demonizing the mainstream foreign media as "bourgeois" or as the "mouthpiece of international anti-China elements." It took the U.S. State Department several decades since the late 1970s to convince the Chinese leadership that the president of the United States DID NOT have the power to fire the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post or the New York Times. On issues such as the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Tibet, Taiwan, PLA, human rights, and CCP’s bureaucratic malfeasance, Chinese officials have often attacked the foreign media as demonizers of a rising China, as harboring sinister motives to contain a China that has been bullied by westerners for over 150 years, and as "having severely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people." Quite frequently, there is a government denunciation of some sort when a major event in China is being reported by foreign media. With total government control of news access, most Chinese people do not have an alternative view on how the foreign media reports on China and many have believed the Party line. As a result, there has been wide-spread skepticism among the Chinese population about western media.

Yet, the SARS crisis has changed this pattern of demonization in a remarkable way. With the exception of the war in Iraq, SARS developments in China remain on the front page of many western newspapers for weeks and months. It is the western media, such as the venerable Washington Post, the New York Times, and Time magazine that pursue the SARS stories doggedly and produce enormous amounts of information on the epidemic.

These timely, detailed and often devastating reports reached the Chinese via the Internet, international broadcasts and CCP’s "internal reference" system (neibu cankao) and created a sharp contrast to the Panglossian Chinese official media reports on SARS. Then two things happened miraculously: the Chinese government unprecedentedly failed to criticize the voluminous "negative" reports on SARS in China and, on April 20, the Chinese government did an about-face admitting there had been a cover-up about SARS in China. This is an oblique way of saying that the western media has been right about this vital matter and that the people of China have more reason now to trust the much denounced western media than the Chinese government and the Chinese media under its firm control.

Throughout the SARS crisis, the tone and contents of the western media reports have been overwhelmingly critical of the way the Chinese government has handled the SARS crisis. Yet surprisingly, the usual government attacks on western media are mostly absent. There have been only two isolated cases of protest against the western media’s reporting on SARS. One was from economist Hu Angang, who in early April issued a stinging attack on the so-called anti-China biases in SARS reporting by western media. The other was from China’s foremost critic of western media, Professor Li Xiguang of Qinghua University, who has denounced the SARS reporting by western media and WHO as "hype" and "anti-China."

Yet, quite interestingly, these two scholars instantly became the targets of merciless ridicule on high-traffic Chinese Internet sites and basically made fools of themselves in the eyes of the nation [3]

Even up to today, every dispatch from China by the Washington Post or the New York Times is instantly translated into Chinese and posted on many high traffic Chinese Internet news networks such as www.chinesenewsnet.com, www.epochtimes.com, www.ncn.org, www.bignews.org, www.observechina.com.

2. THE SARS CRISIS DIVIDED THE CHINESE RULING ELITES. The total control of news media in China is predicated on the solidarity of the Chinese ruling elites. Yet the SARS outbreak has deepened the rift between factions inside the CCP high command. This has created a situation that is indirectly constructive in producing press openness. When President Hu Jintao ordered an about-face on April 20, launching a "people’s war against SARS," he became increasingly popular among ordinary Chinese. In contrast, Hu’s rival faction, led by the Chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission, Jiang Zemin, is believed to fear its slipping relevance in Chinese politics. On May 2, Jiang made history by ordering the publication of a news item truthfully admitting the loss of a PLAN Ming-class submarine and its crew of 70.

This news item is stunning to the world as the PRC has never disclosed any military disaster of such a scale. Had there not been Hu Jintao’s "truthfully reporting SARS realities," Jiang would never have felt upstaged and thus ordered the news release of the submarine tragedy. The news item itself became a sensation, and many see it as a sign of China’s new openness in news reporting, no matter how premature this optimism may be.

Nevertheless, the widening rift between the two factions in China continues to play a nuanced role in politics and remains an interesting development to watch.

3. CCP’S INTERNAL REPORTING SYSTEM WILL BE IMPROVED. The CCP maintains a massive internal reporting system throughout China. The system functions as secret channels to the highest authorities for social control and policy making. The irony is, while the entire world believes China’s controlled and managed media reporting was at fault for the out-of-control SARS epidemic in China and much of the world, the Chinese government has learned a totally different lesson: media control in China has nothing to do with the spread of SARS, and the SARS crisis was never a result of a news cover-up, but rather of a bad internal reporting system inside the Party and Government. When China fired the Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong on April 20, the world praised China for facing up to the deceptive media policy conducted by the two high CCP officials.

Yet the world was wrong, because Zhang Wenkang and Meng Xuenong were fired not because they lied to the public about the SARS statistics, but because they could not get their acts together and get accurate, coordinated SARS statistics to the top leaders. On May 30, Gao Qiang, China’s second in command in the "people’s war against SARS," emphatically denied at the State Council press conference that lying was the reason why Zhang Wenkang was fired, and that "Comrade Zhang Wenkang" was removed because he failed to coordinate intra-ministry data gathering mechanisms.

When Hu Jintao and other Chinese officials speak of "truthful reporting," and when the State Council in mid-May issued "the Regulations on Emergency Public Health Incidents" (tufa gonggong weisheng shijian yingji tiaoli), they did not mean "reporting" to the public via free media, they meant reporting to the central government through secret internal channels. In fact, the newly issued "Regulations" specifically prohibits "any work units or individuals, including news organizations, from making public any information about emergency public health incidents." [4]

Therefore, since regime survival is the obsession, the current SARS crisis may result in a swift change of China’s massive internal reporting system which is designed for the secretive Party elites for social control and policy making. More sycophant and incompetent Party hacks may be weeded out and some draconian Party disciplinary measures may be instituted to prevent apathy and deception to the Party Central (not to the public as a whole) when it comes to reporting epidemics or other disasters that may affect the Party’s tight grip on power and the society.

But this is still not a genuine reform in allowing a free press to exist, because genuine press reform WITHIN the existing political system is suicidal for the Chinese Communist Party.

4. THE SARS CRISIS HAS SIGNIFICANTLY ERODED THE BANALITY OF DECEPTION WITHIN THE CHINESE SOCIETY. After five decades of non-stop managed news reporting and total domination of media, there has developed in China not just a severe lack of objectivity and balanced perspectives on current events among the Chinese people, but also, far more importantly, a uniform way of thinking about key issues in life. People are used to lies and deceptions; those lies and deceptions have become banal and prosaic, so much so the people take them for granted. This is especially true when it comes to issues like Taiwan, Tibet, or U.S.-China relations. The SARS crisis has begun to change this in a remarkable way.

One amazing example is how ordinary Chinese people responded to situations in Taiwan during the SARS crisis. Due to the anemic performance of WHO with regard to Taiwan’s SARS situation and its refusal to consider Taiwan’s observer status in the organization, Taiwanese politicians have reacted boisterously against China’s stonewalling and obstinacy. Remarkably, President Chen Shuibian threatened to resort to an island-wide referendum on WHO membership; Vice-President Annette Lu has gone even further to attack the mainland regime, blaming the PRC for spreading SARS worldwide, demanding a PRC apology to the world, and suggesting changing the name of SARS or feidian ("atypical pneumonia") to Chinese Acute Pneumonia.

In the past, cantankerous actions such as these by Chen and Lu would have surely ignited an avalanche of condemnation from ordinary Chinese people on the street or on the Internet. Yet the response to Taiwan’s outrage has been remarkably inconsequential and virtually non-existent among the usual "superpatriot circles" such as the college campuses.

Clearly, the conditioned mental response system is beginning to crack. It may be because more and more ordinary Chinese have felt duped by the state-controlled media and are realizing that they may have been the willing executioners of lies and deceptions over the years when functioning as unthinking "patriots" and as the Party’s "Angry Youths" (fenqing).

5. THE SARS CRISIS HAS FACILITATED AN AVALANCHE OF REFLECTIONS ON CCP’S INNATE MENDACITY. While the Party insists the SARS scandal is an aberration in PRC’s media history, there has been an outpouring of articles proving otherwise. On major Internet networks and some international radio broadcasting stations such as Radio Free Asia, many brave Chinese citizens, incensed by the SARS scandal, have turned themselves into devoted muckrakers exposing CCP’s horrendous history of lies and deception in the past. The most famous ones include Ren Bumei of Beijing, Donghai Yixiao of Hangzhou and Zheng Yichun of the Northeast.

Mr. Ren Bumei is tantamount to a weapon of mass destruction against the mendacity of the CCP. He set up an Internet website devoted to China’s political and media reform. His Internet site was so popular worldwide within the Chinese community that it has since been shut down. Mr. Ren has recently conducted two phenomenal studies with regard to China’s press control. One, entitled "A Critique of China’s Internet Legislations," (zhongguo hulianwang lifa pipan) published in October 2002, is a scathing analysis of China’s repressive methods of controlling and censoring the Internet. The other, called On the New Culture of Controlling Speech (yanlun guanzhi xinwenhua), published in December 2001, is an analysis of the pernicious social and cultural consequences of China’s tenacious media control. [5] These two studies have been repeatedly cited by many Chinese on the Internet during the SARS crisis.

Mr. Zheng Yichun, an English professor in Northeast China, sees a pattern of lies and deception within the CCP. He has endeavored to compile a history of CCP mendacity, many examples of which have appeared in a special column designed for him on the influential Chinese news website www.epochtimes.com. Throughout the SARS crisis, his writings and his voice have appeared on international radio and numerous Internet sites. Mr. Zheng has rapidly become a hero inside and outside China.

Based in Hangzhou, Mr. Donghai Yixiao is an influential iconoclastic Internet rebel, whose weekly columns appear worldwide. His savage attacks on lies and deception in China have gained him many admirers, as well as enemies within the government. As of this writing, his last column speaks of PRC cyber police’s blocking of his IP address, and his imminent arrest by police waiting in the neighborhood.

Without the SARS crisis and the political atmosphere of relative thaw because of the SARS crisis, outspoken individuals such as these three gentlemen would never have lasted long. It probably would have taken much longer for the public to recognize their courage and accomplishments.

6. THE SARS CRISIS HAS HELPED CRYSTALLIZE THE IMAGE OF THE GOVERNMENT AS INEPT AND OUT-OF-TOUCH. It’s not a secret that the Chinese government has not been the most efficient in the world. Under Mao Zedong, the CCP government was regarded by many as totalitarian and fanatically ideological; under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zeming, especially since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, most Chinese consider the government as corrupt. The SARS crisis has added one more characteristic of the government to the thinking of the ordinary Chinese: it’s down right ridiculous. Throughout the SARS crisis, this htmect of the Chinese government and society has been expressed in a surge of folk satire. Throughout China during the crisis, on Chinese Internet, in emails and SMS (short messaging service) notes, billions of pieces of savage satires, clever rhyming couplets, mock Mao poems, etc., have created a bonanza of materials ridiculing the surreal dimensions of the situation. [6]

Humor is traditionally the weapon of the weak. But under extraordinary circumstances, humor, rumor, and satire can signal the emergence of enlightened souls. Once people realize their daily situation is not only bad, but ridiculous, they may take action to facilitate the demise of the ancien regime.

7. THE SARS CRISIS MAY PROVE INSTRUMENTAL IN CREATING ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF REPORTING NEWS IN CHINA. The Chinese government’s information management system has been so thoroughly discredited during the SARS crisis, and the stake is so high for ordinary citizens, that a powerful impetus for an independent news reporting entity has emerged. Whether this impetus will lead to the immediate birth of an out-of-government news channel or not is largely dependent upon how the existing, scattered independent resources,--Internet forums, profit-seeking local dailies, and even Hong Kong/foreign related media outlets, etc-- can get their acts together and do a much better job of reporting truths that might benefit both the populace and social stability.

The government, of course, will not like an independent news entity outside the editorial control of the Party, but they may not have any choice. Just remember this: 150 years ago when the momentous Taiping Rebellion broke out, directly threatening the regime survival of the Chinese imperial dynasty, the incompetent Qing Court had no choice but to lift the ban against ethnic Chinese holding military command. The result was the Chinese-commanded Hunan Army which defeated the rebels, thus saving the regime but also sowing the seeds for the eventual downfall of the dynasty.

China’s news reporters are all embedded with the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatchiks, and some of the talented news reporting professionals are not very happy with this relationship. An independent, or even semi-independent news outlet might find many Jiang Yanyongs who would be willing to provide them with more accurate and truthful information to report to the public.

It is likely more people will be put into jail for doing this, but the likelihood will be lessened if the CCP leadership becomes smarter and less intransigent after the SARS crisis. They may realize that the best way to maintain social stability and international dignity is not to suppress truth-reporting, but to report truth as it is; and that societal stampede always starts with lies and half-truths. If the government news people can’t do the job of truth-telling, then alternative reporting channels have to be used.

If this should happen, China’s press freedom will have hope and China’s reporters will be able to deliver truth and reality rather than the archaic proletarian gibberish of ostentatious profundity that still permeates China’s news media of all forms.

All the above fallouts of the SARS crisis with regard to media control and censorship in China may or may not develop into major instrumentalities of fundamental change to repressive media policy and practice in China. Yet, we can only be hopeful that soon the Chinese will get rid of the old curse that Alexis de Tocqueville described as the ultimate antithesis to democracy in China-- "The Chinese excel at preventing, not at creating." If a government is committed to preventing people from knowing things and doing things, instead of encouraging individual freedom and creativity, then the government is doomed to fail. And the whole world has the obligation to precipitate its downfall.

YU Maochun

U.S. Naval Academy

Annapolis, Maryland

yu@usna.edu

410-293-6276

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Notes:

[1] First Worldwide Press Freedom Index, RSF, see http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=4116]

[2] "Chinese Government Is Blocking SARS News as Usual," VOA/Chinese, May 27 2003

[4] "Chinese Government Is Blocking SARS News as Usual, " VOA/Chinese, May 27 2003

[5] Minzhu Zhongguo, October 2002 issue and December 2001 issue.

[6] See for example, A Complete Anthology of SARS Humor up to May 5 2003 (feidian youmo daquan), from the Chinese language Internet news service Chinesenewsnet.com or duowei news.