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This is an interesting piece of news for two reasons: the content of the news, and the fact that The China Daily is running it as the top story on it's website, marked 'exclusive'.
There never used to be 'exclusive' stories in China since all publications and TV stations had to get their news from Xinhua or a small, limited range of other official sources.
Exclusive: Easing flood fears at Tangjiashan
MIANYANG, Sichuan -- Amid low visibility, a Russian helicopter successfully delivered a large bulldozer and other eight sets of big machineries near the swelling Tangjiashan lake, in order to dig a diverting channel to prevent a flood, said Minister of Water Resources Chen Lei.
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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Newspapers nationwide are using only black ink on their front pages, and the government has announced an official mourning period of three days, including asking for three minutes of silence at 2:28 pm today.
From The China Daily:
Nation in grief as quake toll hits 32,476
China on Monday began a three-day national mourning for the tens of thousands of people killed in a powerful earthquake which struck the country's southwest on May 12.
At 4:58 a.m., the national flag at the Tian'anmen Square in downtown Beijing flew at half-mast after a complete flag-raising ceremony.
All public amusements will be suspended for three days from Monday.
The State Council, the Cabinet, on Sunday ordered a nationwide display of respect for the dead.
China's missions abroad were also ordered to observe the order, and condolence books are to be opened in the Foreign Ministry and Chinese embassies and consulates around the world.
The public are asked to stand in silence for three minutes from 2:28 pm on Monday, the time the deadly quake hit, while automobiles, trains, and ships would sound their air sirens.
The confirmed death toll from the disaster has risen to 32,476 by 2:00 pm Sunday, and the toll would possibly rise to more than 50,000 as many, still buried in rubbles, are feared dead.
Apparently, gaming and entertainment websites have been ordered by at least some government departments to shut down or suspend operations for the next three days. Shanghaiist has more about this including a translation of an announcement about the mourning period for websites from the the government of Hefei, capital city of Anhui Province. This article is from Danwei.org
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As more news of destruction caused by yesterday's earthquake emerges, Xinhua says the death toll has reached nearly 10,000.
The figure may climb as more remote parts of mountainous western Sichuan are reached by rescue teams. President Hu Jintao has declared emergency relief of affected areas a national priority, the People's Liberation Army is being mobilized, and Premier Wen Jiabao is on the scene again rallying the citizens.
Xinhua has a special page updated with earthquake news here. This article is from Danwei.org
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From The Guardian:
China suffered a propaganda own goal today when a state-organised media trip to Lhåsa was interrupted by protesting monks who accused the government of lying to the outside world.
From a Xinhua report on The People's Daily website:
Foreign reporters tour in Lhasa interrupted, but resumes soon
A tour by overseas reporters to cover the Lhåsa riots was interrupted by a group of låmas at the Jøkhang Temple on Thursday morning, but the media tour soon resumed.
Officer with the Information Office of China's State Council, organizer of the media tour, said the coverage of the reporters would go on as scheduled.
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Better than riots In 2005 and 2006, Web editors at Xinhua and the China Daily, probably unbeknownst to their bosses, uploaded many photographs of scantily clad women to the sports, fashion and photo gallery sections of their websites.
Danwei followed this trend for some time, coining the word 'Skinhua' to describe the phenomenon: see for example, Pamela Anderson kissed excitedly by homosexual pop star, Skinhua goes nuts, Skinhua overdrive, and Sinner Daily gaining on Skinhua?.
Since mid 2006, a series of anti pornography and 'civilized Internet' (文明办网) campaigns seem to have slowed down the Web editors enthusiasm for scanned Playboy and FHM covers and lingerie shows.
But perhaps the even less welcome images in the news in the last two weeks have made the Xinhua web editors revisit their old habits: the image reproduced here is from a Xinhua photo gallery uploaded on Sunday, titled Lingerie show in ski resort, filed under 'Entertainment'.
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Page 2 of the 10 January, 2008, edition of Tongzhou Newsletter The Chinese media presented another lesson this week in how ham-fisted attempts to quash local news stories that "harm the image" of an individual or institution can end up propelling the story into major newspapers, where a far larger audience gets to look on as petty local politics play out on the national stage.
In this instance, an unflattering photograph of the mayor of Beijing's Tongzhou District that got a photographer fired from a small local newspaper in January has ended up all over the Internet as a result of a follow-up investigation by Southern Media Weekly.
Wang Lili (王力利), a photographer with the Tongzhou Newsletter (通州时讯), a local newspaper under the direction of the district party committee, took a photo of Tongzhou mayor Deng Naiping (邓乃平) presenting the district's annual work report on 9 January. In the photo, which ran in the newspaper alongside Deng's speech the next day, the mayor's head is bent and his eyes seem to be closed. For committing this grave error and causing a "political incident," Wang was fired on the 11th.
The news was not widely publicized at first. Media blogger "aside" posted a report on the incident to his blog the day it happened, but because the photo was not online and corroborating information was unavailable, it remained essentially a rumor. ESWN translated aside's report on 14 February and dug up a photo of Deng at a 2006 conference; the mayor is reading a speech with his head bent and his eyes half-closed, identical to the posture in Wang Lili's photograph.
Over the Spring Festival, Southern Metropolis Weekly interviewed Wang Lili and a few of his colleagues, and this week published a lengthy report on the whole incident. The piece leads off with the infamous photo, which spans four columns of text—it's even bigger than the version in Tongzhou Newsletter that caused all the trouble in the first place. The full report has been reposted to various blogs and forums, and a condensed summary that includes the photo in question has been making the rounds of other media outlets.
It's a fairly one-sided piece—the newspaper was unable to get in touch with anyone from the district government, so the question of who really gave the order remains unresolved. Oddly, Deng Naiping is mentioned by name only four times in the entire report, two of those in quotations from other sources; the rest of the time he is merely "the district mayor" (区长).
A "Political Incident" that Started with a Photograph
by Shi Feike / SMW
It was only three days from when the photo was taken to his dismissal. And a scant six hours from when he heard that the photo had gotten him into trouble until he was asked to leave the news agency. A "political incident" ruined the life-long reputation of 52-year-old photojournalist Wang Lili. If it weren't for that photograph, Wang Lili would still be slinging his camera bag over his shoulder and setting out at 7:30 every morning from his home in the former Beijing Chemical Plant dormitories, taking the 667 or 647 bus for half an hour to the West Tongzhou Avenue stop, then turning left and crossing at the corner of West Xihaizi Road underneath the Royal Photo building, and walking for ten minutes along a road lined on both sides with storefronts, until he finally arrived at the Tongzhou Cultural Center. His work unit, the Tongzhou Newsletter, was located in a large office on the second floor of the district's culture center.
Wang Lili walked this route for four years and eight months, up until 11 January, when he was dismissed from Tongzhou Newsletter.
Tongzhou Newsletter was originally the official newspaper of the Tongzhou District party committee. Five years ago, when a restructuring of the national periodical system eliminated county-level party newspapers, it was converted into a local edition of the Beijing Daily Messenger. To better manage human resources and advertising operations, Beijing Daily Messenger and the publicity department of the Tongzhou party committee set up an ad company called Xintong Lida, but in actuality the paper was still run by the publicity department.
As that was going on, Wang Lili was being sent into early retirement by the Beijing Chemical Plant, where he had worked for more than two decades. At the plant, he had worked for years in union propaganda, so he asked a friend to find him a new job at a newspaper. He worked there until he was dismissed this year, just before the Spring Festival. Wang says that he was "Tongzhou Newsletter's most experienced photojournalist."
 The infamous photo of district governor Deng Naiping A decision for a pre-festival firing
Wang Lili was dismissed because of a photograph he took at Tongzhou's legislative sessions, the "Two Meetings." In January, Tongzhou held the Two Meetings in Hebei's Grand Epoch City, and the paper sent Wang as its only photographer at the sessions. The sessions opened on the 9th with a government work report presented to the assembly by district mayor Deng Naiping. On the following day, the news appeared in Tongzhou Newsletter. On the third day, the 11th, the sessions ended, and at 9 am, en route from Hebei back to Hangzhou, everyone breathed a deep sigh of relief after so many days of work. As Wang was joking, his phone rang. It was a call from his supervisor at the newspaper.
After the incident, one of Wang's colleagues recalled that Wang's expression changed as soon as he answered the call. He told everyone, "Bad news. There's a problem with the photo in the article on the Two Meetings that ran in yesterday's paper." Wang remembers that over the phone that day, his superior requested that he immediately write a sincere, deep self-criticism on the photo issue to be placed on his desk that same day. he was also fined 500 yuan, and warned: "If you don't treat this affair correctly, we cannot continue your employment."
It was already noon when Wang reached the office. He started writing a self-criticism immediately, without even taking lunch, reviewing his own lack of responsibility and the effect that the affair would have on the image of Tongzhou. At around 1:30, Wang handed in the self-criticism. At 4, the agency held a meeting of all staff, where Wang once again carried out an extensive self-criticism. Just as everyone was beginning to think that the matter would blow over, the leaders suddenly announced their decision to dismiss Wang. One reporter with the paper, Deng Jie*, recalled that everyone was dumbstruck. No one imagined that it would turn out to be so severe. Deng Jie was one of the few original reporters who had joined the paper with Wang Lili after the reorganization, and in the instant that the leaders read their decision, she remembers glancing at Wang, who was sitting there, his face ghastly pale. After the meeting adjourned, many colleagues surrounded him to offer their consolations, and someone was sobbing.
As Wang Lili remembers it, he actually received notice from the leaders shortly before the meeting started. They said, "This affair has become a serious political incident. We cannot protect you—we have even been asked by the district mayor to write self-criticisms." "So I asked him, what counts as a political incident? He said, never you mind. We think it's a political incident and that's that. I thought, why beat around the bush, I'm out of work all the same. I'm a fairly straightforward person, so I handed in my key and left."
The matter was handled as fast as lightning. It was only three days from when the photo was taken to his dismissal. And a scant six hours from when he heard that the photo had gotten him into trouble until he was asked to leave the news agency.
 The letter of dismissal (the print edtion of SMW did not black-out his ID or address) Half a month later, on the eve of the Spring Festival, Wang Lili got his notice of dismissal. A few days ago, in a cafe near Bawangwen, this reporter saw the letter, which was sent from the Beijing Xintong Lida Advertising Company. This was the dismissal reason given:
Upon investigation, the news photo you took of district mayor Deng Naiping presenting the government work report on behalf of the district government, which appeared on the page 2 of the 10 January, 2008, edition of Tongzhou Newsletter, was misleading and had an extremely bad political influence. It is grave dereliction of duty, a political incident. After deliberation, our determination is to dissolve the employment contract between this company and yourself, effective immediately.
The letter of dismissal, dated 11 January, was not stamped by either the newspaper agency or Xintong Lida. But another of Wang Lili's superiors, Xintong Lida vice-president An Jilian, confirmed to this newspaper that the letter was genuine.
A photo of a bowed head, with eyes that seem closed
On page 2 of the 10 January edition of Tongzhou Newsletter, this reporter saw the photo captioned "District mayor Deng Naiping presents the government work report to the assembly on behalf of the district government." This photo, spanning two columns, was the only photo on the page, and accompanied the full text of the district mayor's work report.
The letter of dismissal that Wang Lili received did not mention what was misleading about the troublesome photo, or what sort of political incident it had caused. Wang said that the anger of the district leadership was directed at the "bowed head, closed eyes, and poor image" of the district mayor as he appeared in the photo.
A high-ranking individual with Tongzhou Newsletter explained to this reporter over the phone about the political implications of the photo: "As a news photo, it was wrong in what it conveyed about the spirit of the meetings. It was not stimulating—did the photo want to tell the reader that work was done poorly in Tongzhou last year, that the district leader was bowing his head in acknowledgement of his guilt?"
One of the agency leaders said that Wang was insufficiently attentive to his work in the shooting of this photo; he was unable to capture the instant that the district mayor raised his head and faced the front during his work report. This individual, who was responsible for the final approval of the paper mock-up, admitted that when he was choosing photos on the computer, the mayor's eyes were indeed open in the photo: "You could at least tell his black pupils from the whites of his eyes." He didn't expect the print quality to be so shoddy, but Wang Lili had only taken six pictures during the district mayor's presentation, so he ought to assume the responsibility!
Wang Lili said that he actually waited out the entire half-hour and took eleven photos altogether. They were all of the district mayor reading his text with his head bent. He selected six of them to give to his editor. But he is often plagued by painful, confused memories of whether or not the district mayor ever raised his head.
He said, "When the district mayor made his report, he basically read his text with his head bent. Over an hour and a half he may have raised his head once or twice, but while shooting I couldn't just sit there and wait for it—I couldn't capture it." But he also said, "The district mayor just doesn't raise his head. No matter what, he doesn't look up. We can't say to the leaders, Mr. Leader, look up so I can take a picture. That's no good. So it's hard to say." He even said that he wanted to look through the live tapes at the local TV station to demonstrate his innocence, because, "they're at least a little better than me: the machine's always recording. Will we be able to find a frame or two where the district mayor looks up?"
He doesn't mince words about his recklessness at the time: when he was taking photographs, he did not keep an eye fixed on the mayor from start to finish, and after he took the photos he did not try to find ways to remedy the situation, such as voluntarily discussing it with the leadership or issuing a warning beforehand. His colleague Deng Jie lamented that everyone involved in Tongzhou propaganda knows that the district mayor is not photogenic.
Even half a month later, he still regrets every little missed chance for redemption, from a change in venue to possibilities of substitute photos. In fact, this was not the first time that Wang shot this kind of photo, nor was it the first time that he had photographed this district mayor. He admits that at the Two Meetings last year, the newspaper used a shot of his, also of a bent head. But "the frame was larger, and since it included the stage, it wasn't as noticeable as this time."
"Previously, meetings were always held in the Tongzhou assembly hall, and we always knew before hand where the district mayor would stand to present his remarks. The placement was level with the cameras and it was easy to shoot. This time, the conference was in the huge meeting hall at Grand Epoch City, and the mayor's location during his speech was elevated. We could not stand in front of him to shoot, so we had to shoot from below. I took a few shots that were a little wider, but the editor didn't choose them. They were all there together."
 The governor in good spirits The same edition of Tongzhou Newsletter also included several additional photographs of his. "If this one had replaced the work report image, everything would be OK," he said, indicating a photo on page 6. That photo, taken the same day, is captioned "The mood is enthusiastic, and the district leaders encourage everyone to contribute opinions and suggestions, so that together we can draw up a blueprint for the development of Tongzhou in 2008." Second from the right in this photo, the district mayor is all smiles. "If I'd known he'd get angry, then even an ID photo would have worked."
Responsibility and Reasons
Up until publication, this reporter was unable to contact anyone else directly involved or Tongzhou mayor Deng Naiping. Wang Lili has always been at a loss as to where the trouble over the photo first broke out, in the short space of two days, and whether it was the idea of the agency leadership or the district mayor to dispose of him. If it was the mayor's idea, then what provoked his wrath?
He did his best to recall every detail of the conference: "When the paper came out, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Everyone was reading it at the conference, and I even saw ministers and the mayor's secretary talking and nodding. Nothing was wrong, until the morning of the next day." He speculated on the mental workings of the leadership: "It's just that the photos of the other leaders were all so good; maybe the district mayor was angry about something, or maybe someone said something to him that put him in a fury."
Chang Bin, former deputy editor in chief who left Tongzhou Newsletter a few months ago, was Wang Lili's direct superior for more than three years. He has a very good impression of Wang. "Nothing can be said against his performance. He works conscientiously and he's been named a model worker," he said.
As for the outcome of this affair, Chang was surprised that it was so serious. Wang Lili's former colleague Deng Jie also had a hard time understanding why Wang was dismissed, and a hard time believing the rumors about the reason. "He took more than one photo, and he wasn't the only photographer there. People from the publicity department and the archives were taking pictures, so the editors and the leaders should also bear responsibility for selecting and approving that photo."
But to date, only Wang Lili has been disposed. "During the all-staff meeting, an old ad guy said, so you're just going to dismiss someone? Wang Lili was a model worker. Is this appropriate? Isn't it too sudden? Shouldn't you deliberate it some more? The agency leader said there was nothing to deliberate. Everything had been determined."
Wang Lili also wondered about the circumstances surrounding his dismissal. "I think it may have been that the agency leadership was in a hurry to help the district leadership put out the fires. I think this is understandable: in this game, you have to protect yourself, and to know when to give up when things get dangerous. It's an instinct, an action that everyone has. Everyone has their own problems."
He is a little depressed. He never thought that a news photo, "you shoot what's there," would lead to problems. He's also a little remorseful: if he knew he was going to be fired, he wouldn't have written such a thorough self-criticism. "My thinking at the time was that if I wrote a self-criticism taking full responsibility, then maybe it would protect the agency head. If I still wanted to work there in the future, there's no point in making those people unhappy over one small thing. Now I think that I might have been filled with a kind of righteousness—in this game, loyalty is most important—if you fire me, it doesn't matter. I can find work anywhere."
An Jilian said that how this matter was handled was not the decision of any single individual; it was the result of the synthesis of several elements. Wang Lili's superiors admitted that his work was not bad and that he was a conscientious worker, but he did not pay enough attention to politics when he was taking photos of political news: there were certain matters that he did not handle correctly, and he had made similar small mistakes in the past. He was fired this time first of all because "Wang Lili was not a GAPP-accredited journalist; he was a just a reporter-for-hire. In addition, it was only after collective deliberation and a consultation with the district committee's standing committee that the decision was made, for the cause of toughening agency discipline."
But Wang Lili does not wish to place too much of the blame even on the agency leader who announced the decision: "I don't find the deputy director to be a bad man. He was always quite considerate of me. I don't hate him—he doesn't have it easy, either. Every evening at 7:30 he has to hurry over from the district committee to approve the newspaper, and he has to read through each political news item carefully. I respect the man."
 Deng Naiping at a conference in 2006 "I've been approached by a lawyer who said that this was not right—I should sue them. What evidence would they bring forth? What was their standard? And colleagues at other papers said that even someone took similar photos of [former Beijing mayor] Wang Qishan and [current Beijing mayor] Guo Jinlong, it wouldn't be enough to get fired—they'd just sit them down for a talk. I thought to myself, everyone department of Tongzhou knows about this now, so what? So what if I win a little justice? Will they let me go back to work? And even if they let me back, would I go? No, I certainly wouldn't. I'm not that desperate."
Re-employment
The day before the Spring Festival, Wang Lili, already without a job, picked up his final payment from An Jilian. It was 19,415.85 yuan in severance pay, which the agency calculated according to his work experience. At the same time, he received 900 yuan in compensation for his last two weeks of work for Tongzhou Newsletter, including 15 yuan for the troublemaking photo. Previously, his monthly income from Tongzhou Newsletter was almost 4,000 yuan, a relatively stable amount. The agency leadership said that he was an Associate Senior Reporter, and that he drew the highest income out of all the reporters-for-hire at the agency.
Even though his wife was retired, Wang Lili has not looked for work. Worries that he is too old are his major reasons: "These days college students come in waves. Can an old man like me join in the fun? Maybe if they reached rock-bottom."
He sighed: once you reach fifty, the body starts to go, but you continue to work and don't dare let up. "I was the only photographer at the agency. The photos on all eight pages were all my work, including politics, community news, and local stories. I had to contemplate every day what to shoot. My blood pressure is 110 to 160, and it never drops: the doctor said, it's because people like you are always in a state of anxiety."
His fervent desire is to find an opportunity to do some work during the Olympics, but he wonders whether any friends are still willing to help him after his more than four years doing propaganda at the Tongzhou Newsletter during which he had little contact with photojournalists in the outside world.
"I've been in Tongzhou for four and a half years. There's not news there for you to shoot—it's all repetitive stuff. One community or a village holds some activity, and they all do. You have to report on each of them, and the leaders always talk about big cultural issues. Over four years I photographed at least ten painting and calligraphy exhibitions, but they were all the same: lots of people looking on with their hands clasped behind their back. But you have to think of a way—you have to wrack your brain to find some way to make the old stuff new again."
Wang Lili refused this reporter's request to visit his home. His mother and father are still unaware that their fifty-something son lost his job shortly before retirement. "I don't want to tell them. I'm afraid that they'll worry, and I wouldn't be able to stand their nagging. They don't understand all this."
He even hid the matter from his daughter, who's now in college. Wang said that he was fairly cautious over the Spring Festival; he wanted to wait until he found a new job to tell his parents and daughter. Fortunately, over the holidays, no one asked. "Every morning when it was time to go to work, I just went out for a walk, or went over to a friend's to wait it out, and then went home."
A banner hanging in the Tongzhou Newsletter office reads, "Care for the people's livelihood, the people's feelings, and the people's will." The desk where Wang Lili worked for more than four years is hidden deep within the office of a paper that pledges to "Build China's Number One Community Newspaper." In response to this reporter's questions, his former colleagues were evasive. A middle-aged woman said, Wang Lili isn't here anymore; he wasn't transfered, he didn't resign—oh, it's a difficult question. You'd better ask him yourself.
After all the paperwork was complete, Deng Jie and a few other colleagues helped him move his things home in a few cardboard boxes. This was the first time that she had been to Wang Lili's home. She lamented, "His place was really old and shabby. I never imagined that there'd be such a poor area so close to Soho New Town. The wardrobe and kitchen cabinets were piled together, and there was no heat in the dead of winter. His wife has heart trouble and speaks in gasps. She told me to sit on the sofa, where there was an electric blanket so it was warmer."
Deng Jie said that she had the urge to find the district mayor's mobile phone number and send him an SMS telling him that an old hand at the Tongzhou Newsletter, a particularly conscientious individual, had lost his job on the eve of the Spring Festival. How was he supposed to celebrate the New Year?
Wang Lili's mind is still on that photo that brought him so much shame: "If I were given the chance to talk to the district mayor, I would say to him, 'If you had lifted your head, I wouldn't have missed photographing you. If you had lifted your head just once during the half hour, I guarantee that I would have caught it.'"
Links and Sources
This article is from Danwei.org
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 Staging Sha Fei's "Close Combat". Is it possible to post a breathtaking photo online without being accused of image manipulation?
After the South China Tiger debacle (which no one now wants to take responsibility for) and suspicions that the Chang'e moon photo was fabricated, to recent revelations that an award-winning photo by Liu Weiqiang of Tibetan antelope racing under the Qinghai-Tibet railway was actually a composite, it seems like everyone on the Internet is an expert at spotting the traces of a Photoshop job.
In response to the Liu Weiqiang scandal, Wenzhou-based journalist Zhang Xiang'ou has been posting a series of articles on his blog examining the lack of a concrete distinction between news and propaganda in China. One example he brings up comes from the work of Sha Fei, a renowned photographer who joined the Eight Route Army as a photojournalist and shot a number of iconic works in the 1930s and 40s.
The images at left (click for all three), titled "Close Combat" (肉搏), could possibly be scenes from the battlefield, but upon inspection, they are obviously staged. Zhang writes:
[When I first saw them], I wondered whether they may not have been shot on the battlefield. Perhaps this was training, or a movie set. Later, I looked carefully through Collected Works of Sha Fei and discovered a number of similar sets of photographs, but there were practically no real scenes of fighting.
So I asked Sha Fei's daughter, Wang Yan, and senior members of the photography community to determine the "true face" of the photographs, and the response was all negative—they were not taken at the scene.
So then they were staged! I was taken aback—how could the famous Sha Fei stage his photographs? This wasn't something that a journalist ought to do! But now I understand why: the images that Sha Fei shot were not all news photos that reflected the course of the war; they were propaganda photos meant to promote the Eighth Route Army's war against the Japanese to the outside world. Even though Sha Fei was a photojournalist, when he shot these propaganda photos, he was just a propaganda photographer.
In that era, with the equipment and talent that Yan'an had available, the Eighth Route Army could not have let Sha Fei really go to the front lines; even if he had an overwhelming desire to do so, he still could only stage re-enactments of battle conditions from where he was positioned behind the field of battle. Human resources were limited, and the safety of those photographers was paramount! Recognizing this historical background, I feel that what he did is understandable. The problem lies in the fact that when Sha Fei is mentioned, we seldom see behind the curtain of history.
Think about it: if people had looked at Close Combat with the same joy that they brought to Liu Weiqiang's photo only to discover that it was posed, and if they did not understand the historical conditions and the particular limitations that Sha Fei was operating under, they would likely misunderstand both Sha Fei and the history of the Eighth Route Army's war effort. This is not something that anyone wishes to see happen.
Even so, I am still grateful that Collected Works of Sha Fei included this set of three photos, because if it had only included one image, I as a reader would never have had the opportunity to doubt.
In a subsequent blog post, Zhang Xiang'ou recalled his days spinning propaganda for the People's Daily:
Mainstream Propaganda Also Needs to Seek Truth Through Facts
by Zhang Xiang'ou
The city I live in, Wenzhou, launched yet another major campaign a few days ago to clean up the Wenruitang River. We learn from the local media that over the next four years, four steps will be taken to overhaul 29 fetid streams in urban Wenzhou, so that by 2011 all of the stench and pollution will be eliminated.
Reading this news, I felt as if I had been given a stinging slap to the face. Wenzhou started a management project for the Wenruitang River back in October, 2000, and announced great results a long time ago. Back then, I was a reporter attached to the central China branch agency, stationed in Wenzhou; the following year, my superiors tasked me with writing an article about the river clean-up, for publication in the central China section of the People's Daily. The article, "How could this ditch be so clear?" extolled the swiftness with which the Wenzhou goverment and party committee had achieved significant results through their brilliant policy and management work. That article has been a weight on my mind all these years, because for seven years, filthy water continues to flow in the streams that I see before me.
When I entered the journalism profession, I set a standard for myself: I can write flawed reports because of errors in knowledge, but I cannot turn out articles that violate morality and justice. However, our reporters' station back then was also responsible for bullshit business tasks: sometimes, in order to facilitate good relations on all sides, we had to write propaganda stuff for various departments. I was in charge of news-gathering and editing, so I took on the majority of those tasks.
Of course, I am not repenting of my entire life at the reporters' station; rather, I regret the highly undisciplined work ethic I applied to propaganda work during my time there. I did no real interview, using instead whatever documents and clippings were provided to assemble a cut-and-paste report. And I relied heavily on a piece of software called MaxReader (丹青), which could take a scan of a printout and convert it directly to text. I didn't even need to retype it—I could simply edit the text into a new document. I violated my own internal standards and became so unprincipled mainly because I felt that these propaganda articles I was writing wouldn't be taken seriously anyway. When I wrote critical articles, I had to face questions from the people involved, but that wasn't really a danger with these uncritical reports. Doing too many propaganda articles gives one a charmed, irresponsible attitude.
There's no question that "How could this ditch be so clear?" was the result of cutting and pasting official documents and news clippings—it didn't even have any general quotes. If, seven years ago, my announcement that "Wenzhou's water management has achieved great results" were true, then naturally we wouldn't have another massive management campaign in 2008. But in this harmonious society, will the media pursue the question of how much of the taxpayers' money was spent on water management over the last eight years, and who is ultimately responsible for its failure? So with this in mind, my remorse may seem to some people to be too much of a show; unnecessary, even. I write this here not only to express my remorse over my frivolous work ethic in the past, but more importantly, because this memory is the key that allows me to unlock a door behind which I will finally discover the answer to this question: why do we have so many fake photographs?
 "Love in the Time of SARS" by Qiu Yan. Taking a look back at problem photographs over the past three years, I found that they all share one common point: they are all photos that promote the main propaganda theme. Perhaps the fabricators did not expect that their photographs, reflecting as they do the prosperity of the country, the stability of the people, and the flourishing, harmonious era in which we live, would be singled out for scrutiny.
I posted "Did Sha Fei fake a photograph?" yesterday, and there's one point that I ought to explain: Sha Fei is definitely a pioneer for those of us working in photojournalism, but pioneers are certainly not perfect. If he is simply deified without an objective consideration of the facts, then our our understanding of Sha Fei himself, of history, and of news photography will all be affected. From Sha Fei to Liu Weiqiang, we see a heritage of the conceptual confusion between "news" and "propaganda". The glory of one generation is a disgrace for the next. Is this not enough to give us pause?
If the main voice of propaganda were to seek truth from facts, then it would, as a matter of course, put an stop to the repugnance that people have for "the main theme." But truth be told, in today's environment of exaggerated public morality, it's probably a bit too idealistic to think of accomplishing that. As someone who's also in the news profession, I deeply understand the difficulties you face—propaganda photographs must be taken, after all. But this is the heart of the problem: stage them if you have to, shoot what you need to, do them up right—but always remember: they're just propaganda photos! You want to enter them into some news award competition? They're no different from Edison Chen's sex photos that are on the Internet! In both cases, something that should not have seen the light of day has been forced out under the sun. Edison may have been framed, but you've done this to yourselves.
We ought to be understanding and forgiving of Sha Fei, working as he was in those difficult historical conditions. But as for today's muddleheads, we should not permit them to profit in troubled times. We must be firm in our insistence that people like Qiu Yan and Zhang Liang,* who shamelessly fabricated "harmonious SARS" and "harmonious bird flu" photos, are not to be tolerated. For they stand in front of generation after generation of descendants, and we must not let them hand down a heritage of shame.
 "Plaza Pigeons Innoculated Against Avian Flu" by Zhang Liang Postscript: Let me state here my opinion on the Zhang Liang photo: even if that pigeon was not added afterward, it's still not a real photograph. Is that the way to give pigeons shots, when they're all flying around? How many can you do a day? Would you really work like that instead of saving effort and working right at the pigeon coop? It's entirely staged—there's no need to argue over the question of a single pigeon. That something like this can be awarded a prize says only that the China Journalistic Photo Competition isn't serious at all.
Note: Qiu Yan's image of a bride and groom crossing a street wearing masks against SARS won a World Press Photo award in 2004, after which the subjects of the photo said that they were models whom Qiu had paid to stage the scene (see this Beijing Today story). Zhang Liang won an award for his image of pigeons flying above a Harbin plaza while a vet innoculates them against avian flu. Chinese netizens accused Zhang of Photoshopping the birds onto the background (see ESWN's story).
See also: Imagethief, Scandalous death of a propaganda image.
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 Will it be good this year? Just three more days until we can start complaining about the performances at this year's CCTV Spring Festival Gala.
It's kind of unfair, really. Months of planning and tens of thousands of person-hours are poured into the program, but with the exception of a standout segment or two each year, people don't usually have anything nice to say about it.
But at least they're trying. At the end of January, high-level officials reviewed the dress rehearsals and offered their suggestions for improvements; here are the thoughts of three of them, courtesy of the China News Agency:
Ouyang Jian, deputy director of the Publicity Department: Overall, the dress rehearsal came off well. It gave highlighted festive themes, and all the necessary elements were present. There were frequent high points among the rich material.
Hu Zhanfan, vice minister at SARFT: Hu thanked the cast and crew for their efforts. He felt that the rehearsal met with expectations. His recommendations:
- Language should be closely managed. Care should be taken to make sure that the hosts' introductory material and the skit segments use correct, appropriate, and decent language. Pop songs should maintain a healthy tone;
- Dance numbers should be striking: create brilliant, important, and classic segments;
- Refine the skit segments to increase their overall effect;
- Improve the costuming of non-professional performers;
- Heighten the atmosphere to increase visual impact and foster interactivity.
Zhao Huayong, president of CCTV:
- Improve the lighting effects and take more care in camera positioning and scene framing;
- Use the entire stage to open up the performance;
- Visuals on the big screens should better complement the action on the stage;
- Performers in spoken word segments should be more expressive; design and costuming of dance and acrobatics numbers needs to be improved;
- Transitions between segments should be smooth; countdown dialogue before midnight should be carefully planned out;
- Improve cast and crew management, heighten discipline, and strengthen follow-through.
In an article posted at China Elections & Governance, Daniel Bell notes the recent decline in viewership, and suggests that political satire might be the way to restore the Gala's lost luster. But that would be a complete reversal from the current politics of the Gala:
Not surprisingly, the show also serves a political purpose. It is meant to unify Chinese speakers across the world, including overseas Chinese. The past few years have included skits involving Hong Kong and Taiwan performers, and there are shots of Spring Festival parties in other parts of the globe. It is also meant to solidify support for the Chinese Communist Party. At the end of last year's show – the countdown right before midnight – the screen flashed images of CCP leaders, from Mao Zedong to Hu Jintao. Perhaps the idea is that the love shown to family members during the holiday season should be extended to the "father-figures" in the party.
Could political satire be injected into this feel-good atmosphere? The Gala is a cash cow for CCTV; if viewership continues to decline, would the network be forced to adapt to the tastes of its audience?
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This article is from Danwei.org
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On 6 December, CCTV's evening news program, Xinwen Lianbo (新闻联播, translated in this post as "Network News Broadcast"), introduced a new presenter, Hai Xia, who read the news with veteran anchor Luo Jing. In the days that followed, three other new faces showed up for the 7:00pm news program.
How have they been received? Acclaim has poured in from all quarters. According to an online poll sponsored by CCTV International, People Online, and Sina, the new presenters were deemed satisfactory by more than 85% of the 400,000 respondents. Even SARFT, which is rarely pleased with anything these days, posted a short notice on its website hailing the organized, effective manner in which CCTV is training anchors for the future.
The network had previously tested out new anchors on 5 June, 2006, but the following day everything was back to normal. Although an online poll taken after that broadcast showed a 68% approval rating, there were complaints that the two new anchors, Kang ***, in his 30s, and Li Zimeng, 28, lacked the gravity that the older anchors had brought to the news.
This round of changes is being done more systematically. To ease the transition, each new presenter is paired with one of the current six.* Kang ***, Li Zimeng, Hai Xia, and Guo Zhijian will work with Luo Jing, Xing Zhibin, and the other familiar faces rather than holding down an entire program on their own. To show that things are really serious this time, CCTV has come up with a catchy four-part slogan: "Adding, not subtracting; training new people; veterans lead new arrivals; old and new advance together."
 Guo Zhijian 郭志坚 Interest in CCTV's changes hasn't been limited to the domestic media. On 14 December, Xinhua's International Herald Leader summarized the reaction in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore.
Taiwan's CTI TV reported on the changes in a broadcast on 8 December that said "the new anchors will make CCTV news more watchable." (Other Chinese newspapers reported the exact time—one minute forty-nine seconds—devoted to this news item.) Korea's Chosun Ilbo was quoted as saying that the personnel changes were designed to update the stodginess of the old news crew.
On the negative side of things, Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao felt that the new faces slid too easily into the old mould: "the individuality of the young anchors was homogenized by the rigor of the Network News Broadcast." The paper noted that Kang *** and Li Zimeng were much more muted this year than in their one appearance together in 2006.
Do the changes have implications beyond the ratings game? IHL turned to a professor of communications at Tsinghua University:
Lianhe Zaobao had the following assessment of the aborted test last year and its resumption this year: "The 'changing of the guard' at the Network News Broadcast can be seen as a re-enactment in miniature of China's present road of reform: reform is the general direction, but things can only proceed by small steps."
"I take issue with this assessment," said Shi Anbin, assistant professor of Journalism and Communications at Tsinghua University, in an interview with IHL. Shi said that there is a transitional stage in any organization's change from old to new. For example, when ABC's high-rated evening news program in the US changed anchors, it first had the old anchor work on the weekdays and the new one on the weekends, and this transitional period went on for more than half a year before it was complete. "When exchanging old for new, such mixing is industry standard," said Shi Anbin.
The Network News Broadcast, the most-watched television news program in the world, is about to celebrate its 30th anniversary. For thirty years, the foreign media have searched every detail, hoping to discover clues about China's movements. To Shi Anbin, the foreign media's objective reason for doing this is that CCTV is the national television station. Actually, "China's news programs are diversifying. Some among the foreign media are still looking at China through their old, colored glasses, and they watch the Network News Broadcast from a one-sided perspective. So over-analysis and over-interpretation is unavoidable."
In an editorial for this week's Southern Weekly, Southern Metropolis Daily lead writer Chang Ping offered a different reason for that over-interpretation (an extended version is available on his blog):
Overanalysing CCTV faces is due to a lack of information
by Chang Ping / SW
CCTV's Network News Broadcast brought four new anchors to the fore this week. The new faces boosted ratings to a peak of twice what they normally are. To win such success without changing either the anchors' style or the program content is quite unexpected.
Instead of saying that the new faces have brought about a new climate, careful analysis suggests that it might be better to say that everyone's curiosity was sparked by the information about the program changes. Updating the program is seen as renewal within CCTV, and renewal within CCTV is seen as a sign of renewal within the upper leadership. Someone suggested that this analysis is over-reaching, that there is no reason to make such a fuss. For its part, CCTV said that these are normal working arrangements, and that it hoped the audience would react calmly. From a purely theoretical standpoint, this is entirely correct. However, in reality, audiences are not so simple. Living under conditions where there is a long-term lack of political information has cultivated a habit of paying attention to the slightest detail in order to extrapolate the big picture.
 Hai Xia 海霞 Obviously, CCTV's Network News Broadcast is not a typical program. It is an important propaganda tool for the ruling party, and its rigid format has a certain symbolic meaning. For this very reason, though the news-readers' framework is out of date and their style is obsolete, CCTV cannot readily make changes. Modern media theorists could never have imagined that the personnel changes at the Network News Broadcast would being with a proposal made by a CPPCC member [Ye Hongming]. That proposal said: "In a certain respect, a Network News Broadcast presenter has the nature of a government press spokesperson and represents the image of the entire country." This expresses how people truly see the image and function of the Network News Broadcast.
Whether for the sake of the country or for their own personal interests, people are brimming with a strong curiosity about politics. Although political transparency has been rising by leaps and bounds, the fact that the personnel changes at the Network News Broadcast have been over-analyzed demonstrates that the public has not yet left behind its old habits of mystifying politics, and it proves that political information is still insufficient and unable to satisfy the demands of society. Of course, foraging for food after dinner may be for some other reason besides an empty stomach: it may simply be a personal hobby. A minority can be granted this right, but the majority should not be forced to go "hunting."
On the one hand, CCTV enjoys a monopoly on political information, but on the other, it wants to become a member of the modern media. It is in an awkward situation, one that it will have to make the best of, from the looks of things now. And it may prove difficult to fulfill both goals in the long term. Thinking like normal media, CCTV ought to choose the market instead of planning. In this respect, the changes at the Network News Broadcast have come too late; they're just patching the fence after the sheep have fled. Audiences should vote with their remotes to compel CCTV to deign to satisfy their needs rather than simply crying out for livelier programming. Rather than over-analyzing the changes at the Network News Broadcast, why not simply ask for more complete political information and pursue a better democratic life.
Paris-based journalist Xiong Peiyun took a look back at CCTV's missed opportunities in a column for Southern Metropolis Daily:
Network News Broadcast or Network Propaganda Broadcast?
by Xiong Peiyun / SMD
An old program and several old faces. That the changing of the news readers at the Network News Broadcast should become a "top story" in the Chinese media—over the past few years newspapers have even written editorials about it—is without a doubt one of the peculiarities of this age of transition.
Although I left the Network News Broadcast behind long ago, I still can understand quite well the joyful applause of some in the audience. Like exchanging the family's 14-inch black & white TV for a stylish new LCD screen—it's normal human emotion to be excited about this for a few minutes. Of course, I also understand how some other people object: if the program content doesn't improve, then all the faces in the world won't make a difference.
No one questions the major influence that the Network News Broadcast has on Chinese political life. In China, if the foreign media invite you out to eat, and if it happens to be night-time, then in many cases you may waste time waiting for them. They will often rush over after watching the end of the Network News Broadcast. Of course, the broadcast is a required course for so many foreign reporters stationed in China for a simple reason: it is one window onto Chinese politics, a barometer, a monitor on which Chinese politics are exhibited to the world.
 Kang *** 康辉 In today's world, many people resist television because it is "government in the dining room." But in China, the Network News Broadcast is even more like a government spokesperson. Since it began broadcasting on New Year's Day, 1978, the Network News Broadcast has scrupulously observed its mission to be the "promote the voice of the party and the government, and to broadcast the great matters of the day." In a sense, this principle determines the true nature of the Network News Broadcast as a "network propaganda broadcast."
Obviously, news is different from propaganda: news can occur and be broadcast at any time, while propaganda is planned and slanted, with repetition valued over long-term effectiveness and preaching emphasized over facts. One difference to the audience may be that news can be used to analyze the parties involved in the news, while propaganda can be used to analyze the propagandists. The attentive can even guess at the pulse of politics and future directions in this transitional society.
People watch the Network News Broadcast for another major reason: the program has a "partial monopoly" on the dissemination of Chinese political information. Beginning with the broadcast of the 12th National Party Congress in 1982, the central authorities granted the Network News Broadcast exclusive rights to air major news items one day before other media. The authoritative, rigid image of the Network News Broadcast and its role in handing down the voice of the leadership gradually took shape. Obviously, this advantageous system exceeds the typical set-up of a normal news program. In truth, this is why the Network News Broadcast is not merely a network broadcast of the news; it also is a network broadcast of the way all the pieces line up on the board. Without exception, all provinces and cities rebroadcast this two-headed, uneasy mode of reporting.
Some may say that the Network News Broadcast is China's most successful means of "governing with the news" (新闻执政), but from the perspective of political communication, a news broadcast technique that has propaganda results as its primary goal is inseparable from the "rule by propaganda" (宣传统治) of traditional political communication. The difference between the two lies in the fact that in governing with the news, the government preserves a cooperative relationship with the media: it sets the media agenda and the public agenda through declarations, actions, and policies. Rule by propaganda, on the other hand, expresses itself as the government's direct involvement in the media: it exceeds its authority by directly setting the media's agenda.
It must be acknowledged that on the road to openness, China has begun to transition from rule by propaganda to governing through news. Officials from the State Council Information Office have even said that the Chinese government's attitude toward the news media is in the process of transitioning from the traditional "media control" and "media management" to "media cooperation."
The thirty years of the Network News Broadcast have also been thirty years of reform and opening up. To an extent, it is the reform done in miniature. Those familiar with the history of the Network News Broadcast know that the program has actually tried to adapt to the rules of journalism in the past. On 29 January, 1986, "America's Space Shuttle 'Challenger' Explodes" led the broadcast in place of the normal run-down by rank of the central leadership's activities or the day's major domestic news. However, this pioneering stroke failed to win support, or it was unsustainable on its own, so more than a decade later, the world-changing 9-11 incident was not broadcast as a major story on the program. But can you say that CCTV didn't have the resources or the professional skills?
 Li Zimeng 李梓萌 Televisions sales are up, but the Network News Broadcast viewership is dropping. This is clearly tied to delays in reforming the program. Correspondingly, as the reform and opening up has progressed, the political and authoritative capital that the program relies on for its reputation is ebbing away. With the flourishing of the Internet, the news marketplace has subdivided and channels for people to obtain information have multiplied. Even for "great and useful" political information, people turn to government websites.
Thirty years of the Network News Broadcast. For the majority of Chinese media, living in this era of fast yet sluggish transition, a program that has had a 30-year lifespan can truly be called "immortal." Unfortunately, when I think back on this unchanging, diamond-class program, the only words that I can think of to sum up these thirty years are, "The news is still far off, and network broadcasts are always propaganda." And this awful impression is clearly not something that can be changed by simply swapping in a couple of charming young faces.
Zhang Wen, a long-time newsweekly reporter who is currently head of the editorial department at Xinhua's Globe magazine, doesn't watch Network News but still congratulated the program in this recent blog post:
Congratulations to Network News for bringing in new faces!
by Zhang Wen
Old faces give way to new ones, but the song remains the same
Reports about the Network News Broadcast bringing in new people have been online for several days. Involved in the news myself, I saw the information a while ago, but I have been too lazy to go watch the program. It's been years since I even glanced at it.
What sort of attraction is there in an old face sitting there reading "eight-legged" news in solemn tones year after year?! At any rate, it doesn't attract a man like me in the prime of life. I yearn for news like that overseas nude broadcast, but unfortunately I cannot watch it.
If I want to understand domestic and international affairs, I can watch Phoenix, or I could go on the Internet! Why should I set a time to attend to a greying old woman and listen to her prattle on?!
 Li Juan (李娟), early CCTV anchor. We audiences have been dissatisfied for quite some time, and our throats have grown hoarse from calling for change. Last year they finally tested a couple of new faces, and although they were late in coming, they still won significant praise. Who'd have thought that in the end, the old faces would be back in place?
I'm confused at how difficult it is to find someone new to fill such an undemanding position. Someone once said that the old-timers have significant political experience and won't exceed the bounds of propriety. Of course this is one reason. But since the Du Xian affair in 1989 [when Du Xian and Xue Fei were canned for going off-message], what journalist—a CCTV news anchor, no less—would be careless around politics?
I can only read one thing from this substitution: structural inertia is a consideration even when changing a Network News Broadcast reader. To break a long-standing taboo requires immense courage!
Today, we still cannot openly reflect on the Cultural Revolution, nor can we openly reflect on the "merits and faults" of certain great individuals: we leave the next generation an ambiguous contemporary history.
The Network News Broadcast finally changed personnel following the leadership changes of the 17th Party Congress. But I long ago lost interest, and I won't watch those new folks read that "old news." However, change is a good thing.
For this change, I sincerely congratulate CCTV and the Network News Broadcast!
Note: The six established anchors are: Xing Zhibin (started in 1981), Luo Jing (1983), Li Ruiying (1986), Li Xiuping (1989), Wang Ning(1989), and Zhang Hongmin, who started sometime in the early 80s.
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 Yum yum yum The Mid-Autumn Festival — celebrated by giving — and once in a while eating — stodgy mooncakes falls on September 25 this year. Xinhua reports:
Shanghai joined Beijing and Guangzhou yesterday in sending mooncakes to Chinese peacekeepers working in war-torn countries.
The three cities all started to mail the traditional sweet at 3:30pm yesterday via the county's EMS postal service...
..."There are more than 2,000 Chinese peacekeepers abroad now who have been away from home for an extended period," said Hu Shiyun, a spokesman for Shanghai Post.
..."All the Chinese soldiers abroad said they were eager to eat the mooncakes from home at the festival, so we decided to mail the special dessert to all of them this year," Hu said.
China to date has dispatched more than 7,000 people to take part in 16 peacekeeping missions with the UN.
Eight Chinese soldiers have been killed during China's 16-year peacekeeping history, which has included stints in Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Lebanon.
Poor peacekeepers.
Mooncakes are China's answer to Christmas fruitcake: a festive food that nobody actually enjoys eating. In fact, mooncakes are most useful as a means to hide bribes: you give the bribee a really expensive box of mooncakes, which he then takes to a mooncake buying company that gives him cash with no paper trail. The mooncAke buying company then sells the mooncakes for repackaging for next year's Mid-Autumn festival. This option is probably not available to peacekeeper soldiers in Lebanon.
This article is from Danwei.org
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 People's Daily acknowledges 1989 in 2004. (click for full-size) As reported on ESWN and widely mocked elsewhere, the China Daily website slipped up when it reposted a Reuters article in full, not noticing that it referenced certain sensitive events from 1989.
We can't say that we're surprised. Not because the China Daily website has a reputation for blind copy-and-paste journalism (though it does), but because it did exactly the same thing back in 2004, when it reposted an AP obituary of Anita Mui that closed with a mention of the pop star's work with a Tiananmen-related charity.
In that case, as in the present one, the full story was shared with the People's Daily website and stayed up for between 12 and 24 hours before being cleansed.
Reports on this latest goof, which included lavishly illustrated spreads in Hong Kong newspapers, tended to use headlines like "China Daily acknowledges history." However, blame for the mixup rests with the website, not the print newspaper. If I were the China Daily, I'd be pretty ticked off at the website for continually dragging my good name through the mud. The peculiar editorial process at the Xinhua website has been chronicled elsewhere, and from the frequency with which screw-ups and plagiarism occur at other official English-language online media, we can only assume that the procedures are the same.
So having a perpetual "China Daily Plagiarism watch", "China Daily asleep-at-the-switch watch", "China Daily babewatch" or even a "Chinglish watch" quickly becomes tiresome. It's fun to play "gotcha" once in a while, but pointing out each and every instance is sort of like, oh, running a tank back and forth over a pig carcass. This was an especially satisfying catch, however, and we look forward to the next one in 2010.
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 Homer and Xinhua - click to enlarge Xinhua has published a report about new scientific research about multiple sclerosis (MS) — a debilitating degenerative disease. On Sunday, European and American researchers published findings showing that people who carry two newly discovered genes have a much greater chance of developing the disease.
On Xinhua's English website, the article is illustrated with an image of an X-ray photo of Homer Simpson's brain.
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 China Newsweek 2007.06.11: "The Power of SMS" The last issue of China Newsweek (11 June) featured in-depth reports on a number of major events related to government transparency and crisis management - the Xiamen PX demonstrations, the Taihu Lake pollution affair, and the cause of this year's high pork prices.
The cover feature looked at the role of moble and online media in the 1 June demonstration against Xiamen's PX chemical plant. Here's a translation of the main article:
Xiamen PX Incident
Expression of Popular Opinion in the New Media Era
by Xie Liangbing / China Newsweek
Thirty-two-year-old Ye Zi (name changed) received an email from her friend on 26 May. That was her first time to see the English word PX, and the first time that she was aware that in Nandu, Haicang District, not far from her home on Guliangyu Island, a massive PX (paraxylene) chemical plant was being constructed.
In the email from her friend, Xiamen's PX chemical plant project was described thus: starting production "would be like dropping an atomic bomb on Xiamen Island; it would mean that in the future, the people of Xiamen would live in the shadow of leukemia and deformed children." "This really shook me," said Ye Zi, who calls herself a gentle person who's never been one to get excited.
At first, Ye Zi did not believe that this was true. After searching through materials online, though she found out that things were not as sensational as the email made them out to be, Ye Zi still determined that PX was a dangerous chemical product. And in the following period, she received similar messages about the PX project through MSN and QQ.
At this point, a close friend from high school gave her a phone call asking if she'd received an SMS about PX. This friend urged Ye Zi, saying: "Don't just stay at home with your husband and kid. Look at what's happening outside. Don't forget to put on a yellow band and go out for a walk on 1 June."
Put on a yellow band and go for a "walk"? This gave the timid Ye Zi a pause. But she thought about her son, only three years old, and her life in the future with her whole family breathing PX fumes, and decided to go out. "I hoped to express the true wishes of a citizen of Xiamen," Ye Zi said. On Friday, 1 June, at 7 in the morning, Ye Zi found a piece of yellow cloth at home. She tore off a strip and put it in her bag, and then went out toward Xiamen Island. Coincidentally, on the ferry to Xiamen Island, she ran into her uncle's family. Talking to them, she found that their aims were identical.
From the city government to S. Hubin Road, Ye Zi and her uncle's family followed a procession of nearly 1000 people, and shouted slogans with them. "However, I kept that strip of yellow cloth in my bag and never dared to take it out," Ye Zi said. What disappointed her was that the good friend who had first urged her to "walk" never appeared for their meeting.
That night, Ye Zi found related news on the scrolling tickers of all of Xiamen's TV stations. But what she thought was just a gentle way of using a "walk" to express her wishes was defined by the Xiamen PSB as an "illegal mass demonstration" that "seriously disrupted public order and disturbed the lives and work of the general public."
This was not the first time that the Xiamen public expressed their will about the PX project.
Proposal
During this year's Two Congresses, 105 CPPCC members signed a joint "Proposal recommending moving the Xiamen Haicang PX project." This became the first key proposal of this year's CPPCC. Spearheading the proposal was CPPCC member Zhao Yufen, a CAS academician and a Xiamen University professor of chemistry who resides on Xiamen Island.
"If I say PX you may not understand, but you'll definitely remember the November, 2005, explosion at the Jilin benzene plant as if it were yesterday. PX is p-Xylene, a dangerous, highly carcinogenic chemical that causes a high rate of fetal deformations. And the PX project is located in the densely-populated Haicang District," Zhao Yufen said in an interview with China Business.
In the proposal, Zhao and her colleagues set out the safety consequences and pollution threat that the PX project might cause. On the site selection, for example, the proposal said that international practice for similar projects is to have them separated from cities by 70 kilometers; Chinese practice is usually 20 km, but the Haicang PX project is just 7 km from the main city districts.
After this proposal was reported in many papers like China Business, Southern Metropolis Daily, and China Youth Daily, there was an instant, fierce reaction in Xiamen. And more citizens wondered why such a major project connected to the public interest was not announced to the public beforehand.
According to media reports, on 26 March, all the homeowners in the "Future Waterfront" around 4 km removed from the PX project sent a letter to Zhao Yufen saying that the proposal revealed an unsettling inside story unknown to the majority of homeowners. Another letter signed by the villages of Wencuo, Dongyu, and Zhongshan in Haicang District expressed their pleasure at the willingness of the proposal to "offer advice."
Graffiti
On the evening of 8 May, a long-term resident of Xiamen originally from out of town returned to Xiamen from a business trip, passing by the construction site facing the Lujing Hotel east of Xiamen University. He discovered some English-language graffiti of tears, egrets (Xiamen's city bird), and "I LOVE XIAMEN," "Everyone is island," "Everyone is Xiamen," and "ANTIPX."
At first he thought that this was graffiti put up by foreigners who loved Xiamen, so he took photos of the graffiti and posted them to his blog. He never imagined that back in his company, a colleague would see the photos on his blog and immediately get a jubilant look in his eyes that said, "I've finally found an organization!" This colleague turned out to be a steadfast opponent of the PX project.
The designer of these pieces of graffiti was eventually confirmed. They were the work of Zhezi, moderately-well-known in Fujian, who had done a "Don't want to graduate" series of works on 6 May. On the night of 10 May, Zhezi posted to his blog: "About ANTIPX, I want to say that I am not an angry youth standing on principles, and I'm not a courageous person."
Zhezi said that this was just the action of a sensitive, cowardly individual searching for his own voice, not opposition or challenge to anything. "So I think that everyone should treasure this pand. To know that at this place and time there is someone else writing down the same thing that is in your mind: Xiamen, I love you," Zhezi wrote on his blog.
Even though Zhezi felt compelled to say, "Forgive me for my impotence in the face of reality. Facing PX, facing the pollution in this city, there's nothing but sorrow and wan description," and although there is now no longer any trace of the graffiti in many places lining the route of the walkers around Xiamen University, through the swift dissemination of the Internet, ANTIPX became the unanimous aspiration of the legions of Xiamen environmentalists.
SMS
On 29 May, the media reported that more than ten thousand Xiamen residents were circulating the same SMS message. But before long, the message was screened and it became hard to send or recieve it again.
The contents of the basically ran: "The Xianglu Group has invested in a (benzene) project in Haicang District. Should this highly-toxic chemical product be manufactured, it would be like dropping an atomic bomb on Xiamen Island; it would mean that in the future, the people of Xiamen would live in the shadow of leukemia and deformed children. We want to live. We want our health! International organizations have rules that these projects must be developed at least 100 km from cities; Xiamen is just 16 km away from this project! For our children and grandchildren....when you see this SMS please sent it to all of your friends in Xiamen!"
According to this reporter's understanding at the scene, there were not all that many city residents who received the SMS. "I did not personally receive that kind of SMS. I heard that some people around me got it. Everyone was passing it on. And I learned about today's action too," said Ms. Wen, who said she worked at a foreign trade company and who was out "parading" at noon on 1 June.
However, this did not seem to prevent "Have you received the SMS?" from becoming a greeting among Xiamen residents who met each other during that period. Mr. Chen, a man from Anhui who has been driving a taxi in Xiamen for five years, talked about PX with this reporter and had the solemn air of someone who knew inside information. "Just so happens that the past few days I've taken a number of people from Haicang District, and they've all been talking about this."
But at this time, the Xiamen municipal government had not revealed to citizens any further information regarding the PX project, so the "Boycott PX, Protect Xiamen" feeling circulated by SMS gradually covered Xiamen, whose summer sun was unobscured by rain or thunder.
Internet
Ms. Wang, who participated in the 1 June "walk," said that she first learned of the PX project about three months ago on Sina. "However, it seemed that before long the post was deleted," Wang said. In fact, for many local Xiamen residents, it was on the most popular local BBS - Xiaoyu Community - that they learned about the important base for PX.
On 30 May, this reporter tried to access the Xiaoyu BBS but found the message, "The community is temporarily closed for a program upgrade. 2007.05.29." According to one user of the Xiaoyu BBS, they had all received an email from the BBS whose general message instructed them not to post anything having to do with PX. On 5 June, this reporter again tried to access the BBS and found that it had returned to normal.
At the same time, during a period at the end of May, Xiamen's netizens used email, MSN, and QQ to receive information about PX.
Ye Zi received a message on QQ that went like this: "For our children and grandchildren, take action! Take part in a 10,000-person YX [游行, march]. At 8 am on 1 June, set off from your home for the municipal government. Tie a yellow band on your hand. If you have no time to participate, then send this information as widely as possible. For your own life, take action!"
On 2 June, the information sent through these channels went like this: "For two days, spontaneous parades have demonstrated our attitude. Production must continue, life must go on. There is no need to be impetuous and give unlawful elements eager for chaos an opportunity. Let us turn our eyes toward how the government handles the critical issue of the PX project."
"Anticipation for a green home never falters. Let us use soft, quite means to bring that forth. If you oppose the PX project, then tie yellow scarves everywhere - on your vehicle, on your work desk, on the bag you carry with you....at any place and at any time, ANTIPX, yellow scarves, so the city dances!"
"Walking," ANTIPX, yellow scarves...these became the symbols of the citizens' gentle expression of their opinions.
* * *
Following this was an article titled "Government PK Citizens: They're Both Winners" that began
It cannot be denied that when information was neither transparent nor balanced, the common people were thrown into a massive "PX panic," which carried with it elements of aimlessness and extremism. However, when this mass panic became an unstoppable flood of resistance and "persuasion," the local government had to be even more rational in its approach toward handling this public crisis.
as well as a final analysis by Zhao Lei that concluded
[China University of Political Science and Law professor] Cai Dingjian writes that one important platform in China's current transformation of public participation is the People's Congress within the country's political framework. In recent years, the Two Congresses, particularly the NPC meeting, have gained a high level of attention, demonstrating the extent of the public's thirst for participation. The People's Congresses needs to further improve their own representative mechanisms to better speak for the interests of the people; this is the main avenue of public participation.
However, in the deliberative procedure for the Xiamen PX project, the People's Congress was ignored. "From a legal standpoint, this at the very least did not fully respect the People's Congress system. The law stipulates that local People's Congresses have the right to decide upon major projects. With this size of an investment, profit, and effect on the populace, it is inappropriate for the decision to be made by the government," Cai told this publication.
China Newsweek is published by China News Service, the country's second largest news organization. Zhang Wen, editorial department head at Xinhua's Globe newsweekly, echoed this call for participatory government in a blog post on 8 June:
The Xiamen PX storm continues unabated, but the wind has changed direction, beginning to give the feeling of "settling up in Autumn." Seeking investment in Hong Kong, Xiamen's mayor was unbowed, saying that the PX project was just delayed, not stopped; if the officially-commissioned environmental assessment proved that there was nothing wrong with the project, then construction would continue.
Though I do not oppose the professional knowledge of the academicians and cannot perform a scientific analysis or proof of the danger posed by the PX project, searching on the Internet, I found that the dangers are roughly: PX is a commonly-used, flammable solvent. Long-term poisoning by PX can cau | |
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