Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. ix, 206 pp. US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-74131-4.
Pál Nyíri states that mainland China’s engagement with the world is expanding rapidly and that it is important to understand what and how Chinese are learning about the global scene. Nyíri contributes to an understanding of that subject with this compelling and highly original anthropology of journalism focused on overseas Chinese correspondents who report on the outside world for a domestic Chinese audience. The study is centred on a series of interviews and informal conversations that Nyíri conducted with over seventy Chinese journalists stationed, variously, in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Some of the journalists work for state-run and others for commercial media. Reporting for China contains a wealth of ethnographic detail that sheds light on Chinese foreign correspondents’ living and working conditions abroad, and how those are shaped by China’s broader political and ideological environment.
Nyíri maintains that Chinese people have access to far more information about the outside world today than they did a decade ago. Moreover, the information is more nuanced than what was available earlier. Nyíri is self-reflexive and goes out of his way to avoid being one more Western student of the Chinese media narrowly focused on the subject of censorship. He believes it important to understand how Chinese correspondents see themselves and perform their work.
One of his important findings is that China’s foreign correspondents, with the state and commercial medias alike, consider themselves professionals and resent the too-easy Western accusation that they are powerless stooges or cynical propagandists for the Communist Party. Young Chinese who go into journalism are well educated and cosmopolitan. The ones who work overseas observe and interact with correspondents from other countries and consider themselves to be doing similar work.
At the same time, Nyíri argues, it is impossible to ignore the Chinese government’s interference in foreign correspondents’ work. As he observes, the Chinese government is the driving force behind the expansion of journalistic coverage of the outside world, through which it seeks to project its worldview outward and thereby to contest Western domination of the international media, including, most importantly, its coverage of China. On the domestic side, foreign reporting is managed so as to present the world in terms that encourage Chinese people to have confidence in the Party and pride in China. The entire effort to build a global Chinese media presence over the last decade has been strategically engineered by the Chinese Communist Party as a form of soft power.
Nyíri does a fine job illuminating the fascinating blend of cosmopolitanism (the world outside China is important and needs to be known) and nationalism (China is locked in a battle with the Western liberal order) that constitutes the framework within which China’s global media presence is unfolding. On one hand, correspondents live abroad for long periods of time, are capable in English, and interact with non-Chinese people on a regular basis. They generally develop a degree of respect and affection for the countries in which they live. On the other hand, few become deeply engaged in those foreign societies. And all correspondents accept that they must report in a way that puts China in a positive light and are accustomed to having their stories shelved by editors who have determined they are too sensitive. The Party is not to be criticized while pride in China is to be evinced. Political considerations are foremost.
Nyíri concludes that China’s media is not cosmopolitan and proposes the useful term “patriotic professionalism” to capture the complex nature of Chinese foreign correspondents’ self-understanding. Nyíri does not deny the correspondents’ professionalism, but neither does he downplay the many and basic ways that they are controlled and used by the Communist Party. They are frequently genuinely patriotic people, he says, but in any case, patriotism is part of the job description.
The vast majority of correspondents do not experience tension in all of this. They accept the Party’s rule and take the limitations and requirements it imposes for granted. The Party defines and shapes their habitus. Its domination is wholly naturalized, its basic values internalized. While most correspondents chafe at Communist Party rules to some extent, and liberals feel suffocated under Xi Jinping’s harsh rule, very few Chinese foreign correspondents are overly concerned with big political questions. What they worry about most are matters closer to home, such as financial security, how to arrange family life, and office politics.
The international reporting that results from this system can be high quality. But as Nyíri states, overall, it is more concerned with China than it is with the outside world, self-referential and sanitized for Chinese consumption. In illustration of this, Nyíri provides an interesting discussion of the step-by-step process by which articles are selected and made ready for publication at various news outlets. A story’s interest value in China is always one of the most important considerations. As a result, readers’ interests rather than events in the world drive coverage.
This of course is true everywhere. Yet in China’s case, Nyíri argues, owing to the fundamentally political function of China’s international news coverage and the ideological screens through which stories must pass before they can be published, the outside world is often presented in distorted terms. Despite all the new information that Chinese media consumers have been treated to over the last decade, Nyíri does not rate China’s global media project a success.
The tidal wave of new information does not appear to have changed the way Chinese think about the world, he says, and neither has it done much to change the way the outside world thinks about China. These final two assertions are logical, but not fully fleshed out; Nyíri is far stronger on the production than the reception side of the news. This is an original, nuanced, and informative study that deserves a wide audience.
Timothy B. Weston
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA