This article is by Alec Ash, a British student at Peking University (also known as PKU and Beida) and the blogger behind Six, which follows “the lives of six young Chinese in Beijing — stories from the generation that will change China”.
Not long ago, I attended a talk in Beida by the Economist journalist James Miles: ‘A foreign journalist’s twenty five years in China’. The room (too small) was packed, the front row with the latest issue of the Economist out on the table. Students — the clean cut guy standing next to me was studying an odd combination of Economics and Dentistry — listened from the back to Miles’ anecdotes of traveling by night to AIDS villages in Henan, and his defense of the Western media’s response to the Tibet riots (“Western media, by and large, not only got it right, but got it first”).
The event was organized by Beida’s translation society, in collaboration with the website Ecocn, which regularly posts Chinese translations of Economist articles. I asked my dentist-to-be neighbor, Zang Pang, if he read the Economist: yes he did, and also The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (both online), on top of the Chinese media he consumed — but didn’t necessarily trust. Like much of the crowd that day, he was a news junkie. At the end of the speech, he asked a question about censorship of the Chinese press.
That’s one end of a spectrum: elite students at one of China’s top universities, who follow Chinese and Western media, inquisitively and with skepticism about both. If that’s the ideal, then the other end is a ‘split end’: there’s those who are apathetic; and those who read the news, but swallow everything they read without question. Students at PKU, like all young Chinese, are all over that spectrum. But I was curious: how did other Beida students read the news?
As I asked around, two things became apparent which were obvious enough before, but still worth stating. Firstly, they read the news online, chiefly on portals like Sina. Even if the campus newspaper stand sees a steady flow of Mao’s face changing hands (the lady running it tells me the paper she sells the most of is the well-respected Southern Weekly), it really is all about the web. No one seems to even have a TV, although a noticeable trend is students reading news on their mobiles. What’s interesting is that many trust the news on Sina more than that in newspapers – even though many Sina stories are taken direct from the papers. But it’s online, so it’s OK — netizens can comment below.
Secondly, they read the news in Chinese. Even for those whose English is good, they still digest foreign news through Chinese syndications of foreign media in Cankao Xiaoxi, not the original. (See this Danwei post by Bruce Humes for more on Cankao Xiaoxi’s reliability).
Anyone excited at the idea of Zang Pang reading about Tiananmen in the NYT can curb their enthusiasm: he’s the exception.
Next up: what news are Beida students reading? In a noodle canteen, I asked a dozen students what news item they’ve been reading about recently. A couple said ‘none’ — exams coming up, studying ten hours a day, I don’t read the news!
One girl (a lesbian who proudly introduced her girlfriend to me) replied the Li Tuo An, or Rio Tinto trial. The rest, of course, said the Yushu earthquake. In other words, if it’s on the front page, especially domestic news, then students are reading it — just like in any other country. (Although one friend I talked to later said he always skipped the front page, as it was the most ‘harmonised‘ and, consequently, boring.)
But do they make that first turn of page or scroll of cursor? What about other stories making waves in China, of the kind that members of the Danwei danwei read about right here?
How many had read, for instance, about Wang Keqin’s exposé of the Shanxi vaccination scandal? Of the dozen, just three had. How about Google leaving China, then? That seemed like an elephant hard to miss. But only half of those I asked were certain what the story was; or if they’d hear the the gist, they still hadn’t caught on that Google.cn now redirected to Google.hk.
If that surprised you — as it did me — then the answer that stories are reported confusingly, or not enough, in a censored Chinese media is only half-right. The problem isn’t that no-one has heard of such stories, it’s that they don’t know if they can believe them or not. Cheng Liang, or ‘Leonidas’ (who I write about on my blog), had seen the Google headline on Yahoo.com, but “I don’t know whether foreign stories or the Chinese story is true. We don’t know what is actually happening.”
On this note, allow me a little digression to illustrate how limited Beida students are as a representation of China’s youth. I also asked my dozen test-subjects if they thought the press in China was free or censored. Everyone said censored, except for one buzz-cut lad who looked puzzled and said “what does ‘censored’ mean?” Then in response to the question ‘what’s the main function of the Chinese media?’ He replied “so the government can relay news to the people”. I asked him what his subject was. Ah, he blushed: actually I’m not a student here — I work in the coffee shop.
Unlikable as the word ‘elite’ is, I find students at Beida and Tsinghua more skeptical about the news than others their age; and that skepticism is as strong towards Western bias or ‘framing’ of stories as it is towards domestic media.
But that doesn’t mean they’re always better read. That Google’s pullout or the vaccination scandal were met with so many blank stares can’t be blamed on their sources alone — the news is out there alright, as are the means to guess its reliability. What has also formed is a kind of ‘news-as-entertainment’ culture. Even political news, my friend Wang Dingnan tells me, is treated as entertainment by his classmates: for instance, Han Feng’s lurid sex diary, or netizens exchanging pictures of the suspiciously lavish watches officials wore during the CPPCC.
In his speech, talking of the different generations of Chinese youth he’s encountered over the years, James Miles said “I think young people are always the same. They like to have fun, they work hard, they play hard, and they read news in between.” As a young person myself, I’m also hyper-sensitive to being patronized – but on the campus of Beida I agree with Mr Miles. Hidden among book pagodas on the huge wooden desks of PKU’s library, of those students taking a break from their studies, I invariably see ten watching films on Youku for every one clicking onto the news.