Ralph Jennings has lived in Taipei since 2006. He works as a news reporter. He blogs at Laolaoshi
Money talks and bullishness walks. That axiom is driving an upstart Taiwan daily newspaper’s coverage of mainland China. The Want Daily, one morsel in a giant food production firm, is bearing broader business interests in mind as it reinvents Taiwan’s normally standoffish coverage of its erstwhile foe on the other side of the Strait.
The paper is going where media from other regions have gone before, following particularly some of the Hong Kong papers whose parent companies have commercial interests in the mainland. But the full-color tabloid is breaking ground in Taiwan.
Mainstream Taiwan newspapers usually dedicate just one page each to mainland news. Those pages appear at the backs of thick front sections dominated by Taiwan news. They play up major accidents, sensational economic data and political moves that could affect Beijing’s ever-sensitive relationship with Taipei.
In short, most mainstream media headlines from the mainland either scream or bleed. It doesn’t matter to most local media much what’s going on over there.
Want Daily, available online in print and online, in Chinese and English, covers the other side of the Strait in depth and with a measure of sobriety lacking in other Taiwan media reports from China. Most of the 21-month-old paper’s stories are about the mainland, not the much smaller Taiwan, even though the paper is aimed at readers on the island.
The December 14 edition carries a story on Beijing’s decision to keep Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo in prison. Another headline says mentally ill workers are “enslaved” in northwest China. The same edition reports that “Hong Kong benefits from closer Mainland Ties” and that “40 million foreigners now learning Chinese.”
A day earlier the paper ran an analysis of China’s challenges in meeting its 2011 economic goals.
Want Daily, despite a small circulation, seeks to bridge the Taiwan Strait, said George Tsai, political scientist with Chinese Cultural University in Taipei. “I wouldn’t use the word mouthpiece for China, but I think it’s being used to promote an understanding of China,” Tsai says. “So naturally it appears friendlier to China.”
The friendliness is natural because it makes business sense. Want Daily belongs to the Want Want conglomerate of Taiwan. The company sells rice crackers and dairy products, among other eats, to the giant mainland market. Want Want, listed in Hong Kong, has 100 factories and 330 sales points in China.
Media under the company also encompass Taiwan’s long established China Times daily and CTI Television. Both say they’re impartial, though critics in Taiwan see a pro-Beijing bias. Why would any of them want to risk taking a bite out of Want Want’s China food sales?