Reporter banned from China keynotes ‘Mediating Asia’

Local, international experts at CU-Boulder symposium to mull over the implications of Asia’s rapidly changing media landscape

 

By Clint Talbott

After reporter Melissa Chan was expelled from China in 2012, a Chinese official told an American diplomat that Chan was an “aggressive journalist,” which the diplomat unsurprisingly viewed as a good thing. Since then, China’s censorship and journalistic restrictions have worsened and will probably continue to tighten, she says.

Chan, a San Francisco-based correspondent for Al Jazeera America, is a keynote speaker in a daylong symposium called “Mediating Asia,” whose sessions will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, April 17, in the British and Irish Studies Room in Norlin Library on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

Since Chan’s expulsion in 2012, there’s been a 'visible, palpable backsliding in terms of civil liberties under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.'"Chan will discuss her experiences in reporting from China, focusing on “media, human rights and the authoritarian state.”

“Mediating Asia,” sponsored by the CU-Boulder Center for Asian Studies, will feature local and international scholars and journalists and will consider Asia’s changing media landscape. With the rise of social media and media industries, Asian media industries are more powerful and accessible than ever, the event’s organizers state.

Two keynote speakers and four panel discussions will focus on that shift throughout the day. The event is free and open to the public.

Chan’s case helps to illustrate one piece of the puzzle. While not specifying the reasons for Chan’s expulsion, Chinese officials suggested not only that she was too “aggressive” but also that she might have broken unspecified Chinese laws.

Those who have traveled to China as tourists probably have not experienced such scrutiny or behavioral restriction, Chan notes. When tourists go to Shanghai or Beijing, “You don’t feel like you’re in an authoritarian state. You really don’t. It doesn’t look like one. It doesn’t act like one on the surface.”

“It’s what I would call a 21^st century authoritarian state. It has a lot of the trappings of other societies that you would consider more open, but underneath the surface, that’s where you run into trouble and start seeing the inner workings of the tremendous control and power of the Communist Party.”

One way China effectively restricts journalists in that country is by encouraging local police—often in plain clothes—to follow and harass journalists. Sometimes, police hire citizens, “thugs, for lack of a better word,” to run journalistic interference, Chan says.

“They’re very good at intimidating our interview subjects.”

And though the country is repressive and highly sensitive to dissent, “China isn’t Russia,” Chan adds, meaning that doing journalism doesn’t make one feel “like you might get killed.”

Since Chan’s expulsion in 2012, there’s been a “visible, palpable backsliding in terms of civil liberties under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.”

More journalists have been expelled. Internet censorship has gotten tighter. China has blocked news web sites of The New York Times, Bloomberg and, just last month, Reuters.

When she reported from China, Chan used a Virtual Private Network to scale the “Great Firewall of China,” to gain access to information blocked by Chinese censors.

Despite all of this, Chinese people are generally not frustrated by restrictions on what they can read. She frames this as a reflection of human nature.

“What do most Americans do when they’re on the internet? By and large, most Americans are not on the internet looking for news or politics. They’re looking at cats and dogs and funny things. They’re following Lady Gaga on Twitter. They’re following sports.”

Similarly, “Most Chinese use the internet for entertainment. They like to look at puppies and kitties as well.”

In China, a segment of those who care about politics, news, freedom of information and “what’s really happening in their country” go to the trouble of trying to circumvent censors.

“So they’re not in the dark. It’s just very tough for them.”

Because most Chinese people are happy with their internet access, the government faces no significant pressure to ease its censorship.

At the same time, “you do find young, educated, urban Chinese who do find the censorship annoying, because they’re the most inquisitive and they’re the ones who care the most about global politics.”

Journalists, meanwhile, have been discouraged from vigorous reporting on public affairs. The threat of jail time has become too great, Chan says. China has “really lowered the threshold of what they will tolerate and what they will not.”

But what China tolerates has waxed and waned over the decades.

In the 1980s, much foreign press coverage focused on the transformation of Chinese markets: the first major department store, the first KFC, the rise of modern buildings.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, in which Chinese forces slaughtered an unknown number of peaceful, pro-democracy protesters, China clamped down on journalism. China’s tolerance of independent journalism generally rose in the last two decades, particularly leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games.

Chan is careful to emphasize that her job is not prognostication. But the future of journalism doesn’t look bright, she observes. Xi Jinping will be leader for the next seven years, “and this guy does not look like he will relax” press restrictions.

“So we could be in for a long, slow decline in terms of media freedoms.”

Organized by the Center for Asian Studies, “Mediating Asia” is also supported by the CU-Boulder Center for Religion, Media and Culture, Center for Environmental Journalism, College of Media, Communication and Information, Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

For more information, click here. To see a poster outlining the symposium's schedule, click here. 

 

If you go:

Date: Friday, April 17

Time: 10 a.m.

Location: British and Irish Studies Room, Fifth Floor Norlin Library

Keynote Speakers:

10:15 a.m. - Mediating Indonesia: The Slow Emergence of a Young Nation

Endy Bayuni, The Jakarta Post

11:00 a.m. - Reporting from China: Media, Human Rights and the Authoritarian State

Melissa Chan, Al Jazeera America

Panels:

1:00 p.m. - Media and Environmental Politics

Isabel Hilton, China Dialogue

Tom Yulsman, Center for Environmental Journalism, CU-Boulder

 

1:45 p.m. - Authoritarian States, Nationalism and the Unruly Media

Rianne Subijanto, CU-Boulder

Timothy Weston, CU-Boulder

Michael Curtin, University of California Santa Barbara

 

3 p.m. - Identity, Culture and Branding

Hiromu Nagahara, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hun Shik Kim, CU-Boulder

Mark Bender, Ohio State University

 

4 p.m. - Concluding Observations

Tim Oakes, CU-Boulder

Stewart Hoover, Center for Media, Religion and Culture, CU-Boulder

Nabil Echchaibi, Center for Media, Religion and Culture, CU-Boulder

Reception to follow.

April 8, 2015