Bad News Tests China's Propaganda Arm
President Allows Some Criticism as Officials Scold Reporters Over Negative Stories

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 27, 2007; A16

BEIJING -- According to a report circulating among Beijing intellectuals, Li Changchun, China's senior propaganda official, went to President Hu Jintao recently suggesting a ban on the July issue of the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu.

The scholarly monthly had published a long and daring article by a Communist Party professor saying that the party's monopoly on power was the "root cause" of many of the ills afflicting modern-day China, including corruption and peasant unrest.

Although Hu has generally shown a restrictive attitude toward free speech, he counseled tolerance this time, the report said, advising Li that it is healthier to have such debate out in the open than to let it ferment under the surface. The magazine remains on the stands.

The incident was only the latest in a string of setbacks for Li and China's propaganda bureaucracy. An explosion of negative news -- tainted food exports, slave labor at brick kilns, political challenges and even supposed cardboard dumplings -- has pained party censors and renewed demands for ideological and political discipline among China's journalists.

"News publishing professionals must resolutely instill a Marxist concept of news, maintain party principles, firmly uphold professional ethics and voluntarily commit themselves to upholding the sacred mission and glorious responsibility bestowed on them by the party and the people," said an order issued Monday by the party's main propaganda organizations.

The order was handed down in response to a high-impact Beijing Television broadcast this month reporting that a fast-food restaurant had mixed cardboard with pork in stuffing its steamed dumplings. The report caused a sensation among Beijing residents, who cherish their dumplings and who were already sensitized by weeks of reporting on food safety concerns.

But authorities quickly branded the broadcast a hoax. The reporter, identified as an inexperienced temp called Zi Beijia, was jailed, and party propaganda officials scolded journalists loudly for lax ethics and needlessly stirring up worries among the public.

In the minds of authorities and Chinese who follow the party line, the scandal was a way to undermine weeks of other reporting on tainted food and drugs, including numerous dispatches by foreign correspondents. In their view, such reports were vastly overblown.

"This kind of reporting has badly damaged China's image," complained a mid-level executive in a state-owned oil company. "It's gotten so bad that some tourists coming to China are bringing their own food along."

But years of party propaganda and news reports distorted by censorship have instilled skepticism among other Chinese, particularly the better-educated. The party propaganda apparatus, which enforces censorship rules, has little credibility to lecture journalists on accuracy, they noted in Internet postings. In that light, some Beijingers expressed belief the cardboard dumplings report was true.

"Because the dumpling news had such a bad influence abroad, the government is trying to block it," said a 31-year-old computer engineer who works in the capital.

Chinese authorities have been particularly sensitive recently about how the party is portrayed. In part, the concern has arisen from a desire to radiate a good image for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But more important, officials have begun the countdown to a crucial party congress in the fall during which Hu is expected to cement his leadership, establish his ideological credentials and stack party organizations with his supporters. Against that background, the rash of negative news has been particularly unwelcome.

After a meeting of top Beijing propaganda officials, for instance, the capital's newspaper editors and television news directors last week were handed a list of newly off-limits subjects, Beijing journalists reported. The list included food safety as well as riots, fires, deadly auto accidents and bloody murder cases, they said.

"Our bosses said the next couple of months, preceding the 17th Party Congress, will be very tense," a Beijing reporter said after getting the new instructions.

The Yanhuang Chunqiu article, written by Wu Min, a professor in Shanxi province assigned to train up-and-coming party officials, was particularly sensitive because it amounted to a frontal challenge to Hu's ideological leadership. The president, in his role as party leader, had only days earlier given a solemn speech in which he said the Communist Party must continue economic reforms but also retain its one-party dictatorship.

Hu's lieutenants and the party propaganda apparatus hailed the speech as a definitive explanation of China's trajectory, laid out for all to study in preparation for the party congress. Jia Qinglin, a member of the Politburo's Standing Committee, said Hu's speech provided answers to any questions that might have arisen about where the party is heading -- answers that Wu apparently found inadequate.

To make matters worse for the party, just as Wu's essay was being published, an open letter signed by 17 former party officials claimed that Hu was betraying China's socialist heritage by giving in to foreign influence and pushing free-market reforms too far and too fast, without concern for those left behind.

"It can be said that socialism is in jeopardy because the party and government have cut themselves off from unsatisfied people," they warned in a Web posting. "This is the most dangerous time for the Chinese nation. Facing such a domestic and international situation, Communist Party members, particularly old cadres, are all very worried."

Hu had a less tolerant attitude toward the former cadres than toward the Shanxi professor. Shortly after their letter was displayed on a site called maoflag.net, the site was knocked off the Internet. It soon reappeared, but with the offending letter removed.