Re: WTO, Media Restrictions and Mark Twain

A Dissectorgram to His Excellency, Jiang Zemin, President of China and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party

Mr. Chairman:

May one of the least powerful journalists in the world address one of the world's most powerful leaders?

We don't know each other, but I was 50 yards away from you when you were leaving Harvard University during your state visit to the United States two years ago. You turned and waved toward me, which I took as a sign that perhaps we could have a chat about your ideas of press freedom.

I am writing on the eve of a closely debated congressional vote on whether to grant China permanent trade status, a step on the road towards China's admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). (How it can be a "World" Trade Organization without the largest country in the world participating is one of those questions that is rarely raised.) Nevertheless, as you are all too aware, those nasty human rights issues are once again throwing a monkey wrench into the economic engine now driving globalization and relations between your country and ours. The traders on the Hong Kong exchange and their counterparts worldwide, along with hundreds of big companies and agribusiness interests, are just about wetting their pants hoping for closure on the WTO deal.

As for human rights, you are right, Mr. Chairman, there is, as you've noted and I agree, plenty of hypocrisy to go around on all sides. But the fact remains that there are people in our country and the world who happen to think that systematic torture in prisons and your rather vicious crackdown on those Falun Gong spiritual practitioners are not such good representations of what your government calls "building socialism with Chinese characteristics," i.e. "market Leninism."

Many also worry about the way the press is being used and abused in all this.

Mr. President — or should I call you Mr. Chairman? — you don't know this, but the two of us share a passion that we might talk about if and when we do get together: a love of Mark Twain. Your official biography, published on the China Today Web site, notes that you "love to read novels of Mark Twain." As I am sure you know, Your Excellency, in addition to being a novelist, Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens) was, like you, an anti-imperialist. (He opposed the U.S. war in the Philippines while you challenged the NATO war in Kosovo.)

More importantly, like me, the author of "Huckleberry Finn" and so many other literary classics was a journalist.

In fact, Mr. Clemens was also a very astute critic of media power, yet gave Caesar his due well before Americans started packing movie theaters to see "The Gladiator." At a banquet for newspapermen, he acknowledged the power of the media monopoly in his times, at the turn of the last century. "There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the world," he declaimed. "Only two — the Sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. I may seem to be flattering the Sun, but I do not mean it so. I am meaning to be just and fair all around."

And so, "balanced journalism" was born. Oh yes, Twain's tribute was delivered at the news agency's annual dinner. No fool he.

I am invoking the AP because of a recent wire-service dispatch out of China that reports a new threat to journalists. It's from the French wire service, Agence France-Presse (AFP), now my favorite service from that part of the world, where it beats AP coverage regularly. This story indicates that at the very moment, Mr. President, that you are cajoling, lobbying and enticing the West and the U.S. Congress to make your People's Republic welcome in WTO's capitalist fraternity, just as you are opening your doors to the outside world, you are slamming your doors on journalists.

Please help me understand where you are going with this: A May 8 AFP headline from Hong Kong read "China Blocks Foreign Journalists From Visiting," explaining that foreign journalists stationed outside China were being prevented from going to the mainland on individual tourist visas and had to join government-supervised tour groups.

What would such a journalist's tour consist of? Where would we go? (Disneyland isn't open yet!) What would we be allowed to see? What would be off-limits? Could we tour prisons, detention centers, labor re-education camps? Could we visit other international journalists based in China who also face growing restrictions in this new era of the "opening" to world trade?

Adds AFP: "The rule comes at a time when China is also putting restrictions on foreign journalists based in China. In December, police began requiring journalists to show their housing rental agreements whenever they apply for a new residence card or a renewal. The rule is intended to crack down on journalists who live in residential units not approved for foreigners. In November, the Foreign Ministry also issued a set of wide-ranging rules, which attempt to restrict work and personal freedom."

What would your hero Mark Twain say about all this? We'll never know because he's no longer with us.

But I can tell you what I think.

It's a big contradiction. That's a word Chinese know well because it was Mao who wrote the book on it, called, appropriately enough "On Contradiction," a classic of Marxism. As Mao's successor — Deng was there before you — I am sure you know what a contradiction it is to close the door as you are opening it.

I also note with interest, Mr. President, that you are the author of detailed studies on the World Electronic Information Industry. So I know you know that information is here to stay and that blocking access to it, whether by restraints on journalists or restrictive filters on the Internet, won't ultimately be effective in this era of new media.

So what's the story? What is really going on in your mind and China's when it comes to muzzling media? Your official profile calls you a scholar, born to an "intellectual family." So why all this anti-intellectualism and, frankly, cultish behavior? You seem to be running your own "cultural revolution" to reinforce orthodoxy at home while championing internationalism abroad. You have been crisscrossing the globe amusing audiences with your charm, quotations from Shakespeare and command of Broadway show tunes, while deflecting serious debate on pervasive human rights violations.

Has the cult of Mao been reincarnated as the cult of Jiang? I know this must sound bizarre to you, given the crusade you are running against the nonviolent meditators of Falun Gong. Their heads seem to be getting banged on daily in protests in Tiananmen Square after you branded them an "evil cult." It is hard for me to understand why a person so grounded in science and rationality regurgitates terms like "heresy" and "evil" so often. Did "Blair Witch Project" make that much of an impression?

Let me assure you, Mr. Chairman, that I am not so thrilled either with the U.S. media: its kowtowing coverage in China and the unwillingness of many media outlets here to cover China (and the rest of the world) with any regularity. As you know, major media executives came to see you last year in Shanghai at a conference under the auspices of Fortune magazine. Not only did they not criticize the suppression of critical ideas, as China's human rights activists requested, but some actually supported it. Global media mogul Sumner Redstone, there representing Viacom, called for American press restraint in the coverage of China — to the delight of your regime.

The media, he said, should report the truth but avoid being "unnecessarily offensive" to foreign governments. "As they expand their global reach, media companies must be aware of the politics and attitudes of the governments where we operate. Journalistic integrity must prevail in the final analysis. But that doesn't mean that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the countries in which you operate."

Yes, Mr. Chairman, I'll admit that censorship is alive and well in our country too, although it's corporate more than governmental. Our press may not be covering the WTO debate much better than yours. Last week I chatted with Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, about what Americans are learning about the situation in your country and the WTO debate. He is a critic of China but doesn't mince words about superficial coverage in our media or kowtowing to China by the Clinton administration.

He explained to me how China's economic reform — so favored by big companies and the U.S. government — has not led to political or democratic reform. "Unfortunately, I don't think the media has gotten a whole lot beyond the somewhat simplistic equation of trade with promoting human rights through so-called constructive engagement," Ken said. "That was the level of debate eight years ago, and it hasn't changed a whole lot since. I think we can tell that merely engaging isn't going to improve human rights. The question is, What kind of engagement are you going to have? Are you going to try to link various forms of engagement with improvements in China's, and other countries', human rights practices? The Clinton administration has run as fast as it could away from that kind of engagement."

He also criticized the press's handling of the WTO debate. "On the one hand, labor has some protectionist dimensions to its position, but also some very genuine concerns with making sure that globalization occurs on a level playing field, where one country cannot compete over another by simply being better at repression, rather than being better at producing cheap goods," Ken pointed out. "That's a part of the position that's been obscured in the race to portray globalization as inherently good for everybody. I have seen very few, if any, attempts to show what globalization has meant from the perspective of workers who are forced to work in factories where their basic labor rights are not respected, rather than from the perspective of government elites."

As the leader of a country dedicated to the victory of the proletariat, these issues should concern you too, Mr. President.

For years in America, labor activists were denounced as Commies. Now they are challenging real commies, while a strange coalition of hard-line conservatives like Senate Majority Whip Tom "The Hammer" DeLay and many liberal democrats rally behind a corporate agenda to make moolah in China, its people be dammed. Only the AFL-CIO is standing up against it.

Whatever the vote's outcome, these issues will still be around.

Oh, President Jiang, help me understand these puzzling contradictions. When can we get together?

The East is Red, and I am ready.

Yours in finding common ground,

Danny Schechter

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