I’ve cultivated a habit for the past three years living in Beijing. I read the Chinese press in English every day. It began unpretentiously, as an intellectual curiosity, but regular reading proved to be a valuable learning experience.
It is a fascinating sociological experience to read the China Daily from cover to cover for, say, a week. To some degree it is informative. It’s civic. In part, it’s great for anyone who needs a little escapism.
You finish reading and feel optimistic about the world — and, of course, China. Not to be unfair, the China Daily occasionally brings news about corruption or an environmental disaster in a corner of China — and they are always accompanied by references to punishments and measures to prevent these problems.
The Global Times, for its part, is useful in taking the temperature of the Chinese Communist Party’s thinking. I remember that in 2020, the then US Secretary of State deserved an editorial entitled “[Mike] Pompeo, a enemy of world peace.” He had said that the party was a threat to humanity — and the GT took charge of the response.
Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post is a breath of fresh air covering China. I often joke that it’s the most important newspaper in the world that you’ve never heard of. The SCMP fills a gap in news coverage of China because it’s Chinese (even if it’s from Hong Kong) and it’s also plural — it deals with sensitive issues, publishes opinions for and against Beijing. Recently, it released a video of student protests against the “Covid zero” policy.
SCMP was bought in 2016 by the Alibaba group, then led by Jack Ma, who is a member of the party — and that doesn’t seem to have affected the newspaper’s editorial line. The National Security Act for Hong Kong of 2020, which led to the closure of other vehicles, did not silence the SCMP.
Over the past three years, mainland China’s English-language newspapers have highlighted the growth of a negative view of the international scenario. The message was consolidated that the West does not accept the Chinese rise. The proverbial win-win, typical of Chinese discourse on foreign relations, was losing ground.
At the same time, criticism of American problems gained prominence. Racial tensions and gun attacks in the US, for example, have widespread repercussions — to the point that Chinese parents are wary of sending their children to American universities, as a student from Yunnan told me.
The pandemic made the Chinese press tirelessly contrast the chaos abroad with normality in the country, especially between 2020 and 2021. Now, the focus is to value the results of these two years. This week, with lockdowns still in place, China Daily highlighted the fact that 1 million Americans died from Covid. The triumphalist tone of the superiority of the Chinese response has cooled, but the essence of the message has not changed.
A sinologist once told me that, in China, the journalist is a professional who sees his role as part of building the country’s image. He’s been learning this way since college. When I shared this vision with a Chinese journalist friend, he returned the tease to me: if foreigners already play the role of criticizing China, yours would be to offer the counterpoint.
It doesn’t take three years of reading to reach that conclusion, but whether you like it or not, getting to know China better today involves understanding the messages the government wants to convey.
