中国新闻困境引发思考.docVIP

The Plight of the Chinese Newspaper Reporter There is a saying that Chinese people are afraid of officials, and officials are afraid of foreign reporters, my friend Yang, a wily reporter for one of Beijings city newspapers, told me as we were driving to dinner one evening. That was last spring, well before the governments recent efforts to intimidate foreign reporters attempting to cover calls for a jasmine revolution, but it has been true a long time. You have the power in China, he said, teasing me. But a moment later, after wed passed a forlorn-looking couple waiting for a taxi in the rain, he had a question of his own: So, the foreign reporters in Beijing are the successful ones? I thought maybe they had all lost their jobs in Washington, and so had to come to China. He had managed to simultaneously channel two oxymoronic views of the foreign press corps in China -- that we are both feared, and looked down upon. Yet at that moment, Yang, who works for a state-run paper, dearly envied us. While a great deal of attention has lately been paid to restrictions on foreign press in China, a more interesting long-term question is how the role of Chinese journalists has lately evolved. Contrary to common stereotypes, the reporters themselves, as distinct from the system in which they find themselves, are hardly unblinking toadies. Yang, easily one of the most astute people I know, exemplifies what it means to daily walk the tightrope act of being an inquisitive mind inside a closed system. Soon we stopped at a little Sichuan-style restaurant, poorly lit and with Celine Dion music piped in through sputtering loudspeakers. I asked Yang, who is in his early 30s and at about six feet tall towers over most colleagues, why he had wanted to become a journalist. It was always my dream, he said matter-of-factly, as if the question hardly deserved asking. Why wouldnt his motivation be the same as mine, an American journalist? I wanted to learn many curiosities and to travel the wo