The Contest of the Century (29 page)

Before the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Zhang Jigang, the event’s deputy director, made the following prediction: “I really hope that the people of the world can… get to know China, to understand China,
to love China, to long for China.” If trying to revive a Chinese intellectual tradition is one part of the underlying project, the other is an effort to present it as modern and hip, to define China Cool. The emotional high point of China’s soft-power push was the ravishing Olympics opening ceremony—another beneficiary of a budget stretching into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Zhang Yimou, the country’s most famous film director, was instructed to demonstrate the richness of traditional Chinese culture, the sort of brief that has produced many a tired, bureaucratic show for foreigners. Yet, with the help of fifteen
thousand immaculately drilled performers and luminous lighting to tell the story of paper, printing, and the compass, he provided a vision of modernity China-style, with a powerful state rooted in Confucian wisdom yet also married to modern technology. After the ceremony, Zhang admitted that the only other country that could have put on a performance of such scale and discipline was North Korea, and they could not have mastered all the high-tech visual trickery that went along with it. Steven Spielberg, who had withdrawn as an adviser to the ceremony in protest against Chinese policies in Sudan, called it “arguably the grandest spectacle of the new millennium.”

When visitors to the Olympics got tired of the sport, they were able to do a side trip to see some of the newest wonders of modern architecture. They would probably have seen the recently opened Norman Foster airport terminal, whose roof is shaped like a dragon. Beside the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing, they could visit the new titanium-domed concert hall, which goes by the name “the Giant Egg.” And of course, there was the “Bird’s Nest” stadium at the Olympic site, by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, which is encased in twenty-eight thousand strips of structured steel, like a woven basket. But the biggest architectural draw was not even finished: the new China Central Television headquarters in the city’s main business district. CCTV is the principal state-run broadcaster in China and, in the eyes of many Chinese, a reliable mouthpiece of stale government propaganda. It has spared neither money nor effort in its quest for a prestige building with the sheen of brand-name modernity. The $800-million project, on which work started in 2004, is the brainchild of the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture and its principal architect, Rem Koolhaas. It is as much an exercise in engineering as in architecture and might only have been possible in China.

The building is made up of two L-shaped towers made of glass and metal, pieced together to create a cantilevered corridor that seems to hang in the air. Beijingers have bestowed many nicknames on the project, the most popular of which,
da kucha
, means “big shorts.” Other, less flattering names include a play on the words for hemorrhoids. The design would have violated the building codes of most developing countries, but the architects managed to convene a meeting of the different
Beijing agencies to talk them through the idea. One of the quirks of modern China is that so many senior officials are qualified engineers, and that allowed them to follow all the technical details as Koolhaas and his thirty-something protégé, Ole Scheeren, walked them through the computer models. The building was approved. Even then, there was still huge anxiety about joining the two towers together, which was done before dawn in case the daytime heat caused the steel to expand slightly. It was a moment of “early-morning intimacy,” as Scheeren told me.

A week before the Beijing Olympics, the
New York Times
architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff had this to say about the host city:
“If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it’s understandable. It’s not just the grandeur of the space. It’s the inescapable feeling that you’re passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust. The sensation is comparable to the epiphany that Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect, experienced when he stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor more than a century ago. He had crossed a threshold into the future; Europe, he realized, was now culturally obsolete.” The gushing about Beijing’s new architectural triumphs (each one, as it happens, built by a European architect) might be an extreme example, but the article underlined the trepidation and awe that some in the West feel about China’s rising cultural attraction. China is now beginning to promote its values and culture abroad just at the time when the West is undergoing a profound crisis of confidence. The financial crisis has not only inflicted huge damage on the economies of the Western world, it has also sapped confidence in the ability of democracies to solve their deepest problems. While China appears to be steaming ahead with its modernization plans, barely missing a beat during the crisis, the U.S. and other democracies are beset with doubts about corrosive political partisanship, about the power of vested interests, and about the inability of politicians to see beyond the latest headline. According to Ian Buruma, one of the most perceptive writers on modern Asia, “China’s success story
is the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930s.”

Amid such disillusionment, China’s campaign to sell its cultural vitality around the world could not be better timed. Yet it will fall
short. China’s efforts to mobilize soft power misunderstand the forces that actually make societies attractive. The flaw is nowhere more evident than in the huge amount of money China is spending on taking its media groups overseas.

FOXIFICATION

In forty years in the television news business, Jim Laurie has done just about everything there is to be done. He spent two decades touring the world as a foreign correspondent for NBC and ABC. He was the only American network journalist in Saigon when the Vietnamese Communists took the city in 1975. Laurie has done breaking news and long-form documentaries, taught journalism, and helped set up News Corporation’s news channels in India. In his locker, there are two Emmys and a George Peabody Award. It is a CV that any aspiring journalist would die for. And now he has a new challenge. He is one of the senior executives for CCTV America, the recently established U.S. operation of the Chinese state broadcaster.

In China, CCTV’s showcase program is the main 7 p.m. news broadcast, which is a template for political power in the country. The broadcast begins with a rundown of the activities that day of the secretary general of the Communist Party, describing his meetings with foreign leaders and regional bosses and noting any comments he might have made. Then it moves to the number-two leader in the Communist Party Standing Committee, before describing the day of the number three in the list. The set is gray; the newscasters are unsmiling and stolid. A Chinese friend likes to joke that the broadcast is designed to persuade older Communist officials that nothing has actually changed in the country over the last three decades. CCTV runs a dozen or so channels, and some of its programming has tried to push boundaries. A few of the scandals about shoddy consumer products in China in recent years have actually been first aired on CCTV shows. But it can never escape its principal purpose, as the state’s main tool for dictating the national news agenda.

Laurie was teaching journalism to students in Hong Kong when he got the offer to help start CCTV America. “The Chinese want to play catch-up,” he says. They saw the global impact of Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based
channel that broadcasts in both Arabic and English and which has won any number of accolades in recent years. Russia and Japan also have English-language channels vying for foreign audiences. Al Jazeera’s success persuaded Chinese executives that there was a huge potential demand for “non-Western” news. The Chinese took the view that U.S. networks seemed to be shunning more conventional news in favor of Hollywood gossip and stories about celebrity addiction. They also observed what Laurie calls the “Foxification” of news in much of the West, where the once straitlaced presentation of facts has given way to different points of view and much more attitude. “The Chinese want to have their own perspective represented,” Laurie says.

When Chinese Communist Party leaders met in October 2011 for their annual plenum, they issued a document with the following title: “Central Committee Decision Concerning the Major Issue of Deepening Cultural System Reforms, Promoting the Great Development and Prosperity of Socialist Culture.” It was the most definitive in a series of policy statements over the last few years which have endorsed the promotion of cultural soft power. The document concluded: “Whoever owns the commanding heights of cultural development and soft power will enjoy a competitive edge internationally.” Such high-level endorsement helps loosen budget strings. Over the last few years, Beijing has thrown a huge amount of resources at projects aimed at reaching the “commanding heights” of global soft power. There are more than four hundred government-sponsored Confucius Institutes around the world, promoting the Chinese language. When Hu Jintao visited the U.S. in 2011, the government rented another of the huge screens in Times Square to run a series of expensively produced promotional videos to show a more appealing side of China. There were images of “award-winning Chinese talent” such as pianist Lang Lang and “thrilling Chinese athletics,” including Yao Ming. Another section of images of successful entrepreneurs was entitled “Chinese wealth,” which, in retrospect, was probably not the best message to win over skeptical New Yorkers.

Of all the initiatives that have been launched to support the government’s soft-power campaign, the overseas expansion of Chinese media is the biggest and most ambitious. The injection of resources into the international divisions of Chinese media has been striking.
China Daily,
the party’s English-language daily, is now sold widely across the U.S. and Europe. Friends have reported that at times it is the only English-language paper available free in certain European hotels. It partners with a host of other papers that allow
China Daily
sections to appear across Asia. Readers of the
Washington Post
also receive a weekly “paid supplement” inside their paper which is written by
China Daily
staff. At the same time, China Radio International provides programming for a number of radio stations in the U.S., having started out with a station in Galveston, Texas. The Xinhua News Agency moved its journalists from a Queens suburb to Times Square. As well as its more traditional print and news-wire services, it is developing a Web-based TV service in foreign languages for a hundred countries. In a number of African countries, for instance, newspapers which in the past used Reuters or Associated Press articles for many of their news pages now lean heavily on Xinhua. CCTV is just as ambitious. It has recently opened a broadcast center in Nairobi, and since early 2012, it has been employing around a hundred people in Washington to put together programming for the U.S. market from a new studio just a few blocks from the White House.

Laurie says that CCTV spent a huge amount of time studying the BBC and CNN, looking at how they present news and trying to establish a “professional look.” It also went about hiring journalists with internationally respected credentials. Cutbacks in the West have helped. In Latin America, CCTV picked up the former BBC Brazil and Cuba correspondent Mike Voss, who was laid off in one of the organization’s cost-cutting rounds. While in China, I saw Voss giving an interview to the main CCTV channel, explaining his decision to join them. “I have already done more live takes in two months with CCTV than I did in the last year with the BBC,” he said. “This shows they are really committed to the news.” When Tom Brokaw was booked to appear on one of CCTV America’s shows, the conservative
Weekly Standard
made a gibe about how China was “trying to buy good coverage for its Communist regime.” Laurie is well aware of the baggage that his new network carries. “We are CCTV—and all that comes with it,” he says. But he insists that the new channel is pushing back barriers on what a Chinese network can cover. During the week of their first broadcasts, the Pope happened to be visiting Havana, and Voss pitched a story on the trip.
China’s relations with the Vatican are a politically treacherous subject in Beijing, and so a visit by the Pope to another Communist country is delicate territory. But CCTV America broadcast the item.

As well as the look, CCTV America has paid close attention to tone. Russia Today, Moscow’s alternative to CNN, takes an aggressively anti-Western point of view and takes pleasure in its potshots at the American networks. One regular feature is about a piece of news that U.S. news channels have chosen not to cover, which usually includes a dig at America’s presumed moral authority. In 2012, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was given a show on the channel. The Russia Today Web site is even more dismissive. One column about the U.S., by a writer called Robert Bridge, concludes:
“What we are left with is an obese, drug-addled Burlesque Empire, bursting at the seams with electronic circuses, cocaine and corn puffs, physically and mentally incapable of finding the remote control when the scenes of war become too unappetizing.” Alongside such competition, CCTV America is altogether more straitlaced. On a typical night, the news is heavy on economic themes and avoids sensationalism or gossip. It is straight, professional, maybe a little dull, but not without authority. If there is an implicit criticism of the U.S. and the West, it is not a full-throated one. Instead, the underlying politics are more subtle, an exercise in the sort of relativism that Chinese officials often adopt—an argument along the lines of “Your society has problems, our society has problems, so let’s not be too judgmental about each other’s political systems.”

No one has a monopoly on providing the news, of course, but the identity of the leading broadcasters is still a matter of some importance. Imagine, for a second, if such important international stories as the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square or the war in Bosnia had been beamed to the world not by the cameras of the BBC and CNN, but by the producers and correspondents of CCTV. Would the events have played out in the same way? Would the pressure on the Egyptian government not to use violence against the protesters have been the same? Would Washington have felt obliged to get involved in Bosnia had the dominant broadcaster in Sarajevo been Chinese? The high-minded goal behind China’s overseas media splash is to try and frame the global conversation, to push a news agenda that is not so laced with Western values. Beijing does not want to evangelize the world against democracy, but it does want to
shift some of the terms of the global debate. At the same time, lurking behind the project there is a certain animus for what Chinese officials routinely denounce as the “Western media,” a term of abuse that lumps together journalists from any democracy, be they American, German, or Japanese. Beijing is trying to counter what it sees as the systematic bias in how foreign reporters portray China and the Communist Party to the rest of the world. The heads of foreign media bureaus in Beijing are summoned to the Foreign Ministry for periodic dressings-down by a senior official, and during one meeting I took notes. “Lots of good things happen in China but they do not interest you,” the official complained. “You pick on anyone or anything that seems to support your views, which makes people think you have an agenda. You only seem to see the problems, so that makes people nervous.” The lecture went on: “The Chinese people are getting more and more bored with this arrogance. They think it is unfair.”