‘Successful newspapers reinforce the prejudices of their readers’. Using simplified sociological perceptions and some additional inferences, I discuss this in the context of two contrasting national titles, namely Financial Times and The Independent, and analyse what seems to be the prejudices, attitudes and editorial mindsets of each. The illustration is based on how the biases are demonstrated in specific items taken from issues of each paper and the explanation of possible reasons.

While discussing the biases imposed by newspapers to their audience, we have to face this dilemma: on the one hand, ‘we mostly self-select what we watch, listen to, or read to suit our own interests.’(Richard Alan Nelson, 2003); one the other hand, as mass audience we are part of the process of control and homogenization(Denis McQuail, 1997:13), which means this is not simply a one-dimensional issue that was to look simply at the descriptions which were offered of the world in a specific text, but to look at the social relations which underpinned the generation of these descriptions. In any contentious area there will be competing ways of describing events and their history. Ideas are linked to interests and these competing interests will seek to explain the world in ways which justify their own position. So ideology (which we defined as an interest-linked perspective) and the struggle for legitimacy go hand in hand. (Greg Philo, 2007)

Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative. Since it is impossible to report everything, some prejudices are inevitable. According to Hofstetter(1976: 34), prejudices occur ‘when some things are selected to be reported rather than other things because of the character of the medium or because of the incentives that apply to commercial news programming.’

The social context of newspaper biases

Some scholars have identified at least three major conceptions of the audience. First, the audience is the assemblage of readers, viewers or listeners, information receivers of the mass media (Schramm, 1954). Secondly, the audience is an aggregate of the consumers of media products with differentiated tastes in a marketplace, whose selective consumption of and active participation in media production constitutes a possibility of membership of a democratic society (Billings, 1986: 200–13.). Thirdly, the audience is an institutionalized role relationship in the market-based media system that involves marketers, media producers and consumers of media products. (Turow, 1997) This indicates when we discuss the prejudices of media and audience it is impossible to avoid talking about the social context such as democracy, marketplace and different nationalities.

The theory that foreign journalism biases is more obvious and typical was first introduced by Galtung and Ruge (1965). They scrutinized the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuba crises of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March-April 1964. A dozen additional hypotheses are then deduced from the theory and their social implications are discussed. Mainly, those hypotheses can be condensed as: First, The lower the rank of the person, the more negative the event is; Second, the more distant the nation, the more negative the event is especially when it happens in undeveloped countries in dire situations.

In other words, western media is often criticized in the rest of the world (including Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East) as being pro-Western with regard to a variety of political, cultural and economic issues. Edward W. Said (1997:25) said: The general basis of Orientalists thought is an imaginative and yet drastically polarized geography dividing the world into two unequal parts, the larger, ‘different’ one called the Orient, the other, also known as our world, called the Occidental or the West.

But it has been an unexamined assumption that since Europe and West advanced into modern scientific age and freed themselves of superstition and ignorance, the march must have included oriental world. (Ibid) Therefore, when covering news of the non-democratic or undeveloped countries, the newspapers are unavoidably setting the West and Orient opposed and there are always apparently imbalance covering of their assumed Orient.

How “balanced” news can be depends in part on the area of news. On issues where the state is very sensitive, such as in coverage of Northern Ireland in the period of the ‘troubles’, the news could become almost one-dimensional-alternatives were reduced to fragments or disappeared altogether (Miller, 1994). In the controversial case of Tibet, the British newspapers boasting their ‘justice’ and ‘balance’ became the trouble makers and almost all the reports are ‘one-dimensional-alternatives’ with prejudices against current Chinese government. Among these newspapers, Financial Times and The Independent’ are two typical titles.

Financial Times and The Independent’s covering of independent protest in Tibet

According to the online search engines of FT and The Independent, from 1st Mar to 1st Apr 2008 there are totally 112 results of ‘Tibet’ in Financial Times and 75 results in The Independent, which is not a small number.

From all these articles, it is apparent that the coverage of China has distorted the truth of things happened in Tibet and imposed drastically negative effects on the British public, which is implying: something very bad and vicious is now happening in China. One of the direct consequences is that mobs and gangs in Tibet act more insanely to produce the incidents and ‘news’ that fit the taste of the western audience. And the further influence of it, which derives from the distortion and dissemination of wrong information about Tibet, will lead to unjust political judgment about China.

Apart from the obvious distortion when covering Tibet, British daily newspapers choose a biased set of discourse methods to present the news in Tibet and their unconspicuous implications will undoubtedly exert a more subtle influence on the readers.

• The common prejudices imposed on audience

According to UKChinese.com (2008), more than half of articles concerning Tibet they surveyed use the words with negative shade, such as ‘repression’ and ‘seal off’, to describe the reaction of Chinese government and army. However, as to the mobs incurring the violence they often use ‘Tibetan people’, ‘protesters’, ‘dissidents’, ‘peaceful campaigners’ or some other neutral terms rather than emotional ones. (My Tibet: Secret report from the roof of the world, The Independent, March 30th 2008)

Without a full comprehension of the cause and consequences of Tibetan incident, it seems that journalists had begun narrating it in light of their pre-existing ideologies and notions about Tibet as the suppression of pro-democratic movement. In all the news articles I surveyed, more than one third compare Chinese army to ‘flood’ using such phrases as ‘pour into’ and so on. But, in the very beginning, the West media’s reporting has been based on overseas Dalai Lama and his clique’s sources. These are not first-hand source information, but newspapers have been using them without questioning their reliability.

Besides, when words like ‘dead’ and ‘killed’ appear in the articles, it is more often than not connected with ‘Tibetan people’ or ‘suppression of government’, barely mention about the casualty of ‘ethnic Chinese’.

In some cases, the coverage of Tibet is directly or indirectly connected with Beijing Olympic Games and the ceremony of Olympic torch, through articles like Carrying a torch for China in Tibet (Financial Times, March 20th 2008), The Olympic threat to China (Financial Times, March 31st 2008) and China tries to shrug off shadow of Tibet as torch comes to Beijing (The Independent, April 1st 2008) and so on the Tibetan independency, military suppression and campaign against Beijing Olympic Games have been woven altogether and presented as a totally negative image of China.

When only one or two titles are doing this, the issue is not that big but when most national titles follow the same ideology whilst covering Tibet, it is apparent for us to see the political tendency and ideological stance behind it and imagine what the landscape of China is going to be in the views of British audience after reading these reports. On the one hand, the violating conflicts in Tibet have been generally reported as ‘holocaust’ inflicted by Chinese government; on the other hand, however, the fact that mobs and Tibetan protestors killed innocent ethnic Chinese is entirely unreported.

From March 17th onwards, the frequency of descriptive words about the event itself has been waning steeply while some other political issues which the western media is apt to discuss about, such as human rights, government and modernization in China, have been raised. The number of reviews such as Timeline: Tibet-China relations (Financial Times, March 17th 2008) and articles of that nature is increasing obviously.

Richard McGregor and Jamil Anderlini from Financial Times (March 19th 2008) did one of their discussion of Tibet on the basis that ‘calibrating public opinion is difficult in China because of strict controls on the media and internet’ and this directly made the Chinese unsympathetic to the Tibetan cause. Unlike the instancy of pure news events, the discussion of them will exert continuing effects on their audience and ideologically penetrate into public consciousness. Therefore, gradually and eventually, these issues will transfer into chronological motif shaping the audience’s general impression and judgment towards China.

• The different of prejudices between these two titles

It is palpable that the general prejudices of the two contrast national titles are the same-very negative and they automatically put themselves and their readers in the side of justice and human nature. But there also exist different stances towards China between the two newspapers.

Headlines such as China prepares for crackdown by clearing Tibetan capital of witnesses (The Independent, March 18th 2008) are quite ubiquity when we look into the recent coverage of British newspapers about Tibet. With the implication of aggrandizing the factual death number and ‘bloody suppression’ and the assumption that news from Chinese media is untrustworthy and phony, they tactfully juxtapose the death number and the ‘pouring in’ and ‘killing’ of Chinese army in order to establish an association between the casualty and garrison of Chinese army and thus induce the audiences to equalize the death number to the total number of protestors.

What is more, newspapers such as The Independent chose to use the misleading words like ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ (The Independent, March 17th 2008) and some of them quite irresponsibly compared it to ‘Tiananmen Square incident’ in 1989, making the impression of fierce conflict and forbidden of information in Tibet, which will grasp readers’ attention when they ‘scoop out’ some ‘shocking news’ with ‘big headlines’.

Jezza Neumann, a reporter at The Independent, argued in one article that he had to be disguised and under cover while working as a journalist in China because that the truth is totally forbidden there and he and his friends have to find ways to avoid official surveillance and the Chinese police. He even described such a dramatic scenario: ‘During an interview we were conducting, there was a knock on the door. When the interviewee thought he recognised a man outside as a member of the secret police, we all ran off in different directions. I ate the piece of paper with the contact phone numbers on, a piece of paper that we had previously kept in Tash’s sock.’ When everybody is arguing the help to reveal the real truth of Tibet, in the perspectives of journalistic justice one would ask: truth for whom?

Undoubtedly, the truth is designed for the western readers’ favor. As has been noted by Zaller, journalists seek routinely to cover non-emergency but important issues by means of coverage that is intensely focused, dramatic, and entertaining, ample opportunity for expression of opposing views. Reporters may use simulated drama to engage public attention when the real thing is absent. In this case, the breaking in of the Chinese police is the best drama which stimulates readers’ interest. As with a real burglar alarm, the idea is to call attention to matters requiring urgent attention, and to do so in excited and noisy tones. ‘News would penetrate every corner of public space so few could miss it.’ (Zaller, 2003)

Possible reasons behind the prejudices and suggestions

Greg Philo (2007) said the concept of the journalistic theme is an assumed explanation which gives a pattern or structure to an area of coverage. For example, the theme that strikes were to blame underpinned whole processes of news reporting. It has been explained by C. Wright Mills in a sociological way: the first rule for human understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experience is always indirect. (1967: 405-6) The crucial point is, thereby, that the pattern of coverage and the subjects that it highlights can assume the explanation even without it being directly stated. In a nutshell, the compiling process of journalism is, in some respect, a subordinate to its ideology.

If reporters don’t actually need to go out and get the first-hand material, journalism would become a monotonous conglomeration of information. According to research team at Cardiff University’s school of journalism, in Britain, 80 per cent of news stories consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or material from Press Association, and a further 8 per cent contained unclear source they are unable to trace. In other words, only 12 percent per cent of stories where researchers could say that all the material are completely generated by the reporters themselves. (John Lanchester, 2008) That is to say, most newspapers are rewriting the copies they get from other resources, refining it into the formation they need. This could explain why the basic points of different newspapers’ coverage about Tibet are more or less the same.

At the same time, most of the media in the UK are commercial institutions in their own right, so the need for market share-to gain viewers and readers-is a paramount concern. Market direction is another important comprising element directs the way news articles are compiled. For example, in Financial Times, which has the 53% of white collar social classes readership and 72% of male readership (Bobby Duffy and Laura Rowden, 2005: 20-12), the articles about killings and arsons are way less than the ones in The Independent. In other words, The Independent (with a comparatively low readership of male and whiter collar social classes) is using the political and violent prejudices as a ‘selling point’ to attract the attention of middle classes and focus on new market of readership.

Of course, showing a relationship between readership and views does not necessarily show that newspapers are influencing views, rather than people choosing newspapers that reflect already formed opinions. Those who supply information to the media certainly intend it to have an impact, but they are still aware of the contexts within which their messages will be received.(Greg Philo, 2007) So what is supplied will itself be shaped by an anticipation of the reception process as well as by an understanding of the likely response of different elements of the media.

George X.J. Sun

References

Bobby Duffy and Laura Rowden (2005) You are what you read? How newspaper readership is related to reviews, MORI social research institute

C. Wright Mills (1967) “The Cultural Apparatus,” in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz, Oxford University Press

C. Richard Hofstetter (1976) Bias in the News: Network television news coverage of the 1972 election campaign, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Clifford Coonan, Dalai Lama attacks ‘cultural genocide’, The Independent, March 17th 2008 [Online] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/dalai-lama-attacks-cultural-genocide-796795.html

Clare Dwyer Hogg, My Tibet: Secret report from the roof of the world, The Independent, March 30th 2008 [Online] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/my-tibet-secret-report-from-the-roof-of-the-world-802630.html

David Miller (1994) Don’t Mention the War: Northern Ireland, propaganda and the media, London: Pluto.

Denis McQuail (1997) Audience Analysis, London: Sage

Edward W. Said (1997) Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world, London: Vintage Books

Greg Philo (2007) Can discourse analysis successfully explain the content of media and journalistic practice?, Journalism Studies, 8(2),175–196

Jezza Neumann, ‘It’s hard to explain that fear in your gut’, The Independent, March 31st 2008 [Online] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/jezza-neumann-on-undercover-reporting-its-hard-to-explain-that-fear-in-your-gut-802670.html

Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965) The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers, Journal of Peace Research, 2(64), 64-85

John Lanchester (2008) Riot, Terrorism etc, London Review of Books, 6 March, 3-4

John Zaller (2003) A New Standard of News Quality: burglar alarms for the monitorial citizen, Political Communication 20(2),109–131.

Joseph Turow (1997) Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Richard Alan Nelson (2003) Tracking Propaganda to the Source: Tools for Analyzing Media Bias, Global Media Journal 2(3), [Online] http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/fa03/gmj-fa03-nelson.htm

Richard McGregor and Jamil Anderlini, West’s perception of Tibet angers Beijing, Financial Times, March 19th 2008, [Online] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/229ac4d6-f5d8-11dc-8d3d-000077b07658.html

UKChinese.com (2008) Tibetan incident: Be aware of the British Newspapers (in Chinese) [Online] http://www.ukchinese.com/www/43/2008-03/375.html

Wilbur Schramm (1954) The Processand Effects of Mass Communication , Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Victoria Billings (1986) “Culture by the Millions: audience as innovator”, in: Sandra J.Ball-Rokeach and Muriel G. Cantor (Eds), Media, Audience, and Social Structure ,Newbury Park

Research purpose

Citizen journalism is starting to pick up in China – at least in certain quarters. But when we correlate citizen journalism to China we’ll surely be confronted with such a mixed picture which suggests that a more nuanced theoretical approach to the relationship between the Internet and people is required, one that gives due attention not only to the properties of specific technologies qua technologies, but also to the political, social, and cultural context in which they are deployed. Moreover, with the Chinese-language Internet soon to become the largest part of the global Internet, we need more bridges, more collaboration, more dialogue, and better understanding. With the development of technology, citizen journalism will introduce fresh voices into the national discourse on various topics, and help build communities of interest through their collective resources.

The cultural milieu and social context in which Chinese citizen journalism becomes a possibility and the social transformation it brings about are the main concern of this research. Since the mid-1990s, Internet usage in China has grown very rapidly. As of September 2007, China boasted 172 million Internet users, the world’s second largest, behind only the United States, and 523 million mobile phone users, by far the largest in the world. As China entered the 21st century, a number of journalists and scholars felt that media commercialization might push the country toward more independent media.

Therefore, the thorough scrutiny and understanding of Chinese Internet media calls attention to scholarly work that helps to the citizen journalism. Does the Internet bring more democracy to the country? Is there more freedom of expression on the Internet? Can we get the full and authentic image of China via the Internet and public journalism? In the process of Internet formations of journalistic learning and practices, what had once been defiantly marginal and oppositional gradually became, in its turn, orthodox–a brand new condition which we never had before.

Review of literary relevance to the problem

• Briefing on Chinese journalism in the last decade.

When describing the different phases of journalism development in China in the 1990s, scholars use different chronologies and appellations to name the Chinese journalism. Some use the terms such as ‘Journalism since 1989’ (Hugo de Burgh, 2000) or ‘Journalism in post-Deng China’ (Zhou Yuezhi, 2000) or, as Feng Ai (1996) defined, ‘Semi independent journalism’. But, apart from other social and political elements, all these discussions missed a critical point that the looming of Chinese Internet in the mid 1990s and the recent development of blogosphere and public journalism make the Netizens and freelance writers robust rather than hesitant about the question of Chinese development, social problems and freedom of speech because their own input into it, our their sense of the direction in which it should go, will constitute a significant part of whatever is made, and, moreover, will lead to some definition of the considerations that would apply in deciding a direction is both hard and necessary to achieve, precisely because of the uncertainty deriving from various social resources.

• Open source journalism and official surveillance

Above all, the uncertainty goes with the definition of citizen journalism. There is no easy answer to this question and depending on whom you ask you are likely to get very different answers. Some have called it networked journalism, open source journalism, and citizen media. Dan Gillmor (2006) sees it as a wider phenomenon of ‘a global conversation that is growing in strength, complexity, and power.’ The Internet has enabled citizens to contribute to journalism, without professional training. Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis gets to the heart of it: ‘The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.’ (Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, 2003: 10)

The idea behind citizen journalism is that everyone who disseminates information to the public should be presumptively entitled to invoke the reporter’s privilege, whether based on journalistic laws.(Mary-Rose Papandrea, 2007) Unless it involves citizens using the web to report what is happening in dire situations like that in Zimbabwe right now, citizen journalism is short of credibility. So, will the so-called ‘citizen journalist’ turn out to be a global phenomenon or will it only flourish in certain countries?

The answer requires more open source as well as the availability and conglomeration of information, upon which the influences had been impose by the electronic censorship under Chinese rule. And this will cause restrictions and limitations of a truly informed journalistic citizenry.

Internet and online journalistic surveillance are the main paradox China today faces. On the one hand, the government understands that information technologies are the engine driving economy. On the other hand, China is an authoritarian, single-party state. These two reasons made the electronic panopticon model unstable. Through the Internet doors are being opened, and path dependencies created, which cannot easily be reversed. Transnational social, political, and economic networks are beginning to permeate Chinese society, burrowing deeper and wider into more sectors of life. In a sense, we can say that the electronic panopticon is falling, largely due to the increased volume of Internet traffic in China (Greg Waltson, 2001:5).

Although firewalls are formally employed to block access to them, in practice such firewalls are easily sidestepped by net-savvy Chinese journalists. (Ronald J.Deibert, 2002:153) For example, when the dissident blogger Michael Anti’s site was shut down, its content was copied and distributed cross the net. (Mark Leonard, 2008:79)Therefore, in this respect, citizen journalists in China have the many opportunities to be activists within the communities they write about. This has drawn some criticisms from traditional media institutions, which have accused proponents of public journalism of abandoning the traditional goal of ‘objectivity’ and swamping the most vital information.(Andrew Keen, 2007) Many traditional journalists view citizen journalism with some skepticism, believing that only trained journalists can understand the exactitude and ethics involved in reporting news.

• Criticisms of citizen journalism and its confrontation in China.

As Aaron Barlow (2007: 140) put it, the rise of blogosphere has changed the ideology of civic journalism, which is a ‘deliberate attempt to retool a profession that has lost its way’, into the practices of citizen journalism and in this process journalists end up struggling to continue the conflict instead of working for resolution, for the conflict itself becomes their métier. But, as a matter of fact, the practices of citizen journalism will be affected by various elements from commercialization, politics and conventions of its participants.

An article by Tom Grubisich reviewed ten new citizen journalism sites and found many of them lacking in quality and content. Grubisich (2006) followed up a year later with, ‘Potemkin Village Redux.’ He found that the best sites had improved editorially and were even nearing profitability, but only by not expensing editorial costs. Also according to the article, practically the citizen journalism sites are more or less profitable market-oriented. For example, Backfence(an American citizen journalism site), with its investor funding, has been able to expand in three major markets in a little more than a year, and, like YourHub, hire ad staffs to generate revenue.

In addition to it, the conditions of citizen journalism in China are that it is not only driven by the economic and market purpose but also by political and partisan impetus, which deeply blurs the integrity of journalism via online resources. Therefore, others criticise the formulation of the term ‘citizen journalism’ to describe the concept, as the word ‘citizen’ has a conterminous relation to the nation-state. The fact that many millions of people are considered stateless and often without citizenship (such as refugees or immigrants without papers) limits the concept to those recognised only by governments. Additionally, the global nature of many participatory media initiatives, such as the Independent Media Center, makes talking of journalism in relation to a particular nation-state largely redundant as its production and dissemination do not recognise national boundaries. So, the problem with citizen journalism is that it tries to force news back to what it was. (Steve Boriss, 2007)

Structure of the research

Even though Daniel Bell predicted that in the information society, “the most significant of these is a shift in the majority of the labour force from agriculture (the primary sector) and manufacturing (the secondary sector) to services (the tertiary sector), (William H. Dutton, 2004: 23), it doesn’t mean that every country will undergo the same development of Internet. Quite the contrary, each country should have its unique way to develop Internet and online community according to different milieus. As what is aforementioned, citizen journalism in China is now undergoing pressures from both government and market and the image of it has thus become muffled and complex.

• Social basis of this research

Considering the complexity of the research, I plan first to make a brief overview of the social context and general description of journalism in the last decade, analysing the three prevailing social theories which articulate a distinctive emancipatory significance for the state–market nexus with consequences for journalistic freedom and equality in China.

Liberal pluralism, first of the three social theories but a general framework against which all of its alternatives must be measured, sees the market as a positive counter balance to state control of news media. The other two social theories, as Lee Chin-Chuan (2000) put it, can be broadly termed as the Chinese “old left” of the 1980s aligned with the ill-fated political reform, and the Chinese “new left” of the 1990s situated within current western critical discourses which offer radical critiques of media commercialization. The three social theories have internal connections, but the rise and fall—as well as running battles—are also closely related to the larger socio political contexts inside and outside China.

These social theories converge on the central importance of democratizing China’s party-state, but diverge on the role of the market in this process. While liberals empower the market to foster “negative freedom” for journalism, radicals attack the anti-democratic tendencies of media commercialization. Among the Chinese intelligentsia the “New Left” is sharply critical of both liberal-pluralism and the “Old Left”. As Lee Chin-Chuan (2000) put it, new democratic discourses must explain the relationships between China’s journalism and the state–market nexus in the context of globalization, the rebalancing universalistic principles with national narratives.

The complexity of Chinese citizen journalism, a more nuanced theoretical approach is required, which is established on the sociological readings of the development and limitations of Chinese Internet, new media, and citizen journalism.

• The relationship between the social context and the research of citizen journalism in China

Based on the general analysis and discussion of the basic ideas that have propelled the social theories concept into public consciousness highlights not only the increasing significance of ICTs as a new strategic resource, but also the substantial value gained from understanding the social, political, cultural, institutional, and economic factors that shape outcomes from the design and use of citizen journalism. However, popular conceptions of the citizen journalism fail to provide adequate insights into the technology’s role in social and journalistic transformation. A key reason for this is indicated by Castle’s (2000: 2) critique of traditional views of development and globalization: ‘the very notion of development often implies a technological belief in progression towards a pre-fixed goal: the type of economy and society to be found in the “highly developed” western countries. Social transformation, by contrast, does not imply any predetermined outcome, nor that the process is essentially a positive one.’

Therefore, we need to make a careful investigation of citizen journalism in China rather than stiffly enforce it into the vested occidental ideologies and research structures. This is because the current Chinese journalism is neither totally independent nor completely under government control and this is partly the consequences of the three social theories I mentioned above which make the de facto image of journalism in China blurring and comparatively distinctive from its western par.

Methodology

This study aims to explore the relatively new research area of cultural distinctions in Chinese citizen journalism and the new social transformation it has caused through the methods of content analysis, social investigation and personal interviews (This is feasible because I myself am now writing for GVO and I know a lot Chinese bloggers and citizen journalists). Also, the nature of this study requires various social and cultural methodologies and resources.

• Hofstede’s dimensions

I got this methodological inspiration after reading a piece of research paper by Hofstede. As Internet exists in different languages, differences in the creation of articles across the language versions might occur. Specifically, I investigate the relation between users’ behavior on line and their cultural backgrounds as defined by the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede. He collected data from 116,000 IBM employees working in over 70 countries.(Gert. J. Hofstede, 2003).From the findings of the research, Hofstede identified four central dimensions of cultural diversity, which he proposed were largely independent, which can be measured across nations and expressed in scales.

This theory had been reconfirmed later by Ulrike Pfeil and Panayiotis Zaphiris (2006) in theory to the study of Wikipedia to prove that the web is not a culturally neutral medium, but is full of cultural markers that give country-specific websites a look and feel unique to the local culture, and members of different cultural groups prefer different icons, colors, and site structures. (Ibid)

These findings give rise to implications regarding how aspects of collaborative work in the public journalism are influenced by pre-existing cultural and social differences. In this perspective, it can provide some facts and advices to the development of Chinese Internet and a better method for theoretical discussion. For instance, people from a country, such as China, with a high Power Distance (PDI), which describes the relationship between the higher-ups and lower-downs of a society and how human disparity and differences in power and wealth are dealt with, are more likely to add information.

Apparently, they hypothesize that Hofstede’s dimensions, which on the whole involved the study of cultural differences across many nations, provide insight into how Netizens act in real life, are also applicable to the research of citizen journalism model, which by definition is part of the wider phenomenon of social Web.

• Case studies and comparative studies

In the case studies, I firstly want to make an analogy comparing the development of citizen journalism in China with journalistic transition in western history. In their book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel make a compelling argument that each time there has been a period of significant, social, economic and technological change, a transformation in news occurred. This happened, for instance, in the 1920s with radio and the rise of gossip and celebrity culture; the 1950s at the onset of the Cold War and television. ‘The arrival of cable, followed by the Internet and mobile technologies, has brought the latest upheaval in news.’ (Kovach, 2001: 13)

Making a historical comparison is good for the study of current citizen journalism in China. New technology, along with globalization and the conglomeration of media, is causing a shift towards journalism that is connected to citizen building and one that supports a healthy democracy. This theory approach could effectively illustrate the whereabouts of citizen journalism in China.

Secondly, I intend to make a comparison between a few Chinese citizen journalism sites or organizations and their counterparts in other Asian and European countries. For instance, the study of ‘OhMyNews’ and ‘The Onlines.co.uk’, pre-eminent Korean and English citizen journalism websites respectively, and ‘inmediahk.net’, a Hong Kong-based Chinese citizen journalism website, will provide some interesting insight into the differences between different versions of public journalism. OhMyNews in South Korea is a highly successful ‘citizen journalism’ site with 33,000 citizen reporters, alongside professional editors. Founded by Oh Yeon-ho in 2000, it has a staff of some 40-plus traditional reporters and editors, with the rest coming from other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens.

OhmyNews has been credited with transforming South Korea’s conservative political environment, but Rebecca MacKinnon(2004) of Global Voices pointed out that the success of it could be put down to South Korea not having a long-established free press.

The interesting thing is that mainland China and Hong Kong also don’t possess a long-established free press, but why does Hong Kong successfully follow the Korean model and establish their relatively consummate citizen journalism? Instead of commercial citizen journalism model, China established its citizen journalism on the basis of blogosphere (the sharp-cut and open-minded blog site Bullblogger.com, for example), which can be attributed to the social context. As I noted in the former parts of the article, the sociological reason of it can be inferred from three hypotheses: First, the semi-capitalism regime made the public journalism unstable; secondly, when the Internet is supposedly the force guaranteed to change China, in the event, however, it is China that has changed the internet: forcing internet giants like Google and Yahoo to play by the formidable rules set by Chinese government (Mark Leonard, 2008: 77); thirdly, the Chinese market-directed economy is directing citizen journalism to a more merchandized and entertained formation and thus debilitating the independence and impartiality of citizen journalism practices. And these hypotheses determine that the Chinese citizen journalism will lead its unique way of development under pressures and effects coming from every social element.

References

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Barlow, A. (2007) The Rise of the Blogosphere, Praeger Publishers Inc.

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Grubisich, T. (2006) ‘Potemkin Village Redux’, USC Annenberg, Online Journalism Review. November 19, [Online] http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/Grubisich061911/

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China and India are burying the hatchet after four-plus decades of hostility. A few companies from both nations have been quick to gain competitive advantages by viewing the two as symbiotic. If Western corporations fail to do the same, they will lose their competitive edge–and not just in China and India but globally. The trouble is, most companies and consultants refuse to believe that the planet’s most populous nations can mend fences. Not only do the neighbors annoy each other with their foreign policies, but they’re also vying to dominate Asia.  

Moreover, the world’s fastest-growing economies are archrivals for raw materials, technologies, capital, and overseas markets. Still, China and India are learning to cooperate, for three reasons. First, these ancient civilizations may have been at odds since 1962, but for 2,000 years before that, they enjoyed close economic, cultural, and religious ties. Second, neighbors trade more than non-neighbors do, research suggests. Third, China and India have evolved in very different ways since their economies opened up, reducing the competitiveness between them and enhancing the complementarities. Some companies have already developed strategies that make use of both countries’ capabilities. India’s Mahindra & Mahindra developed a tractor domestically but manufactures it in China. China’s Huawei has recruited 1,500 engineers in India to develop software for its telecommunications products. Even the countries’ state-owned oil companies, including Sinopec and ONGC, have teamed up to hunt for oil together. Multinational companies usually find that tapping synergies across countries is difficult. At least two American corporations, GE and Microsoft, have effectively combined their China and India strategies, allowing them to stay ahead of global rivals.

A historic event, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, took place on the border between China and India on July 6, 2006. After 44 years, the Asian neighbors reopened Nathu La, a mountain pass perched 14,140 feet up in the eastern Himalayas, connecting Tibet in China to Sikkim in India. Braving heavy wind and rain, several dignitaries—including China’s ambassador to India, the Tibet Autonomous Region’s chairperson, and Sikkim’s chief minister—watched as soldiers removed a barbed wire fence between the two nations.

It seems to be common sense that if two individuals have different skill sets, and if they can both prosper more together rather than apart, they should work together. We see this daily with task forces, management teams, and corporate mergers, and yet when brought to the highest level, countries, working together seems impossible.

I have to agree that the UK is too proud to work together. I am learning every day, that as Briton they value themselves higher than other countries. Their nationalism is extremely high, and is prohibiting UK from “stepping down” to work with other counties. But, as Chinese, could we prosper by freeing the border and collaborating between China and India? I don’t have any evidence to back up my claim, but if my common sense is correct, I would guess ‘yes’.

‘China has one of the three great book publishing industries in the world. Along with the UK and the US it publishes around 200,000 new titles and new editions a year, well ahead of the nearest rivals, Japan, Russia and Germany. It is by far the largest publishing market by volume – officially about 6bn units a year, but many more when pirated copies are taken into account. In terms of value the market will probably amount to around £4-5bn in 2007, which would put it fourth in the world – behind the US, Germany and Japan and ahead of the UK.’ says Paul Richardson, an international research fellow at the Chinese Institute of Publishing Sciences in Beijing. 

The Chinese literary world is like a parallel universe, almost invisible to many in the west, complete with big hitters (Su Tong and Jia Pingwa), innovators (Xi Chuan and Che Qianzi), and bestselling superstars (Han Han and Annie Baobei), some of whom are earning more than £1m a year. Though as the Beijing-based translator and journalist Eric Abrahamsen points out, these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. “The number of books sold is a mystery to everyone,” he says. Underneath the confusion, however, there is an unprecedented opportunity for publishers to break into an underdeveloped market, and one which, according to the translator Nicky Harman, has an undeniable thirst for books. 

“When you go to big towns you see these huge shops called shu cheng – book cities – which are the size of department stores.” she says. Beijing Book City, for example, employs about 700 people and carries 230,000 titles on the shelves. “Last time I was in Wuhan people were queuing up on a Sunday morning, waiting for the shop to open. You find people sitting on the floor reading books, squatting on tables, crowding the aisles, filling trolleys. They’re stuffed with people.” And in contrast with the west, it’s mostly young people. “The older generation matured through the Cultural Revolution,” says Richardson. “They grew up in a very different world. So far as they do read books for pleasure, they’re likely to read the classics.  

This rush to the market has led to a “huge explosion” in genre fiction, according to Abrahamsen, with martial arts, sword and sorcery, romance and crime fiction very popular. “It’s sort of a release,” he says, “as if people are saying ‘finally we can sit down and read a romantic novel in the afternoon, rather than worrying’.” He is less optimistic about the prospects for literary fiction, suggesting that authors are “writing for a population that doesn’t want to think about their lives” and would rather just get on with making money. There is a small group of “very smart, very brave” writers trying to understand what’s happening to China in a period of change so rapid that “people are living differently now to how they were even six months ago”, but it is increasingly hard for them to find an audience for their work. “Almost nobody else is interested. The government’s implicit deal is ‘Don’t ask too many questions, just do your thing’,” he explains. “There are a lot of really disheartened writers who would like to put their heart and soul into writing, but who aren’t doing it because most people aren’t reading it.”  

The Nanjing-based poet and novelist Han Dong is equally pessimistic. “The fact is that readers’ interest in contemporary literature is waning, the number of people who read any kind of literature is dropping, and the number of those who read contemporary work is dropping even more,” he says. “If a writer is only motivated by the desire to be read, then the current environment is disastrous.” “It’s possible to do good work, but it’s hard,” agrees another poet Yang. “I was among the so-called Misty Poets – we were the founders of contemporary Chinese poetry after the Cultural Revolution. We had this magazine called Today, which began in 1978. Among our group were five or six important poets. Now, apart from me and one other, all the others have stopped writing.”

In March Taiwan’s independence-leaning President Chen Shui-bian wants approval to seek U.N. membership under the name “Democratic Taiwan”. “From the perspective of the United States, the conduct of such a referendum is a mistake,” Negroponte, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, told reporters of Retuers, echoing comments made in December by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Negroponte made the remarks ahead of two days of talks with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo that will cover Taiwan and other diplomatic hotspots, including North Korea and Iran. In other words, as a matter of fact U.S. don’t want to be engulfed in the military conflicts in Asia-pacific area but once there broke out a civil war between China mainland and Taiwan, U.S. will be put into a dilemma situation. 

To fight or not to fight? Here’s the rub. Quite the contrary to some gossips about China’s enthusiastic expectation of war against Taiwan, the Chinese government actually doesn’t hope any clashes or conflicts round Taiwan Strait. At the same time, China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that must accept reunification and calls the referendum a provocative bid to create formal independence for the island.

Even thouth Taiwan remains China’s top worry and it wants Washington efforts to help stifle Chen’s plans for the vote alongside presidential elections on the island, Chinese government still made the most generous concession announcing that if Taiwan doesn’t announce its independency, China will keep the current situation in Taiwan Strait. This can be described as a big favor our mainlanders offer to Taiwan because in the long run we all know that it is not China ‘liberates’ Taiwan but Taiwan ‘assimilates’ China. At this point, I must say, Chinese government is pretty clever because we all know what we are in the long run.

Regretfully, the leader of Taiwan is not that clever to understand the implication made by Chinese government. In Mr Chen Shui-bian’s opinion, to be a president is like to be in Disney Land- you should play all the games before you leave. The last and maybe the biggest game of President Chen Shui-bian is Taiwan’s referendum in March (even it is under Washington‘s opposition). But if he’s not an insane man, Mr Chen should know from his common sense that the referendum will put China, U.S. and other east-Asia countries in a very embrrassed and even dangerous situation.In this perspective, President Chan is like a bug to both U.S. and China. Yes, in a way he’s indeed a bug. When hiding in your body, the bug will make you feel itch and uncomfortable or even takes a bite at you occasionally, but it won’t going to kill you. However if you don’t make away with it in time this little bug may cause vital disease to human body. When that happens, the bug is no longer a bug; it is called Chen Shui-bian.

In the major Yangtze port city of Hankou, water levels fell to 13.98m (46ft) in early January – the lowest level since records began in 1866, China Daily said, citing local media. Water levels in other rivers and reservoirs in China are also reported to be at record lows. But, officials said that an earlier than expected dry season was to blame for the drought. Authorities have already warned that climate change could make weather conditions in China much tougher in the years ahead. Large amounts of water were also stored behind the Three Gorges Dam last month, causing a 50% reduction in the flow volume of the Yangtze, China Daily said. But the Yangtze River Water Resource Commission said this was not the cause of the problem.   

All the statement made by government is totally opposed to what the Financial Times reported about Three Gogers Dam. On their website of Chinese report we can read these sentences: “From the beginning, the project (Three Gorgers Dam) faced intense criticism from international and domestic activists and even from many within the Communist party.” and: ” In recent months, senior officials have publicly admitted for the first time the Three Gorges region faces an environmental catastrophe if urgent action is not taken.”  

Born in a Communist family, I am very familiar with the way they propagandize and it is just like how they did it in the years of Mao Tze-tung. Generally speaking, it can be distilled into the two disciplines: 1.ruthless media manipulation; 2.activity substituting for achievement. Despite the propaganda and jargon, little essential information as to the dam is allowed to be known by the subjects.

Nonetheless, as the time goes by, with more and more reports and facts uncovering the true color of this project, the government currently has to confess there’re severe environmental and social problems brought by it. Yet, at present it is nonsense to argue whether this project is good or evil. On one hand, we must instantly find some effective methods to solve the problems and remedy; on the other hand, the journalistic morality and integrity require the Chinese media to tell the truth about the problems they made to the domestic people. This, I think, is the only proper way a mature and rational government does and I also believe that this acitivity, if our government became honest to all their subjects, will consolidate the stability of our regime rather than cause any subversive or anti-government actions because the demos always support and show their respect to a brave and straight government. 

Obviously,these two asian countries share the same category of regime-dictatorship and some historical connections between them may as well bring these two countries together in the same battlefront providing the political pressure is really intensifying and alarming.Nevertheless,Chinese Communist Party this time has to think twice before taking a single step and carefully speculate what mechanism they could figure out to handle such emergency.After all,the horrible memoir of the great massacre in 1989 is,hopefully,none the less vivid in the mind of every Chinese and this can possiblelly make the Beijing goverment get stuck in a paradoxical morass due to the Olimpic Games, which imply international kudos and access to civilized world,held in next year.

Actually,Beijing government won’t be that stupid to assist one of its so-called poor pal at the risk of losing its chance to get international assessment and admittance for the sound of criticism about the action on human-rights abuses has never stopped since some half a decade before,when the IOC announced that the 2008 Olimpic Games will be held there.Moreover,an artical from The Observer told that Beijing just wants the Olimpic badly so that it is going to avoid and diminish every possible factor that can “become a platform for democracy campaigners to highlight China’s human-rights abuses.” The direct outcome therefore,must turnout to be the total pretending ignorance of what had happened in Burma.

But,one of the funny,and perhaps paramount,facets on this issue might be that Beijing government is now likely to be brainstorming some effective ways to block out all information and digital communicators in terms of net and cellphones if those clashs like 1989 or Burma surely recur in the future.(Now is after all a digital era,and don’t forget all the MMS messages as to the Burmese crackdown)When the students again gather around Tiananmen Square,we’ll be lucky to see the scene of the military forces’ capture of bunches of Nokias and Motos rather than bloody ears that uesd to belong to some humanbeings.

According to official indexes (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the new CCTV headquarters, at a height of 230 meter and a floor area of about 400,000 square meters, combines administration with news, broadcasting, studios and program production – the entire process of TV making – in a sequence of interconnected activities. Although the building is 230 meter tall it is not a traditional tower, but a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections that establish an urban site rather than point to the sky. The irregular grid on the building’s facades is an expression of the forces traveling throughout its structure.

 The second building, the 115,000 m2 Television Cultural Center (TVCC) includes a hotel, a visitor’s center, a large public theatre and exhibition spaces. It is visible from the main intersection of the Central Business District through the “window” of the CCTV headquarters. The project, covering an area of 187,000 square meters, was designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and supposed to be ready for partial use in time for the Olympic Games next August and completed in 2009.

 Another creepy little bastard created for Beijing Olympic Games! This is not only because the building is ‘startlingly different from any other object in sight’ but also that everything the Chinese created for next year’s Olympic Games is inevitably holy flunk. Look at the five damned mascots, the nest-like stadium they created and the Big Brother’s new headquarter. In the perspectives of occidental people, they are, in some respect, very good designs, but, so long as it seems to me, they might fail to consider the accordance of the environment, the Chinese style of surrounding architecture as well as the Chinese cultural background.  

The failure of all these made the Olympic constructions in China like exotic items endowed by Western world. It is very happy for everyone to see the China CCTV is trying to make a change. And this is a positive inclination implying the will we Chinese hold that the 2008 Olympic Games can thoroughly represent a new, enthusiastic and democratic China in this century. I don’t stand against this happy idea, and my argument is concerning more with the balance between occidental and oriental culture and I also firmly believe on a global scale, our international friends will be happier to see the elegant blend of both Modern and traditional Chinese culture.