MCLC: serious PR problem

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: anne hennochowicz (annemh at alumni.upenn.edu)
Subject: serious PR problem
*******************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (2/8/12):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/08/chinas_pr_problem>China

The Muddle Kingdom has a serious PR problem.
BY ISAAC STONE FISH

Wang Xuming is different. Unlike other Chinese officials, he actually
enjoys communicating with the world outside of the Communist Party. As a
spokesman for the Ministry of Education, he released his cell phone number
to the media. "I was available 24 hours a day," he told me in November.
"There are some journalists with mental disorders who would call me at 10
or 11 at night. Of course I don't mean you," he added with a smile. He
peppers his speech with flowery expressions and blunt asides, unlike his
counterparts, who often sound like Karl Marx audiobooks. Remarkably, he
would actually admit when he didn't know anything. Chinese reporters saw
him as a rare light in Beijing's darkness, which is why he was fired in
2008 for being too outspoken.

Both domestically and internationally, the Chinese Communist Party has a
public-relations problem: Its officials do not know how to communicate
with the media. Decision making is highly centralized, and the relatively
low-ranking officials tasked with speaking to reporters don't want to
offend their superiors by saying the wrong thing. Although Reporters
Without Borders ranks
<http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2011-2012,1043.html> China's media
as 174th in its latest Press Freedom Index, just slightly better than Iran
and worse than Sudan, news is transmitted through Twitter-like
micro-blogging services, of which roughly 250 million Chinese use. Though
few expect China's stilted state-run media to be crusaders for change,
there are more independent newspapers, like the business magazine
Caixin and the newspaper the Southern Metropolis Daily, and journalists
there increasingly ask difficult questions about everything from pollution
cover-ups to low-level official corruption.

Spokesmen, though, hide from the domestic and international press. Besides
Wang, all of the half-dozen current and former spokespeople I've met have
declined to give me their contact information besides a general office
phone number. Wringing a comment from a government ministry more often
than not involves the request to fax a list of questions, which are rarely
answered.

And when poorly trained spokesmen and officials do speak, PR disasters
often ensue. On Tuesday, rumors swirled online that a vice mayor named
Wang Lijun in the city of Chongqing attempted to defect to the United
States (the State Department on Wednesday confirmed only that he had met
officials at the consulate and left "of his own volition"). Wang shot to
fame for overseeing Chongqing's highly publicized fight against organized
crime, and a scandal involving Wang
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-16940146> could hurt Chongqing
Party Secretary Bo Xilai's chance of promotion. The Chongqing government's
official microblog responded that Wang was taking a "vacation-style
leave." This ridiculous response drew 21,000 comments and has been
re-tweeted an astonishing 60,000 times, blowing up the story domestically.
"This style of PR really makes me disappointed by the government," wrote
one Weibo user. "What a sense of humor!" wrote another.

After a high-speed train crashed in Wenzhou last year, killing 40 people,
the railway ministry tried to clean up the accident before an official
investigation could take place. The railways spokesman claimed,
unconvincingly, that this was done to aid rescuers. He told reporters,
"Whether you believe it or not, I believe it anyway." The ministry sacked
the spokesmen, the fourth ministry official to be fired after the crash,
but his remarks only added to public anger and added to grassroots
pressure for the government to reform the ministry
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/03/us-china-railways-idUSTRE81205A2
0120203>.

China faces a worse PR problem internationally. After the Nobel Committee
awarded imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo the Peace Prize in 2010, China's
Foreign Ministry spokesman called the decision "blasphemy," a response
that immediately fueled comparisons between China's response and that of
Nazi Germany, when the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to a German
dissident. The Western world perceives the Chinese government as
unreasonable toward the Tibetans in part because of its officials'
tendency to issue tin-eared statements calling the Dalai Lama names like a
"wolf in monk's robes."

Chinese government officials complain of an anti-Chinese bias in Western
media <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/asia/02china.html>, but the
foreign journalists whose reporting shapes Chinese perception almost
always have a difficult time getting the Chinese government's side of the
story. Government officials and spokesmen rarely give interviews. Chinese
dissidents are generally far more media savvy. The Dalai Lama has given
hundreds of one-on-one interviews to foreign media. So has dissident
artist Ai Weiwei. President Hu Jintao has given none. With the exception
of Premier Wen Jiabao, for the past few years neither have any of the
other members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, ostensibly the
nine most powerful men in the country.

Yiyi Lu, a former Chatham House fellow and expert on Chinese civil
society, wrote a paper entitled "Challenges for China's International
Communication," due to be published in April. She reports that China's
bureaucratic system punish those who make mistakes when talking to
journalists but doesn't reward those who say positive things, creating
strong disincentive for officials to engage the media. In addition,
"spokespersons dare not comment on officials who are more senior than
them. Since most spokespersons are middle-ranking officials, it means many
topics are off limits," she writes.

Things used to be much worse. One of the Communist Party's founding
mandates was to "thoroughly break off connection of any kind with
bourgeois intellectuals and similar parties
<http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-07/01/content_12816398.htm
<http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-07/01/content_12816398.htm>,>>,
and
the country was closed to outsiders for much of the Mao years. China first
appointed a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in 1983 who held weekly
press conferences but didn't allow questions
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/2010-07/09/content_11051171.htm>; the
second spokesman appeared in the Taiwan Affairs Office in 2000. After
being slow to respond to successive PR disasters, like the SARS outbreak
in 2003 and the Tibetan riots in 2008, the government has made it more of
a priority to try to present its side of the story to the international
media, but has yet to set up a functioning system of spokespeople.

"I think today's spokespeople are in a bottleneck period," says Wang, the
ousted Education Ministry spokesman, who now directs the ministry's
Language and Culture Press. "The question of whether or not there are
spokesmen in China has already been solved. The far more difficult
question is what should spokesman say, and should they say anything at
all?"

But instead of focusing on domestic accountability or openness, the
Chinese government has been investing heavily in the internationalization
of its own TV and news stations, to counter what it perceives to be
anti-Chinese bias 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/asia/02china.html> in the Western
media. The state broadcaster CCTV yesterday launched
<http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/02/08/watch-chinas-cctv-now-broadc
asting-in-north-america/> a new program in English called CCTV America,
which it says will "project China" to the world. The central government
has reportedly committed $6 billion
<http://www.economist.com/node/15607496> to the global expansion of its
state run media. But by allowing its spokesman and officials to actually
say something and convincingly present their side of the story would go a
long way to countering perceived media bias.

That is the goal of Wang, who has become China's most vocal spokesmen for
spokespeople: He released a book last month about how to be a good
government spokesperson in China, and he has criticized his former
brethren in print and other media. "Our party is very great," he says.
"But party, government, is very abstract. The way we understand it is
through people. I hope we can have flesh and blood spokespeople." He adds,
"Spokespeople cannot be useless, like deaf people's ears. If a
spokesperson doesn't speak, than he's not a real spokesperson."