MCLC: teaching journalism in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: teaching journalism in China
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Source: NYT (6/3/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/world/asia/04iht-educlede04.html

Treading a Fine Line by Teaching Journalism in China
By LARA FARRAR

SHANTOU, CHINA — On a Monday afternoon, Peter Arnett took his class of
Chinese journalism students to the outskirts of the southern coastal city
of Shantou, to a park dedicated to remembering the turmoil of the Cultural
Revolution.

The memorial’s walls bear descriptions of the killings during the
decade-long campaign that Mao Zedong began in 1966 to eradicate what were
considered bourgeois elements. Like the memory of the revolution itself,
the memorial, which opened in 2005, exists in a gray area. The local media
rarely write about it. Few who live in Shantou know it is there.

“I bring all of my classes here,” said Mr. Arnett who has visited the site
at least a dozen times. “They need to know the truth. It is something they
should know.”

Mr. Arnett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent who has covered
conflicts from Vietnam to the Middle East. In 2007, after he finished his
final reporting tour in Baghdad, he moved to China to take up a post as a
journalism teacher at Shantou University. <http://www.stu.edu.cn/> He has
been teaching at the school ever since.

“I have great difficulties explaining this to my former colleagues, who
laugh and say, ‘How can you teach journalism in a country where the
government controls the media?”’ Mr. Arnett said. “I base my teaching on
my career, about challenging authority. I tell the students: ‘You want to
know about sacrifice? Why we do it? Because we believe in finding the
truth in society.”’

Mr. Arnett is one of a growing number of foreign journalists teaching at
Chinese universities, in a country conflicted about its relationship with
the international media. On one hand, foreign correspondents can face
pressure; one recent example is the removal of Melissa Chan, an outspoken
correspondent for Al Jazeera. On the other hand, the Chinese government is
pouring billions of dollars into state-run media, which are opening
bureaus worldwide as part of a strategy to create news agencies that can
compete with CNN or the BBC.

Caught in the middle are journalism schools in China, which, according to
academics, now number about 1,000. At the more progressive campuses, there
is a struggle between two ideologies: one that says that the media should
serve the state, and another that sees them as an independent monitor.

In journalism schools from Guangdong Province in the south to Shanghai and
Beijing, there is a desire to improve the quality of the education, which
is why many foreign journalists are invited to teach.

“Yes, Western ideology is the dominant ideology here I think,” said Zhang
Zhi’an, an associate journalism professor at Sun Yat-sen University
<http://eng.sysu.edu.cn/>in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong. “There is
not a gap between our school’s education and the Western education but we
are still monopolized by our party, and we are still on mainland China.”
“The idea of freedom of speech in the way we conceive it, it does not
exist here at all,” said Chris Hawke <http://www.chrishawke.com/> , a
Canadian journalist who teaches reporting at the Communication University
of China  <http://www.cuc.edu.cn/en2/cuc.htm>in Beijing. “It is deeply
embedded in the culture, so when I am teaching, I have to take that into
account.”

Most foreign journalism professors seem to avoid the subjects that are at
the heart of international media covering age in China. Few say that they
have been told what and what not to say; but they feel they can accomplish
little by discussing subjects like Tibet, the 1989 Tiananmen Square
crackdown, dissidents or human rights.

“I have broached subjects about independence of media, dissidents, things
that are not considered kosher by the Chinese government,” said Arielle
Emmett, <http://www.arielleemmett.com/bio.html> a U.S. journalist who
teaches at the China Agricultural University in Beijing.
<http://www.cau.edu.cn/cie/en/>“One student reported me once, went to the
local administrator who is a very staunch member of the Communist Party
and told her I was talking about ideas she found strange.”

“They said they were going to send a monitor to watch me, and I said, ‘If
you do that more than once, I am going to quit,”’ Dr. Emmett said.

No monitor ever showed up.

“I think the progress in China is, we can tolerate some people who are
talking about some things that are different in front of our kids,” said
Steven Guanpeng Dong, director of Tsinghua University’s Global Journalism
Institute in Beijing. “The new progress is everyone can talk, and you can
talk about your values, but the question is whether the students will
accept it or not.”

Tsinghua’s journalism school has a partnership with the Washington-based
International Center for Journalists and frequently invites journalists
from Reuters and the BBC to lecture. The Global Journalism Institute,
according to Mr. Dong, aims to replicate Harvard University’s Nieman
Foundation <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/NiemanFoundation.aspx> and the
Florida-based Knight Foundation <http://www.knightfoundation.org/> , both
of which promote freedom of information.

The emphasis is on “internationalization or globalization,” Mr. Dong said.
“It is definitely not Westernization.”

One foreign journalist who wished to remain unidentified for fear of
professional repercussions, said that he often addressed issues that could
be contentious.

“I am out there lecturing about the Pentagon Papers, the First Amendment,
independent judiciary, The New York Times defying the President of the
United States and publishing national security secrets, and audiences are
lapping it up,” he said. “Hordes come up afterwards wanting to get my
e-mail address.”

He said he focused on teaching professional standards but also infused his
lectures with examples of how journalists covered genocide in Rwanda or
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Students have turned in assignments on human rights abuses in North Korea,
China’s one-child policy and how the Chinese government addresses
information control and the social media.

“I ask myself all the time, ‘What am I doing here? What is the point of
being here?”’ he said. “Students have told me I am not wasting my time
that ‘maybe you will see you were here at the beginning of something
special, that you inspired us.”’

There is the question of what happens when students leave classrooms run
by foreign journalists and enter the real world which, for most of them,
means working for state-controlled media. Some say they find ways to work
within the system.

“Every system has a rule, has a boundary, even in the Western media, so I
think if you want to play the game better, it is better you respect the
rules first,” said a reporter who studied journalism overseas and now
works for a state-run newspaper who requested anonymity out of concern
about losing her job. “Maybe someday when you become a really famous
reporter, maybe you will have the ability to push the boundary a little,
but I never say I want to change the whole system, no.”

Others choose to abandon journalism altogether.

“We are really tortured by idealism in journalism school,” said Summer
Xia, a journalism student at Fudan University in Shanghai. “I am so
confused, and I have so much mixed information. I think my views of
journalism are now so strange. I am kind of relieved I have decided not to
be a journalist.”