MCLC: me and my censor

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Mon Oct 29 09:17:11 EDT 2012


MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: me and my censor
***********************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (10/26/12):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/26/me_and_my_censor

Me and My Censor
A reporter's memoir of what it's like to tell the truth about today's
China.
BY EVELINE CHAO 

My first day of work in Beijing, my boss asked if I knew the "Three Ts."

I did not. It was February 2007, and I was a wide-eyed 26 year-old
fresh off the plane from New York, struggling to absorb the deluge of
strange information that had hit me since arriving.

The Three Ts, he informed me, were the three most taboo topics to
avoid in Chinese media -- Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen. My boss was
Taiwanese himself, and delivered this information with a wry tone of
bemusement. He had been doing business here for nearly 30 years, he
had said, since China first began opening its economy to the outside
world, and had witnessed a lot.

"You'll hear more about it from our censor," he said, and then, having
inserted that tantalizing fragment into my head, sent me off to begin
my new job.

For the next two years, I served as an editor, then managing editor,
of an English-language business magazine called China International
Business. The editorial staff was comprised of, at various times, two
to four American and British editors, and two or three Chinese writers
and research assistants. Supposedly, we had a print circulation of
45,000, though nobody I talked to had ever heard of us. In theory,
there was a website too, but it was perennially under construction
and, since the guy in charge of it didn't actually speak English,
never quite readable. We ran briefs on current events; profiled
businesses in China; interviewed executives of international companies
with a presence in the country, like Crocs and Calvin Klein; and also
did long analytical pieces spotlighting industries ranging from coal
to lingerie to frozen foods. Our audience was mostly expat
businesspeople in China; hence, in addition to being available by
subscription, we were distributed in five-star hotels, international
schools, and other expat enclaves.

Technically, we were the only officially sanctioned English-language
business publication in mainland China. There were a handful of other
English-language magazines in town, mostly listings and entertainment
mags along the lines of Time Out. These were usually founded by
foreigners who'd partnered up with private Chinese companies to secure
a license from the General Administration of Press and Publications
(GAPP), which oversees print publications in China. Unlike them, we
were published not just under the umbrella of the publisher's private
media company, but also in cooperation with the Ministry of Commerce
(MOFCOMM). In other words, the government wanted us there.

Like any editor in the United States, I tweaked articles, butted heads
with the sales department, and tried to extract interesting quotes out
of boring people. Unlike my American counterparts, however, I was
offered red envelopes stuffed with cash at press junkets, sometimes
discovered footprints on the toilet seats at work, and had to explain
to the Chinese assistants more than once that they could not turn in
articles copied word for word from existing pieces they found online.
I also liaised with our government censor.

Jobs like this are practically a rite of passage for young, aspiring
writers in China who also happen to be native English speakers (and
who are trying to avoid teaching English, the default job for most
Westerners in Asia). Most start out as copyeditors at state-owned
papers like China Daily, correcting the English on articles by Chinese
reporters, and often making $1500 a month -- enough to live
comfortably in Beijing in the first decade of the 21st century (and
two or three times the amount of native colleagues with decades' more
work experience). I myself was hired as a copyeditor with no prior
magazine experience (though I'd worked in book publishing in New
York), promoted to editor two months later, then another eight months
later found myself running the show as managing editor, at the ripe
old age of 28. This was a fairly normal career trajectory in China.
Despite the title on my business card, however, I was always
technically an "English language consultant" -- no foreigners are
allowed to direct editorial content in Chinese media. Our censor got
pride of place on the masthead, with title of managing editor.

Every legally registered publication in China is subject to review by
a censor, sometimes several. Some expat publications have entire teams
of censors scouring their otherwise innocuous restaurant reviews and
bar write-ups for, depending on one's opinion of foreigners,
accidental or coded allusions to sensitive topics. For example, That's
Shanghai magazine once had to strike the number 64 from a short,
unrelated article because their censors believed it might be read as
an oblique reference to June 4, 1989, when the Chinese government
bloodily suppressed a pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. Many
Chinese-run publications have no censor at all, but their editors are
relied upon to know where the line falls -- i.e., to self-censor.

Our censor, an employee of MOFCOMM, was a nervous, flighty woman in
her forties with long, frizzy hair and a high, childlike voice, whose
name was Snow. (Snow requested I only use her English name for this
article.) In late September of this year, I learned that Snow left the
magazine, enabling me to finally write this story without fear that it
would affect her job.

Snow's name made for much late-night comedy in my office, along the
lines of: "God, that article totally got snowplowed," or "Uh-oh, I
predict heavy snowfall for this one." I met Snow for the first time
during our inaugural editorial meeting at the office: the top two
floors of a six-story, spottily heated building with a pool hall in
the basement and what appeared to be fourteen-year-old security guards
at the door, in central Beijing. Here, just as my boss had promised,
Snow elaborated on the Three Ts, relaying an anecdote about a
journalist friend of hers. A photo enthusiast, he once ran a picture
he'd taken in Taiwan alongside an article, but had failed to notice a
small Taiwanese flag in the background. As a result, the entire staff
of his newspaper had been immediately fired and the office shut down.

Despite these words of caution, we didn't take the fact that we had a
censor very seriously, at least for my first few months on the job,
and evading Snow's changes became a game of sorts. This was easier
back then; the August 2008 Beijing Olympics were a year-and-a-half
away, and it behooved China to demonstrate that it was an open
country. Besides, Snow was a small presence in our daily work routine.
She did not come to our office, and aside from that first encounter,
didn't attend our story meetings. Each month, we emailed her our list
of article topics for the upcoming issue. After we had edited those
articles, we emailed them to Snow, and she sent them back marked with
her changes. She reviewed them again in layout, and, once satisfied,
would give the printer the order to start the presses.

Business content is not censored as strictly as other areas in China,
since it seems to be understood that greater openness is needed to
push the economy forward and it doesn't necessarily deal with the
political issues Chinese rulers seem to find the most sensitive.
English-language content isn't censored as much either, since only a
small fraction of the Chinese population reads English. (As foreigners
reporting on non-sensitive subjects in English, we could worry much
less about the dangers -- threats, beatings, jail time -- that
occasionally befall muckraking Chinese journalists.) And, in the
beginning, most of Snow's edits were minor enough that we didn't feel
compromised. We couldn't say that a businessperson came back to China
from the United States after "Tiananmen," but we could say "June
1989," knowing that our readers knew the significance of the month. We
couldn't say "the Cultural Revolution" but could write "the late 1960s
and early 1970s," to allude to then Communist Party chairman Mao
Zedong launching his disastrous campaign that sent millions of
intellectuals to the countryside. Writing that a company planned to
expand into "foreign markets like Taiwan and Korea" was forbidden
because it suggested that Taiwan was a separate country from China,
but we could say "overseas markets," since, according to Snow, Taiwan
literally is over a body of water from the mainland.

The waters around China were always touchy. In May 2007, we ran an
article about wind power, and had an artist create a map of China
dotted with wind turbines to illustrate it. Snow cautioned that if we
were going to depict a map of China, we had to make sure it included
Taiwan and various disputed territories, including the now hotly
contested small chain of uninhabited islands that China calls the
Diaoyu and Japan the Senkakus. "Just put in a couple dots around the
bottom, but whatever you do, make sure they don't get cut off," she
said. In lay-out those islands did, indeed, get cut off; but at Snow's
advice, the designer haphazardly Photoshopped a few stray dots around
the bottom of China's eastern coast. The small gray blobs were not
terribly accurate from a cartographer's standpoint, but apparently
they were good enough. Snow was satisfied and the illustration ran
without incident.

Some of Snow's changes arose from the inherent absurdity of having
English-language content reviewed by a non-native speaker. We gave an
article the subtitle "Mo Money, Mo Problems," and Snow asked if we'd
meant "No Money, No Problems." A December issue included the subtitle
"'Tis the Season," which Snow corrected to "It's the Reason."

Once, Snow deleted the word "monster" from a piece that said the Hong
Kong stock market had been "boosted by a trend of monster IPOs" from
mainland Chinese companies. "I bet the government is trying to
downplay these huge IPOs because speculation on the stock market is
getting out of control," said our then executive editor, Gwynn
Guilford. Later that afternoon, I walked by Guilford's office and
heard her saying into the phone, "No, it's not monster, like, grrrrr,"
while she curled her fingers into a claw and pantomimed an angry bear.
Then she hung up and said, "We can leave in ‘monster.'"

Many changes were enigmatic. We were told not to use "Manifest
Destiny" in a subtitle because, as Snow wrote in her somewhat offbeat
English, "this is an anti-government sensitive words group." This
provoked a flurry of excited calls from our end, exhorting Snow to
tell us more about this "words group" -- ideally in the form of a
full, emailed list. We had heard that some publications received a
weekly fax outlining what topics were taboo, and were dying to see
something similar. But she never explained further.

In our December 2007 issue, we had a paragraph saying that the Chinese
oil and gas giant PetroChina had been pushing forward aggressively in
its overseas acquisitions. Earlier that year it had bought a 67
percent stake in PetroKazakhstan, and it had plans to buy more oil and
gas assets in Africa, Northern Europe, and Southeast Asia. Snow wrote,
"Better to delete, it is an oral request that the energy sector's
overseas acquisition is not encouraged to report." In other words, we
wouldn't find any overt directives in writing anywhere, but those in
the know understood that this subject was touchy.

All of this pointed to the petty human dynamics that underscored the
censorship. The things Snow flagged were rarely taboo because of any
overt directive from above. More often, it seemed to me that she
thought it might offend another government ministry, which would bring
retaliation upon her own ministry. Or, if Snow personally didn't find
a statement sensitive, she worried that her boss might, or her boss
thought that his boss might. Everyone was guessing where the line
fell, taking two steps back from it to be extra safe, and
self-censoring accordingly.

Since we never knew when Snow was guessing about what might be
off-limits, and when her comments stemmed from real political
directives from above, every correction spawned wild conspiracy
theories around the water cooler. One month, we ran a short news brief
with figures on the number of mainland Chinese tourists that had
visited the United States in 2007, and Snow flagged the number for
deletion. We wondered what dirt we had unwittingly stumbled upon.
Which government bureau oversaw tourism figures? What were they
hiding? Finally, I called Snow, and learned that the numbers we had
cited were for the number of Chinese tourists worldwide, not just in
the United States.

So much for the would-be plot. Chagrined, I had to announce to my
colleagues that we'd made a mistake.

We knew we were lucky to have the censor that we did, if we had to
have one at all. Snow was patient with our push-backs, and, though she
didn't have to, often went to great lengths to explain the "why" of
her changes. When we wanted to run a piece that was somewhat critical
of China's healthcare system, Snow spent days poring through it,
typing up lengthy explanations for how we could rearrange the piece to
pass muster. The changes were surprisingly minor. She reworded the
subtitle "China's ailing healthcare system -- and the government's
plan to fix it" to "The Chinese government's plan to fix the ailing
healthcare system." She replaced pull quotes (excerpts from the
stories displayed in larger text to the side of the article), pointing
to flaws in the system, like "High medical expenditure is the main
cause of poverty in China in 30 percent of cases," with more positive
ones that highlighted ways China was working to reform the system -
"Reform of the healthcare system has been at the top of the political
agenda for some time." But Snow allowed the more critical statements
to remain within the body of the article itself.

She explained that we had to be careful not to offend anyone at the
Ministry of Health, but also that nobody at any ministry was likely to
ever read the piece. We just had to make sure there was nothing
potentially offensive in large print (i.e. the headlines and pull
quotes) or in the opening paragraphs that someone important might skim
in passing. We made her changes, and ran the piece.

Snow even helped us with our research. When we wanted to write about
something she felt was sensitive but doable -- for example, a piece
suggesting that tourism figures during the Olympics would be lower
than expected due to tightened visa restrictions -- she provided
figures from official state media. "This way," she wrote, it
"guarantees we won't make a mistake -- even if we're wrong, it's
following their error, and we won't be directly responsible."

Her reactions also provided a reliable marker of the political
touchiness of an issue. One article about skyrocketing food prices
around the world quoted economists saying that the rising quality of
life in China, and the attendant increase in meat consumption, might
play a role, because more arable land was being used to grow feed for
animals. Snow called me to relate her changes, and grew so angry over
that particular line suggesting a link between Chinese meat-eaters and
worldwide food prices that she began to shriek, "Are they all
vegetarian in the West? No! So many fat people in America, and they
dare to say this is China's responsibility?"

Sometimes, just when we felt this was all a joke and had convinced
ourselves that the censor changes were no big deal, something truly
dispiriting would happen. A column titled "Why Joint Ventures Fail in
China" got axed. The subtitle in a piece that mentioned a foreign
company's failed attempt to buy a stake in a Chinese steelmaker --
"Interest from abroad stymied" -- was changed to "Interest from abroad
still high." Occasionally, Snow would send something back with none of
her colorful commentary or explanations, and simply write: "Wrong
opinion."

After I became managing editor, though, and without particularly
meaning to, I somehow won Snow's heart. I asked her for the contact
info of someone I had assumed was a freelancer; Snow explained he was
actually a high-ranking official at the Ministry of Commerce, who'd
been contributing as a favor to her. My predecessor, Guilford, I
learned, had once double-bylined one of the official's articles with
one of our own reporters, and without thinking about it had listed
that reporter's name first. Snow said her boss and her colleagues
reprimanded her, and she had to write a self-criticism as punishment.
We'd merely been listing the writers' names in alphabetical order, but
I wrote back apologizing for the misunderstanding.

Until then we'd almost always communicated in English, because Snow's
English was much better than my Chinese; but now she responded in
Chinese saying she knew I hadn't been involved with that incident. She
followed this up with a phone call, congratulating me on my new role.
Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial hush and she added, "To tell the
truth, I do not think [your predecessor] is a very good editor. I
think you are much better, because you are Chinese. You can understand
China, and why we must do things the way we do, because of your
Chinese blood."

I was not sure how to take this. The implication to me seemed to be
that, because I was of Chinese extraction, I would accept censorship
more readily than my (white) predecessor had. Whatever her meaning,
from that point onwards, I found myself in the odd position of having
acquired an ally who was a censor for the Chinese government.

This was not the relationship I wanted to have with Snow. I believed
in free speech. I‘d spent a summer interning at the ACLU. I was
beginning to question the morality of my paycheck, of playing any
part, no matter how incidental, in a system of which I disapproved.
Thinking of her as my adversary allowed me to feel I was fighting the
system. But my adversary wanted to be friends.

She started to call more, and email less, about changes, then wanted
to chat on the phone. She loved spicy food, Snow told me. Her husband
was often away on business trips. I never figured out what he did, but
it often seemed to involve playing golf, or wining and dining Japanese
clients. She missed her old neighborhood up near where the "Bird's
Nest" Olympic stadium now stood, but had moved to the west side to be
closer to her son's school.

Sometimes, when the issue was running late, I took a cab to deliver
the layouts to Snow myself. I'd meet her outside her son's swimming
lessons or his weekend "Olympic math" tutoring, and she would prattle:
Her son was taking $22-an-hour drum lessons. She'd gotten a $30
parking ticket the last time she drove, so now they took taxis, which
were $5 each way. He always wanted McDonald's afterwards, so that was
another five bucks. She was tempted to halt the lessons, but she had
heard that music improved academic performance.

"The world is getting more and more competitive," she would sigh. "It
takes so much work just to keep up, to make sure your child will be
able to keep up."

In addition to the uptick in phone calls, her emails, too, grew more
expansive and personal. She had told me once that we couldn't put a
Chinese flag on the cover (I still don't understand why), and so I
wrote her to ask if we could run a cover image that suggested a flag
more abstractly, with yellow stars against a wash of red. She wrote
back in Chinese:

Dear Little One,

Stars are definitely not okay either, please please do not take the risk.

I once published, in a newspaper, a picture of a book put out by the
German embassy, introducing China and Germany's investment
cooperation. The book's cover had a big stream on it, half of it the
colors of the German flag, half of it red with yellow stars. I decided
since it wasn't a flag it was okay, and sent it to print. Our
newspaper office was slapped with a fine of 180,000 yuan [today,
around $28,000] and I had to write a self-criticism and take a big
salary cut.

Quite a lesson, yes? Sigh -- we must remember it well.

Another time, in the fall of 2008, my phone rang and I picked up to
find Snow in an excitable mood.

"Hi Snow," I said, trying to sound distant and professional.

"Are you busy?" she asked.

"Well, actually, I am a little..."

"Oh good. I was thinking: December will be the 30th anniversary of
‘Reform and Opening.' It will be a big deal and there will be many
celebrations in the media. Are you planning any articles about this
topic? Because, I think, maybe you can interview people about their
experiences from 30 years ago. Like me, for example -- when I was
young, we did not have meat to eat. And we lived in a building with
many other families, and we had only had one phone for the whole
building. If it rang, someone would answer it and shout your name. In
those days, it was always for me. The man who answered the phone would
yell, ‘Snow, the phone is for you again!'" She laughed delightedly.

On a few occasions, Snow asked me to lunch, and I always said no.
Keeping my distance became easier as the year progressed and my
disillusionment increased. Media restrictions began to tighten
severely in the wake of pro-Tibet protests that were following the
Olympic torch around the globe. China had naïvely been caught off
guard by the expressions of anti-Chinese-government sentiment, and had
reacted strongly. Visa regulations tightened, and many younger expats
who did not meet the new work experience requirements had to leave the
country. The June issue of the English-language version of Time Out
Beijing was, due to a licensing technicality (it did not have its own
separate publishing license but was piggybacked onto the license of
their Chinese-language edition), abruptly pulled from the presses,
though their license structure had never been an issue before. And the
changes at our magazine, which had always seemed generally
comprehensible and rooted in logic even when I disagreed with them,
veered into the realm of absurdity.

I was told that we could not title a coal piece "Power Failure"
because the word "failure" in bold print so close to the Olympics
would make people think of the Olympics being a failure. The title
"The Agony and the Ecstasy" for a soccer piece was axed because agony
was a negative word and we couldn't have negative words be associated
with sports. We couldn't use the cover image I had picked out for a
feature on the rise of chain restaurants, because it was of an empty
bowl, and, Snow told me, it would make people think of being hungry
and remind them of the Great Famine (a period from 1958 to 1961 when
tens of millions of Chinese starved to death, discussion of which is
still suppressed). Even our Chinese designers began to roll their eyes
when I related this change to them, and set them to work looking for
images of bowls overflowing with meat.

Finally, in July 2008, one month before the Olympics, I gave my notice
and, knowing I might never see her again, accepted one of Snow's
invitations. She picked me up from my apartment, and drove us across
town to her favorite restaurant, Haidilao, a Sichuan hotpot chain. She
complained about Beijing's terrible traffic, which I had somehow
thought a censor wouldn't do, because it constituted criticism of the
government.

A car cut her off, and she shook her head angrily, and exclaimed,
"Look at this! They won't let me pass even though they can see I was
in front. See, this is how Chinese people are." She asked me if this
would happen in the United States. I said yes. "Really?" she replied.
"I imagine in the United States everyone obeys the traffic rules.
People are not so backwards there. That's what I hear."

Over lunch, she asked me about my plans. How would I support myself? I
said I wanted to try freelance writing. If it didn't work out, I'd
start looking for a new full-time job. I might move back to the United
States, or maybe to a new country.

"Ah, you young people," she said. "So much freedom to do what you
want. To tell you the truth, I would love to change my job too. But I
can't -- I have a family, I've been there too long, it's not the same
for us old people."

She leaned forward, and looked intently into my eyes. "Have you ever
considered opening your own research firm for foreign companies that
want to invest in China? You would be very good at this, because you
are Chinese, too. Even though you are born in America, you understand
our Chinese thinking. You can be a big important consultant. And then
you can hire me so I don't have to work at my job anymore. I'm serious
-- think of me if you ever do this someday. You should. And then you
can hire me."

She was speaking lightly, and laughing, but she also seemed to mean
it, and I suddenly wondered if this was the purpose of our lunch. I
found this idea utterly depressing. I was a lost, aimless kid,
drifting around China, and yet this older woman could look at me and
see the possibility, however tenuous, of a lifeline.

I understood then the mundane nature of all that kept her in place. A
job she didn't like, but worked hard to keep. A system that would
never reward her for good work, only punish her for mistakes. And in
exchange: Tutors. Traffic. Expensive drumming lessons. They were the
same things that kept anyone, anywhere, in place -- and it was the
very ordinariness of these things that made them intractable.

After lunch, Snow asked me if I'd seen the Olympic stadium yet, and I
said I hadn't, so she turned north to drive by it. A road was blocked
off, and a traffic cop in a neon yellow vest waved us towards an
alternate route. Snow remarked that with the Olympics imminent, the
streets of Beijing resembled the United States, with cops everywhere.
"In U.S. movies," she said, "whenever a crime happens, the cops always
show up immediately. Is that true? Are they really so fast?" I said
that I wasn't sure whether American cops arrived at crime scenes more
quickly than Chinese cops, but that they definitely weren't as fast as
they seemed in movies.

When the Bird's Nest stadium loomed into view, I murmured "Wow." I had
been editing blurbs about the thing for so long, it had never occurred
to me that I would be impressed by it in person, but I was.

Snow asked if she could drop me off at the nearest subway stop. I said
it was no problem, and as we turned I asked how many siblings her
husband had. She had been complaining towards the end of lunch that
she and her husband had to support them.

"Twelve, but half of them died. So there are six of them, total."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.

"Oh don't be. It was like that for everyone back then. Because you
know, Mao had probably gone crazy, and encouraged everyone to be a
‘hero mother' by having five kids. They say that's what caused the
famine. But Mao was crazy and..."

She broke off and laughed.

"You see," she said, "we can say this here, just you and me; we just
can't say it in print." Then, suddenly, switching to English, she
exclaimed, "That's China!"

We had reached the subway stop. I got out, and said goodbye, and then
she went to get her son.





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