Journalism in China: Party workshops, declining print and the clickbait challenge

There’s a cat at the Central Party School in Beijing, a slightly bedraggled white one that lurks in the shrubbery nearby before wandering in front of us as we walk to one of the school’s elegant buildings. The school occupies a sprawling campus with leafy avenues, lush lawns and its own sports stadium that your average state politician here would kill for. Having a resident cat is hardly surprising, given Deng Xiaoping’s famous line that it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

The Central Party School is where party cadres come to capacity-build, deep dive and workshop ideas on challenges, undertake theoretical and practical courses, train trainers and raise consciousness, all part of a network of dozens of schools across China. The courses as described to us combine CCP ideology with bureaucratese — unsurprising given it is also the Chinese government management school, with which it was merged in 2018.

Courses can be as short as three-day workshops, or up to four or five months, one of our hosts explains as we wander through the grounds in glorious — especially by Beijing standards — autumn sunshine. The curriculum naturally includes President Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese characteristics. Xi used to be president of the school and, we’re told with visible delight, still returns for the occasional lecture. But as our hosts later explain in a wood-lined meeting room, students still read the classics — Marx, Lenin and Mao — in between courses on economic regulation, governance, anti-corruption, ecology, contemporary events and even film appreciation.

We’re considered very lucky to have the opportunity to visit the school. Senior staff of the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA), a kind of industry peak body that is hosting us, have all studied there; more junior staff marvel at the opportunity we’ve been given to get an insight into the top-flight party school.

The ACJA arranges for a US-educated radio host to join us for dinner that night, and she’s dead jealous. “I want to study there!” she gushes enviously. After a stint on Wall Street, she moved back to China, forged a media career and now raises her daughter in Beijing and runs a book club podcast. She’s also been “upgraded” ideologically, she says, and is an enthusiastic fan of the CCP’s achievements and of Xi.

Over hot pot, it becomes clear why she was asked to dine with us. She doesn’t merely deliver party talking points, she argues its position eloquently and passionately as part of a coherent worldview. China is a family, she explains, and Taiwan and Hong Kong are children who need to come home in order to be “protected”.

More senior figures from the ACJA — all proud alumni — join us next morning when we visit. Evidently on the previous days we failed to live up to the Chinese image of Australian journalists: closed-minded, aggressive, unwilling to listen. That we readily criticise our own government while discussing politics and Australia-China relations probably doesn’t hurt. When Liu Siyang, the urbane head of the ACJA, invokes the ASIO raids on Xinhua journalists in Australia for some of the tensions over Australian journalists being allowed back into China, one of us wisely replies that intelligence agencies have raided Australian journalists too and we’re no happier about it.

The walls are lined with photos of former ACJA leaders, from gruff-looking revolutionary era types to modern management, and gifts and plaques from journalist bodies around the world, while across from us is an elaborate bookcase, somewhere between IKEA and Chinese minimalist. Up near the top, as if gazing down on us, is a shelf full of three weighty, English-language tomes by Xi, just out of reach, as if, strain as we might, we’ll never quite be able to grasp the wisdom of the leader and his near-telepathic connection with the Chinese people that we’re assured he possesses.

While the polite thrust-and-parry continues back and forth across the small tables between us, and we learn a single typo will get you disqualified from the Chinese version of the Walkleys, I try an open-ended question. What are the big challenges facing journalism in China? In Australia that would draw the usual replies about government secrecy and defamation law. Liu embarks on an extended discussion of the threat the internet poses to traditional media in China, how there are 10 million “self-media” journalists who aren’t regulated or required to adhere to accuracy standards, and how his association is trying to work out ways that China’s broadcasters and newspapers can appeal both to older, traditional audiences and younger online users they struggle to attract. Hmmm, sounds familiar, we reply.

Later in Shanghai, we meet Shen Yueming, the softly spoken director of political and legal news at Xinmin Evening News, which is home-delivered at 3-4pm each day and is one of just three evening newspapers left in China.

Shen, with the resigned air of an old media hand struggling to work out how to get these internet kids off his lawn, says print readership for the paper is in significant decline. They’re working hard to lift online revenue, he says — they tried subscriptions, but readers, even older readers, simply wouldn’t pay for news, so the publication relies heavily on advertising.

The strategy is to build up and keep big follower counts on key social platforms like WeChat and Weibo that will attract advertisers, rather than simply generate viral content which is harder to monetise. And anyway, Shen reflects, news videos need to keep getting shorter and shorter to connect with today’s audiences — shorter than he’s evidently comfortable with.

They’ll keep going with print for now — the paper’s 100th anniversary is coming up — but “everything has an end”, he says tellingly.

Perhaps the Central Party School needs a workshop on online engagement for news content. In China, like here, the old media cat isn’t catching the new media mouse, no matter what colour it is.

Bernard Keane travelled to Beijing, Chongqing and Shanghai as a guest of the All-China Journalists Association.