David Feng
In the past month or so, it has really been a whirlwind international trip my end. Coming in from Beijing (after 14 years), both my wife and myself have seen the social media spectrum world in China and Europe. We left China in early August 2014, and have been around, not just in the UK, but also in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Spain and Portugal.
We’ve also seen two very different worlds — a developing country that is aptly styled the People’s Republic of China (imagine the Tube, ten times worse, and you’ll get the gist of the world of Line 10 in the Beijing Subway), and Europe — both in the UK and in what we call “Schengenland”. The social media world is vastly different in the two. In China, Twitter and Facebook is almost never mentioned, yet city subways are chock-full of QR codes; scan these and you get to follow brands on Weibo and WeChat. In London, as well as in major European centres — Zurich, Salzburg, Vienna, Barcelona, et al, icons that have come to “simply mean” Twitter, Facebook, and others, are simply everywhere. My Swiss school is on Twitter; CUC is on Weibo.
Having met with a handful of top-notch academics, as well as “the rest of us”, both before leaving China and upon settling in the UK, I can clearly tell there’s a gap — the dimensions (so to speak) of which might put those in the Tube to shame. Whilst it might be less pronounced in the UK than is the case State-side, it remains quite clear that not everyone’s getting the latest info about China. We’re largely past the era where those of us in the West were fed this untrue truthiness (actually, that’s a bit of an oxymoron) that everyone in China were supposedly was poor, lived in an oppressive society, and were about communism all the time. No, the mass media does itself a disservice to keep airing such excesses. A sign of a healthy media society is one that enables and facilitates a diversity of views to be expressed.
I’ve spent over 12 years in Europe. One of my favourite TV channels is Euronews’s No Comment. What’s fantastic about this show is that there is no commentator. Every member of the audience is able to make sense of the footage the way he or she sees fit. To a pluralistic democratic society, this is what we’d come to expect. Nobody should stop, say, CCTV News from broadcasting (although whether or not it is watched or paid attention to is a different matter).
I speak from personal experience. I confess I am a unique academic: I just left China, a country some prefer to equate with mass censorship, and I am Swiss by passport. Switzerland’s constitution has been at times mutilated by some “loud” politicians who at times have veered dangerously close to demagoguery, yet article 17b remains intact — and that article bans censorship, full stop. Comparatively speaking, this puts it very much on an equal footing as the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Reports on Swiss media criticising potential content censorship are nothing unheard-of. A diversity of views on China is what’s really needed.
To many extents, we have to allow CCTV and its voice to be heard to an increasing audience, just as much as we’d like hear how the BBC and other world media organisations think of China. To me, as someone who’s travelled over a million kilometres in 24 countries and territories, the most in persuasiveness comes not from a carefully-orchestrated propaganda campaign from any side, but much more the permissiveness and plurality of reports about a particular topic aired by the media. It is even more the case when people, interested in a topic (this time China), travel to the country. I have heard of countless cases of Westerners who have experienced a China totally contrary to that “they are told of”. Of course, to them, not being able to directly access Twitter or Facebook in China is an annoyance. But the oohs and wows outweigh the more critical views of China. Most go home with more stories of China’s amazing growth and a China they find to be more modern than horror stories of being interrogated by the police — or even minor grudges, such as having issues with squat toilets (yours truly can truly relate to the latter!).
For those of us using computers (aren’t we all?), we’ve been told (told off?) — regardless if it’s by Apple or Microsoft — that if something doesn’t work well, we apply software updates first. It’s time to do the same to the China of the 21st century — and to how people form their views about the country. Yes, the Communist Party’s slogans are still there, and there’s still that picture of Mao over Tian’anmen Square. But you only need to move not more than two or three miles away from the square to see a completely different China. In the same vein, we need to focus more on the Weibo and WeChat ecosystems rather than just stopping the Chinese social media story at “China censors Twitter and Facebook”.
Here are just a few of the “tastier morsels” I’ll be discussing in subsequent postings. It’s time to discover a very different China…
- Did you know that WeChat’s success is likely more due to the fact that it’s a mashup than it being a “wannabe Facebook for China”? (I’ve personally seen my wife use the service’s more Uber-like features!)
- Did you know that conversations on Weibo are visibly more active than that on Twitter? (The Chinese language is more “compact”; if you were able to merely describe a banana split on Twitter using 140 characters in English, the Chinese language is of such “compactness” that you can easily attempt a mini-essay of the same on Weibo!
- Did you know that the country is literally chock-full of QR codes? Arm yourself with the WeChat app’s Scan QR Code option active, scan it, and follow the advertised service — just like that! (The QR codes appear even on TV screens and train tickets!)
- Did you know that you can now report corrupt officers online? As a result, even in the CCP’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, opinion columns increasingly show readers a China where officials, rather than the population, are increasingly scared of the Internet. It really is increasingly a case of: One wrong move, get caught on the Web, and you’re it!
- Did you know that, even in the absence of “official” or clearly designated opposition Chinese-language media in China, an increasing number of reports, even political ones, are getting critical of Beijing? When two HSR trains crashed in southeastern China three years back, some of the nation’s most “liberal” papers even took to publicly cursing the central authorities, which then (still) owned the nation’s railways. (Of course, the papers with the crass exclamation were quickly yanked, but it showed us a very different China than the one most of us think still might be there — a supposedly obedient media which apparently always “toed to the official line of the central government”).
I myself am happy to share with the China Media Centre, as well as the larger University of Westminster community and the rest of Britain and the world, stories from China and its media world. Stories that dip into academic theories from time to time, but also stories that tell the Chinese media world the way it is. Stories seen in a very unique way, from someone who is Chinese by background, Swiss by passport, and considers himself at home anywhere on the planet, especially here in London. Stories from someone from a typical Eastern Asian family background, who was educated in Europe and Asia… from someone who understands both the English and Chinese languages fluently, who has spent over a decade in both the Western and Eastern worlds, completing the 22 year academic trek from elementary school through to his PhD viva voce, and has taught students from over 30 countries and territories in a variety of languages. Insights from someone who sees himself as a student — a lifelong learner — even after completing his terminal degree in Communications.
The China Media Centre is a unique and fantastic place. I’m hoping to do my bit in making it better — in making sense of Chinese media stories to an interested wider world.
