日知录（116-5）The People's Daily as ritual rather than news

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 7:25 AM by will

Pop by the blog of Peter Ford, the Christian Science Monitor's man in Beijing and read his post on the People's Daily's approach to covering the National People's Congress, which has apparently remained the same since time immemorial. Or at least since the advent of color printing. Ford points to a Chinese blog post that reproduces People's Daily front pages for several years of NPC wind-ups. They are, shall we say, of a type. I won't reproduce the images here, because the original poster deserves the traffic [per Joel's comment below, the original post is actually here]. But go have a look. You won't regret it.

On this syndrome, Ford writes:

In one sense, perhaps, the cookie-cutter front pages are an accurate reflection of the “news” they are covering: the “National People’s Congress” is a fake-democratic rubber stamp parliament.

How little real news it generates is clear from the banner headlines in red, running down each page: they are identical, for six years in a row, except that the number of the parliamentary session changes with time, as do the names of the Politburo Standing Committee members on the podium.

All the headlines say “Wu Bangguo hosts (he’s the individual in the left hand photo), Wen Jiabao gives the government work report (he’s the one in the right hand photo, behind identical banks of pink lilies, year after year.)

Well, by all accounts there is actual debate at the NPC, but much of it is of the kind that never sees the light of day. And demonstrating monolithic consensus is clearly part of the plan. In fact, the National People's Congress is probably better thought of as political ritual than political process. Most of the political process happens elsewhere. The NPC is the ritual by which the outcome of that largely hidden process is publicized and enshrined.


I use the word "ritual" on purpose. Here are some definitions:

An established or prescribed procedure for a religious or other rite
Observance of set forms in public worship
Prescribed, established, or ceremonial acts or features collectively, as in religious services
Any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner

Stripped of the spiritual implications, I think any of these captures the NPC pretty well.

The People's Daily is printed on broadsheet newsprint and can be bought at news-stands, but that's about where its resemblance to actual newspapers ends. The People's Daily certainly doesn't exist to print news as most people desire it over their coffee in the morning. In nearly five years of PR in China, I think I've worked with the People's Daily once. And I'm not sure why we did it that one time. I think a client insisted.

It's helpful to think of the People's Daily not as a newspaper in the modern sense of the word, but rather as part of the ritual, and thus subject to a relatively unyielding set of conventions. It publicizes policy and the government's point of view in adherence to strictly observed rules of protocol and status. Hence the rigidly formulaic approach to covering a rigidly formulaic event. This comes not only in the layout and repetitiveness, but also in the stilted, political language that is used.


Explanation is not justification. The People's Daily is a throwback to an earlier age when it was a cog in a propaganda apparatus that dominated Chinese mass media. In today's relatively lively and diverse media environment, it probably survives to some degree on bureaucratic momentum. Even the people at People's Daily Press (the pleasant campus of which Imagethief runs past several times a week) probably know this. The group includes many other publications, including the hell-raising nationalist tabloid Global Times and the optimistically named Satire and Humor among others.


Personally, I kind of like the People's Daily. I am, after all, a student of propaganda. And in a rapidly modernizing media environment, it's one of the purest and least apologetic expressions of propaganda left. There is a pleasing throwback quality about the red-letter days (remember the space walk?) and rigid protocol. I might not subscribe (and I'd have trouble reading it if I did), but if I was going to hang a newspaper commemorating a major Chinese event on my wall, it would be high on the list.


Note: I changed the title of this post slightly. Originally it was "The People's Daily boldly departs from formula". But I decided I'd rather have the actual point in the title.




source:http://news.imagethief.com/blogs/china/archive/2009/03/18/people-s-daily-as-ritual-rather-than-news.aspx