“You’ll see Chinese journalists taking on the world,” said The Australian’s Asia-Pacific editor, Rowan Callick, during the “China: Opening Up or Closing Down?” session.
He was joined on stage by the Asian affairs and telecommunications reporter for The Age, Peter Cai, and SBS Radio’s head of the Mandarin language program, May Hu.
Mr Cai said the Western vision of the “Chinese media landscape as a monolithic media entity” does not accurately reflect the diversification and complexity of Chinese media.
Echoing other panel members, Mr Cai acknowledged the rise of “fine investigative journalism” within China’s business media.
He said that “China’s most dangerous woman”, Hu Shuli, a journalist with the media group Caixin, was pioneering investigative journalism in China, exposing corporate wrongdoing and public corruption.
“If you get a call from one of her reporters, you know you’re in trouble,” said Mr Cai.
Ms Hu agreed and said Ms Shuli was not trying to create a new democratic revolution but, rather, wanted to improve China “case by case”. “Like a woodpecker,” she added.
Yet the panel acknowledged that investigative journalism in China continued to run into roadblocks.
Mr Cai said he had spoken to Chinese journalists who had been working on investigations for weeks, only to be told by the Government they could not publish their stories.
The panel agreed that an explosion of social media sites such as Weibo had created unprecedented channels for the Chinese people to express themselves.
Sina, the Chinese media company that runs Weibo, claims the site has 46.2 million daily users and more than 503 million registered accounts – roughly the same amount as Twitter globally.
“The net has become the default community notice board in China,” Mr Callick said.
The panellists noted that while social media gave the Chinese people a new method of communicating ideas, it was also being used by the Communist Party of China (CCP) to monitor its citizens.
“You can’t talk about how social media functions without considering the political culture that frames it,” Mr Callick said.
“Net police” patrol China’s Internet, while the CCP closely restricts and monitors political discussion, he said.
Mr Callick also said a key aim of the CCP was to prevent people “joining the dots”. “The big ‘no no’ is to connect up people who are dissatisfied in different places,” he said.
Painting an example of CCP heavy-handedness, Mr Callick spoke of a micro-blogger who was recently arrested for defaming Chinese Revolutionary hero Lei Feng. His crime? Questioning how Feng could have afforded his iconic leather jacket and shoes on his modest wage of six dollars a month in 1959.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, China has traditionally ranked low on the Reporters without Borders “Press Freedom Index”, which rates 179 counties.
China rose one spot to 173 in the latest index – just ahead of Iran, Syria and North Korea.
“[This is] perhaps not a glowing indictment of China’s media,” said Mr Cai.
The director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, Margaret Simons, chaired the session, concluding proceedings by asking the panellists to envision Chinese media 10 years from now.
Mr Callick said there would not be any dramatic “opening up”, but the Internet was a reality the government would have to learn to accommodate.
On the other hand, Mr Cai said the media situation would depend on political and economic stability. Stability would allow media freedoms to deepen and grow gradually, while instability would lead to the government tightening its controls.