China’s propaganda mouthpiece is in some ways just your typical, old-school news outlet, stumbling its way through the brave new world of social media. The difference from other newspapers is that from the perspective of the People’s Daily, losing control over the online conversation could have dire consequences.
In a lengthy essay published Monday, Yang Zhenwu, chief editor of the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, warned that Beijing could make a “historic mistake” if it fails to control new media and harness it for propaganda.
“To lose speech is to lose power,” he wrote — apparently without irony — about the challenge facing state media.
It isn’t exactly a new message: China has been “perfecting” its “Internet controls” for years. But it comes amid renewed crackdowns on social media accounts after a high profile loyalty tour by Chinese President Xi Jinping to the three central Communist Party-controlled media outlets in February.
Mr. Xi paid particular attention to the news outlets’ online operations and called on official news media to “reflect the Party’s will and views.” Chinese social media services are generally more freewheeling than traditional media, but have been held to gradually stricter censorship.
Mr. Yang’s essay emphasized that social media is not only not exempt from this loyalty campaign, it must lead it. That point might be of interest Mark Zuckerberg, who was in Beijing over the weekend as part of his long-running charm offensive to convince China’s censors to allow Facebook back in the country. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Some people believe the party’s publications, TV channels and radio stations should direct public opinion, while there is a ‘hole in one side of the net” for local publications or new media,” Mr. Yang wrote. “This kind of belief is wrong and harmful.”
He acknowledged that China’s stodgy state media does not always excel at generating viral online content, something he said needed to change with the help of partnerships between traditional and new media outlets.
“Only when new mainstream media develop with continually growing user numbers, market share and influence, can we effectively seize the frontline of online public opinion,” he wrote.
This would appear to be just grandstanding, except that China’s central media outlets have noticeably worked to up their cool factor in recent months. They have produced a series of unorthodox, pro-China online videos that range from a rap about the catchily named Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reform to a video about foreigners who think the country’s president “Papa Xi” is adorable. The latter has generated more than 144,000 views on YouTube, which is blocked in China – not shabby for a newspaper that traditionally even Chinese people find dry.
Qiao Mu, a media scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the essay signaled that censorship of social media posts and detentions of online critics were likely to continue. In addition, authorities could start to more aggressively target critics inside the party like state media journalists and public intellectuals such as Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate developer whose social-media accounts were closed last month after he criticized censorship.
“They might now put the knife to these people and make an example out of them,” Mr. Qiao said.
In his war-imagery-laced essay, Mr. Yang praised the “formidable ideological weapons” that Mr. Xi had given state media.
“The public opinion job of the news is to carry out construction in people’s heads, to influence them through the transmission of information,” he wrote. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/21/peoples-daily-chief-warns-of-historic-mistake-if-china-loses-grip-on-new-media/
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