I Was a "Polisher"
in a Chinese News Factory

The twenty-five-story skyscraper that houses the main office of China's Xinhua News Agency in downtown Beijing was, at the time of its completion in 1990, the city's tallest. Since then, glitzier skyscrapers have surpassed it in height, but none of the newcomers comes close to matching

the power to mold public opinion that is generated in this building whose shape is supposed to resemble a calligrapher's pen.

According to a glossy brochure put out by Xinhua earlier this year, the agency's domestic service releases "news items running into more than 800,000 words to national, provincial, municipal, prefectural, and county newspapers, as well as radio and TV stations. . . ." Meanwhile, its overseas service "releases uninterruptedly round the clock news items totaling half a million words in six languages."

A huge organization, it edits and publishes forty periodicals, including Fortnightly Chat, whose circulation of 7 million tops that of all other Chinese publications, and Reference News, whose circulation of 4 million makes it China's leading daily. (It is devoted, interestingly, to translations of articles about China that have appeared in foreign publications.) Virtually all foreign news made available to Chinese publications and broadcasters is first processed by Xinhua translators and editors.

The list of Xinhua departments and ventures -- including a p.r. firm, restaurants, farms, and a school of journalism -- is virtually endless.

The agency also enjoys ministerial and, surprisingly, diplomatic status. Thus, in Hong Kong, the Xinhua bureau serves as a de facto consulate. And thus, on September 30, the eve of China's National Day, it was Zheng Junsheng, vice-director of Xinhua's Hong Kong bureau, who hosted the lavish reception attended by nearly 4,000 people, including Governor Chris Patten.

As a so-called foreign expert who spent one year working in a single segment -- the English Section of the International News Department -- of this multifaceted organization, I can claim no knowledge of the whole and only a working visitor's knowledge of that one part. Throughout the year, I talked to other foreign experts about their experiences, to Xinhua employees at many levels, and to a handful of Chinese academics and non-Xinhua journalists. I also sampled the critical assessments foreign experts are routinely requested to hand in at the end of their year's stay which are, as I discovered, routinely ignored -- as I expect most Western news organizations would ignore critical assessments submitted by visiting journalists from another culture, if they thought to invite such comments in the first place.

One reason Xinhua's top brass pay so little attention to what carping foreigners have to say about their operation may be that they are satisfied with things as they are -- with reporters, that is, whose main or only claim to being journalists is that they can read a foreign-language newspaper and file something based on an article or two that appears in it, and with a newsroom in which it is difficult to detect the slightest interest in news.

Fifteen years ago, cjr published an article titled "By Your Pupils You'll Be Taught," by James Aronson, a former editor of the socialist National Guardian newsweekly and a professor of communications at Hunter College of the City University of New York. In the piece, Aronson recounted his experiences as the first American to be invited to teach news writing in China since the Communists pushed the Nationalists off the mainland. The invitation had been extended by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. After pointing out that his hosts "made it clear that they did not want to change the purpose of Chinese journalism, only its content and style," Aronson wrote:

They felt that Xinhua, for example, had a long way to go to catch up with the foreign news agencies. Stories were either too long and dull or too short and uninformative. . . . Stories based on interviews with officials were largely verbatim reports, without response, of what the officials said. Feature stories tended to be pure puffery. . . . Readers were becoming impatient with this kind of journalism.

Aronson and others who followed him to China to teach journalism or work at Xinhua as foreign experts made a difference, and everyone I spoke to, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, agreed on one thing: that journalism in China was starting to come of age, that young subeditors and desk editors alike tried to keep on top of the news, that Xinhua was becoming competitive with other Asian news agencies until the summer of 1989 -- the summer of the Tiananmen massacre. The suppression of the pro-democracy movement marked the end of the heyday of journalism at Xinhua.

"During the 1980s, I found it a credible source of non-Western-angle reporting. The caliber was quite high, especially in the field of science and technology," recalls Kunda Dixit, a former KathmanduÐbased reporter and editor who since 1986 has been based in various Asian capitals as regional director for the alternative news agency Inter Press Service (see "What's All the Fuss About Inter Press?," cjr, January/February 1983). After Tiananmen, Dixit adds, "the service has not been very professional. It lost initiative."

Meanwhile, Xinhua continued to invite foreign experts to polish the young translators' often-stilted renditions of the often-mystifying Chinese originals sent in from abroad -- to turn Chinglish into English. And journalists young and old continued to come, most of them drawn by a desire to live and work in China, to get to know something about a country that is home to one-fifth of the world's population.

Twenty or so foreign experts are seated around a big table in a Xinhua conference room. It is January, a couple of weeks before the Chinese New Year, when people take vacations and news dries up in Xinhua bureaus around the globe. An affable senior official recites the impressive statistics cited in the glossy Xinhua brochure. He then invites the foreign experts to offer comments, criticisms.

A Cuban observes that Xinhua news released on the Spanish wire is one day old when the Xinhua correspondent reads it in a Spanish-language paper, two days old when the correspondent's file reaches Beijing, and often three days old by the time it has been translated from the Chinese into English and, after being polished, into Spanish. Who wants three-day-old news? he wonders.

"An interesting point," the affable official says.

A Russian observes that short articles about pig production in a given province, offered without context or analysis, seem unlikely to attract subscribers and/or readers.

"An interesting point," the affable official says.

I mention that, in conversations with Xinhua colleagues, I proposed that editors and foreign experts might select and circulate to bureau chiefs around the world four or five pieces that qualify as good journalism together with four or five that fall far short of the mark and that my colleagues had said this was impossible: the writers of substandard pieces would lose face. My question then: How can a news agency that can't set standards hope to improve the quality of its reporting?

This, too, the affable man finds interesting.

A British foreign expert suggests that perhaps the young subeditors, whose job it is to translate the stories coming in from Xinhua bureaus abroad, would learn something were they to look over the foreign expert's shoulder as he or she edits their translation on the computer screen.

"An interesting idea," the inflexibly affable official says.

Soon thereafter the ceremony of listening ends and we all go upstairs for a banquet during which I ingest spoonfuls of fish eyes before learning what was in the soup. Months pass. There is no follow-up on any of the comments or suggestions.

The lack of interest in news, in breaking news, in what was actually happening, was a never-ending source of wonderment. One Latin American foreign expert recalled "polishing," as the foreigners' editing process is called internally, a Xinhua piece about NATO "considering" responding to Serbian attacks on Sarajevo while, on the sometimes functioning TV set across the room, CNN was showing film footage of NATO planes attacking Serbian gun emplacements. The story he was burnishing was three days old.

CNN was forever presenting information that simply could not be worked into the Xinhua account. The CNN report was fresh; the Xinhua story was aging fast or dead on arrival. The one displayed the Western penchant for at least pretending that there are two sides to a story; the other, often based on a government-controlled news agency representing one side of a given conflict, could not include contradictory information without being completely rewritten -- causing an impermissible loss of face or faces.

A notable instance of one-sided reporting was Xinhua's coverage of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Until very recently, Xinhua had one bureau in the region, in Belgrade; its reporters, or newspaper readers, relied almost entirely on the Serbian news agency Tanjug.

Xinhua editors in the International Department -- many of whom are, or would like to be allowed to be, genuine journalists -- pressed their superiors to rectify the situation, to provide at least an appearance of balance. Finally, last fall, an editor-reporter was dispatched to Sarajevo for a period of two weeks. And finally, late in the summer of 1995, four years into the war, Xinhua set up a small bureau, not in Sarajevo, no, because Xinhua provides no life insurance for its foreign correspondents, but in safer Zagreb.

Similarly, the war in Chechnya was covered exclusively from Moscow and, at least in the first weeks of the war, the reporting (and the Moscow bureau actually did some enterprise reporting) displayed a strong pro-government bias.

One rationale for such one-sided reporting (apart from the high cost of life insurance) was: Xinhua simply can't afford to send people all over the place the way Western news agencies do, or used to do. But this is beside the point. Reporters who must depend on secondary sources, as is generally the case with Xinhua reporters, can -- if they possess a modicum of initiative -- plug into any number of sources, just as their Beijing-based editors can call up stories from the world's major wire services.

But to point out such holes and lopsidedness in coverage is, as it took me a while to learn, to display a profound ignorance of Xinhua's priorities. Numbers are what the top brass want. It's the number of stories the agency can crank out day after day, year after year that matters. Each successive president of the Xinhua News Agency seeks to make his mark by increasing the grand annual total of words, words, words.

To make sure that this year's total of stories or lines or words will surpass the previous year's, correspondents will sometimes write one fairly long story, then chop it into pieces. They will file a flurry of two- or three-graph stories about, say, the lightest baby ever born, not in Sweden, not in Stockholm, but in Stockholm's Eastern City Hospital, and then, having met their weekly or monthly quota, take it easy.

Sometimes the quota will have been met midway through the month. Then the foreign expert in Beijing responsible for polishing stories filed from a given bureau may, if new to the job, worriedly inquire if perhaps there's been some sort of communications breakdown. There has been no breakdown. The Xinhua folks out there in foreign lands, where they live and work in self-sufficient compounds from which they rarely emerge, have just stopped reading the local papers. Enough is enough.

Sometimes, too, a foreign expert, especially if new to the job, will begin to polish a story and then cry out, "Jeezus Christ! This is too much!" and suggest that a grossly substandard story be killed. And sometimes in fact the outcry does result in euthanasia. Yet such mercy killings are necessarily rare: the Chinese editor may share the Westerner's low regard for the piece, but he -- all the editors in the English Section who are authorized to release stories are male -- knows what the people upstairs want above all else. And they, the editors, must remain, while the volatile foreign experts are free to come and go.

Yet, interestingly, despite their awareness that their efforts will probably be filed away and forgotten, every year a group of these editors will voluntarily spend a good deal of time assembling and evaluating a sample week's output of stories in the hope, presumably, that such a report will alert their leaders to a problem obvious to everyone down there in the third-floor newsroom.

Similarly, year after year foreign experts take the time to evaluate Xinhua's output. In August of 1989, for example, Fred Shapiro, a long-time New Yorker staff writer who had worked as a polisher for nearly five years and was given leave to write a piece for The New Yorker on the Tiananmen massacre, noted in his evaluation: "Almost everything we publish, with the exception of an occasional roundup or news analysis, is copied from newspapers. . . . News isn't news if the reader . . . has already read about it elsewhere. . . ."

Five years later, Lew Baxter, a veteran British journalist who has worked with the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times as both reporter and feature writer and who was a professor of journalism, made many of the same points as Shapiro and went on to observe that there is "no regular contact with bureaus worldwide even if a story sent in is considered incomplete/inadequate or just plain nonsense. In fact, I have never known it happen in twelve months that a correspondent has been sought out for clarification."

But while the drumbeat of criticism goes on and on, the powers that be at Xinhua seem not to hear it -- perhaps because they are marching to the much louder beat of a different drummer.

"To be a journalist, you must first be a politician."

Such was the message Xinhua's president, Guo Chaoren, sought to drive home to an upper-floor gathering of Xinhua managers and editors in August 1995. The translation from the Chinese, transmitted to me by a colleague who was by no means a dissident, may have needed polishing, but others who had heard the man said it was consistent with what Guo had said before.

 The statement might well stand as a warning to Western critics to hold their fire for fear of wasting their ammunition. As long as the stuff that goes out of the Xinhua newsroom contains no political mistakes, as long as Xinhua continues to serve as an unfiltered conduit for the endlessly repetitious speeches of premiers and vice-premiers and deputies and unelected parliamentarians who tour Europe every summer to discuss parliamentary issues with their "counterparts," as long as bits of actual news or bits of news analog provide a journalistic cover for official pronouncements, official news analyses, and podium-thumping editorials, who cares upstairs about anything else?

Of course, from a journalistic point of view the August 28 directive that floated down from on high to all editors was absurd: No mention was to be made of Hillary Rodham Clinton's decision to attend the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and the NGO Forum in Huairou. Every other news agency in the world regarded her decision to come as newsworthy. Xinhua knew better. It knew that Chinese readers alerted to her coming so soon after the release of Harry Wu might think a deal had been struck. Thus, the politicians of Xinhua spiked the First Lady when she was news -- and then went to work on her after she had uttered words that grated on the leadership's ears.

The editors I worked with -- in their forties, fifties, and sixties, some of whom had suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution -- were helpful and thoughtful and intelligent. They were journalists to the degree they were allowed to be. They were parents whose children were now attending or about to attend college. They had to moonlight to make ends meet. They were you or me, but Chinese, meaning that they had endured and continued to put up with hardships Westerners would find intolerable.

Meanwhile, several floors above these likable people were the powers that be, whose heavy-handed direction had, in the eyes of at least one Westerner, made the Xinhua skyscraper resemble, not a calligrapher's pen, but a bulky-bottomed hypodermic. Apart from delivering a general anesthetic to the world at large, it appears to have a potent effect on its occupants: prolonged exposure to the hermetic world of Xinhua inhibits, then deadens, all interest in news and information. It ought to bear a label.

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