Reporting for China: Cosmopolitan Attitudes and the “Chinese Perspective” among Chinese Correspondents Abroad
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Pál Nyíri
Abstract
Western scholars’ and policy analysts’ attention to the expansion of China’s media abroad has focused on the state’s strategy of soft power behind the global spread of institutions such as Xinhua and China Central Television, on the propagandistic image of China that these institutions seek to project in their foreign-language programming, and on the potential damage to media freedom in Africa and elsewhere. No attention has been paid to the reverse: how the emergence of a global network of Chinese correspondents impacts dominant Chinese views of the world and China’s place in it. The ethnographic research project on which this article is based reverses this lens, seeking to understand how Chinese journalists who report for PRC media from abroad see their work, what stories about the world they want to tell Chinese audiences about the world and how their choices are shaped by state policies, institutional pressures and individual preferences. Its preliminary conclusion is that while the lifestyles of the new generation of correspondents are increasingly cosmopolitan, this does not necessarily translate into more innovative or reflexive reporting.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the journalists, editors and others who have put him in touch with their colleagues, particularly Zhang Hong, Yang Shanshan, Zhou Gufeng, Wu Chen, Vincent Ni, Guan Juanjuan, Zhang Xiaoyu, Yuan Zhenyu, Sam Xu, Jia Yanning, He Shenquan, Wang Fang, Zeng Guohua and Evan Osnos. The author thanks Li Lin for her assistance in collating and analysing online texts. The author is also indebted to Mikkel Bunkenborg and Iginio Gagliardone for helpful discussions, and to Wang Zhongyuan for pointing him to online discussions of Chinese media. Research for this paper has been supported by an Independent Social Research Fellowship. The paper is based on a book, Reporting for China: How Chinese correspondents work with the world, to be published by the University of Washington Press.
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©2014 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Rethinking China’s Soft Power
- Articles
- Reporting for China: Cosmopolitan Attitudes and the “Chinese Perspective” among Chinese Correspondents Abroad
- Rewriting the Chinese National Epic in an Age of Global Consumerism: City of Life and Death and The Flowers of War
- Fei Cheng Wu Rao (非诚勿扰): Staging Global China through International Format Television and Overseas Special Episodes
- Exporting the Communist Image: The 1976 Chinese Peasant Painting Exhibition in Britain
- Projecting the Good Life at Home and Abroad: Lineages of the Chinese National Image from 1949 to the Present
- New Public Diplomacy Meets Old Public Diplomacy – the Case of China and Its Confucius Institutes
- The Politics of Affect in Confucius Institutes: Re-orienting Foreigners towards the PRC
- Book Reviews
- Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel: The Syrian Dilemma
- Jaesok Kim: Chinese Labor in a Korean Factory: Class, Ethnicity, and Productivity on the Shop Floor in Globalizing China
- J. H. Elliott: History in the Making
- Daniel Brook: A History of Future Cities
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Rethinking China’s Soft Power
- Articles
- Reporting for China: Cosmopolitan Attitudes and the “Chinese Perspective” among Chinese Correspondents Abroad
- Rewriting the Chinese National Epic in an Age of Global Consumerism: City of Life and Death and The Flowers of War
- Fei Cheng Wu Rao (非诚勿扰): Staging Global China through International Format Television and Overseas Special Episodes
- Exporting the Communist Image: The 1976 Chinese Peasant Painting Exhibition in Britain
- Projecting the Good Life at Home and Abroad: Lineages of the Chinese National Image from 1949 to the Present
- New Public Diplomacy Meets Old Public Diplomacy – the Case of China and Its Confucius Institutes
- The Politics of Affect in Confucius Institutes: Re-orienting Foreigners towards the PRC
- Book Reviews
- Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel: The Syrian Dilemma
- Jaesok Kim: Chinese Labor in a Korean Factory: Class, Ethnicity, and Productivity on the Shop Floor in Globalizing China
- J. H. Elliott: History in the Making
- Daniel Brook: A History of Future Cities
