At The Wall Street Journal last week, departing China correspondent Yoko Kubota described her experiences as “a Japanese person who worked for an American newspaper” in a climate of rising nationalist sentiment and international tension:
In China, the drumbeat of nationalistic sentiment has intensified with time. Negative push alerts about Japan from news outlets and social media filled my smartphone screen as relations became more tense. In a museum playroom, a preschool aged child lectured my children and me about how terrible Japan was.
It wasn’t only directed at Japanese. The space for connecting with certain international cultures has shrunk significantly, even when it comes to something relatively innocuous as embracing Western cultural exports.
[…] China has also built a high-tech propaganda machine, filled with messages describing the outside world as dangerous, including the U.S. I noticed that Chinese news apps were often fast to send news alerts about killings or plane crashes, so long as they happened overseas. When bad things happened in China, the news apps were often mum.
[…] As a journalist, I felt the wariness building up. I covered science and technology, and over the years, various topics started to fall under the national security umbrella, including semiconductors and data. Some Chinese people who used to share their perspectives cut off contact with me. When China-Japan ties worsened, some Chinese people I was speaking with asked me to stop reaching out, citing worsening relations, or abruptly ceased communication. Increasingly, in interviews with Chinese companies with U.S. footprint, executives were doing gymnastics to avoid discussing any geopolitical topics. [Source]
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Allyson Horn reported in March on the growing difficulty of speaking on the record with delegates at the National People’s Congress.
CDT has translated numerous examples of Chinese online commentary on official warnings about the dangers of other countries (and even their websites), versus China’s supposed safety. Yanzhong Huang commented in a New York Times op-ed this week that these narratives are contributing to a “dangerous overconfidence”:
Traveling across China this spring, I am hearing this narrative everywhere. After one particularly gruesome variation on the “kill line” meme made the rounds recently, my family members in China said they feared for the safety of our relatives in the United States. I hear about students who once dreamed of studying in America now enrolling elsewhere, worried about U.S. crime and poor job prospects.
[…] This belief is partly a defense mechanism to help Chinese people cope with their own problems: a slowing economy, a collapsing property market, high unemployment and a widespread sense of uncertainty. A Beijing taxi driver captured this uneasy mix of anxiety and swagger last month. After venting to me about the problems China’s people face, he added, “At least we have a minimum safety net here. Better than falling below the kill line in America.”
Insular, nationalist voices are amplified more than ever. Zhang Weiwei, a university professor who served as Deng Xiaoping’s interpreter and has millions of online followers, absurdly claimed in a viral video in January that China is the only country in the world whose people eat well. [Source]
Kubota’s departure is just the latest of many, as Eliot Chen reported at The Wire China this week:
Six years after a U.S.-China tit-for-tat cycle of journalist expulsions decimated the foreign correspondent corp in China, the situation remains dire. Through attrition and at least one expulsion, U.S. bureaus are losing reporters, and Beijing has not approved their replacements.
The result is that, even as the leaders of the world’s two largest economies meet next week, it has become harder than ever to get a full picture of what is happening in China — a problem that shows no signs of abating.
“The U.S. has never had so few foreign correspondents in China at any period since diplomatic relations were normalized in the 1970s as now,” says Ian Johnson, a longtime China reporter who was expelled in 2020. “Two correspondents among the big three newspapers [the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post] is a completely outrageous situation.”
[…] “I was almost going to put out a piece about how China is winning the Iran war, but then I went to Guangdong and learned just how much people were really struggling,” [one] correspondent says, adding they saw how manufacturers there were struggling with higher costs. “Telling that story… that’s what journalists with visas can do. That’s what’s important.” [Source]
Hong Kong’s former status as a relative sanctuary has continued to erode, meanwhile. Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index last week ranked Hong Kong and China respectively 140th and 178th out of 180 countries and territories, noting that Hong Kong has dropped 122 places over the 25 years of the Index’s history. Last month, the organization highlighted the detention and deportation from Hong Kong last November of French journalist Antoine Vedeilhe, “at least the thirteenth journalist to have been targeted by the territory’s authorities since the National Security Law was enacted in 2020.”
