Contents

Origins of this book

In June 2009 a seminar on environmental journalism in China was held in Peking under the auspices of Caijing magazine, China's foremost financial periodical and a leading exponent of investigative journalism. It was instigated by International Media Support (IMS), a non-governmental organisation which is funded by the Danish government to train journalists around the world in what that government advocates as good practice.

In Europe, governments' concerns about global warming have resulted in much attention being devoted to raising awareness of it among their citizens through environmental journalism. This is because they believe that environmental journalism can help to shape European policy and strengthen civil society by informing and mobilising individuals and grass roots organisations.

In China rapid industrialisation is throwing up concerns about pollution, and has led to a growth in its environmental organisations and networks of environmental journalists, along with a widespread disquiet over the possible impact of China's environmental problems on the rest of the world.

Thus, having decided to focus on the question of how the Chinese media are dealing with environment issues, IMS commissioned the China Media Centre (CMC) to interview the participants and report on the seminar. The CMC is a specialist research institute based in London, which, in addition to its research, has carried out consultancy projects for European and Chinese institutions. It is a self-supporting component of the UK's leading research organisation dealing with the media, CAMRI (Communication and Media Research Institute).

As far as we are aware, little research has been conducted on how the media reflect environmental issues in China, although China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has for some years been producing reports of its own activities aimed at stimulating media interest in environment issues (see http://zls.mep.gov.cn/).

In the West, the influence of the media on public perceptions of environment issues has been examined by a number of academics, notably Hansen (1993) and Boykoff and Rajan (2007). The latter found that 'journalism and public concerns have shaped decisions in climate science and policy, just as climate science and policy have shaped media reporting and public understanding' (2007: 210). Other studies see the media as agenda setting, or at least having a powerful influence in determining how people view the issue - see Wilson (1995), Ungar (2000) and Corbett and Durfee (2004). Reinforcing the findings that media coverage influences public attention to climate change are studies by Trumbo (1994) and Hester and Gonzenbach (1997).

China's media today

Although news production in China still operates in an authoritarian political system, in which the political leadership aims to guide and control both the media and public opinion, the Chinese media world has altered as a result of far-reaching ideological and socio-economic changes. These include commercialisation, globalisation, the increased social tension between the poor and the rich and the rising consciousness of the media's social and cultural responsibilities in China's public discourse.

In the 1990s, the major characteristic of the Chinese media was that they were subject to often contradictory forces - the market's commercial line and the Party's political line. Today, they have to be alert to the expectations of the public as well; they need to be more responsive to customers, and to cover issues that interest them with treatments that appeal. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls upon the media to 'supervise' official institutions as a way of curbing widespread and serious problems, such as corruption and the negligent implementation of laws and policies. These developments have brought about more critical and investigative reporting and a reinvigorated role for the media as mediator between State and citizens (for a discussion of earlier manifestations of media-authority relations, see de Burgh 2003). Over the past twenty years, investigative reporting has sometimes been vigorously undertaken and widely valued, although interpretation varies (de Burgh 2003a; Tong 2008; Wang 2009; Tong 2011).

A different factor contributory to the growth in investigative reporting is a developing professionalism among journalists, who increasingly see themselves as scrutinisers of the powerful and protectors of the weak and vulnerable. Several newspapers and magazines, such as Beijing Youth Daily, Weekend South, Southern City News and Caijing, have a reputation for publishing critical and investigative stories. Since the early 1990s, there has also been a proliferation of investigative programmes on television, such as News Probe and Focal Point.

However, the media remain under government supervision, and stories can be killed by the government at the local or provincial level; local media may find it risky to investigate abuses by people who are powerful in their own locality and therefore feed the stories to journalists from elsewhere, in the hope both of fulfilling what they see as their professional duty and of receiving reciprocal help later.

International observers have been very critical of what they perceive as Chinese government suppression of information and the persecution of some journalists by various authorities. Foreign journalists operating in China have also been critical of their handling - and that of their Chinese colleagues - although there maybe a consensus that, from the foreigners' perspective, the situation is improving (Watts 2007).

On occasion, journalists enlist the international media - or at least provide the information on which those media may base stories - to get their reports published. Increasing attention is being paid to Chinese environment issues by the western media, and some of this (as we shall see below) has impressed Chinese journalists, although it can also be viewed as motivated by hostility to China.

In recent years we have seen cases where the Chinese media have been able to shape public opinion, influence policy and instigate law-making; however, it is difficult to establish exactly when and why this becomes feasible and to what extent the media can affect public policy-making, and influence China's social and political development.

As to public policy-makers influencing the media, professional and academic opinion in the anglophone countries has usually had a very different approach than China's, considering that the media should attempt to remain impartial on the great issues of the moment, or at least treat them in an impartial manner. Press barons, political parties, politicians and, most recently, academics who have attempted to manipulate - or in some countries totally determine - how issues are covered are considered reprehensible.

It appears that an exception is being made in the case of climate change. Roberts puts it thus:

With regard to the climate change debate,...