Hong Kong Handover Coverage

Chinese television news has always had a "propagandish" element. And it is not as if Chinese journalists do not know it, they do.

For evidence is an account by Chinese Central Television (CCTV) journalist Zhu Yan (朱炎) in the book 回归的瞬间 (or The Moment of Reunification, 1998).

For a start, Zhu made it clear that "there is a long way to go for CCTV to take its rightful place as one of the world's leading TV networks."

For instance, on the coverage of the 1997 Hong Kong handover, Zhu said that virtually all Chinese reports centered on how the rain had "washed away a hundred years of humiliation."

But citing the angle adopted by America's ABC News, Zhu noted that the ABC team in Hong Kong interviewed a feng shui master. The master was of the view that "the heavier the rain the better", because in the Cantonese dialect, water also means "money." Hence, the rains were a good sign for the territory's continued prosperity. (As for the financial crisis immediately following the handover, well, that is another different story.)

Overall, Zhu made the following two points:

1) Chinese think that westerners hate to watch Chinese news because the country is run by a communist government hence the news is not credible. So overall, there is what he called "an ideological problem." But citing a western CCTV trainer, Zhu eventually agreed that TV news is like medicine. If it is well-packaged and presented, people will be persuaded to take it.

2) That there are many different ways of looking at the same story (but of course), and perhaps CCTV should think of alternative angles every now and then.

For suggestion number (2), like it or not, this will have to depend on changes within the country's broader political climate.