Chinese Journalism School Goes Multinational

Journalism students at Tsinghua University engage in a round-table discussion at a class in Beijing last Monday. The school attracts many Koreans as it is conducted in English. / Korea Times Photo by Sunny Lee

By Sunny Lee
Korea Times Correspondent

BEIJING ― For many people outside ``the Great Wall,'' China does not sound like a great destination to study journalism. Beijing has been accused by the West-leaning international media for suppressing freedom of the press for years.

Now, with its increasing openness and its newly-found status as the global magnet, China's leading Tsinghua University is experimenting with an ambitious journalism program, aimed at making up for what it has been criticized for lacking.

Each year, some 30 international students, many of them are journalists, enroll at Tsinghua's global business journalism (GBJ) program. The two-year masters' program, conducted in English in the Chinese university, has a diverse group of students, including from South Korea, Russia, United States, Zambia, Thailand and China. This year, the journalism school even granted admission to two North Korean journalists, who however didn't show up for the registration.

Foreign students here chose to come to China for a variety of reasons. ``People talk about China a lot. But very few actually know China. So, I came to China to check it out for myself,'' said Park Jin-bum, who works for KBS.

Steven Oden from Uganda said his childhood dream was to become a spy. But later he found something more exciting: journalist. So, now he wants to study journalism at Tsinghua. ``China is very well-known in Africa as a country that makes everything from the cheapest kitchen product to very expensive jet engines. I became curious about this country.''

Ochmaa Masha Tseueen, who is from Washington DC and whose name indicates that she has Mongolian heritage, tersely put her reason to come to China this way. ``When I was studying in the States, `China' was everywhere. Everyone talked about China.''

Yet, many of the international students who had heard of China, also heard of something negative about the country's lack of media freedom before they came here. Some of them wanted to address this matter directly to their Chinese host. After all, a good journalism requires a fearless and inquisitive mind.

``China's media doesn't report on some sensitive topics. What do you think about it?'' Oden posed to Professor Li Xiguang, the executive dean of the journalism school.

Li replied. ``Do you know that there is a Communist party in the United States? But The Washington Post never reports about it,'' Li said in fluent English, adding ``In China, we also have something we don't report about.''

Li, a former senior journalist for China's state-run Xinhua News Agency, chose The Washington Post example because he himself had had a six-month stint with the American newspaper before.

When Tian Yuqing from Hong Kong mentioned that Hong Kong is freer than the continental China, Li wasn't defensive either. He asked back. ``Could you provide some evidence to your statement? As a journalist, you should back up your claim with evidence.''

Apparently, Tian wasn't expecting her question to be bouncing right back to her. Seeing her unease, Li said, ``Maybe you can think about it and tell me some evidence before the end of the class.''

Of course, not every day here goes like this. In fact, in most days, students are busy memorizing business journalism terms, or honing their English reporting skills or understanding some mathematical concepts for finance.

Now, it has been two weeks since the students have been here. And overall, their experience so far here has been quite, if not surprisingly, satisfactory.

``It's too early to judge but I am absolutely satisfied,'' said Nikita Popov from Russia. ``We had a trip to the Bloomberg office the other day. We also visited a radio station. I also like how classes are operated. Teachers and students here communicate on an equal footing. In a Russian university, teachers talk and students just listen. But here we communicate with each other a lot. You can call it a Western-style teaching.''

In fact, Tsinghua's global journalism faculty members are all from the West. The school has enlisted a stellar group of veteran journalists for the teaching, including Robert Dowling, a former assistant managing editor of Business Week; Nailene Chou Wiest, a long-time Reuters business correspondent; Glenn Mott, managing editor at King Features Syndicate, a unit of Hearst Corporation that publishes such magazines as Esquire and Marie Clair; and Gregg Fields, a former Miami Herald senior business journalist. The school's program is also sponsored by world's advertising giant Omnicom and global PR company Ogilvy.

``When you think about China, you think about all kinds of controls in the country by the Communist government. But if you look at the program only, we are a range of people doing business journalism in a more Western way, rather than Chinese way. We have a great team of faculty. China is just a location,'' Oden said, adding he was 90 percent satisfied with the program so far.

Park Ga-young, whose father is a journalist in Korea, admitted that she was initially a skeptic. ``Personally, there was some hesitation on my part whether to come to China or not. To many people's minds in Korea, China doesn't sound like a place to study journalism. But I came here because they do business journalism here, which has less political strings attached. The fact that I had initial low expectation perhaps made me more satisfied with the program now.''

In China today, there are some 800 universities that have journalism programs. That is a great jump from 50 universities in 1989, according to a paper by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. China today also has over 2,000 newspapers, 9,000 magazines, 250 million Internet users, and 500 million mobile phone users. Many of these figures top the global lists, testifying that there is certainly a big market for news and, for that matter, room for journalists in this country.

At Tsinghua's journalism school, international students take 25 percent, or 38 out of 149 new students. Just like other Chinese schools, Tsinghua University as a whole has a huge Korean student pool as well, with 700 from South Korea and 200 from North Korea, according to a school official.

For Tsinghua, the global business journalism program is an ambitious project. ``We are not interested in domestic ranking. We want to be ranked internationally,'' said Li, the dean.

Besides GBJ program, it also runs the well-known Center for International Communication Studies. One of the works the center does is to ``correct the wrongs'' done by the Western media, which has ``demonized'' China and has influenced how China is perceived by the world today.

Armed with the Cold War mindset, the Western media plotted to undermine China's image worldwide by misleading the general public and exerting influence on decision-makers, the Chinese argument goes.

In fact, Li, the dean, a few years ago wrote a book, titled ``Behind the Demonization of China,'' which became a bestseller in China. In the book, Li argued that the primary motivation for demonizing China by the West is to portray the Communist country as inherently evil, which traces back to the Cold War ideological confrontation, yet also even goes further back to the fundamental Western Judeo-Christian dualism worldview, which sees good and evil in the world. From this Western view, China has become the evil by default.

For that matter, the journalism initiative by Tsinghua is, in a sense, a crusade for China to sculpt the nation's international image by cultivating a pool of journalists in their inception who will be very likely to write about China after they graduate from the program and do so with more ``fair'' perspective of the nation. The choice of business journalism is only too appropriate given China's rising global economic status and that has the added benefit of containing less room for controversy seen in political journalism.

Li wanted to assure the students that they made the ``right'' choice. ``You came to one of the best schools in China,'' he said, adding ``Let me provide you with some numbers to back up my statement. When China developed atomic bombs, nine out of 10 were Tsinghua graduates. Among the nine members of the Political Bureau Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the highest decision-making body in the nation, about half of them are graduates from Tsinghua.''

The journalism department has close ties with the government. Since 2001, it has provided training for government spokesmen. ``After the SARS epidemic, we then trained 2,000 spokespersons,'' the dean said.

What does it mean for China? ``It means, in the past when journalists approached the government, they said no. But now they can't. Because they have a spokesperson,'' said Li.

Certainly, the installment of a spokesperson system nationwide gave the world more access to the workings of the Chinese government and overall more transparency, which had otherwise been murky and become the subject for suspicion from the outside.

Yet, journalism still remains a very sensitive choice of profession in China. Foreign journalists in China, particularly, don't necessarily enjoy the most cordial relationship with the authorities. The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) last week issued a statement, urging the government to build on an Olympic legacy by enshrining its pledge of openness.

``China cannot meet its promise of being open to the world unless its citizens are allowed to speak freely to foreign reporters," said FCCC president Jonathan Watts.

With China's efforts to become a more open society, the journalist group called on the government to recognize that the free flow of information is crucial to the proper functioning of the globalized world, to which China has now become a full member.

To many people's minds, expecting a flourishing journalism and free press in China may still amount to a hard-to-fathom hypothesis. ``Journalism in China? That ain't sound right,'' said an American who once worked for the Chinese state broadcaster. For some people, it's ironic to see Communist China attempting to do what is essentially a patent cause for moral higher ground by Western democratic countries that have dismissed the Chinese media as the state mouthpiece to spread the government-generated propaganda.

Well, that criticism rings a bell to China's neighbor, Korea. Some two decades ago, a foreigner who lived in South Korea during the military dictatorship period said that expecting democracy to flourish in South Korea would amount to expecting a rose to bloom in a trash can. He proved to be wrong. South Korea now enjoys a full-blown, if not unbridled, form of democracy.

Tsinghua's move shows China can do something what the West believes impossible for the Middle Kingdom to do. But then, ultimately, it's up to China to prove that those skeptics are wrong. What is ironic to China can become iconic. Who knows? Just like its unprecedented economic growth, China today never stops to surprise the rest of the world.

boston.sunny@hotmail.com