BBC China Week

This paper will not presume to second-guess the motives and thinking of the producers of BBC China Week. Just as the BBC hoped to show its audience what China in 2005 is “really” like – an impossible project – I am presuming – equally impossibly – to show how the BBC “really” understands China, and perhaps how the BBC has both expressed and invoked broader discourses of China in the UK.

Starting with the trivial in the BBC coverage, was the misquoted apocryphal phrase of Napoleon, “the waking dragon”. Fortunately, I came across only two examples of this hoariest of cliches, part of presumably a scripted introduction. It has been replaced, perhaps, by a new cliche: we should not “beware the sleeping dragon for when she awakes…”, but “beware the economically-underdeveloped dragon for when she has ‘world’s fastest growing economy’…”. This phrase, “the world’s fastest growing economy” was repeated like a mantra during every China segment of the Week.

There were faint echoes in BBC China Week of 19th century and early 20th century discourses of the Mysterious East and Yellow Peril. When the radio presenter James Naughtie says: “How much do we really know about China?…”, the answer is, of course, a tremendous amount. Britain was one of the first countries to recognize the PRC. British people were traveling there right from the 50s, when it was almost impossible for Americans, for example.

Similarly with the current affairs program Newsnight, when Jeremy Paxman said: “How a one-party Communist state can also be one of the world’s fastest growing economies is one of the great mysteries about China”. The statement is, of course, absurd. There is no mystery. China is politically authoritarian and economically liberal, of which one can find any number of examples, especially in East Asia, through the 20th century. The “mystery” is not a general politico-economic analytical problem, but “China” itself. Here that mystery is evoked in the presenters tone of voice, a metaphorical gazing to the distant horizons of the Far East.

Finally, there were more recent references: “The BBC was granted unprecedented access…” The notion of “unprecedented access” references Maoist China, when traveling to and moving around China was, indeed, much more difficult than it is today.

If one can find these echoes of the West’s engagement with China in China Week, then one can begin to see how the BBC is engaged is a contemporary form of the very specific task of producing knowledge about China. Like all forms of knowledge, the BBC’s “China” is bounded, structured and operating under a regime of legitimacy and authoritativeness – producing what counts as knowledge of the “real China” and what does not, and engaging in acts of history writing of China.

Clearly, with such a wide range of coverage across the many electronic media which the BBC deploy, there was an attempt to produce a comprehensive understanding of China. The different networks and stations were operating within their different briefs to produce different kinds of knowledge which together formed a whole understanding.

Speaking from the academy, one can map this coverage across academic models: Radio Five was doing ethnography or anthropology, taking in local, “ordinary” experiences, similarly on tv on BBC News 24 and BBC Breakfast, which was doing live crosses and talking to people in the street. Radio 4, the evening news programs and some of the World Service was doing political science, sociology or policy analysis – broader studies of political and social processes in China.

Therefore, the BBC was deploying a wide range of legitimizing strategies across its stations which together formed a coherent whole as to how China should be understood. The interviews, vox-pops provide “data” which offers representative samples of Chinese lives, and the analysis and in-depth constructed reports (as distinct from the live coverage) function as “theory” to make sense of the “data”.

As is the convention with Western news journalism, the coverage was founded on an objectivist epistemology. That is, they drew a clear distinction between the subject position of the “BBC” and the existence of a social object called “China”.

My own work applies a post-structuralist critique of language, and although I won’t get too bogged down in dense theory, this approach treats “China” as a category of meaning in language, rather than some singular, coherent, social object, the truth of which, the “real China”, can be revealed through investigation and research and analysis. Instead, as meaning, “China” can be understood as an idea, one which structures the subjectivity of both Chinese people and Westerners in terms of what we know and feel about this idea. Instead of a singular objective truth (the “real China”) the purpose of scholarly investigation and analysis is to understanding what China means – to us, and to Chinese people themselves: positive, negative, exciting, frightening, important or irrelevant, heading for crisis and catastrophe or global hegemony.

For the BBC, however, just like academics in certain scholarly fields, journalists went in pursuit of an objective truth of China. The methodologies through which journalists produce legitimate knowledge – knowledge that counts as knowledge – are different, of course. A social scientist might survey a large number of people or analyze statistics to produce legitimate knowledge. A survey of one person wouldn’t count. For journalism, a single interviewee is legitimate, and this rests on both the assumption that they are representative of a broader objective social reality, “China’s rural poor” for example, and also that they themselves can offer analysis of that social reality. The media also use the convention of the “expert”, an academic or a government official, for example, whose analysis is legitimized by the knowledge structures of academia or by political power.

Although the BBC may have deployed the conventional media rhetoric of revealing an objective truth about China, what was somewhat unusual about China Week was the way these conventional reports were embedded within a layer of interpretation. Taking a leaf out of Derrida’s book, one can look at the introductions to each of the segments.

The introductions to each of the China Week segments were a rhetorical strategy for legitimzing the BBC’s authorial voice to speak about China. They were mediating between an imagined “British public”, which is assumed, possibly correctly, to be largely ignorant about China, and the field reports, which themselves are an attempt to produce a coherent understanding of the reality of contemporary China. So in the studio, the presenter or newsreader would introduce each report so as to systematically draw the meaning of China into British livingrooms, offering a layer of mediation between Britain and China which does not so obviously exist in daily news coverage.

And what what that meaning?

Even within the BBC’s own coverage, the multiplicities of what China can mean were apparent. Pointing out the fortune cookies references the diaspora, the overseas Chinese migrant, mainly Cantonese, communities in the UK, which is quite a different understanding of China from that of the “PRC”.

Despite these variations, there was a dominant meaning for China in China Week, and that is the notion of transformation. Almost every report was prefaced and structured around the idea of China making some kind of social, civilizational and, of course, economic leap from one state to another.

The notion of transformation is redolent with politics and the politics of history writing. By structuring their knowledge of China in terms of transformation, the BBC was actually engaged in the practice of writing Chinese history itself. Transformation involves trajectories with an imagined starting point, and imagined end-points, with assumptions and expectations built into the understanding of those trajectories. The Western ideas of transformation in Asia are long-established. The model is the West’s amazement, excitement and trepidation at post-Meiji Japan, and the period between 1868 and Japan’s destruction of the Russian Pacific fleet in 1905. Notions of East Asian transformation were renewed in the post-war period with Taiwan and South Korea.

China Week used a doubled structure in many of its reports to show China’s transformation: the poverty of rural life was contrasted continually with a modern urban life in Beijing and especially Shanghai.

For viewers in the UK, the notion of transformation in China is like that of Japan one hundred years ago, and the Tiger economies fifty years ago. Just as it expresses an historical trajectory for China, it offers a way of marking and energizing our own understanding of our own historical trajectories. If China is transforming, then we are transformed, comfortably at the end of this imagined future for China. Much of the reporting offered this vision of China’s westernized future.

If the BBC producing a specific and bounded meaning for an idea of China, “the BBC’s China”, and writing a history of China, then like any teleological discourses, the BBC’s China has effacements and erasures. In particular, China-as-the world’s-fastest-growing-economy began its historical path in 1978, at the beginning of the “reform” period. This serves to attenuate and marginalize what came before, in this case Maoism. Such political processes in history writing are well-established. An excellent model is Taiwan. Even as its notion of post-World War II transformation validated conservative theories of modernization and economic liberalism, beginning its history of transformation under the KMT in 1949, the Taiwan miracle erased Taiwan’s Japanese history and the 228 Incident, a political outcome which was in the interests of the KMT government.

The BBC’s history of China effaces Maoist China by starting the history of the New China in 1978. Maoist China becomes a point of origin, a zeroed starting point, with no history of its own and, in particular, no continuity with China of the 1930s and China of the reform era. Maoist China becomes an aberration, a mistake, a diversion from the “real China”.

The narrative of transformation was articulated by much of China Week’s reportage with the use of extreme contrasts – extreme poverty, the people “left behind”, the “have-nots”, in contrast to the super-rich in the big cities. This attenuated the possibility of invoking the idea of “ordinary Chinese”, people neither especially rich nor poor and people whose lives express neither the timeless ahistoricism of the peasant nor the emergence from 1978 of the super-rich, but rather of greater continuity in their lives over the last few decades that the notion of transformation would tend to acknowledge.

If the BBC has constructed a history of China which begins in 1978, then the question is why. In whose interests is such a history being written? I am not for one moment suggesting that the BBC has been disingenuous in its idea of China, and although the Chinese government itself seems to be happy to disconnect itself from Maoism, lest it should be held accountable for its excesses, there is a common story between the government, business and the media in the UK being told about the New China.

That is, that its economic boom is good, it can solve all of China’s problems, and the political and social institutions which made Maoism possible and which still exist (for example, the Chinese Communist Party) can be disregarded.

The BBC is deeply engaged with that discourse and has reproduced it very thoroughly in China Week. However, it has developed one form of critical response which is extremely important, which is the emphasis on democracy, and to a lesser extent, human rights, which ran right throughout China Week. This theme is not a critique of the overall discourse of transformation and how it re-writes and writes China’s past and future. Democracy is actually an embedded component of the the one of the specific aspects of the transformation discourse which is being applied to China, that with economic development comes a middle class and political liberalization and democracy.

For business, and to a lesser extent government, economic development is all that counts, and if pressed they generally say that democracy in China will happen inevitably at some point in the future. Although it was working within the a common overdetermining narrative, the BBC wanted to know why democracy isn’t happening now in the BBC’s China, and that is very commendable.