The BBC’s China 2

In a country balancing its Communist ideals against the desire to throw open its borders to foreign investment … the BBC has been given unprecedented access but free broadcasting on many issues is still restricted. BBC News 24, 7 March 2005

The notion of “unprecedented access” references Maoist China, when traveling to and moving around China was, indeed, much more difficult than it is today, and it invokes a special claim on knowledge of China as a legitimizing strategy for the BBC’s China discourse.

In contrast to these traditional orientalist notions of China, China Week also made references to the Chinese diaspora. During the Breakfast program, in a report on the Chinese community in the northern city of Manchester, a journalist did a live broadcast from a large Chinese grocery supplier:

Good morning everyone from Manchester. We’re here as part of the BBC’s China Week, looking at the business links between the UK, and between the north west, and China. … The store that we’re in … is a cash-and-carry store that supplies Chinese restaurants … and you’ve got anything you could ever want … and of course the ubiquitous fortune cookies. BBC 1, Breakfast, 8 March, 2005

Pointing out the fortune cookies acknowledges the overseas Chinese migrant, mainly Cantonese, communities in the UK. This is an historically-specific meaning for China from the 19th and 20th centuries, when Chinese migrants settled in the UK and established Chinatowns and businesses in food and services. This is a very different understanding of China from that of the “People’s Republic of China” and decades older than the notion of “the world’s fastest growing superpower”. These references to the many meanings for China point to the ad hoc nature of China Week. They were not offered as part of a deliberate exposition of the history of the West’s engagement with China or Chinese people, but were included as the unreflective reproduction of discourses, and perhaps even stereotypes.

However, within this process of discursive reproduction, the BBC did present a dominant meaning for China, and that was 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.²

Western ideas of transformation in Asia are long-established. The model is the West’s reading of Japan after the Meiji Restoration and the period between 1868 and Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.³ Notions of East Asian transformation were renewed in the post-war period with Taiwan and South Korea, the so-called “Little Dragons”.⁴ The over-determining narrative is modernization and, more fundamentally, modernity, and as with these earlier expressions of Asian modernity, the transformation narrative of China Week became an uncritical telling of a story of China’s transition to a “modern” society. This in turn reproduced a range of unstated assumptions about the “unmodern” point of origin in China’s past from which such a transformation could begin, and the features and styles by which we could recognize that this is a “new China”.

The markers of transformation for such an uncritical narrative in China Week were delimited. The unmodern was broadly represented by China’s rural poor and the modern by the urban rich. China Week temporalized the relationship between the two so as to present urbanization as a feature of an “emergence” or “rise” of China. It used a doubled structure in a number of its reports to show this transition: the poverty of rural life was contrasted with a modern urban life in Beijing and especially Shanghai:

[video of rural village, pig being prepared for slaughter] The way things are done here hasn’t changed for centuries. The man of the house should be in charge, but Mrs Xiang’s had to hire in some help. Her son is a student at college. Killing pigs is not his business. And her husband’s far from home, earning money to pay for the university fees. … [video of modern urban hair salon] … Eight hundred miles away in Shanghai, Gaohui is giving herself a very different kind of treat, a little pampering at the hairdressers. BBC News 24, 9 March 2005.

Often, though, the transformation narrative was presented with start and end points which were implicit rather than stated in such an obvious way. When the presenter said “but economic liberation has not yet been followed by political freedom”, a received set of suppositions about the nature of social progress was put in place: China’s transformation is indicated by the creation of particular kind of free-market liberal economic regime, and modern China starts with the creation of this regime. Then, the transformation of its economy sets in place other necessary developments, in particular political and social freedom, leading China theoretically toward an imagined liberal democratic future.⁵ This narrative leaves assumed the point when China’s path to modernity, or industrialization began, and where it is going:

[Journalist] “Well, we used to have bicycles, now we have mopeds, hopefully we’ll soon have cars,” he said. China’s following a well-trodden path. Korea, Japan and others have industrialized rapidly, and all the evidence is that if China’s come a long way, it can still go a lot further. BBC News 24, 12 March 2005.

In China Week, little of this was made explicit, and as noted above, these issues of how to understand China were not self-reflexively included in the broadcasts. Rather than interrogate what makes China look “new”, China’s modernity was identified and presented in a received form recognizable to both the British audience and the BBC. It was envisioned most strongly by a familiar consumer culture, urbanization and modern architecture, signified by Chinese people participating in China’s consumer boom, for example in modern houses, shopping malls, cars and roads, and again and again with the illuminated vista of the Lujiazui financial district of the Pudong New Area in Shanghai.

These recognizable signs of the “new China” established reference points with which Chinese history and futures could be known by a British audience, and through which a British audience could also know itself. If China is transforming, then Britain is transformed, at the end of this imagined future for China, waiting for China to catch up, or even overtake the UK. The structured nature of this version of China’s path to modernity overshadowed other aspects of China’s modernization, ones less recognizable to the BBC and to a British audience. In particular, with notable exceptions such as the story on the Three Gorges Dam project, state-sponsored modernization was not a feature of China Week, largely excluding the potent state and Party visions for China’s future around nationalist ideology, the military, infrastructure or the space program. China’s transformation in China Week was generally showing the emergence of the individuated urban consumer as the sign of the arrival of this “new China”:

[Journalist] I am walking along one of Shanghai’s most fashionable shopping streets, Huahai Rd in the centre of the city and it is lined with exactly the same trade names that you would see in any major Western city. There’s a Pierre Cardin, Adidas, Mango, across the road, Episode, Armani, they’re all here, and they’re all catering to the new rich of Shanghai. BBC Radio 4, The World Today, 9 March, 2005.

More fundamental than these elisions, the narrative 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. The transformation of the “New China” involves trajectories with an imagined historical starting point, and imagined end-points, which introduces effacements and erasures into its historical narratives.

For China Week, the starting point for China’s transformation into “the world’s fastest growing economy” was very clearly 1978 and the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, when the Chinese Communist Party initiated “reform”: the Open Door policy, economic liberalization, and the continued dismantling of collectivized (though not state-owned) agriculture and industry. In terms of the politics of history-writing, if China “began” its transformation in 1978 then this serves to attenuate and marginalize what came before, in this case Maoism. By starting the history of the new China in 1978, Maoist China becomes merely a point of origin, a singular moment with no history of its own and, in particular, no continuity with the China of the 1930s and 1940s and the contemporary China of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. By structuring it around a narrative of transformation based on economic growth, the version of Chinese history of China Week erased Maoism from Chinese history.

In one of the live crosses to Shanghai across from the Pudong New Area, this erasure was clearly expressed:

[Journalist] Hello and welcome to Shanghai, and I am on the Bund, Shanghai’s famous waterfront … Take a look over there, that skyline seventy years ago the most famous in Asia. In those days Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East, and now many people hope that those glory days are coming back again. You look over the river [pan to Pudong New Area] and you see some of the reasons why. Ten years ago that was marshland … BBC News 24, 7 March 2005.

In this introduction was a history of China in which Mao and Maoist Communism became a void, an absent presence, around which Shanghai had deviated away from its “natural” status of “glory”.

It is notable that the narrative of transformation articulated by much of the reportage of China Week was the use of extreme contrasts – extreme poverty, the people “left behind”, the “have-nots” in contrast to the urban rich in the major 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 timelessness of the peasant nor the emergence from 1978 of the rich consumer, but rather greater continuity in their lives over the last few decades that the notion of transformation would tend to acknowledge. Similarly with the attenuation of the state and the Party from China Week, which while still controlling most of the economy and being an active presence in Chinese lives, does not fit within the transformation narrative and a history of China that starts in 1978.

If the BBC has written a history of China that starts in 1978, then the question becomes what are the implications of a such a specific and politicized history. The danger for the BBC is that in writing Chinese history in this way, and being apparently unaware of the implications of its own history-writing, or even that it was engaged in such a task, it finds itself aligned with a common story about China being told by government and business that privileges economic development and commercial opportunities and attenuates the both the continuing presence of the Communist state, and the complexity and continuities of China’s social experience as a narrative of change over the whole post-imperial period. Importantly, this is a version of China’s story that the Chinese government itself is also telling, as it distances itself from Maoism and encourages China’s consumer economy, while continuing to secure its position of political authority.

The history of China which the BBC was reproducing was told during China Week itself by a representative of the British business community on a panel discussion program on Radio 4:

[Program guest] I think we have to get the big picture here. China’s economic miracle over the last twenty five years in an event of historical proportions. Four hundred, five hundred million people have been brought out of poverty over that period. We are looking at rates of growth going forward of eight, nine percent in the next ten years. No other developing country is looking at that future at the moment. All these problems, the banking sector, maybe a small housing price bubble in Shanghai, which of course is only one city among hundreds of cities, these problems are manageable if growth keeps going, even the environmental problems, we know … once a certain level of per capita income is achieved these start to be solved much more quickly. It’s a question of industrialization which China is going through right at the moment. BBC Radio 4, The World Today, 11 March 2005.

In understanding the implementation of economic reform by the Chinese Communist Party as a “miracle” and “an event of historical proportions”, a specific set of policies are read as China’s transition to modernity starting twenty-five years ago. The narrative deprecates China’s previous experiences of modernity and the continuities across the 20th century of both its economic development and especially its politics. Furthermore, it imagines a distinctly old-fashioned, and perhaps reassuring, Western modernist vision of limitless progress through modernization, in which all of China’s problems will be solved by capitalist industrialization. The BBC was deeply engaged with this way of understanding China and has reproduced it very thoroughly in China Week.

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¹ John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: politics, culture and class in the Nationalist

revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 62-63.

² see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China, ibid., for a detailed exposition of the history of the transformation trope from the 19th century to the early 20th century.

³ Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-national America,” The Atlantic Monthly Vol.118, No.1 (July 1916): 88.

⁴ Ezra F. Vogel, The Four Little Dragons (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1991), 18

⁵ See Samuel P. Huntington, “How Countries Democratize,” Political Science

Quarterly Vol. 106, No. 4 (Winter 1991-1992): 579-616 for a version of this theory, and also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Avon Books, 1992)

⁶ ibid.