Episode 2 | Being a Journalist in China

For some in the West, being a journalist in China—especially one at a state media organisation—is seen as little more than parroting party propaganda. This caricature not only disregards the courage and dedication of many Chinese journalists but also misrepresents the complex realities they navigate as mere state coercion. How does censorship actually operate inside a Chinese newsroom? What new possibilities and constraints have emerged with commercialisation and the rise of social media? And is it possible to produce quality journalism about China without institutional backing or from another country?

To answer these questions and more, for Episode 2 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with legendary TV reporter Luqiu Luwei 閭丘露薇 and celebrated print journalist Fang Kecheng 方可成, both of whom now work as journalism professors in Hong Kong.

Guest Bios:

Luqiu Luwei 閭丘露薇 is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication, where she researches censorship, propaganda, and social movements in authoritarian regimes. Before joining academia, Luqiu worked as a television journalist for two decades, most notably at Phoenix TV, and reported from the frontlines of many major events in and out of China. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2007 and has authored or co-authored several books on journalism in East Asia.

Fang Kecheng 方可成 is an Assistant Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Before joining academia, he worked as a political journalist at the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly (南方周末). He received the Early Career Award from the Association for Chinese Communication Studies (ACCS) in 2024. Fang is also the founder and editor of the media analysis newsletter Newslab 新闻实验室.

Related Materials:

Fang, Kecheng. 2024. ‘Quality Journalism in China Is Not Dead; It’s Just More Dispersed Than Ever.’ Made in China Journal 9(2): 112–17. Link.

Luqiu, Luwei Rose. 2018. Propaganda, Media, and Nationalism in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Luqiu, Luwei Rose. 2021. Covering the 2019 Hong Kong Protests. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wu, Vivian. 2024. ‘Loud and Mighty: Navigating the Future of Chinese Diasporic Media.’ Made in China Journal 9(2): 138–45. Link.

Full episode transcript:

Yangyang Cheng: So when I was preparing for this episode on journalism in China, I was trying to recall when did I first gain an impression, an image of what a Chinese journalist is like that is distinct from say like a TV news anchor on China Central Television. And I could not locate an exact time or occasion. It would be around the turn of the century when I was about to start middle school. But every version of my recollection contains one name, Lüqiu Luwei.

So after a path breaking two decade long career as a TV journalist and very notably as a war correspondent, Lüqiu Luwei went back to school, earned a doctorate in communication studies here in the US from Penn State, and is now a journalism professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. I cannot overstate how excited I am to have Lüqiu Luwei with us in the show today. Lu Xiu, thank you so much for joining us.

Luqiu Luwei: Thanks for having me.

Yangyang Cheng: So let’s start. Before your legendary journalism career, you grew up in Shanghai. You studied philosophy at University of Fudan, right? And then you worked as an accountant at Pricewater houses briefly. So when did you decide that you wanted to become a journalist? And especially I think by the mid 1990s, frontline TV reporting was still a relatively new thing for many Chinese viewers.

So was TV journalism for you by choice or by chance?

Luqiu Luwei: I wanted to be a journalist when I was in primary school. That was mid-80s. It was because there was a very popular novel. It’s about how journalists report corruption in China. And then it became a TV drama series. I’m not sure whether you still remember the name. I think it’s called Xing Xing. Or because you guys are too young.

I just felt okay, being a journalist can bring justice for the society, which became my goal. But since when I graduated from Fudan, that was 1992, it was very difficult to be a journalist because just imagine in Shanghai, you only have one TV station and I think two newspaper outlets. And if you want to be a journalist, have to have a very… ‘guangxi’

I think if you study China, understand the importance of a relationship or the connection with the officers or with the officials. So I just came from a very humble family. There’s no relation with the people in power. I decided, okay, I have to choose another path. But I always have that kind of a dream to be a journalist. So when I immigrated to Hong Kong that was 1995. So I just read a newspaper advertisement that’s called, I think it’s TVB on CTN, or Hong Kong based television looking for journalists and also editors. So then I think, oh, I can achieve my dreams. I just want to try, give it a try. And then, yeah, I got it. And then I started my path in Hong Kong. So I would say it’s just because of One Country, Systems, which make Hong Kong, especially in 1990s, it’s a very vibrant environment. So that’s why I got the chance. Just sometimes I will look back at the nowadays, if you want to be a journalist in Hong Kong, I think it would relatively be very difficult. So yeah, this is also the challenges when I teach journalism students nowadays in Hong Kong, especially a lot of them who really want to be a journalist here in Hong Kong or maybe in mainland China. Yeah.

Yangyang Cheng: Wow, I know it sounds a bit like a cliche to say, but your path is indeed inspiring. I was wondering when you were starting out as a TV journalist in Hong Kong, were there any like role models or individuals since TV is such a visual medium, like you were looking up to or trying to learn from?

Luqiu Luwei: I started my first job based in Hong Kong, but working for Taiwan television network. So a lot of my colleagues came from Taiwan. Some of them are educated in, trained in the United States. So they really bring me some new ideas and experiences, or as the role model to teach me how to be a TV journalist. But I have to say, Hong Kong is relatively a very freedom place.

So a lot of the news media including a lot of television in 1990s. So being a fresh journalist, you still have a lot of opportunity to cover all kinds of assignments. So I actually I learned from myself. I have to say I learned from myself. If you’re talking about the role model, I would say it was in 2000, early 2000, I watched a TV series, it’s called Xinguang.

It’s a Japanese TV drama and I was so inspired by the leading role and who show her professionalism in front of the camera and also willing to sacrifice for the integrity of being a journalist instead of co-op with the power. yeah, don’t have a, actually I don’t have a very real life role model in journalism. I don’t know why, but yeah. I would say it’s Hong Kong because you have the opportunity to witness how your peers work in the field and also you can watch a lot of like news reporting from different kinds of news outlets and learn from them.

Yangyang Cheng: Wow. What you just said reminded me of this Lucille Clifton poem, Won’t You Celebrate with Me, where she said, and I would paraphrase a bit, was like, I made it up as I go. have like no models other than myself. And thank you so much for sharing that. Before we go into more about your story journalism career and about journalism in China in general, I would like to bring in our second guest.

And before I formally introduce him, I would like to ask him a question. So, Fang Kecheng, when you were young, did you watch Lüqiu Luwei on TV?

Fang Kecheng: Yes, of course.

Yangyang Cheng: So Fang Kecheng and I, we’re the same age and we actually grew up in the same province in central eastern China in Anhui. And we actually went to the same high school program in neighboring cities. And if I might mention at rivaling institutions. so Fang Kecheng is a constant reminder of how much I have wasted my life. so like Li Qiu on Fang Kecheng is also a journalist turned academic.

He worked for the Chinese magazine Nanfang Zhoumo, so in print, for several years in the early 2010s. And then he received his PhD in communication studies also here in the US at Penn and is now a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. So Fang Kecheng, I mentioned that we went to the same high school program and it is actually a very selective, quote unquote, science experimental program where we were trained for the Science Olympiad.

And I focused on physics and very boringly later, I also majored in physics at university and became a physicist. You majored in, you focused in math and high school and you did very well, much better than I did at the science Olympiads. But you chose to study journalism when you could have studied anything at university. And this was the mid 2000s. I know this is a story you’ve shared before, but if you could share it again, especially with a 20-year retrospective. What did you imagine the work of journalism to be at the time? And what prompted you to become a journalist? Did your experience later in journalism school and as a working journalist live up to your expectations?

Fang Kecheng: Well, I’d like to first thank you very much, Yang Yang. You’re really, really kind. Actually, looking at your life, I think I wasted my life. Because you had your PhD in physics, that’s subject I was never good at. Also, you have published such an amount of beautiful writings. So yeah, I’m a big fan of your work.

Thank you very much for having me.

Yangyang Cheng: Listeners, can see here that mutual flattery is the key to a harmonious society.

Fang Kecheng: Yes. Okay. But back to a question about why majoring, why choosing to major in journalism after winning a prize in mathematics in high school. I think, I don’t know about Yang Yang’s experience in this kind of so-called experimental class, but basically, we rushed through all our regular high school classes, three years of classes in one year, and then spent the rest of the high school just drilling for math, physics, biology, chemistry, right? So part of the reason why I didn’t choose to do anything related to science majors is because I was really burned out from all those endless problem-solving drills, like 提海战术, right? So that was part of the reason. So I really envy that Yangyang stayed on her path in physics. But the bigger reason, I think it was 2003, that year when I had a chance to choose my major at Beida, because of the math competition prize, I could go there without taking Gaokao.

So I was really lucky and I got to choose my major. That was 2003. was a huge year for Chinese journalism. Maybe you can also call it a peak or at least the very, golden age of Chinese journalism. There was this very important case, the Sun Zhigang case, where a young college graduate died in basically sort of police custody and the system called custody and repatriation, 收容遣送, and newspapers Southern Metropolis Daily, Nanfang Du Shi Bao really dug deep into this incident and did the amazing investigation. Their reporting actually helped to end that entire custody and repatriation system. And also that same year, that was SARS outbreak, right? So journalists in China really pushed hard for more transparency after the initial cover-up by the Chinese government. So they got the government to share more information, and that really also changed how China handled public information going forward. another thing is that at Southern Metropolis Daily, the Nanfang Du Shi Bao case got even more intense later that year when they arrested the chief editor, Chen Yizhong, and the manager of that newspaper. Of course, for so-called economic financial reasons, issues, but actually we knew that is sort of political, basically political punishment, right? So as a teenager, watching all these kinds of things happen, SARS, Sun Zhigang case, the Nandu case, I thought like, wow, that was really… what I want to do. Instead of working on maths or in a science lab, I really wanted to be out there and making real changes happen in society. So that was my dream. However, by the time I finished my six years of journalism education, first a bachelor degree and then a master degree at Beida and I started working in 2010. Things were already quite different. So I worked briefly for three years at Southern Weekly, Nanfang Zhoumo, the newspaper I always wanted to work for from 2010 to 2013. Looking back, those were probably the very last few years of what we call the golden age. So we faced much stricter censorship than before, and also our revenue was going down.

And also we got a lot of hate online. I remember that during that time, people already started calling us journalists working for Southern Weekly as like traitors (汉奸), and the slaves of the West (西奴）, so all those kind of bad things started to happen. And of course, another thing is the kind of reporting that inspired me in the first place, like the Sun Zhigang story just wasn’t happening anymore. So that was my story, a little bit sad, but that’s I think a window into how China’s journalism developed and then declined in the past 20 years.

Luqiu Luwei: I can add something because when Kecheng talked about 2003, that was a memorable year because I covered the SARS and also because of the Iraq War. 2003 is relatively a heyday as Fang Kecheng mentioned. So South China Morning saw them weekly and also saw them multiple days. They just did a lot of great job. And when we talk about SARS, I still vividly remember

After the new administration, like Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao came to power, they sacked the mayor of Beijing and they replaced with the new leadership. So I still remember I can follow then the mayor of Beijing, Wang Qishan. So they allow us as four overseas journalists, right? I can cover their daily meeting for the whole week. So the Beijing, all the top leaders of Beijing, we can attend their meetings to see how they made the decision to deal with this crisis. And also, journalists allowed, I was in Beijing, so we were allowed to interview almost everyone. And no pre-screening, and also no need to apply for the permission.

I just feel like things have changed bit in 2008 during the earthquake in Sichuan earthquake because I just spent one week in, oh, two weeks, almost two weeks in field and then I was recorded by my headquarters. Then I realized it just for the safety of mine. Because we just are starting to touch on some so-called sensitive issues and we got a lot of complaints. As we know, even if you’re working for CCTV, you’re not safe enough, right? You might be put in jail. So there is several cases which are journalists covering earthquake and then made a trouble, no matter you’re working for the state media or overseas media.

So then they will see a huge change starting from 2008. But since they got a little bit change, because 2010, we have Weibo, the social media, the new tools. So that will bring, I think it’s a new thing for the sensors. They just don’t know how to deal with this new technology. So they haven’t had enough time to put their, I mean, by using their censorship strategy for the traditional media and adapt to the new media. So that also created a lot of opportunity for the generalist and also the newspapers and medias in China. I still remember at that time social media like a Weibo, it’s called, there’s a term, 围观改变中国, right? I think that was the word to say from from Kecheng’s colleague.

Fang Kecheng: Yeah, by one of our editorials actually, yeah, Xiao Shu, guess, by him. He wrote that piece.

Luqiu Luwei: Yeah, People are so optimistic. And actually, you read some studies at that time, a lot of studies on Chinese journalism was so optimistic. And we have the power to set agenda. And the newspaper, the traditional media, even the state media have to follow the agenda of social media. But I think it’s only last two years. I remember 2012, some Davi or KOL, like… What’s the name of it? it’s a…

Fang Kecheng: Xue Manzi

Luqiu Luwei: Xue Manzi, had to do the open, what is called? The confession on TV. It’s the public confession because of their influence on social media. And then you started feeling the control on internet. And that have a huge impact on Chinese journalism.

Fang Kecheng: Hmm, yeah.

Yangyang Cheng: Thank you so much to both of you for not just sharing your personal experiences, but basically giving an overview of the past two to three decades of journalism and the shifting landscape in China. And on that, since we are getting to the elephant in the room, which is a lot of people’s first impressions, especially for an Anglophone audience, thinking about journalism in China, the first thing that comes to mind is often censorship.

And you also mentioned a few things with regards to the techniques of censorship, such as like censorship on social media or these kinds of like TV confession techniques as punishment. But I was wondering, Fang Kecheng, if coming back to you, if you are teaching a journalism students, and how do you introduce state censorship in China to them in terms of how does it actually work? How much of it is censorship before the reporting process? How much of it is post-reporting, censoring what has already been reported, how much of it comes directly from state authorities and how much of it is like anticipatory obedience from newsroom editors themselves?

Fang Kecheng: Yes, that’s a very good question because when teaching students today, the first thing I have to remind them is that media is not only Xiaohongshu, it’s not only Weibo, because they would consider censorship to be internet censorship. But I think to understand this issue, we have to trace back a little bit. So we have to first understand how media works in China. Basically before the 1980s we only had party newspapers like People’s Daily. They are party propaganda organs. But then with the market reforms, we got what we call market-oriented media, 市场化媒体, or you can call it commercial media. So those outlets actually made the money from advertisements and selling the newspaper. So just like normal business. But they were one very, very important thing is that they were not really private media. So they are commercialized, but they are not private. So for example, the Southern Weekly, the newspaper I worked for, we were, of course, more open and did bolder reporting, but we are still state-owned. So actually, Southern Weekly is a subsidiary of a party newspaper, Southern Daily, Nanfang Ri Bao. And Nanfang Ri Bao is an official party newspaper of Guangdong.

So actually we are really inside the system. So this setup is very important for us to understand how censorship works. So it’s basically a chain of command in a big organization. So orders would come down every day through this large bureaucratic system, which commercial media actually part of. So at Southern Weekly, we’d get orders from Guangdong Propaganda Department who got their orders from the central propaganda department in Beijing. And since you are in the system, you are actually technically a state employee. So you have to follow these orders. So do not publish anything on this issue. Or on that issue, you can only follow the Xinhua news agency’s narrative. Or on that issue, you can report on that. But do not make it big deal do not make a fuss. So different kinds of requirements and you have to follow those. If you don’t, you could lose your job. So that’s a basic setting of how censorship works in China’s institutional media, because I have to emphasize this again and again, for institutional media in China, they are all state owned, no private media in China. So of course, another thing is about self-censorship, right?

So self-censorship, of course, it exists. But most journalists I knew actually tried to push the boundaries when they could. Like, for example, if there is a big accident, for example, like an explosion somewhere in central China, actually reporters would rush to get there as fast as possible. Because trying to report before any censorship restriction orders came down, you may have this kind of chance of a few hours of time window to publish some reports. But of course, we know that there are some definitely absolute no-go zones, the red lines. Things like Tibet, Xinjiang, June 4th movement, or social movements in Hong Kong, those topics actually we couldn’t touch, and we never thought of touching on those issues.

Basically, it’s not like someone standing over our shoulder checking every word we wrote. It’s more like playing a game where the rules keep changing, and you’re always trying to figure out how far you can go without getting into trouble. So some days, you could push pretty far. And other days, the limits were quite tight. But the thing is that you are always part of the bigger system. So at end of the day, the system had the final say. So I would describe the whole system, at least for institutional media, institutional journalism. That’s how it works in China.

Yangyang Cheng: So if I could follow up quickly on what you meant about pushing the boundaries and you gave the examples of how journalists would try to seize on stories before the censorship cracks mechanism kicks into place. But this is primarily about the choice of topics. I’m also curious in terms of reporting on a specific story itself, how do Chinese journalists push the boundaries in terms of the layers and the dimensions and how far or how deep they could go?

Fang Kecheng: There are some tricks that you can play. The founding chief editor of Southern Weekly, Zuo Fang, I read his memoir and he mentioned a few of those tricks. For example, letting the… when we cover any sensitive figures or sensitive issues, we cover the non-sensitive part of that. For example, I think it was… during the 1980s or early 1990s, there was a sensitive party figure, Hu Jiwei. And Southern Weekly published a story about him, but it’s only about his marriage, his personal life, not about his political views. And another thing is that Zuo Fan also says, when you cover some non-sensitive issues or figures, we actually try to add some sensitive elements into that to attract more audience.

So that was a trick, I guess, started from the 1980s, and I think it still holds true today. So when covering some sensitive issues, actually the editors will try to do what we call counter clickbait. Basically, try to write the most boring headline. But if you read that, actually people will know that there are some really spicy information in that. So I think there are a lot of tricks that you can play. But I would really recommend that a book by my friend and my co-author Maria Rabintikova, and in that book she really proposed a concept or a phrase to describe this. She calls this guarded improvisation, meaning that this is actually a dynamic where both sides are constantly adjusting and improvising, but they are, of course, boundaries so it’s guarded. It’s guarded by the state by the system. So but it’s not like we were working from some fixed script. So but we always feel big for example different months in a year would mean different degree of freedom, right? So usually like in early March it’s stricter because the two sessions the long way was it’s happening every March, right? Of course early June it’s also another sensitive time period. So yeah, so I guess in China, journalists, if you work a few years, you would get to know all those small tricks. But the bigger picture is that it’s always a constant interaction.

Yangyang Cheng: Thank you so much. I’ll putting a plug here that Maria Repinikova is also a member of the editorial board here at the Made in China Journal. so Lichiu, coming back to you and you spent most of your journalism career at Phoenix TV, which is, I would say it’s also legendary, and it has occupied a very unique position in terms of sinophone reporting. It is a Hong Kong based satellite TV station, but it also broadcasts to the mainland. So how does a television network like Phoenix TV navigate the censorship and the political landscape of mainland China.

Luqiu Luwei: Yeah, so as Kecheng already talked about the boundaries, so for Phoenix, although based in Hong Kong because it broadcast into China, so it’s also had a lot of constraint. Sometimes compared with the mainland, conventional media, think Phoenix has more constraint from all different kinds of level. I still vividly remember when I was, I think that was 2006, I interviewed a professor in Harvard, Chou Chen Peng, to criticize Beida. And I think that was not a very sensitive story, right? But it was killed because a phone call from the head of Beida to my boss, former boss, and the story happened.

Yangyang Cheng: And this is a math professor I would mention.

Luqiu Luwei: Yeah, math professors. Just talking about the education issue, which I think is totally nonsensitive. everybody in different level trying to influence the media by using different means, so Phoenix is in a very special position.

So, is some strategy. So in Phoenix, we always say you’re running with the sensors. So because we are based in Hong Kong, it’s different from a mainland media. You are not to receive like a Hong Kong document every day, the instruction every day, but we do receive calls every day. That’s not the detail. I mean, for a long time, later became more more detailed. So, which means you have a specific window you can report which you think is very important and when the story came out and causing some response or causing some attention and maybe you will receive the cause and we have to kill the story but you already put it out here.

Yangyang Cheng: Can I ask who makes the calls on calls from who?

Luqiu Luwei: Usually from a different level of propaganda department officers, sometimes at state level, central level, sometimes at provincial level, but sometimes even like Beida or some specific organization that can make the call. My boss have to make the decision and whether to let the story to keep on airing or to secure it. And for me as a journalist and also the host of of Phoenix. I have to deal with censorship almost every day and sometimes I have to pay the price like I remember when I host a show, it’s called the editor chief editor’s time, so I was always so excited because I was the female the first female who can host a very important show but after I report some story about the politician, democratic politician in Hong Kong, they’re visiting to US, then my boss received the call, so he was not able to protect me, so I have to remove from the show, and for in Chinese, they for a certain kind of putting the refrigerator for a certain kind of time. Also, sometimes you have to try the boundary, you just never know.

I remember when I was doing a live talk show during the two sessions (两会), we were going to talk about one child policy. For a period of time, one child policy is a very sensitive issue. And Ji Shengwei, they’re so powerful, they just don’t want turn any criticism from anywhere. So I was so stupid, I put the topic on my Weibo account to announce the topic for tonight’s show. And then after five minutes, my boss received the call and I have to change the topic. But this is too late. It’s a live show. yeah, just imagine me and my partner have to talk like 20 minutes for nothing to fill the hole. I think it’s happened for Kecheng. It seems like you have to kill the story and then they have to think about how to fill the hole of the newspaper. So it happens a lot. The way we’re dealing with it is, yeah, we do have some red lines we know we should not cross. So that’s why people in Hong Kong for a long time never considered Phoenix as a Hong Kong media because we never covered the video in the Victoria Park.

Yeah, because we know this is a red line, we never touch it. And also like Xinjiang, yeah, for a long time. But the sense is sometimes the red line change. For example, Cultural Revolution. If this was the anniversary, that would became very sensitive. But now anniversary years, you can talk about that. So, I mean.

Yangyang Cheng: So Kecheng, coming back to you and in your writings, you’ve often presented a very nuanced perspective in terms of both like how censorship works in China, as you just very beautifully summarized, but also in terms of thinking about the media landscape in China, it’s not a dichotomy between state censorship versus the journalists themselves who either just obey or resist. There are a lot a lot of other types of constraints, which Luqiu also mentioned, and you also mentioned in terms of commercial viewership and such. And so I would like to come to this aspect in terms of the commercial incentives or the incentives to drive viewership and the other types of beyond explicit political restrictions that also shape what kind of stories are reported, what kind of voices are highlighted, and what kind of voices and stories are marginalized or completely erased. And as you mentioned earlier, you worked at a pioneering, commercial driven, but still state owned outlet, the Southern Group. And you also later has a lot of experience as a social media content creator with your Xinwen Xian Shi News Lab. And a lot of social media content creators in China today also do citizen journalism.

And so talk about some of that. How do these shifting landscape from completely state-owned and state-funded to commercially driven motivations, including self-funded and self-published platforms, shape what kind of stories are told in China today?

Fang Kecheng: Thank you. I really appreciate that you mentioned the economic side of the story because usually for outsiders, people only care about political control, right? But honestly, I think economic side story is more fascinating because it’s very important. I think it’s an important driver for both the good, best of Chinese journalism and also the bad, the decline of Chinese journalism. earlier we mentioned the golden age of Chinese journalism, right? It was really literally golden because I was told the money was really good. I remember that I only caught the very, very last few years, but I heard from my colleagues, from my peers that maybe 10 years before I started my journalism job. Journalism was really a high paying job in China because Ad revenue was just pouring in those commercialized media outlets. Another very important dynamic that I mentioned that all those commercial media outlets belong to party media, right? Belong to the system. Actually, when they earn a lot of profit, they had to give a big chunk of the profit back to the party media, back to the system. So because the commercial media outlets were actually owned, are actually owned by party media, so they had to give a big chunk of the profit back to the party media. That actually gave the commercial media some kind of status in the system. Because when you are making that kind of money, you actually have more bargaining power.

So in a Chinese word, means it’s 英气, right? You’re tough and powerful. So actually, you can be tough and powerful in negotiations, even with propaganda officials. So journalists sometimes can even push back against those kind of orders on very important issues. But then things started changing.

And it was not just about political control getting tighter and Xi Jinping. That is what most people think. I’d argue that a bigger deal was our business model. It just fell apart. Social media came along, as you mentioned, and ad market for institutional media, for print media, shrunk. And the whole commercial media ecosystem basically collapsed.

So this lead us to what’s happening now, of course, with content creators and citizen journalism. I think like everywhere else in the world, power has shifted from big institutional media organizations to individual creators. In China, also same, but we have to note that most social media content creators in China are in it purely for money.

They stay away from current affairs and political topics, or if they cover them, they tend to take a nationalistic perspective because it’s safe and profitable. But there are really some really interesting exceptions. in early this year, I wrote a piece for Made in China. And in that piece, I mentioned a few examples. For example, last year, the very most important piece, investigative piece was by Beijing News, Xinjing Bao. It reported on the oil tanker story, which was the horrible case that cooking oil being transported in tankers previously used for industrial oil. that was, so after the Beijing News published story, there was a creator on Bilibili who is a Chinese video sharing website, he actually tracked down the complete route of the truck using its license place number from the report. So basically that content creator figured out which company’s oil it was carrying. So that kind of work really added much value to the original reporting of institutional media. So I think it was a fascinating example.

And also there are other creators who found creative ways to comment on current events. They might look like that they are just discussing Jing Yong’s martial arts novels, or they’re just talking about some ancient dynasties, or analyzing a classic piece of literature. But people who know what’s going on can actually see that they’re actually commenting on recent important social events. So while the content creators cannot like I think we have to admit that content creators even though they are very creative, they cannot completely fill the gap left by the decline of commercial media. So they definitely bringing something new and interesting to the table. It’s more diverse, more creative, but sometimes they just cannot do the same, especially in-depth investigation like Southern Weekly, like Southern Metropolis Daily, like Caixin did before, it’s just a mixed picture, I would say.

Yangyang Cheng: Thank you so much, Kecheng. And I would also like to mention to our listeners that you should go check out Kecheng’s really wonderful piece in Made in China Journal about “Quality journalism in China is not dead, it’s just more dispersed than ever”. And it is part of our latest issue of the Made in China Journal that did a special section about journalism in China. And in that section, we also covered a lot of the new dynamics and shifts in the journalism landscape in China, which includes part as with economic rise of China, that there are more Chinese people, especially wealthier, well-educated Chinese people who moved abroad, partly facilitated by their economic and social capital and partly also incentivized by the increasingly shrinking civic space and tightening political control in China.

And that also created a new market and demand for diasporic Sinophone media. And in this issue of Made in China, we also published an essay by the veteran Chinese journalist now based in New York, Vivian Wu Wei, who did a piece about the history of Chinese diasporic media from past to present, as well as her own experience establishing one of the new media outlets called Dasheng.

And Lüqiu, I know that you’re guest on Vivian’s Dasheng quite recently, about half a year ago. And could you talk a bit about your impression of some of these new diasporic Chinese media outlets? And what are your observations of them? And how do they compare with this? How do the existence of these diasporic media outlets challenge or complicate this idea that one needs on the ground physical access to understand a country or a place.

Luqiu Luwei: Okay, so that would be my next research topic about the journalists turn the YouTubers on reporting China. So, Phoenix can be considered as the first diaspora media because it’s based in Hong Kong and broadcast all over the Chinese world, all over the world. I think there’s a demand for alternative voice always in the mainland China. So that’s why I make Phoenix quite successful. And also because of the content, because the recent years, the last 10 or 12, starting from 2010 or 2012, I constantly heard people say, oh, Phoenix is no more special. It’s more like a CCTV or… so why should I watch your TV channel because you cannot able to provide any alternative information right now? So I think that diaspora media always play the role to fill the gap and provide alternative content and to meet the demand, a huge demand of the mainland audiences. They do want more information, which was not able to provide by the local media because of the constraint of the news media.

The rise of diaspora media in recent years is quite complicated because you see all those quality, mean, use Vivian as an example, she always complains like if she makes the content very hard and very professional, then we’re losing the audiences. So it seems like for the diaspora media to be a challenge, how to attract audiences and also maintain the quality journalism. There is a few examples. If you compare with the most popular diaspora media, for example on YouTube, usually those talking heads would be more welcome than those journalistic work. So of course it happened even in all the market, mean, so the sensational or the views are more popular than facts, than reporting. I think I was not able to make a conclusion whether they were contribute to improve the quality journalism or whether they will sometimes will provide more disinformation and misinformation. I’m not sure about Kecheng. I know you are doing similar studies. So yeah, I am still doing some content analysis to see whether they stick to the journalistic standard or they have to adapt to the social media format which lowers their journalistic quality. Yeah.

Fang Kecheng: I think that’s a very important issue. So I can share one of my previous studies about diasporic media in another platform, not YouTube, not Twitter, but Instagram. So I think that’s a very interesting study. Basically, in that study, we term this type of accounts as transnational citizen journalism. basically, that was after the White Paper movement in 2022. Many overseas media and individuals started to pay attention to this new Chinese media project overseas. But actually, many of them were already quite active before the white paper movement. in that study, I focused on several fascinating Instagram accounts. Citizen Daily, Gongmin Ribao was probably the biggest one. And there were others like Northern Square, Beifang Guangchang, and another very interesting, quite small one, but also very important one, Tears in Rainbow. It has that series of content called Free Souls in the High Walls 高强里的自由灵魂, right? Basically, it reposted the some of the posts and comments from Weibo which shows that there are still a lot of free souls living inside the high walls. What’s really interesting about this group of Instagram accounts is that of course they chose Instagram not Twitter. This may sound to be a small deal but detailed but it actually tells us a lot about the generational change in Chinese media.

So Twitter was a platform for the older generation of democracy activists of China, right? But young people just don’t connect with them. So it’s partly about language style, but partly about different priorities. Like younger generation care a lot about gender issues and topics about, for example, Palestine, which the older generation mostly middle-aged or older men might not focus on or might even have very different views about. So for them, for the younger generation, Instagram works better because it’s visual, it’s where their audience is, and it lets them express themselves in their own way. For example, they use a lot of memes, the funny memes, and they speak Gen Z language. So it’s really creative.

Northern Square, for example, actually posts the beautifully curated historical photos from 1989, so from the square. So the aesthetics is just on the point, especially for Gen Z. So another cool thing is that how internationally they are. So the editors told me that they are connected with activists from Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran, et cetera. So they share each other’s campaigns and learn from each other’s experience. So it’s really different from the older generation of Chinese diaspora media. But of course, they face challenges. For safety reasons, they keep their teams quite small and volunteer-based, which makes it hard to keep going long term. So after the white paper movement, the activity did slow down quite a bit. So, but maybe that’s just how media works now. It’s more fluid.

We’re really not depending on a few big organizations like Southern Weekly, like Phoenix or Caixin. So I think that was a really interesting example for this transnational diasporic media from the Chinese world.

Luqiu Luwei: Yeah, I just want to say the sustainability of these diaspora media, the crowdfunding is one of the ways to support the media, it depends on the political environment. During the movement, usually you can attract a lot of support from the individual, but if it’s more calm, more peaceful time, so that would be very difficult for them to survive. And also for them is the access to information like they are very difficult to interview people and they are very difficult to verify the facts because you have to tell people who you are and then make people to make the response or confirm with things. Those are all the problems they are facing, challenges they are facing. And the interesting thing is I use YouTube as an example. Those most popular YouTube journalists, the YouTubers, actually they belong to I think like Falun Gong Xi, right? So in the surface it seems like an individual, independent media or independent commentators, but actually there is a network and people not aware about that and the people would be attracted by the element or they promote them as the independent media. So yeah.

So which makes things more complicated because if for those small-scale real independent diaspora media you have to compete with these networks accounts, right? Networks outlets, that’s the challenges.

Yangyang Cheng: I am so envious of the journalism students of both of you because I could listen and hear you speak forever, but we are coming up on the hour. And both of our guests today have given us like a tour day force of journalism in China across time and space, across national borders and different political systems and different political climates, as well as across different mediums from print to TV and social media platforms.

And to conclude, I would like to come back to the questions we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. What made you want to become a journalist? What was the journalism ideals you held at your youth? And now not just as working journalists, but also as educators of the next generation of journalists. I was wondering if you have any thoughts, whether it’s words of advice or wisdom or just encouragement to aspiring journalists, not just in China, but also anywhere in the world, especially when the crisis facing journalism from different political, economic, and social forces are not limited to any single country or political system. So why don’t we start with Kecheng?

Fang Kecheng: That’s a difficult question, but I do think a lot about this because we every year we welcome new students and I will be thinking about, what should I say to them? So first of all, I think I would like to say that if any of these young people get a chance to work for institutional media, I would still encourage them to take the job to do the reporting, even though it is very difficult and more challenging than my times. So because they would get trained and they would get, even if their story cannot be published, they still would get hands-on experience, very, valuable experience of how to do journalism in a proper way. So that’s a very important thing. But we also have to admit that… like we already know, institutional media have been declining. So there are just not that many jobs available in institutional media. So the situation we have to face now is that most of our students, most of our graduates will not become journalists because there simply are not enough jobs. And also the jobs are not good paid, so well paid. So that’s the situation.

But that’s not a problem because if we think bigger, I think we really have to have some new imagination about what is journalism and what is media and whether we can expand that. I’d like to use this kind of the previous question, the transnational media as example. We talked about YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, but if we expand our imagination even broader, we can even think about projects like bookstores, like Feidi, right? Nowhere. Or Ji Feng Books, right? Or we can even think about the family stand-up comedy shows, right? They are not doing the so-called journalism. They are not claiming to be journalists, but they are serving the same mission which inspired me, and also I think inspired Li Xiu, to take on this career and to focus, to also continue our focus on this area. So I do think that although this is not a good time for journalism, there still are creative ways to serve the public mission, which is embedded in the core of journalism.

Yangyang Cheng: So there is always a need for stories and for storytellers and there are always stories to be told. And so Lvqiu, you have the last word.

Luqiu Luwei: Okay, so yeah, to tell accurate good stories is a useful skill set for your lifetime and being a journalist is a way to gain this capability to tell the story. And the second thing is I want to say is a lot of people worried about AI will replace journalists. This is constant talk, but I think the differences between AI and the journalists should be on the field and then you talk to real people. it’s a face-to-face communication. I am not worried at all that journalists will be replaced by AI. Journalism always existed, but the form will be changed all the time because in 1960s we’re talking about television as the new media. Who knows, maybe after 20 years what will be the new media. But this is, we’re still telling the story the generalist standard always existed.

Yangyang Cheng: Lüqiu Luwei, thank you so much for joining us today.

Luqiu Luwei: Thanks for having me.

Yangyang Cheng: And Fang Kecheng, thank you so much and for being a pride of our hometown.

Fang Kecheng: Thank you so much Yangyang, really a pleasure.