China's Environment and China's Environment Journalists: A Study

By Hugo de Burgh and Zeng Rong

Environmental issues are of growing concern in China, with numerous initiatives aimed at encouraging dialogue and increasing awareness. And key to these initiatives is the environmental journalist. The first English-language study of this burgeoning field, this book investigates Chinese environmental journalists – their methodologies, their attitudes toward the environment and their views on the significance of their work – and concludes that most respond enthusiastically to government promptings to report on the environment and climate change. Additional chapters demonstrate journalists’ impact in helping to shape governmental decision-making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781841506067

Hugo de Burgh

Hugo de Burgh was Walt Disney Chair of Media and Communications at Schwarzman College of International Relations, Tsinghua University, until 2022 and now writes full-time. He has published books on investigative journalism, Chinese affairs and media. His next novel tells the stories of Chinese students in London as hostility between the Anglophone and Chinese worlds grows.

Book preview

China's Environment and

China's Environment Journalists

A Study

China's Environment and

China's Environment Journalists

A Study

Hugo de Burgh and Zeng Rong

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2012 Hugo de Burgh and Zeng Rong

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Macmillan

Typesetting: John Teehan

ISBN 978-1-84150-469-8

Printed and bound by Hobbs, Tatton, Hampshire, UK

Contents

Chapter 1: Contents

Origins of this book

China's media today

Method and acknowledgments

Chapter 2: China's Environmental Governance

Environmental issues: Overview

The system for managing the Chinese environment

Principles of environmental governance

Issues

The localisation of power

Citizen involvement with compliance

Effects of the Internet

NGOs and what journalists think of them

The influence of globalisation

The rule of law

The right to know

External assessments

Chapter 3: Findings

Reporting the environment: The current situation

What are the deficiencies in reporting?

Range of stories and main themes

How reporters work

Media influence on environmental issues

Stories unpublished and what they tell us

Whence do journalists get their stories?

Obstacles to reporting and publication

Reporters’ solutions

Recent developments

Chapter 4: Illustrative Cases

The South China Sea

Xin'an area water resource development

The Round Bright Garden

The Tiger Leaping Gorge

The Tibetan antelope

Canton's ambient haze

The Songhua River story

A Xiamen chemical factory

The Nu River

The Three Gorges Dam (Dai, 1989: 6)

The Sanlu milk powder case

Lake Tai and Mr Wu Lihong

Chapter 5: Recommendations

Policy-makers and lobbyists in the environmental field

Environmental awareness among media managers

Decision makers in the Chinese media community

Developing competencies in-house

Media departments in educational establishments

Relevant Chinese authorities

International media development actors

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Bibliography and References

Glossary

The Authors

Acknowledgements

Aside from ourselves, the interviewers were Dr Marina Svensson of the University of Lund, Chang Yiru, then of CCTV9, and Alja Kranjec of the China Media Centre. The manuscript was copy-edited and valuable advice was given by Mary Hodge. Additional assistance was rendered by Aurogeeta Das and Guo Xu. The writers acknowledge with gratitude the work of their fellow interviewers and also the role of Colin Sparks. Professor Sparks, then Director of the UK's leading media research unit, the Communications and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) of the University of Westminster, made the case for the research project to its sponsors, International Media Support (IMS), acting for the Government of Denmark, who thereafter commissioned the China Media Centre to execute it. IMS representatives Ann-Nina Finne and Martin Broom were unwavering in their support. A report of the research upon which this book is based, by de Burgh and Zeng, is available on the IMS website. The illustrations were assembled by Zhu Xiaowen, who put in a great deal of effort to do so. We are grateful to her and to photographers An Guangxi, Zhao Lianhai and Wang Yongchen for generously allowing their pictures to be used. Melanie Marshall at Intellect has seen the project through and we appreciate her helpfulness and efficiency.

Chapter 1

Contents

Origins of this book

In June 2009 a seminar on environmental journalism in China was held in Peking under the auspices of Caijing magazine, China’s foremost financial periodical and a leading exponent of investigative journalism. It was instigated by International Media Support (IMS), a non-governmental organisation which is funded by the Danish government to train journalists around the world in what that government advocates as good practice.

In Europe, governments’ concerns about global warminghave resulted in much attention being devoted to raising awareness of it among their citizens through environmental journalism. This is because they believe that environmental journalism can help to shape European policy and strengthen civil society by informing and mobilising individuals and grass roots organisations.

In China rapid industrialisation is throwing up concerns about pollution, and has led to a growth in its environmental organisations and networks of environmental journalists, along with a widespread disquiet over the possible impact of China’s environmental problems on the rest of the world.

Thus, having decided to focus on the question of how the Chinese media are dealing with environment issues, IMS commissioned the China Media Centre (CMC) to interview the participants and report on the seminar. The CMC is a specialist research institute based in London, which, in addition to its research, has carried out consultancy projects for European and Chinese institutions. It is a self-supporting component of the UK's leading research organisation dealing with the media, CAMRI (Communication and Media Research Institute).

As far as we are aware, little research has been conducted on how the media reflect environmental issues in China, although China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has for some years been producing reports of its own activities aimed at stimulating media interest in environment issues (see http://zls.mep.gov.cn/).

In the West, the influence of the media on public perceptions of environment issues has been examined by a number of academics, notably Hansen (1993) and Boykoff and Rajan (2007). The latter found that ‘journalism and public concerns have shaped decisions in climate science and policy, just as climate science and policy have shaped media reporting and public understanding’ (2007: 210). Other studies see the media as agenda setting, or at least having a powerful influence in determining how people view the issue - see Wilson (1995), Ungar (2000) and Corbett and Durfee (2004). Reinforcing the findings that media coverage influences public attention to climate change are studies by Trumbo (1994) and Hester and Gonzenbach (1997).

China's media today

¹

Although news production in China still operates in an authoritarian political system, in which the political leadership aims to guide and control both the media and public opinion, the Chinese media world has altered as a result of far-reaching ideological and socio-economic changes. These include commercialisation, globalisation, the increased social tension between the poor and the rich and the rising consciousness of the media's social and cultural responsibilities in China's public discourse.

In the 1990s, the major characteristic of the Chinese media was that they were subject to often contradictory forces - the market's commercial line and the Party's political line. Today, they have to be alert to the expectations of the public as well; they need to be more responsive to customers, and to cover issues that interest them with treatments that appeal. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls upon the media to ‘supervise’ official institutions as a way of curbing widespread and serious problems, such as corruption and the negligent implementation of laws and policies. These developments have brought about more critical and investigative reporting and a reinvigorated role for the media as mediator between State and citizens (for a discussion of earlier manifestations of media-authority relations, see de Burgh 2003). Over the past twenty years, investigative reporting has sometimes been vigorously undertaken and widely valued, although interpretation varies (de Burgh 2003a; Tong 2008; Wang 2009; Tong2011).

A different factor contributory to the growth in investigative reporting is a developing professionalism among journalists, who increasingly see themselves as scrutinisers of the