Barry Petersen: What It's Like As A Foreign Correspondent In China (Part II)
The Great Equalizer … The Internet
In a sense, it's nice to know we foreign journalists are not alone. Any Chinese Internet user who tries to get foreign news from foreign sites could well be asking for trouble -- especially with the help of American search engines now cooperating with the Chinese government. [You can watch Petersen's "Evening News" story about that
.]I lived for four years in Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev and the secret police. We knew they listened to us in our apartment because we could sometimes hear them moving their listening devices around in the ceiling. Actually, it was a relief to know it was KGB spies making that strange scraping noise, and not rats.
Definitely not rats.
In China, we know the same thing is going on. But maybe with advances in technology, it is not so obvious. For instance: tapping a phone line can sometimes lead to clicks and noises, but no one can tell if a cell phone call is being monitored.
That is why our team showed up one day to meet a man for an interview about his house being demolished by the government, and instead found police ready and waiting. That meant another detention and another "confession and apology" -- and always, the chilling reminder that they know where we are going.
What Not To Satellite
When we satellite stories from China, our options are limited to, well, one. We must use the facilities of Chinese television, which is (of course) run by the government.
That means there is a government censor who sits and watches our stories as they go out and hits the "go to black" button if there is something the censor doesn't like.
Example: every foreign television reporter knows better than to feed pictures from the June 1989, massacre at Tiananmen Square. Gets you shut down every time. It's easy to get around … just have the pictures inserted into your piece at the home office in New York.
Sometimes, the censors object to stories coming into the country by satellite on BBC or CNN or SKY-TV. They will hit the button and the screen will go to black.
Because the CBS "Evening News" is carried on SKY-TV, it can also be seen, and blacked out, in China. That happened the other day when CBS correspondent Kelly Cobiella did a story on how China's booming building industry is forcing up prices for raw goods in the US. The censor didn't like it. [You can watch her piece
.]When a woman protestor yelled at China's President Hu Jintao during a visit to the White House, it was blacked out everywhere in China: not seen on Chinese television, blacked out on the foreign news channels that come in by satellite, and not a word in government-controlled newspapers.
No matter … the video was on Internet sites not blocked by authorities.
And there is the dumbness of the whole thing. With the Internet – and China is pushing hard to make the country Internet-savvy – things get found out and circulated.
It actually helps the foreign press because reporters can check blogs and see what people on the scene are saying. That means stories not only get through the Great Wall of Authoritarian Censorship, but get out of the country quickly.
[Petersen discussed the growth of the Internet in China with former CBS News producer Peter Herford, who teaches journalism in the country. You can watch it
.]The Future
What do I expect? More of the same, but worse. China recently banned the use of "foreign news footage" about foreign events if it was not shot by an approved Chinese television outfit, like their own news teams.
It's a short step from there to even more clamp downs on what the foreign press can do, especially television reporters like myself. Remember – we need pictures to tell our stories, pictures that we need to obtain (somehow) and get out of the country (somehow.)
China's leadership has made it clear that it wants less information from outside coming in, a daunting – some would argue hopeless - task considering the Internet.
China has a reported 30,000 Internet cops who monitor Web sites and e-mails and can shut down offending sites and block links.
But China also has, as one person said to me, the cleverest Internet users in the world, who can always manage to find what they want despite the Internet cops.
Survival
Here are three rules I live by in China:
1) You know they are watching you all the time, so it's your ingenuity that will make or break getting the story. Are you really going to let "them" win?
2) Cultivate the patience of Buddha, because if you get angry because of every detention or every time officials say "no," you'll be angry all of the time. If you don't have patience, then you better have a medical plan that covers ulcers.
3) Always have a good book handy. It helps the hours of detention pass so much more quickly while waiting for the "proper" authorities to show up.