Here’s the type of story you’re supposed to tell back west after working for Chinese state media.
It’s 2019 and I’m in the Great Hall of the People (and it is a great hall) with a colleague from China Daily, an English-language newspaper owned and managed by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. We were there for the Two Sessions, the equivalent of a budget announcement in China, at a meeting where Communist Party representatives from Fujian province spoke about the year past and coming.
Before we left the paper’s office that morning I’d chatted with senior editors and they were keen for me to ask a question at the meeting. They had an idea. “So it would be great, Eoghan, if you could write something like, ‘Wow, I was so amazed, coming from the west, at how easy it was to put a question to the Communist Party,” said one. Ah come on, I had to tell her, I’ll not be writing that. Officials I’d never met had to sign off on my asking a question and I was being accompanied on the trip by a cadre who was to deliver my speaking rights. I told her I’d figure something out, some personal reflection about the day, the hall, comparisons between China’s complete and Ireland’s half anti-imperialist revolutions. To be fair she understood.
Fujian is in the southeast of the country and as the province closest to Taiwan – Taiwan province as our China Daily style guide had it – its Two Sessions meeting interested western media. Stood beside me in the press gallery was the China correspondent from the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post.
Though I can’t remember which, it being six years ago and sure what’s the difference between the two, I can still picture him: a man in his 50s, well turned out and well established in Beijing, just not enough to have learnt the language, like so many of his counterparts, his interpreter standing with him. He got increasingly agitated as the meeting went on and it became apparent, through interactions his interpreter had with organisers, that he wasn’t going to get to ask a question.
About two hours in he took the initiative back from the interpreter and lost the head with a Communist Party official, started shouting and flailing, his finger pointed in his opponent’s face. He was dragged out. A story for him to tell in an expat (immigrant) bar in Sanlitun later that evening, an easy column for whichever paper he wrote for.
I didn’t get to ask my question either.
Criticise government, not the (free) state
I got a taxi back to the office with the colleague. She told me the cadre who had taken us to lunch earlier on, who also ran the Fujian province bureau of the paper, was in trouble with his superiors and would have to find his own way back. The party worried, she told me, that through his failure to secure me that question he’d embarrassed the party in front of the westerner who’d also been party to that scene with that American journalist. Ara, I thought.
She asked me about journalism back home. “Do you ever write anything bad about the government?” Good question, I told her. (And if you have a left analysis of western media it should give you pause.) That’s kind of the idea, I said, that you hold power to account and all those other similar shibboleths, that it’s foundational to the idea, if not reality, of western media, that, yes, you can write bad things about the government but that criticism of the nature of the (free) state, the ideology that rules it, isn’t as well received.
This was new to her. She had studied journalism in Tsinghua University, an elite institution, Xi Jinping’s alma mater, but she said she’d never encountered these ideas. She was from rural China and a position at China Daily was aspirational, mainly for its promise of a Beijing hukou number, similar to a PPS number, which allowed staff to use state healthcare and education facilities in the capital. She seemed to approach her job similarly to how we consider public relations advisers working for government in the west, consciously, without illusion about their roles.
Back in the flat that evening and I remember my VPN didn’t work. ExpressVPN was considered the best, the ladder that would bring you over the Great Firewall and onto banned western tech, WhatsApp and Twitter and Instagram and Google. Using it was an inconvenience but it worked most of the year. During periods like the Two Sessions the Communist Party could strengthen it so people like me couldn’t get over. Ara, I thought.
The how and why
Some mild cheek aside I’ve tried to write this dispassionately.
This is just how censorship works in China. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to trust the Chinese Communist Party. That’s OK. It put me out me when I was over there, like the time I twice ordered a Roland Barthes collection titled The Scandal with Marxism from Amazon to my flat, had it twice marked as delivered on its online tracking but not show up, presumably taken by a sorter who didn’t like the look of the title.
How it works isn’t as interesting as why it works. The Sinophobes, the western chauvinists, the Trotskyists, the anti-intellectuals come together in condescension: the Chinese are brainwashed; more than 1.4 billion people don’t have the mental acuity to truly experience or comprehend their own realities.
It’s a comforting explanation that allows those who accept it to ignore things like the Communist Party ending poverty for, depending on your source and slant, about 800 million people. They don’t need to consider the time the country’s property industry lost control – the kind of loss that’s immiserating much of Ireland and enriching property developers – mid-last decade and the party decided to rein it in with Xi introducing its principle of, “Houses are for living, not for speculation”. Late last year the Wall Street Journal reported how the Chinese economy was in trouble, with things like growth slowing – the kind of things our own state media tells us are so great here – and that the country was on the “verge of a deflationary spiral”. Xi’s response: “What’s so bad about deflation? Don’t people like it when things are cheaper?”
As the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs put it, with the implication that it’s a bad thing, given their politics, “In the west, money influences politics, but in China it is the opposite: politics influences money.”
The party is open about its intentions for state media. “In China, journalism constitutes one of the major parts of the party's enterprises, the news media is the mouthpiece of the party and the people, and must be under the leadership of the party. In its thought, the news must take Marxism as its guide,” according to state news agency Xinhua in 2005.
Since taking control of the country in 1949 the Communist Party has recognised, like philosopher Louis Althusser, that media is an ideological state apparatus, a channel to promote the ideology of a given state, whether that be a liberal democracy in the west or a Marxist-Leninist state elsewhere.
“To my knowledge, no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the state ideological apparatuses. I only need one example and proof of this: Lenin’s anguished concern to revolutionise the educational ideological state apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized state power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism,” wrote Althusser in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.
That’s how and why it works in China, governed by a party that controls the state means of communication and whose governance is legitimised by what it’s done for its people. Again: you don’t have to like or agree with it, though criticism should come with some western self-appraisal.
A bad name for fuckin’ eejits
We experience a different censorship in Ireland: defamation laws that privilege the names and reputations of those who can afford vexatious and intimidatory High Court proceedings; a mainstream media whose foundational ideology is anti-republicanism, staffed by journalists with homogenous class interests and instinctively hostile to anything left of the Labour Party or right of Fine Gael; a parliament whose ruling parties this year conspired with Ireland’s most corrupt politician alive to limit how often we hear from our opposition parties; the threat of hate speech legislation imposed from above by the European Union.
I’ve written about freedom of expression for both The Ditch and Seán Murray’s Red Wolf, about how the left should reject state efforts to regulate speech, about how embracing that kind of intervention in the Free State, with our history of section 31, is senseless for anyone who considers themselves left, about how supporting hate speech legislation only reinforces the state, which exists, for now, as a vehicle to advance the interests of our ruling class.
Most left parties in the country, even the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, supported the legislation, some with a caveat or two, others more wholeheartedly. If they weren’t able to understand how power has historically used this kind of legislation, contemporary examples illustrate why the left should’ve resisted it.
The state’s previous justice minister, speaking about the proposed legislation, said she considers among the far right, the supposed targets of the legislation for its left advocates, people who are “anti-government, anti-state”. We would rely on the same gardaí who brutalised Mothers Against Genocide protesters, gardaí whom our current justice minister supported blindly, to investigate offences under its terms. Recently John Mooney in British newspaper the Sunday Times ran to the guards to see if they’d investigate chants of Death to the IDF outside the US embassy.
The Irish right, to which the left has ceded opposition to that hate speech legislation, has now discovered the appeal of what it once condemned as cancel culture. With the Trump administration using the spectacle of Charlie Kirk’s assasination to renege on its claimed commitment to free speech and sell hate speech legislation to its base, the Sunday Independent’s Éilis O'Hanlon stood to attention. “This entire column,” she wrote, “could be filled with examples of paragons of the left, in Ireland as elsewhere, who either stayed silent last week after a man was shot dead for having the ‘wrong’ opinions, or who dived headfirst into the ideological sewer.” Silence, respectful or otherwise, isn’t even good enough.
Independent Ireland TD Ken O’Flynn, who gives fuckin’ eejits a bad name, is trying to get Bob Vylan’s Vicar Street concert cancelled because of lead singer’s Bobby Vylan’s celebration – which he maintains was not in fact a celebration – of Charlie Kirk’s death, the thinking behind O’Flynn’s campaign likely no more than, sure, isn’t every man at it. His party leader Michael Collins sought to have a moment’s silence for Kirk when the Dáil resumed this week, an attempt to bring this American pantomime into our parliament, the kind of performance the Americans would consider only proper.
Those on top just laugh
What all these people share is their lack of and claimed opposition to institutional state force. Any day we speak about anything other than housing, healthcare and education – matters of material importance that, when considered with a true class analysis, encompass issues sometimes dismissed as identitarian – is a good one for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, as well as their constituents and proxies across media, academia and civil society. With fury among us directed sideways, those on top laugh or sigh with relief, recognising these episodes only contribute to a culture that further empowers the state.
For pragmatism those considering policing the speech of others should hold off till they have a control of their respective states similar to that of the Chinese Communist Party, along with a similar track record. For principle you could look to Karl Marx himself, whose opinions on freedom of expression differed from the Leninist interpretations of his theories, in Freedom of the Press.
“A censorship law is an impossibility because it seeks to punish not offences but opinions, because it cannot be anything but a formula for the censor, because no state has the courage to put in general legal terms what it can carry out in practice through the agency of the censor,” he wrote. As the kind of speech states target swings from left to right, those subject to these states have the option of returning to that principle.
On my first day in the China Daily office another editor came over to my desk and gave me a copy of the paper’s style guide, a thick volume, but told me I didn’t need to read it all. “Just look at the sections for Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong,” he told me. “Nothing else is all that important.” Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong: important right enough, whether you consider the first Taiwan province or the Republic of China. More important than showing what’s considered the appropriate reverence for someone like Charlie Kirk or the kind of utterance that would be criminalised, from either left or right, by hate speech legislation, that criminalisation serving only the state.
