How to hold a news conference, Chinese provincial style
Follow along with Mary Kay Magistad’s special dispatches on her trip to the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, in China’s far west and the largely ethnic Tibetan province of Qinghai. Part 3
You’re a Chinese provincial leader. A group of foreign journalists is coming through, and you’re supposed to meet them. What do you do?
Judging from what we’ve encountered on this trip, you book a formal reception room in your provincial capital’s top hotel, then sit in a sprawling armchair up front, under glittering chandeliers, with the “leader” of the journalist “delegation” sitting next to you, a phalanx of local officials lined up in slightly smaller armchairs in a long row to your left, and journalists lined up in a long row of the same sort of armchairs to your right.
Hire young women in red silk Chinese dresses, called qipaos, to pour tea. Have at least two or three, so they can talk in whispers near the table in front of the speakers, where journalists put their recorders, since you didn’t leave enough room on the little table to the side of you, so it interferes with the recording. Have one of them wear white gloves, and carry the cordless microphone for journalists’ questions on a silver tray.
Have local journalists from state-run media film and photograph the event, which is set up to look like you are graciously receiving a delegation of supplicants for polite discussion rather than holding a news conference.
Speak in a monologue for as long as possible about the strengths and achievements of your province. An hour is good. Then say there’s only time for a few questions. Deflect or evade the sensitive ones. At the end, congratulate the journalists for their hard work and welcome them to visit again.
I first found out about this novel approach to giving a news conference when one of the Foreign Ministry facilitators of our trip pulled me aside a few days ago and asked if I would be the “representative” of our journalist “delegation.
“But we’re all equal here,” I protested. “I don’t represent anyone but myself and my own media organization.”
“This is a matter of protocol,” he persisted. “We can’t have an empty chair next to the governor of Xinjiang. Someone needs to be there, to thank him for meeting us, and make introductory remarks.”
“But this is a news conference,” I said.
“No, not a news conference, exactly,” he replied. “It’s a dialogue. But you can ask questions. On the record.”
Even in Beijing, the Chinese State Council and Foreign Ministry do the straight-forward official-at-podium or speakers-before-a-table thing, either with room for microphones up front or with a good sound system that journalists can plug into. In our meetings with the Xinjiang governor and Qinghai province vice-governor, the microphone was on a little side table, several feet from the official’s mouth, and cameras were kept well back, so the local state-run media could get the shot they wanted, of their local leader having a friendly if formal chat with a delegation of attentive foreign journalists. After each meeting, we found our photos from these encounters showing up on Chinese news websites.
Ok, so we were being used for propaganda. None of us felt comfortable about that. We consoled ourselves with the fact that we were getting access and interviews that might otherwise have been hard to get, even if, in return, they were getting photos to help the Chinese government burnish its image, at home and abroad.
But there were limits to how much any of us felt comfortable being props in a propaganda photo. In the end, someone from the Chinese Foreign Ministry took the seat the official had been trying to get me to fill in Xinjiang, and a Japanese journalist, who seemed to be more comfortable with the pageantry of protocol, took the seat when we met the vice-governor of Qinghai. Better him than me. Better still, if local governments grow confident enough to just let a news conference be a news conference, and realize that the best way to burnish their international image is to let the facts speak for themselves.
Read Mary Kay Magistad’s first dispatches in our special series
- On the road with China’s Foreign Ministry
- On the Road with the Chinese Foreign Ministry: Anatomy of an Explosive Story
More from The World’s Mary Kay Magistad
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