Mary Kay Magistad

Mary Kay Magistad

Mary Kay Magistad has been The World's Beijing-based East Asia correspondent since 2002, focusing especially on a rapidly changing China and the impact of China's rise on the region and the world.

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On the road with the Chinese Foreign Ministry

August 25, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Bus for journalists in Xinjiang (photo: Mary Kay Magistad)


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 4 On the road with the Chinese Foreign Ministry: the good, the bad and the struggle for the soul of a story

It was around midnight, on a bus, coming off a plane near the end of yet another 14-hour day traveling on a Chinese Foreign Ministry-organized trip through the western region of Xinjiang and province of Qinghai, when a fellow journalist turned to me and said, “What were they smoking when they came up with this schedule?”

It’s a thought that had been going through many of our minds this week. The most generous interpretation was, of course, that our Foreign Ministry facilitators wanted to make our trip as rich as possible with varied experiences – trips to farms and factories, news conferences with local officials, cultural shows.

A less charitable interpretation might be that there was a reason we were spending hours on a bus each day, with long stretches of time at places like an almost deserted peach orchard or desert reclamation site, but very little time talking to ordinary people, especially in towns inhabited predominantly by Uighurs – the sometimes restive Turkic Muslim ethnic group native to Xinjiang. (Indeed, Xinjiang’s formal name is the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region). If we were scheduled wall to wall with official briefings and bus rides, we couldn’t wander off and see how the Uighurs were feeling about their place in the midst of China’s modern economic miracle, or how they felt about the presence of an ever-growing number of Han Chinese migrants in a region that had, historically, been theirs.

In Turpan, a desert oasis, and mostly Uighur, town, we were promised lunch and “interviews with Uighurs” at a Uighur’s home. If our destination was a home, it looked an awful lot like a restaurant, complete with a little police office out front, a performance stage with giant speakers in back, and enough tables to seat a wedding party. We sat on cushions at low tables, under the shade of a grape arbor, and ate kebabs and spicy ragout and bowls of handmade noodles, and watched the Uighur owner and his 10-year-old daughter perform local dances with considerable grace and verve. Interviews? Not so much. After lunch, it was straight off to spend two hours at an unpopulated desert reclamation site – more time than any of us felt we needed.

Mutterings of discontent grew a little louder at this point. Why, asked some of us, did you tell us there’s “no time” for us to wander around Turpan and interview locals, when there’s two hours to do something like this? And why were we told there was “no time” to fly down to the ancient Uighur city of Kashgar, where a part of town that dates back to the Silk Road is now being torn down to make way for what the Xinjiang governor promises to be “the Shenzhen of the west” – a crowded, hyper-modern city of migrants – when we’re spending more hours on a bus than it would have taken to fly there?

The Foreign Ministry official traveling with us listened patiently and explained that his office tries to listen both to what foreign journalists want on a trip like this, and what local officials want, and then merges the two.

That may well be. But the purpose of Foreign Ministry-organized trips has long been to sell a certain way of looking at an issue. The more sensitive the issue, the more careful the organizers tend to be to make sure foreign journalists don’t have time to stray off-piste.

But things have come a long way since the first Foreign Ministry-organized trip I took, in 1996, to an area whose population was going to be resettled for the Three Gorges Dam project. It was basically man-on-man defense, with as many minders with us as there were journalists. We would be bussed into a village and told we had time to interview locals – but it was always with a Chinese minder hovering at our shoulder, often whispering suggested answers to the villagers.

Tibetan herder (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

There’s much less of that on this trip. When I opted out of a couple of activities that seemed to have no apparent news value, our Foreign Ministry facilitators accepted it without argument. And when some of us, having been originally told we were going to be interviewing Tibetan herdsmen, found that the arrangement was instead to interview the Tibetan Communist Party chief in a small town near Qinghai Lake, said we were going to walk down the road to talk to some herdsmen, no one objected, and no one followed us.

But there were still some echoes of the more controlled trips of the past. I felt them most strongly at Qinghai’s Ta’Er (Kumbum in Tibetan) Buddhist monastery, the most important Tibetan Buddhist monastery for the Gelugpa or “Yellow Hat” sect, which the Dalai Lama leads. Whenever I tried to talk to a Tibetan there, two or more local officials would immediately be at my elbow, listening in.

Some of this is a throw-back to the days, not so long ago, when foreign correspondents were only officially allowed to do the interviews the government said they could do, especially when traveling in the provinces — even if most flouted the rules most of the time, without consequence. New regulations on the books since January 2007 have thrown everything open, so we can, in theory, interview anyone who’s willing to talk to us. In practice, the old regulations were only selectively enforced by the government, and the new ones selectively ignored – in both cases, when what the government feels “sensitive issues” are involved.

One Foreign Ministry official traveling with us told me he’s a big fan of openness, of foreign journalists being able to travel anywhere in China. “But I can understand the feelings of local officials here, “ he said. “When foreign journalists talk to Uighurs at a sensitive time, it might stir up unrest. And if foreign journalists talk to Uighurs at times like that, it’s less like journalism and more like politics.” I argued that it’s exactly like journalism – talking to people from all sides of an issue, especially at a sensitive time. “But they might try to use you,” he said. I smiled. Yes, well, I said. Many people try to spin journalists. All we can do is be aware, and try to find the center of gravity nearest the truth.




Read Mary Kay Magistad’s dispatches in our special series


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Discussion

3 comments for “On the road with the Chinese Foreign Ministry”

  • Kat

    This is funny… what did you expect? Ever lived in a dictatorial country? I guess not. The only way to find what you are looking for is to go “undercover” as a tourist for example, and travel smart, so that you will be inconspicuous. Trust me, it’s the only way. Moreover, a person who looks similar is even better- easier to disguise.

    The so much cried about “Freedom of Press” is a contradiction in terms for a country that denies freedom. It is thus naive to assume that one will be granted freedom of interview and observation.

  • John

    Stop bitching! You don’t have to take this trip if you didn’t want to. What do you want to hear from the locals? Their desire to be independent? Then you can interview the exiles. Afghanistan is free, and you can interview the Taliban’s. Probably you don’t want to.

  • Mary Kay Magistad

    Thanks to Kat and John, for your comments. But I think you miss the point of this blogpost. It’s to give a snapshot of what it’s like to travel on a Foreign Ministry trip — what the spin is, and how the spinning is done.

    As a foreign correspondent who has lived in China for more than a decade, I can and do regularly interview a wide range of Chinese people on many subjects, including sensitive ones including, when I’ve traveled on my own — in Xinjiang, and in Tibetan areas of Western China. China is not as closed and dictatorial as you seem to think, Kat. To the contrary, I find it increasingly easy to talk to people here, in depth, about controversial issues. Some choose not to be interviewed — because there can, sometimes, be consequences — but most often, there are none, and younger Chinese, especially, feel it’s within their rights to express their opinions on most things. On the most sensitive subjects — one being ethnic tensions in Xinjiang and Tibet — there are more attempts at control. But even in Xinjiang, foreign correspondents officially have the right to come and report freely. And in Urumqi, at least, I have found this to be the case when going there on my own. (Although, in Kashgar, the local public security bureau has been far less welcoming.) This makes the itinerary of the Foreign Ministry trip that much more interesting — since, if its intention was to persuade journalists that all is well and thriving in Xinjiang, less of the old school approach to filling our time with irrelevant activities, and more confidence shown by giving us time to go off on our own (as we can do on our own, anyway), would have been more persuasive.

    And John, I don’t think there’s a parallel between the Taliban and the Chinese government. There’s a parallel, of a different kind, between China’s taming of its ‘wild west,’ and the United States’ taming of *its* wild west more than a century ago — and the way the concerns of native populations were regarded in each case. Also in parallel is the government’s narrative — which came through strongly on this trip — that what’s being done in the west is to bring civilization and development where there was none. Going on the Foreign Ministry trip allowed me to hear the story from that perspective, and contrast it with the narrative told by Uighurs *within* China. It’s not only exiles who can or do express discontent.