It is already the world leader in 4G technology, and #3 in smartphone sales. But while much of the world is embracing Huawei, the US market is wary. Last fall, a Congressional report said US networks and entities shouldn’t buy equipment from Huawei and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, because of security concerns.

Huawei says they’re just plain wrong. But this is about perceptions – and the recent spate of unrelated Chinese hacker attacks haven’t helped.

Huawei has a story it would like to tell – of a scrappy little telecommunications company started 25 years ago by a laid-off army engineer that’s grown into a leader in its field.

“Our vision is that in the future, information will explode, so we want to build as big a pipe as we can,” said Zhang Linbo, a guide at Huawei’s Exhibition Center at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. “We have already established our leading position in this area, like in IP network, fixed network, and wireless network, we are ranking in the top three. No other company can do this.”

That’s not even going into the consumer devices Huawei started making more recently –laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and USB dongles.

Just this week, Huawei announced it’s teaming up with Microsoft in Africa to offer a $150 smartphone, using Windows software.

And for Americans despairing of getting a consistent mobile phone signal, Huawei says it provides what it calls “no edge” networks – with overlapping circles of coverage, so there aren’t dropouts.

Huawei guide Zhang Linbo (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Those political issues played out in the House Intelligence Committee last autumn. Congressman Mike Rogers co-chaired a House Intelligence Committee investigation into whether Huawei, and fellow Chinese telecommunications company ZTE, pose a potential security threat to the United States.

“We’ve heard reports about backdoors and unexplained beaconing from the equipment sold by both companies,” said Rogers at the hearing. “Our sources overseas have told us there is reason to question whether the companies are tied to the Chinese government or whether their equipment is what it appears. Certainly, there are vulnerabilities built into the equipment that appear to be there by design.”

The Committee’s report didn’t cite any hard evidence that Huawei or ZTE had been spying, but speculated that they might in the future, if the Chinese government leans on them. So the report recommended that US government agencies and American businesses not use Huawei or ZTE equipment, lest it one day be used to spy, steal sensitive information, or shut down entire systems.

Duncan Clark, chairman of the Beijing-based hi-tech consultancy group BDA, found the argument far from convincing.

“I think it was a very unwise report, in that it’s cutting off to the US to access to one of the world’s largest providers of telecommunications and IT equipment,” Clark said.

He added that Huawei’s technology is some of the best, fastest and most competitively priced on the market. And the US could use all that because it’s been steadily falling behind the international standard.

According to Clark, part of the problem is that the telecom industry in the US is an old boys’ network. But he points out that if it’s a connection with China that raises concerns about security, Cisco and others telecommunications companies get many of their components from China, too.

Still, at least some security experts say Huawei’s code is much easier to break into than Cisco’s – and there’s the suspicion that if the Chinese government asked, Huawei couldn’t say no.

Such arguments clearly frustrate Scott Sykes, Huawei’s vice president for corporate media affairs.

“We have an impeccable track record in terms of security,” he said. “Nobody disputes this fact. We’ve been business for 25 years. We are in 140 countries. We are a $32 billion company.”

Huawei VP Corporate Media Affairs Scott Sykes. (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

And with two-thirds of Huawei’s revenue coming from outside of China last year, Sykes says it would be corporate suicide to act in a way that would lose international customers’ trust.

Huawei wants people to see it as an international company, and it’s trying to be more transparent, even though it’s still a private company, and the reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, still doesn’t give interviews. But, increasingly others in the company do, to dispel what they say are false impressions, for instance, in terms of company ownership.

“Zero percent is owned by the Chinese government,” said Scott Sykes, adding that the company is not working with Chinese military intelligence. And while, yes, it has a Communist Party Committee, so do many foreign companies of any size in China, including Walmart. It’s part of the cost of doing business, and the committee doesn’t interfere in business decisions.

But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t – goes the counterargument – a compelling enough one that Australia and Canada, have blocked Huawei from some contracts, and India’s been wary. Britain, on the other hand, has gone ahead, building a network with Huawei, after doing its own security tests.

“In some ways, I think Huawei is much more sophisticated than China (the government),” said BDA Chairman Duncan Clark. “Huawei’s problem is that it’s bumping up against the glass ceiling that China itself imposes through its foreign policy, or through the perception it creates around the world. The resistance to Chinese products or Chinese companies is something Huawei is powerless to change.”

The recent spate of Chinese hacker attacks on US media certainly hasn’t helped. On top of all this, the US International Trade Commission now has two cases pending against Huawei for patent infringement.

If Huawei is found guilty, the products with patent issues would be banned for sale in the US, and that could affect any or all of Huawei’s consumer product line.

Still, Huawei doesn’t give up easily. It’s big in the world, and wants to be big in America. But for all the allure of faster, cheaper, more reliable telecom networks, and cool phones and pads and dongles, there’s at least as much ambivalence about whether this is all a hi-tech Trojan horse.

Huawei is left with the unenviable task of proving a negative.

The World’s Mary Kay Magistad tells anchor Marco Werman that China already has some clean air legislation, but many factories just ignore it.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Remember a week or so ago when the air in Beijing was so polluted that it was ranked as “crazy bad”? Well, it’s happening again for the fourth time in recent weeks. It’s gotten so bad that a real estate tycoon has launched an online campaign for a Chinese clean air act. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing, staying indoors. Are people in China talking about a turning point here, Mary Kay?

Mary Kay Magistad: Well, a lot of people think, you know, how much more of this can we take. It hasn’t just been four times in the last three weeks, it’s been almost the last three weeks. By international standards an air quality index of 300 or above is hazardous. There have been days where I’ve looked at the index and it’s been 300, down from 700 or down from 500, and I’ve thought, oh, it’s not such a bad day. And yes, a lot of people here are talking about it. The smog that’s affecting China right now, it’s not just Beijing. It’s an area that’s the size of Texas times two.

Werman: Wow.

Magistad: It’s huge. And this is a significant issue that the Chinese government has been sort of kicking down the road as an issue that it has to deal with. And I think there’s been such an outcry this month, there’s a recognition that something needs to be done, and more quickly than perhaps had originally been planned.

Werman: How is it affecting people’s health?

Magistad: Hospitals are seeing more people come in with respiratory problems. Those that were prone to asthma are getting asthma attacks. You know, one of the things that’s behind this as a long term problem, is that the current economic model is, we’re going to continue to promote urbanization. We’re going to continue to build more buildings. We’re going to build more roads. All that takes cement, it takes steel, it takes building materials. You need factories to produce those materials. Those factories need coal, and coal is responsible for a lot of the pollutants that are in the air.

Werman: You know, I read there’s even an online campaign, we mentioned it earlier, for a China clean air act by a real estate tycoon and Internet blogger, Pan Shiyi, and it’s said to be getting millions of followers, so it seems some people in China, many people, recognize the pitfalls of this non-stop growth.

Magistad: Absolutely. I mean, this is air everyone is breathing. These are concerns that people have about the health of their children, of themselves, of their elderly parents, and about the future of China and what the air is going to be like to breathe 20, 30 years from now. Interestingly, there actually is already something like a clean air act, or a movement toward it, by the government itself. The Ministry of Environmental Protection has come out with a new five-year plan on how to control atmosphere pollution, and there’s an amendment to an existing law that has been languishing for three years, but if it were to be passed, it calls for use of clean coal, and for coal scrubbers to be used and for various other steps that would help reduce emissions across the board. The problem is many factories, many managers, many heads of industrial companies don’t really want to have to do that because it costs money and it will eat into their profits. As long as they have political connections and they’ve got the ear of decision makers, and the decision makers buy their argument that it’s more important for China’s economy to grow fast now than to worry about the long-term effects on the environment, it’s going to be tough to get these sorts of clean air measures passed through and implemented in a way that’s going to make a real difference.

Werman: Right. You know, it’s funny, not funny ha-ha, but even the pollution triggers the profiteering impulse in China, it seems. I gather that some people are doing a brisk business selling face masks, and there’s even a guy who’s selling cans of clean air?

Magistad: Right. This is a rather self-promoting businessman, a very wealthy businessman, who’s doing this to make a point. So it’s cans of clean air that are about the size of a Coke can that he’s labeled the air with sort of different regions of China, the clean air of Tibet, or the clean air of southwestern Yunnan in the mountains, or whatever. It’s a joke, but it’s also to get people to think about this is what it comes to, that you need to inhale from a tin can to be able to get some clean air in this place.

Werman: Can you actually taste the air, Mary Kay?

Magistad: You can, actually, you can.

Werman: Can you feel it?

Magistad: Yeah, in fact the last couple of days I think it’s made me feel a little dizzy.

Werman: Wow.

Magistad: But there are a lot of people here who came to live in China with no particular health issues who have developed asthma. There are families of ex-pats that are thinking of leaving. But, you know, millions, tens of millions of Chinese, hundreds of millions, are affected by this pollution and most of them aren’t going anywhere. It’s their government that has to be thinking about their welfare, and not just about how to grow the economy.

Werman: The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing. Thanks a lot, Mary Kay.

Magistad: Thank you, Marco.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

01-31-2013 01:00; PM2.5; 276.0; 326; Hazardous (at 24-hour exposure at this level)

— BeijingAir (@BeijingAir) January 30, 2013

Hazardous pollution again in Beijing: at 2pm: PM2.5; 476.0; 484. And to catch up with US GDP, China needs to triple energy use? Good luck.

— MaryKay Magistad (@MaryKayMagistad) January 29, 2013

Government spokesman Hong Lei said the view, expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “neglects the facts.”

Clinton had warned that the US opposed any action that would undermine Japanese administration of the islands.

Marco Werman talks with The World’s Asia correspondent Mary Kay Magistad about the dispute.

“Scary. I’m one year older,” she says. “I’m nervous.”

Why?

“Because I’m still single. I have no boyfriend. I’m having big pressure to get married”: pressure from her parents, from friends, and from society.

Huang is a confident, personable young woman with a good salary, her own apartment, an MA from one of China’s top universities, and a wealth of friends. Still, she knows that these days, single, urban, educated women like her in China are called “sheng nu” or “leftover women” — and it stings.

It’s an odd label in a country with a surplus of single young men.

A television drama, that ran a couple of years ago called “Old Women Should Get Married,” featured a 33-year-old woman who watched her younger sister get married, suffered through blind dates (including one who turned out to be a drug dealer), and put up with her family telling her to stop being so picky and just find a man.

This kind of message gets hammered in multiple ways in China’s state-run media. Even the webpage of the government’s supposedly feminist All-China Women’s Federation featured articles about leftover women – until enough women complained.

So, what’s all this about?

“I argue that the ‘leftover women’ term is actually part of a sexist media campaign by the government, which is facing a severe demographic crisis,” says Leta Hong-Fincher, an American doing her sociology Ph.D at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

She’s written about the leftover women phenomenon, and she says state-run media started using the term in 2007, the same year the government warned that China’s gender imbalance – caused by selective abortions because of the one-child policy – was a serious problem.

“Ever since 2007, the state media have aggressively disseminated this term, in surveys, and news reports, and columns, and cartoons and pictures, basically stigmatizing educated women over the age of 27 or 30 who are still single.”

But the gender imbalance in China is one of too many men. There are an estimated 20 million more men under 30 than women under 30. So why the pressure on women to marry — specifically, educated, urban women? Huang Yingying says it has something to do with men wanting to marry down.

“There is an opinion that A quality guys will find B quality women, B quality guys will find C quality women, and C quality men will find D quality women,” Huang says. “The people left are A quality women and D quality men. So if you are a leftover woman, you are A quality.”

But it’s the “A” quality women the government most wants to procreate, to improve the ‘quality’ of the population, according to Leta Hong-Fincher.

“The Chinese population planning policy used to officially have a law promoting eugenics; they actually had the word ‘eugenics’ in the name,” she says. “Now they’ve changed it, because they recognize that’s kind of offensive. But that’s what the family planning policy is.”

Hong-Fincher says some local governments in China have even taken to organizing mixers, where educated young women can meet eligible bachelors. The goal is not only to improve the gene pool, but to get as many men paired off and tied down in marriage as possible, lest an army of restless, single men cause social havoc.

Some women hold out for guys of a certain height, or education level, or income — or those who already have houses and cars. And many guys insist on women who are young, beautiful, and not as well-off or well-educated as they are.

“…like yellowed pearls”

So the state-run media keep up a barrage of messages aimed at picky educated women. Here’s an excerpt from one titled, “Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy.”

“Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less. So by the time they get their MA or Ph.D, they are already old – like yellowed pearls.”

Ouch. Then again, even in the United States, women of a certain age might remember a 1986 Newsweek article that said women who weren’t married by 40 had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of finding a husband. It created its own wave of anxiety in educated, professional women at the time, and was widely quoted — for instance, in the movie “Sleepless in Seattle.”

Woman: “Just because someone is looking for a nice guy doesn’t make them desperate.”
Man: How about rapacious and love-starved.
Woman: No.
Man: It is easier to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after the age of…
Woman: That is absolutely untrue.
Man: Right, honey. Right.

She was right. Newsweek eventually admitted it was wrong, and a follow-up study found that two-thirds of the single, college-educated American women who were 40 in 1986 had married by 2010.

So it’s a little odd to be calling educated Chinese women leftover at 27 or 30. Even if China does have a long tradition of women marrying young, the average age of marriage has been rising, as it often does in places where women become more educated. A 29-year-old marketing executive, who asks to go by her English name, Elissa, tells me being single at this age isn’t half bad.

“Living alone, I can do whatever I like. I can hang out with my good friends whenever I like,” Elissa says. “I love my job, and I can do a lot of stuff all by myself, like reading, like going to theaters. I think one of the reasons I enjoy my life is that I have many single friends around me, so we can spend a lot of time together.”

Sure, she says, during a hurried lunch break, her parents would like her to find someone, and she’s gone on a few blind dates, for their sake.

“Disaster,” Elissa says. “I didn’t do these things because I wanted to, but because my parents wanted it, and I wanted them to stop worrying. But I don’t believe in the blind dates. How can you get to know a person in this way?”

Elissa says she’d love to meet the right guy, but it’ll happen when it happens. Meanwhile, life is good – and she has to get back to work.

She speaks with anchor Jeb Sharp about what life in Beijing is like when the air becomes unbreathable.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Jeb Sharp: If you followed the news over the weekend, you probably caught wind of the off-the-charts smog crisis in Beijing. On an unofficial air pollution scale of zero to 500 kept by the US embassy there, smog levels hit a jaw-dropping 755. The World’s China correspondent, Mary Kay Magistad, is one of the millions in Beijing who’s been gasping for breath. Mary Kay, how bad is it?

Mary Kay Magistad: Okay, well, on a clear day you can see the Western Hills, which are about sixteen miles away. Yesterday I couldn’t see a block and a half. Basically there’s cold air that’s being held in place by warm air over the top of it, and there’s no wind blowing through, so we’re sort of stuck with whatever emissions there are for a few days. And this happens every few months in Beijing, but this is by far the worst that I can remember in 14 years of living here.

Sharp: What do you do, how do you live, when conditions are like this?

Magistad: Well, you stay inside, breathe shallow breaths, and hope that a strong wind comes through and blows it somewhere else.

Sharp: And are people there accepting, or are they angry? What’s the mood?

Magistad: So on Weibo, which is China’s version of Twitter, there have been something like 60 million tweets about the pollution. It’s not just in Beijing, it’s actually in several cities in northern China, because this is a regional issue. There are factories all around these northern provinces that are highly polluting. This time at least seven cities had very, very serious pollution. And so this has sparked a lively discussion on Weibo, with a lot of people asking why the government isn’t doing more to move China more quickly to a cleaner type of development, not relying so much on dirty coal and low emission standards to try to further growth. The Chinese government already started to move about seven or eight years ago toward improving emission standards and trying to clean up to some extent the standards for emissions from new factories.

Sharp: Meantime how is the government responding?

Magistad: Well, it’s interesting. In the past, in past years, the government tried to downplay pollution and even sort of pretended it wasn’t pollution. They’d call it fog. Now they’re admitting that there’s serious pollution, particularly particulate matter of the fine variety, the kind that can get lodged in your lungs. And it’s interesting how this came about. The US embassy here has monitoring instruments within the embassy grounds, and they’ve been publicizing via Twitter what the readings are every hour. So a lot of Chinese followers of Twitter have been keeping an eye on what the pollution readings are and after the Chinese government sort of sounded offended and made its representations to the US embassy and said, well, how would you like it if we put monitoring equipment in US cities, and the response was be our guest, the Chinese government, the Beijing government, has decided that it should be reporting levels as well and it has been reporting fairly accurately. But basically they’re recognizing that this is an issue and they’re encouraging people to keep exposure to a minimum, keep kids in, don’t let them play outside until this passes.

Sharp: The World’s China correspondent, Mary Kay Magistad, from Beijing. Thanks, Mary Kay.

Magistad: Thank you, Jeb.

Sharp: Just how thick is the smog in Beijing? We’ve got pictures of the CCTV Tower taken over the weekend. Good luck finding the building. The pictures are at TheWorld.org.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The CCTV Headquarters building in Beijing, Jan. 13, 2013. (Photo: Chas Pope/Flickr)

The CCTV Headquarters building in Beijing, Jan. 12, 2013. (Photo: Chas Pope/Flickr)

*UPDATE: A previous version this report included incorrect dates for the photographs of the CCTV Headquarters building. The correct dates are now reflected in the photo captions. We regret the error.

Didn’t work so well in Guangdong, this past week.

Anger exploded when propaganda official Tuo Zhen swapped out the front-page New Year’s editorial of the popular Southern Weekly newspaper, calling for greater civil rights, with an anodyne version, saying China’s hopes lay in the new leadership.

The journalists responded by going on strike — and their protests for freer press in China caught on.

“They insult our intelligence!” yelled one protester. And in a heated exchange, a young man said he supported the constitution and opposed what the censor did. An older man responded, “Well, the constitution is for the Communist Party running China.” The younger guy retorted “The constitution grants the freedom of speech!”

He turned to the crowd, yelling “should we support freedom of speech?” And they roared their approval.

A similar rallying cry went up online. Even with censors furiously deleting critical posts, enough stayed up long enough to be seen by millions, with many – including celebrities – offering vocal support.

“This is a severe warning to the authorities, that their traditional way of managing the media has triggered anger. They need to do better,” said Li Datong, a former newspaper editor.

Li Datong used to edit the edgy supplement “Freezing Point” in the China Youth Daily in Beijing. He lost his job in 2006 for doing something too close to real journalism for the comfort of China’s authoritarian leaders.

Back then, he said, far fewer people in China knew when the censors weighed in, even when they got rid of someone. He’s surprised and heartened by how much celebrities, and even some commercial websites, have taken up the Southern Weekly cause.

“It’s a great sign of progress,” Li said. “It shows that people’s awareness is growing, that freedom of speech shouldn’t be just for a few people.”

But Li wouldn’t call himself an optimist about the current situation. After all, it’s not yet clear what new Party chief Xi Jinping thinks about all this.

Yukon Huang, who headed the World Bank’s China office for seven years and is now with Carnegie’s Asia program, says the past week’s events have given China’s new leaders much to think about.

“If they deal with it successfully, that preserves stability. But then, there is that slippery slope,” he said. “And the slippery slope gets slipperier. And the internet and information dissemination make it more risky. And the risks emanate and go to Beijing much sooner. And the consequences of how they’re handled are much greater, so the risks are magnified.”

The way this dispute was handled was with a compromise; the Southern Weekly journalists would go back to work and wouldn’t be punished for striking, and the censors would back off a little.

But, at the same time, some protesters have been arrested and some people who made comments online are being threatened with charges of subversion. And a Beijing newspaper, the Beijing News, had to buckle under the pressure of censors, when it tried to make its own stand.

Still, Li Datong says, something was gained.

“All the support that came this week showed journalists it’s worth fighting. They can hold on to that as they go forward.”

Li’s done a little fighting of his own. He says even though he’s retired, he’d been getting regular visits from the Public Security Bureau. They’d tell him they were monitoring his phone calls, and would sometimes block him from giving interviews.

Finally, a few weeks ago, he says, he blew up at them. He told them they were shameless, and if they didn’t stop their harassment, he’d write an open letter detailing everything they’d been doing.

Chuckling, he says, they haven’t been by since.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden talk with incoming Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Oval Office, Feb 2012. (Photo: White House/ Pete Souza)

China’s government is increasingly trying to control the message and it’s increasingly having difficulty doing that.

The latest example happened this week in Guangdong, when a government censor replaced the annual New Year’s editorial of a well-respected newspaper. And people didn’t like it.

Marco Werman explores the issue with The World’s Beijing correspondent Mary Kay Magistad, who is currently in Boston.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. What happens when the New Year’s editorial in a respected newspaper gets pulled and replaced by a censor’s message? Well, that’s what happened in Guangdong, China this week. it’s part of a trend in recent months of the Chinese government increasingly trying to control the message, but with more than half a billion Chinese online, that’s not as easy as it used to be. The World’s Beijing correspondent Mary Kay Magistad is in our Boston studio today. Mary Kay, what happened in Guangdong precisely and why is it getting so much attention online?

Mary Kay Magistad: Okay, so basically there was a well-known weekly columnist named Dai Zhiyong, who had put together a New Year’s editorial for the front page, called China’s Dream, a Difficult Dream. And he was talking about the Chinese people’s desire for greater freedom and rule of law. Journalists in China are used to having their articles censored–certain lines, certain paragraphs are taken out. But in this case the entire editorial was replaced by a shorter message from the Guangdong Province censor, who’s message was basically that China’s dream, China’s hopes can only be achieved by putting your faith in the new leader, Xi Jinping. You know, it sounded very old school, kind of the sort of thing that might have been said when Mau Zedong was the head of the party. And there’s been a lot of chatter online, a lot of criticism of this move, like who do you think you are? What do you think this is removing an editorial completely, and why do you think we’re gonna take seriously something like this?

Werman: So the government is trying to exert more control it seems lately. Why now? What’s going on?

Magistad: Well, we’re in the middle of a leadership transition in China. The party leaders changed in November. The same people will also become state leaders of China in March at the National People’s Congress. In the midst of this all the party is very jittery. It knows that it has a lot of huge challenges that it’s facing. A lot of policies that probably should’ve been changed a long time ago, but weren’t because the party doesn’t really want to relinquish control of anything. One of the things that they seem to have decided to do is to squeeze control of the internet. They’ve been deleting Weibo accounts of activists and they’ve been requiring that Weibo users now have to register with their real names and must be aware that if they say anything “illegal” that that could be pulled and there could be serious consequences.

Werman: I mean more than ever, Mary kay, there seems to be this disconnect between what the government is trying to do, you know, living with this old construct, with propaganda censors and the like, and how people both inside and outside China are perceiving it. Why is the government so tone deaf?

Magistad: It’s a really good question. I think part of it is just habit. This is how the party has always functioned and even as the party has been very pragmatic and flexible in moving into the modern age in terms of economic reform, I think it really fears political reform because it’s not sure how many steps it can take in that direction before it loses control.

Werman: So with the Chinese government trying hard to control the message during this transition, I’d love to know how this affects the way you operate, Mary Kay. Is it getting harder to report?

Magistad: It’s not really getting that much harder to report. There had been new regulations put in place that said that foreign journalists could interview anyone who agreed to be interviewed. That was in sharp contrast to regulations before that said basically, we had to ask permission for almost everything. When the various revolutions in the Middle East happened in early 2011, the government got really spooked by this, particularly when there was an anonymous call online that Chinese too should gather for a Jasmine Revolution.

Werman: Right, I remember that.

Magistad: Around that time the foreign ministry gathered their various foreign correspondents, including me, and said well you know that regulation that said you can interview anyone who agrees to be interviewed? We’re not changing the regulation, but you just didn’t understand the nuances of the regulation, and that is if we decide that it’s a special circumstance, a special situation, we decide who you have to ask permission from.

Werman: I see. And had you understood the nuance, Mary Kay?

Magistad: Not in that way, no. But okay, that said, you know, it was a little tense then. It’s loosened up significantly since the and so now the main thing that most foreign journalists are dealing with is that when you’re trying to access information online, when you’re trying to send a story, the internet is squeezed. But it’s not just for foreign correspondents. It’s for everyone in China.

Werman: The World’s China correspondent, Mary Kay Magistad, who is here in Boston with us for a couple of days. Thanks so much.

Magistad: Thank you, Marco.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Listen to some of Mary Kay’s 2012 China coverage:

Follow @marykaymagistad

What to do? Well, some people in many parts of the world are paying heed. In France, there’s a mountain where people are converging to await the arrival of aliens. In Russia, there’s been a run on essential supplies.

But according a survey conducted for Reuters earlier this year, China ranks highest when it comes to end-of-the-world fears. Some 20 percent of those surveyed expected something to happen on December 21, 2012.

Just this week, my housekeeper, Hou Jinrong, asked me if I think it’s true that the world will end next week.

“I heard that December 21, 2012, when winter comes, I heard it’s the end of the world. If the world still exists, there would be no sunlight. So now people in the countryside, every family is rushing to buy candles and store those candles at home,” Hou said.

She added that that includes her own relatives, back in her village in the central province of Henan. She thinks they’re being a little superstitious – but then again …

“I cannot tell them not to do it, because I don’t know whether it’s true,” she said. “If it’s true, they’ll blame me for that.”

You have to give people points for optimism when they think the end of the world would still leave both them and their family members alive and well, and able to continue to rag on each other.

In China, the concern that everything might come to a skidding halt on December 21 came in part from the movie “2012,” which was a smash hit here.

Add that to the mix in a place where rumors and panic have been known to spread quickly, and where social networking turbocharges that process. There have already been more than 60 million posts on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, about next week’s scheduled end of days.

Pang Yen Ting, a 17-year-old high school student in Beijing, says her friends are talking about it, and posting stories about it online.

“They just talk about who do you want to spend the last day with?” she said.

Pang says she wants to spend December 21, with her family – just in case.

Just down the street, a young advertising copywriter named Guan Qiang pauses between drags on his cigarette and looks amused when I ask if he thinks the world will end in eight days.

Barely keeping a straight face, he tells me if CCTV – China’s Central Television – didn’t say so, so it can’t be true.

In other words, if CCTV, the government mouthpiece, isn’t calling the end of the world, move on, have another cigarette.

But Guan admits that even some of his friends – educated, urban, young professionals – are laying in provisions.

“A lot of my friends are talking about it. They say there will be three days when it’s going to be really cold, and people will spend three days in darkness.”

After that, he says, it’ll be okay. There’s that mix of optimism and pragmatism again.

Others in China are making more elaborate preparations; one guy used his life savings to build an ark – like Noah.

My housekeeper, Hou Jinrong, is pretty stoic about the whole thing.

“Who knows what will happen? It might be an earthquake, or tsunami, or volcano eruptions. You may die. You may not die,” Hou said. “When I was young, my mom told me the end of the world is going to be scary. A lot of weird things will happen.”

Or not. I ask Hou if she’s scared of what might happen next week, and she laughs.

“What’s the point of being scared?” she said. “I have to get on with my life.”

Still, she’ll have the candles. Just in case.

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Step into the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center in the basement of an apartment building, and you step back in time.

Yang Peiming, the art center’s founder and owner, was a teenager when the China’s Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. He became a Red Guard – he says just about everyone his age did. But then another group of Red Guards attacked his family’s house, ransacked their belongings, even took his stamp collection. The whole experience made Yang start to see through the propaganda of the time.

“Cultural Revolution gave a very good lesson. When you sit down, you think many things. When you’re thinking, you will distinguish what is real, what is fake, and what is good and what is bad,” Yang said.

Healthy farm animals during the Great Famine (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

“In the Great Famine, there was nothing to eat so they put a big pig in the picture, so at least people could watch the pig,” he said with a laugh.

These days, propaganda in China is decidedly more slick.

The newscast on Chinese Central Television looks like a newscast anywhere. But behind the scenes, the propaganda apparatus is still hard at work. Chinese journalists still get regular directives from the Propaganda Bureau about what to write, what not to write, where to place stories on a page, and how long to leave them up online.

It’s all rather annoying for journalists like Yu Chen of the Southern Metropolis Daily, who’d like to do more real journalism.

He says that censorship of traditional newspapers has gotten really tight in recent years — only the Party newspapers, like the People’s Daily, are allowed to have freer debate on issues.

“At least, there’s social media,” he said. He and other journalists have been using Twitter and the Chinese equivalent Weibo to get ideas out that otherwise would be muffled or shaped into the story the government wants people to hear.

Even that arena is getting renewed scrutiny from China’s new propaganda czar, Liu Qibao. After disappearing for a few days earlier this month (he was mysteriously pulled off a planned trip to Vietnam, Laos and North Korea), he emerged to say he was studying how to strengthen control of the internet. He said the media — or, as he put it, the “propaganda, ideological and cultural front lines” — “must serve the Party. That is their cardinal task.”

He went on to say, “They must explain profound theories in simple language, to enter people’s hearts and minds.”

That’s propaganda, all right.

But Dali Young, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, says the Party’s not so comfortable calling it what it is, anymore – at least, not publicly.

“In fact, the Propaganda Ministry has a building that does not carry its name in front. Sometimes, it feels like that department works almost like an underground organization, and that actually says something,” he said. “It used to be that the Propaganda Department would issue a lot of directives, publicly. That’s no longer happening. Now, they’d make a phone call. They don’t want to publicly say, this is what I do – censorship.”

That’s not surprising, given how media-savvy and sophisticated much of China’s population has become. Almost half are now online so information can be checked and counter-checked, and skepticism is rife.

Propaganda Poster Museum Owner Yang Peiming (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

“I think the government has come to realize propaganda cannot be so important like yesterday,” he said. “Education should be proved by the deeds you have done, how much you solve the problems of the people really, and not only lip service, or the like in the propaganda posters.”

China’s new leaders seem to get this. At least, it’s said that at this time of alarmingly wide and growing income disparity, and disgust with corruption, they’re reading up on what caused the French Revolution.

The message from this propaganda art museum – this glimpse of an idealized Communist China that never really was – may well be, don’t believe your own publicity.

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China has accused the exiled Dalai Lama of stirring up the unrest.

And now China wants to prosecute people who attempt to self-immolate.

Normally the story would not garner a lot of attention but it did, not only because the residents won… But also because their story made it into the Chinese media.

Or did it?

Like a tree falling in the woods, it’s unclear if this actually happened.

Details are sketchy and the court is backpedaling on whether someone was actually sentenced.

These are poor people from the countryside who have grievances against local officials and travel to the capital city in the ancient tradition of petitioning the emperor, and hoping the central leadership will do something to help them.

What often happens, is that local officials, worried about their positions and who don’t want complaints against them will send thugs to hurt the petitioners, sometimes even killing them.

If the story is true and the local officials are sentenced to jail, this represents a step forward for ordinary citizens to have their grievances dealt with.

And then there’s everyone else. Most Chinese people buy what they can afford, and take their chances that the food they buy hasn’t been illegally adulterated, that the milk they bring home is safe to give their children. Billions of meals are eaten each day in China, and most are just fine – give or take a little excessive pesticide used on crops, antibiotics used on chickens and pigs, and polluted ground water watering them all.

And there is good news – a fair bit of it. More Chinese are eating better than at any point in China’s history. As one Chinese farmer once joked to me, “we used to eat what the pigs ate. Now, we eat the pigs.” Chinese, on average, now eat four times more meat per person than they did 30 years ago. Aside from a spike in heart disease and obesity, and the challenges of producing all that meat (China is largely self-sufficient in pork despite being chronically short of land and water) that seems to many people to be a pretty great thing.

But every so often – too often, for a growing chorus of Chinese voices – a fiendishly creative bad actor finds a way to make a quick buck by passing off one thing as another. Pork is made to taste like beef, due to a carcinogenic chemical brushed on it. Watermelons explode, after being injected with a chemical to make them grow faster and bigger. Rotten fruit is pickled and treated with chemicals to make it look fresh on supermarket shelves. And, of course, the most infamous case — in 2008, milk and infant formula were doctored with the chemical melamine, which looks in tests like protein. That allowed middlemen to water down milk and still pass the protein tests. It also made at least 300,000 people ill, and killed at least six infants.

That would be bad enough, except it turns out the government knew this was a problem months before it acted to stop it. It didn’t want a food scandal to put a damper on the Beijing Olympics, so it waited until afterward to deal with the mess.

Ever since, the Chinese public has become more vigilant and more vocal in demanding food safety. It has helped that, for most of that time, an already vibrant Chinese internet scene has been turbocharged by more than 300 million people using Weibo – the closest thing China has to Twitter – to share ideas and information – especially about issues that affect everyone, like food safety.

Food safety blogger Wu Heng has ridden this wave. He starting his blog in his graduate school dorm room in Shanghai in January, and was getting millions of hits by May. He and about 30 volunteers post stories on food safety scandals around the country, and what the government is doing about them. The Shanghai government has praised his efforts; he’d like to see both the local and national governments streamline and sharpen theirs on improving food safety.

“I think the government does know food safety issues are important, but they’re giving other things a higher priority, like fast economic growth and creating jobs,” he says. “But this can’t continue. People are losing trust in the government.”

It’s food for thought for China’s new Communist Party leaders, as they take the helm this week.

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President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden talk with Vice President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China and members of his delegation in the Oval Office, Feb 2012. (Photo: White House/ Pete Souza)

Meet the new leaders of China’s Communist Party. At the top is the incoming president, Xi Jinping. He’s 59, the son of a well-known reformer but most of the other leaders introduced at Thursday’s news conference are older and conservative.

The World’s Mary Kay Magistad looks at what that might mean for China’s future.

The event was meant to be cute – kid reporters asking senior ministers questions – a little entertainment on the sidelines of the Party Congress. They hadn’t banked on 11-year-old Sun Luyuan, pink bow askew in her hair.

“I want to ask the uncles and aunties here one question,” Sun Luyuan said. “Grandpa Hu (meaning President Hu Jintao) said in his report that the health of the people should be improved. But even at my school, there have been problems with our lunches. Some students got food poisoning after drinking the milk and others got sick after eating the food. I like snacks, but how can I know what I’m eating is safe?”

This is a question many Chinese would like to ask their leaders, especially after the 2008 milk scandal, when the plastic melamine was put in infant formula to pass protein tests. It left six infants dead, and made another 300,000 kids sick. Since then, Chinese have become more outspoken in protesting against ever-more-creative food adulteration. They want their government to do more to prevent it.

As China has become more affluent, Chinese are eating more meat – four times more than 30 years ago. But ramping up to feed that demand comes with risks – and temptations for bad actors looking to make a quick buck. The resulting food scandals concern Wu Heng, a 20-something food safety blogger.

“Take pork, for example,” Wu said. “Some was found to contain the illegal additive clenbuterol. It’s put in pig feed to make the pork leaner, but it can also cause heart attacks in humans. It’s gotten to the point where some Chinese coaches tell their athletes not to eat Chinese pork, unless they raise the pigs themselves.”

Wu Heng didn’t start out as a food safety advocate. Just a year ago, he was a grad student at Fudan University, studying historical geography. But he kept hearing about food scandals. One involved a restaurant near his school, using a carcinogenic chemical to make pork taste like beef.

“And I had eaten it for maybe half a year,” he said. “I was shocked.”

So Wu Heng decided to do something about it. He started a food safety blog called “Throw it Out the Window.” He got the name from a story about President Theodore Roosevelt, who president was reading “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, about Chicago meat-processing plants at the turn of the last century. As the story goes, Roosevelt was so shocked to read what went into his sausage that he threw it out the window.

“From that point on, the US food safety situation became better and better,” said Wu Heng. “So that’s the reason I named my website ‘Throw it Out of the Window’.”

The United States once had its own problems with watered-down milk and bad food, killing children in immigrant slums. But then President Roosevelt created the Food and Drug Administration. Chris Hickey, who opened the FDA’s office in China more than four years ago, says the FDA’s founding came at a time in America that has some resonance with China’s situation today.

“There was a focus at that time on the limits of capitalism, and the challenges of industry if it went unregulated,” Hickey said. “In that context, Upton Sinclair’s novel, “The Jungle”, was really formative in bringing to the attention of the American people, issues related to food safety in the stockyards of Chicago. So it was in 1906 in that context that the modern FDA was formed.”

Wu Heng would like to see a similar revolution in Chinese food safety – and he’s doing his bit. His team of about 30 volunteers help him post information on food safety scandals around the country. And Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, has helped him spread the word.

Once Weibo users caught wind of his blog, the number of monthly hits went from about 10,000 in one month to more than five million the next. Shanghai food safety officials tracked him down on his campus and commended him, and he ended up linking to their website, so people with food safety complaints knew who to call. He says, the Shanghai authorities even consolidated four separate food safety hotlines into one.

“Before, people had to remember four numbers to call. It’s very difficult to remember that,” he said.

And if you called one of them?

“They’d say, it’s none of my business. You should call another department.”

This is a problem for food safety enforcement throughout China. Eleven separate agencies have overlapping responsibilities for monitoring some half a million food companies. The FDA’s Chris Hickey says while he thinks the Chinese government is serious about trying to improve food safety, their current approach is not a recipe for success.

“You can’t test your way to safety. Given the global economy and the way that food is traded and shipped all around the world, you’re never going to have enough inspectors, you’re never going to have enough labs to do the job. It’s just unrealistic.”

The alternative? Build a system that’s prevention-based. Hickey says the FDA has run workshops for Chinese government officials and food industry representatives, on how to do it.

“What our experts were able to do was sit over the course of three, four, five days, with 300 or 400 firms represented in the room, and not just talk about broad principles of food protection, but also develop with those firms specific plans for their plants, and how they can prevent adulteration that may be economically motivated.”

But that kind of change takes time – and many Chinese people are growing impatient. They’re unlikely to be soothed by the answer Education Minister Yuan Guiren gave to the 11-year-old reporter on the edges of the Party Congress.

He told her, “Local governments and schools are all working hard to ensure students’ food safety. In some places there have been problems – we can’t promise no problems will happen. But we’ve strengthened the political construction in terms of theory and environment.”

Maybe it’s just a matter of phrasing. Political jargon doesn’t work so well on the Chinese masses these days – clear information and results do.

With half a billion Chinese online, efforts like those of food safety blogger Wu Heng or 11-year-old Sun Luyuan can be turbo-charged and amplified – demanding safe food on the table, and a more responsive relationship between China’s government and its people.

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Mary Kay Magistad’s reporting on food safety in China is part of the “Food for 9 Billion” series, a collaboration with PBS Newshour and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Watch her report on NewsHour, Tuesday, Nov. 13.

Anchor Aaron Schachter speaks with The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Aaron Schachter: I’m Aaron Schachter. This is the World. President Obama is back in Washington today. His reelection means there’s no change at the very top of the US government, of course. Voters didn’t change much in Congress either. Different story in China where a massive leadership change officially got underway today. The Chinese communist party opened a pivotal congress, which will usher in a new set of Chinese leaders. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad is in Beijing. Mary Kay, there are obvious differences between the US elections this week and the Chinese process, to say the least. Tell us about today’s event.

Mary Kay Magistad: One of the big differences between China and the United States in terms of the leadership transition is, you, know, in the US, it’s very clear what the candidates’ positions are or at least what they say they are. There are a lot of debates. There’s a lot of information out in the public sphere. The public can comment. The public can criticize, and nothing happens to those who criticize or comment. In China, we don’t even know entirely for sure who’s making the decision about who the next leaders will be. We do know with a fair bit of likelihood that the top two leaders will be Xi Jhing Ping and Li Kyu Chung. We don’t know whether the least of the public burrow standing committee will be a total of seven people or nine. We don’t know which faction is going to win out in terms of getting their guys in. We don’t even actually know how the factions break down in terms of what they want, who is more reform-minded and who isn’t. But even at this late date, less than a week before the final leaders are announced, it seems that some of this is still in play. Some deals are still being done in back rooms.

Schachtner: So, Mary Kay, who was at the conference, and what does the organization of the deck chairs mean?

Magistad: Well, something that was kind of interesting about this particular party congress is how many of the old guards were there. And these are people who were in power ten years ago, fifteen years ago, there was Li Pong, the guy who at Dung Xiao Ping’s behest got on Chinese national television and said, “We’re ordering the troops into Tienanmen square to crack down on the demonstrators.” He was there sort of smiling faintly as he watched the proceedings. Jun Xe Min who’s 86 years old who was the previous head of the party. He left office ten years ago. He was there. Du Wong Ji who was the previous premier and the economic tzar in the 1990s and who actually, to his credit, pushed through a lot of tough economic reforms. He was there. Interestingly, he was probably the only senior leader who had allowed his hair to go gray. Everyone else was dying theirs black. He was also the only one wearing a sweater vest under his jacket. But the other guys, you know, they were making quite a show of being in smart suits and, you know, with their hair dyed black and basically making the point of we’re here. You can’t ignore us. You know, I mean think about what this would be like in the American context. It would be basically, you know, George Bush the elder and Jimmy Carter going into the Oval Office and saying OK, Barack. We’re going to tell you who you’re going to have in your cabinet, and you have to listen to us.

Schatchner: Now, before the congress got started, you told us about all these security measures that the government was going through to ensure that there was no leaf letting or anything like that. Has there been any noticeable public response to the congress, any errant ping pong balls bouncing around Tienanmen square?

Magistad: Haven’t seen any ping pong balls or balloons being released with hidden messages or leaflets thrown out of windows, but you know, the police certainly did seem to think of every possible way that a dissident could voice his or her discontent, and so far not too much of that happening

Schatcher: The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing. Thank you.

Magistad: Thanks Aaron.

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