PP: To begin, please explain what the project is and where the idea came from.<\/strong><\/p>\n MC:<\/strong> The idea for Assignment: China<\/em> came out of discussions at the University of Southern California\u2019s U.S.-China Institute that Clayton Dube, who runs the Institute, and I, were having about how Americans and others understand or misunderstand China.\u00a0 One of the things that became very evident was that most Americans get most of the information that shapes their views of China from the media.<\/p>\n As we looked at this and thought about it, having been a foreign correspondent for many years, it became very evident that most people don\u2019t have the slightest idea how foreign correspondents actually work. The process of how correspondents gather information shapes the final product people see on TV or hear on the radio or read in the newspaper or a website.<\/p>\n So we began this very ambitious project to tell the story of the people who have told the China story for the American media over the last 70 years.\u00a0 Who were these people, how did they end up in China, what did they do when they were the AP correspondent in Nanjing or Shanghai in 1949 at the time of the revolution, or the Time Magazine correspondent in Hong Kong in 1959, or trying to make sense of the Cultural Revolution in the \u201960s without being able to go there?\u00a0 What was it like to go to China with Nixon? What was it like to open the first U.S. news bureaus in Beijing after normalization?<\/p>\n We began by tracking down as many as possible of the current and former China correspondents and people who interacted with them. In the end we did well over 100 interviews.\u00a0 The series ended up being a narrative of Chinese history from 1945 to 2015, but from the perspective of the people who were on the ground trying to make sense of it as it happened.\u00a0 People talk about journalists writing the first rough draft of history, and so this is essentially an attempt to tell that first rough draft of history through the eyes and voices of people who were standing there experiencing it as it played out.<\/p>\n Some of these people have written books and memoirs but others had never written anything or spoken very much about their experiences.\u00a0 And so in those cases this was really precious material that hadn\u2019t come to light.\u00a0 People were able to give us home movies and private photo collections and all kinds of documents, and then we dug very deeply into the archives of the American television networks, and archives of presidential libraries, and places like Path\u00e9, and old photo agencies, and so on.\u00a0 So we were able to assemble what, even to us, turned out to be an astonishing collection of material.<\/p>\n PP: In the end, you did 10 or 12 episodes?<\/strong> For example, there\u2019s one episode called \u201cChina Watching\u201d that looks at the two plus decades when Western journalists were not able to go to China and had to sit in Hong Kong trying to figure out what was happening.\u00a0 The circumstances of being one step removed created its own sort of\u2014what\u2019s the right word\u2014it became kind of an art form different from conventional journalism in a lot of ways.\u00a0 A type of \u201cPeking-ology.\u201d So part of our project was to track down people who were based in Hong Kong in the \u201950s and \u201960s, and early \u201970s.<\/p>\n Another episode is about the untold backstory of the press and the Nixon trip, which is absolutely fascinating. And then there\u2019s an episode at the end of the Mao era dealing with the first generation of reporters who opened bureaus in Beijing after normalization.\u00a0 There is one on the 1980s up to \u201989.\u00a0 We devoted a whole episode to Tiananmen, partly because the story is extremely dramatic and partly because in terms of the American perceptions of China, it was really this kind of watershed moment that changed the way people looked at China, and in terms of journalism it was really important because it was the first time an upheaval of that scale was shown to American audiences; it was broadcast live on TV.\u00a0 People take it for granted today. You expect to see live reports from anywhere and in fact, you can go live with an iPhone from anywhere.\u00a0 So it\u2019s hard to appreciate how revolutionary it was that I, working as the CNN Beijing bureau chief, could stand in the middle of Tiananmen Square with hundreds of thousands of protesting students behind me and do a live broadcast.<\/p>\n Then we look at the 1990s, and there are four episodes examining the period from 2000 to the present day.\u00a0 The final episode called \u201cFollow the Money\u201d tells the story of how David Barbosa of the New York Times did his remarkable investigative reporting about the hidden wealth of the relatives of Premier Wen Jiabao, and Michael Forsythe, then of Bloomberg News, did the same kind of amazing reporting about relatives of Xi Jinping, which brought the story full circle because you ended up with a lot of the reporting for this being done back in Hong Kong.\u00a0 Also as the Chinese got more muscular in their dealings with the international press, people had trouble with visas.\u00a0 For example, Forsythe ended up back in Hong Kong. The irony is you have a different kind of China watching, in which instead of reading the tea leaves of the People\u2019s Daily, people are going through public financial documents of companies in which relatives of senior officials have lots of money invested, or going through property records to see multimillion dollar apartments.\u00a0 So it seemed to be a good place to end it.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a pretty comprehensive look at the kind of major moments in Chinese history from the end of World War II to today.<\/p>\n The idea as we put this all together is that primarily the goal here is that this material can be used in the classroom, but by no means is it exclusively intended for use in class.\u00a0 The 12 episodes provide a foundation for a course that could be used in journalism education on covering China, but each episode is self-contained and so you can watch one without having to watch the others, although there is a cumulative effect, particularly because a lot of the same characters appear in multiple episodes and you get to know them better and learn more about them.\u00a0 But if you were teaching a course on recent Chinese history or international relations, the episode on the Nixon trip, for example, and the role of the press in the making foreign policy, would fit well.\u00a0 There are also lessons in how the Chinese economy works today, for example with the episode on the hidden wealth of relatives of Chinese leaders, and many other possible lessons embedded in each episode.<\/p>\n PP: A theme that runs through the episodes is this relationship of the foreign press with the Chinese government, and it seems like it ebbs and flows.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s more open, then it\u2019s more closed.\u00a0 Can you comment on that and then on what the current environment is for foreign journalists in China?<\/strong><\/p>\n MC:<\/strong> There\u2019s a permanent tension between the foreign press and the Chinese government.\u00a0 The Chinese kicked all the Americans out in 1949 and with very few exceptions didn\u2019t let any of them back on a regular basis until the late \u201970s. But what you have here is a permanent tension and it waxes and wanes, depending on the overall climate.<\/p>\n For example, around the time of normalization there was this American love affair with China. Deng Xiaoping was the cuddly Communist who went to Washington and wore a cowboy hat when he met Bush in Texas. As a result, there were friendly stories as the reforms took hold: the first restaurant, the first private store, and so on.\u00a0 And the government was sort of okay with that.<\/p>\n But journalists wanted to go deeper.\u00a0 This theme runs through all of these episodes, going over years and years of how journalists pushed the limits, how hard it was to meet Chinese people, how hard it was to have Chinese friends, how difficult it was to get any authoritative information, being followed, being bugged, being hassled.\u00a0 And to some degree it\u2019s always there.\u00a0 When the political climate in China is looser, it\u2019s less evident and the limits are broader.<\/p>\n For example, the late 1980s \u2013 which is when I first was based in Beijing in \u201987, up through Tiananmen \u2013 was a remarkably open time and everybody who was there then remembers it as a time when you could really meet people, and there was this tremendous lively positive engagement, which the authorities didn\u2019t like, but they didn\u2019t push back that hard.<\/p>\n And then after Tiananmen, there was a very deep chill; and then in the \u201990s, again, as the economy began to pick up, it became easier to meet people as the story shifted from political repression to economic growth.\u00a0 But over and over again, it happened where the journalists got in the firing line.\u00a0 Part of what journalists do is to report on issues and tensions in the society and so when journalists went to talk to dissidents, Falun Gong activists, human rights lawyers, etc., they came under all sorts of pressure.<\/p>\n And then there was a period around the Olympics when the atmosphere again relaxed very considerably because the Chinese promised the Olympic committee there\u2019d be a more open China.\u00a0 That was when they changed the rules so that you could travel more freely.<\/p>\n But I would say starting at the end of the Olympics \u2013 2009 onward \u2013 the climate got tighter, and I think the key turning point was 2011, which was the so-called Jasmine Spring. I think the Arab Spring really freaked out the Chinese authorities, and there were these calls on the internet for demonstrations in Beijing. Nobody knows whether it was just a few Chinese exiles in a basement on a computer in New Jersey putting this out, but the authorities totally flipped out. When journalists started going to Wangfujing Street to see whether anything was happening, there was a really, really aggressive push. This expanded into a degree of intimidation that we had not seen in a very long time.\u00a0 Journalists got phone calls in the middle of the night, security people were going to their homes at 5:00 in the morning and threatening, \u201cYou better not cover this.\u201d\u00a0 It is unlikely that anything remotely like what was happening in the Middle East was happening in China, but Chinese officials were nervous, combined with a sense of assertiveness more generally in Chinese behavior that comes from their sense that the economic crisis of \u201908 and \u201909 showed the West was in steep decline and China was on the rise, and they have muscles so why not flex them. As a result, there has been an attempt to not only control the narrative of the Chinese press, which has always been there and has gotten much stronger, but they\u2019re now trying to extend that to the foreign press.\u00a0 And so you had a very, very difficult period.<\/p>\n The other thing is that even though the rules officially say you can travel anywhere and talk to anybody who\u2019s willing to talk to you, the fact is that local authorities either haven\u2019t heard of, or don\u2019t pay any attention to that. Journalists discover when they go around the country, local thugs paid by the local authorities often go after them, beat them up, take their gear, or intimidate people, prevent them from talking to people, or retaliate against people to whom they try to talk.\u00a0 So for many stories, it\u2019s almost like guerrilla war now, where a reporter goes in, gets what they can, and slips out as quickly as possible.\u00a0 And then the investigative reporting I mentioned \u2013 Barboza at the Times, and Mike Forsythe at Bloomberg, as well as The Wall Street Journal \u2013 around corruption of the Bo Xilai case, I think also contributed to the sense of anger at the foreign press and the determination to try and curb that.\u00a0 So a lot of news organizations have had trouble getting visas.\u00a0 It\u2019s eased up slightly compared to 2012, \u201913, and \u201914.\u00a0 But it\u2019s still a very tough assignment.<\/p>\n On the other hand, I think a lot of journalists feel that it\u2019s such an amazing story, and it\u2019s such a big complex country that the government can\u2019t stop you from doing everything, and there\u2019s still a lot of amazing things that one can do.\u00a0 So even today it\u2019s much easier to operate as a journalist, and it\u2019s a much more open society than it was 30 years ago, but it\u2019s tough and you have a government now that if you cross lines, and say things the government doesn\u2019t like, you\u2019re going to hear about it, and sometimes more.\u00a0 There was a French journalist who wrote a commentary about Xinjiang after the Paris terrorist attacks last fall that challenged the government\u2019s narrative that all dissidents in Xinjiang are terrorists, and as a result she was forced to leave.<\/p>\n So it is a very difficult place because the Chinese are much more willing to push back on the foreign press now that they feel \u201cWe\u2019re a big power; we can throw our weight around.\u201d<\/p>\n PP: The other change is that now Chinese journalists and media are going all over the world and reporting back in China.\u00a0 This is new and I just wonder: do you have any sense about whether that is influencing the media in China, given that they understand they want to get information too?<\/strong><\/p>\n MC:<\/strong>\u00a0 It\u2019s a really interesting question because you do now have Chinese foreign correspondents showing up at all the conflict zones, and I think a fair amount of what they do is just straight news reporting, particularly when it\u2019s not an issue that is too sensitive to China.\u00a0 But when it is, the reporting either in the original form or once it is edited is shaped to fit the narrative.\u00a0 There was a debate I know among many Chinese journalists about the fact that CCTV now has a big English language service, and some people see this as just an attempt to project soft power, and it is.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve known Chinese who work there who said, This is a good thing because if we want to be credible, we can\u2019t just be party mouthpieces, we have to do more.\u00a0 That pushes things in the right direction.<\/p>\n Maybe four or five years ago there was some hope that that was the case but I think the direction it\u2019s going now is not great and so it will be interesting to see how this affects the way Chinese operate internationally.\u00a0 If the media has to be such a loyal tool of the Party, at what point can it still credibly report things internationally?\u00a0 But it is true that the Chinese have put a lot of money into it and they\u2019re making these services available like CCTV English for free in many parts of the world, and it\u2019s pretty slick.\u00a0 So it\u2019s a very interesting trend, although if the ultimate overall situation in China continues to tighten up, it\u2019s hard to know how appealing that\u2019s going to be or how skillfully that image can be softened in presentation for the rest of the world.\u00a0 I don\u2019t honestly know the answer, but it\u2019s a very interesting question.<\/p>\n
\nMC:<\/strong>\u00a0 We started out doing interviews for a documentary but after we did the first bunch of interviews, we said, Wow, this is more than just one single film. And it kept growing. One of the joys of doing a documentary in this way is not being a prisoner of a network, and able to distribute it through the U.S.-China Institute website and YouTube channel. In this day and age you don\u2019t need CNN to have a distribution mechanism.\u00a0 You can put it on YouTube and spread the word through social media and that\u2019s what we\u2019ve tried to do. And if it warrants a dozen episodes, then you can do as many as makes sense.\u00a0 For me, coming from a news background, that was very liberating.\u00a0 So in the end we have 12 episodes beginning with reporters who covered the Chinese Civil War from \u201945 to \u201949, and ending with the beginning of Xi Jinping\u2019s era in 2012-2014.<\/p>\n