Beijingers have grown used to thick smog over the past two decades, so the sight of glorious blue skies on many days this year has come as a pleasant surprise. The reappearance of sunsets, stars and cirrus clouds above the Chinese capital is due partly to the economic slowdown, which has choked factory production and thus the demand for coal-fired power. But the government also has good reason to claim that strict traffic controls and pollution-reduction measures put in place for last year’s Olympics have improved air quality.

That is not the only positive Olympic legacy boasted by the authorities. Another is that the media environment has become more open and transparent, particularly for foreign correspondents. Ahead of the Games, travel restrictions for non-Chinese reporters were relaxed and several internet sites were unblocked. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China hailed these moves as important steps forward, but there have also been numerous regressions that suggest the government is anything but committed to media freedom. Now that more than a year has passed since the Olympics, a reading of the Chinese media tea leaves suggests that the authorities are not so much becoming more open or closed as more sophisticated.

Talking to foreign ministry officials over the past six years, the mantra has essentially been the same: "We are moving towards more openness. It will take time, but rest assured the direction is fixed."

Fixed perhaps, but that has not stopped it wavering wildly since the start of last year. Thanks to the Olympics, 2008 was always going to be a huge year for foreign reporters in Beijing. But with the unrest in Tibet and the Sichuan earthquake, it turned out to be the busiest China news year since at least 1989 and one that showed just how erratic the country’s media policy can be.

The unreconstructed blocking urge was apparent during the turmoil in Tibet in March when foreign reporters were denied access to Lhasa and almost every other major Tibetan community. The FCCC, which includes about 300 journalists among its 400 members, received dozens of reports during this time of members being held up at roadblocks. The scale of the police operation was enormous, covering many hundreds of miles. On one occasion, half a dozen of us held an unwanted reunion in Gansu after being rounded up at different points attempting to get into Labrang monastery. With access closed, most coverage of the protests had to be done from afar with all the perils that entails of using difficult-to-verify accounts and the wildly conflicting claims of the Chinese government and Tibetan exile groups.
There were two notable exceptions. The first was the stunning footage of Tibetans on a horseback protest in Bora monastery taken by Steve Chao and Sean Chang of Canada’s CTV news. The second was the on-the-ground reportage from Lhasa by James Miles of the Economist, who happened to be in the city when the riot erupted. His balanced, authoritative coverage has since proved a strong argument for greater media access.

DEATH THREATS
But few people in China wanted to listen at the time. Chinese netizens mounted a furious online campaign against the foreign media’s supposedly biased and erroneous coverage. Government officials, the state broadcaster and the Global Times – the populist and nationalist outgrowth from the Communist Party’s People’s Daily – added to the fury. At least 10 foreign journalists received death threats, two temporarily relocated to Hong Kong because of concerns for their safety, and one major broadcaster moved office for a few days.

If the level of hatred and mistrust had continued, the Olympics in August would almost certainly have been a public relations disaster. But the mood shifted dramatically in May with the Sichuan earthquake, which generated an outpouring of sympathy and a more open approach to media coverage.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, foreign and domestic reporters were free to travel almost anywhere in the affected area. Soldiers often facilitated our work. Like several others, I was taken on a military speedboat to the epicenter and hitched on PLA trucks. Reported from closer to the ground, the focus of most of the coverage was on the heartrending stories of the victims and the impressive rescue effort. But after a week or so, when attention shifted from the tragedy of the natural disaster to the politically sensitive question of the shoddy construction that had led to so many schools collapsing, the authorities started to impose more restrictions: Areas were blocked off, locals were warned not to talk to foreign journalists and the FCCC received another wave of reports about members being detained or turned back.

CONTROL FREAKS
The control instinct was evident all the way through to the Olympics. At the last FCCC press freedom committee meeting before the Games, we suddenly find ourselves being photographed and listened in to by men who sat in adjoining tables without talking to each other. Soon after becoming president in late May, I was visited by several mysterious Chinese “journalists,” who wanted to know what the club’s plans were during the Olympics, though I only saw one article published. E-mails were mysteriously held up and mobile phone communications were intermittently cut-off.

Overall, though, there were relatively few cases of direct interference. Instead of blocking, the government tried to shape the message, to create an image of perfection as impressive as the opening ceremony. Often that meant fakery, such as getting a cute little girl to lip-synch instead of the real singer who wore braces, computer simulating the firework display and opening “protest parks” without permitting anyone to use them. China’s mandarins appeared to have taken a lesson from the British Labour Party in the art of spin.

There was considerable debate about the outcome. Propaganda chiefs publicly declared the Games a success, but in a private meeting a senior government adviser fumed that China had not been given the credit it deserved because the country lacked a strong presence in the global media. To get that, he said the Chinese media needed more investment, more credibility and more openness.

For foreign reporters, the latter was the priority. With the Olympic relaxations on travel due to expire on October 17, the FCCC mounted a campaign to have them made permanent, sending out a flurry of statements and lobbying through embassies, chambers of commerce and visiting politicians. We may never know if we made a difference, but we got what we wanted. At a pre-midnight press conference just minutes before the expiry date, the foreign ministry announced that the easier travel regulations would be continued indefinitely.

INTIMIDATION AND VIOLENCE
It was an immensely satisfying and encouraging development, but club members could not feel pleased with themselves for long. The authorities frequently ignored the rules and attempted to restrict journalists’ movements with road-blocks or the use of thugs or plain-clothes police. In December, the Belgian TV reporter Tom van de Weghe was beaten up by a gang operating with local officials in Henan province as he attempted to do a story about the AIDS problem in the area. After the FCCC and his organization complained, the European Union broached the matter with the Chinese government. A couple of weeks later, Tom received a letter of apology and a check to compensate him for the damage. The amount was small, but the gesture was a breakthrough in terms of accountability.

Detentions and obstruction have continued this year, which contains a number of politically sensitive anniversaries. Tibetan communities were blocked off again in March ahead of the anniversary of the 1959 uprising. Several reporters were turned away or detained when they attempted to return to the sites of collapsed schools a year after the earthquake. Most bizarrely, umbrella-wielding police used their brollies to cover TV cameras filming in Tiananmen Square on the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown.
More disturbingly, pressure has intensified on Chinese sources and staff. The already long list of arrested activists has grown rapidly in the past year and a half. Many of those now in jail, such as Hu Jia, Lu Xiaobo and Xu Zhiyong, were often in touch with foreign reporters. Assistants too have come under greater scrutiny.

A RAY OF LIGHT
The conflict between the forces of control and openness goes on. In the past thirty years, China has moved from a totalitarian state under a single, all-powerful leader, Mao Zedong, to an authoritarian nation in which power is widely defused through the politburo and provinces. In the political sphere, there is no serious rival to the Communist Party, but economics is now a key driver in policymaking and one in which there are a far wider range of voices.

The same is true of the domestic media. Chinese newspapers and TV stations formerly functioned almost exclusively as propaganda outlets for the Communist Party and the government. Today, they increasingly have to justify their existence commercially, which means they must produce stronger stories to drum up readers or viewers and advertising.

Faced also by increasing competition from web portals, the most successful publications have been the boldest. Caijing magazine, The Southern Metropolitan Daily and the Beijing Daily have built up strong reputations for investigative reporting and provocative commentaries.

Even the establishment media is occasionally tempted to push the envelope in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In early August, the China Daily ran a story about Chengdu police obstructing three defense witnesses from testifying at the trial of Tan Zuoren, an activist who had drawn attention to the shoddy construction that led to the collapse of so many schools during last year’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan.

More internet sites are blocked than ever, with Twitter, Facebook and their Chinese counterparts censored since the start of the year. However, the government has so far failed embarrassingly in its efforts to introduce a still tighter method of controlling the internet. Despite the efforts of an army of censors, websites and blogs contain ever bolder news stories, criticism of official policy and nationalist rants. Many netizens use proxy servers and VPNs to get around the "Great Firewall." An attempt to make censorship software mandatory on all computers was suspended at the last minute.

Foreign journalists have been promised greater access. During the Urumqi riots in June, the foreign ministry organized press conferences rather than blocking off the city as they had done the previous year in Lhasa. In August, the State Council Information Office announced a “zero refusal” policy, which theoretically means that ministries must respond to all queries within 24 hours. The early results have not been convincing, but if properly implemented it would be a step forward.

At the same time, the government is expanding China’s international media presence. The state broadcaster, CCTV, has strengthened its English language service, while The Global Times has launched an English edition. Coming at a time when foreign media organizations are trimming their staff around the world because of the financial crisis, the balance of media soft power may well be shifting.
The Olympics may have passed, but the story of media climate change in China is as fascinating as ever. ❶