24 April 2006
Xuanchuan Bu
'The Beijing Daily, the authoritative newspaper of the city's Communist Party committee'
If the Beijing Daily publishes, it lies. It's hard to imagine anything less authoritative, except that it might be argued that the paper is a reliable guide to what whichever faction in government currently has the upper hand want you to believe. So why would a reputable news agency with bureaux in China, print such arrant nonsense?
We begin by noting that there was no by-line on the story, and that its content has entirely been derived from the Beijing Daily (and that is, in fact, the major point).
BEIJING (AP) -- Beijing's mayor has called for a speeding up of the demolition of impoverished neighborhoods in China's capital as part of preparations for the 2008 Olympics, the state-run Beijing Daily reported Saturday.
On a tour of one area in the process of being razed Friday, Mayor Wang Qishan told officials and construction workers that demolishing the dilapidated neighborhoods is an essential task this year and that the work must be accelerated, the newspaper said.
This is a stereotypical Party quote, and one that can be found attributed to dozens of officials around the country daily ("essential task", "work must be accelerated"). Only a long-term state-owned Party hack paper would print it. (A more "independent" paper would only do so if specifically instructed to do so by a Xuanchuan Bu (Propaganda Department) in "correction" of something it might have said that the Pary disagreed with.)
Beijing is undergoing a thorough makeover for the 2008 Games, spending an estimated $40 billion to put up sporting venues, lay down new roads and subway lines, build residential communities in the suburbs and beautify the often gray, polluted capital.
It's about now that you might hope this would turn into a story lamenting the destruction of historic neighbourhoods and recording the vile treatment meted out to long-standing residents, unceremoniously evicted with the scant remains of pilfered compensation to gimcrack, incomplete, satellite estates. But no.
Part of the effort targets poorer areas known as ''inner city villages'' -- where many homes were built illegally and many of whose residents are rural migrants.
This is starting to sound alarmingly sympathetic to the government's behaviour.
The Beijing Daily, the authoritative newspaper of the city's Communist Party committee, said about a third of these areas designated for destruction have been torn down, with the rest to be finished by year's end.
There you have it. There's very little in the way of a story here. All of it's come uncritically from Beijing Daily. So it had better be claimed that Beijing Daily is an important and authoritative source, even if nothing could be further from the truth.
''This work is full of significance in strengthening the environment, building a livable city and realizing the strategic plan of a 'New Beijing, Great Olympics,''' the newspaper quoted Wang as saying.
Another standard Party rent-a-quote (there's probably a manual of these the "journalists" copy from at random) that any paper struggling to have a little independent thought in China would be embarrassed to print. What are we to think of a foreign news agency, entirely independent of the Chinese government, that reprints such utter pap, and does so uncritically, effectively turning itself and its client papers, truly believed by their readers to be authoritative, into extensions of the Xuanchuan Bu.
This is embarrassing.
It's time for AP to change its initials to XCB.
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