EDITORIAL: HUNTING THE ELEPHANT – WHY NOT?
WhyNot was conceived in interesting times. In a long, dark night of the soul. A time of fear, and uncertainty. A time of lockdown, of people confined. At a time when so many things are left unsaid by many Chinese about their society out of fear or apathy. At time when other Chinese speak out but their words are screamed into a void, deleted and dropped and censored by an institution hell bent on monopolizing China’s voice and silencing any alternatives.
Those few who do speak out teeter on a knife’s edge. Many who teeter are young and, in the first light before the dawn, are always looking for ways around censorship, around blockages and filters, around silence and obstruction. They pace about their confines, and the space appears empty. But the room is filled to bursting with an invisible elephant.
So we started WhyNot for you, a certain kind of young, tireless, determined person who isn’t happy staying in the same, suffocating room all the time. You who like to think different thoughts and consider different views from the one you can see outside the suffocating room’s tiny window. And why not? Thinking is allowed, right?
At WhyNot, nothing is off limits because we want to learn more about that weird elephant, too. In this opening issue, we will take you on a hunt for the first elephant — the Chinese media.
We will talk about why there have never been so many trained journalists in China, but how so few of them have kept their ideals intact. How they are left clinging to the wreckage of their careers as increasing government propaganda has tightened restrictions on what is fit to print. We will show you why the fall of China's internet czar made little difference to the environment they face, where so many stories are increasingly left untold.
We will show you the elephant. We know what they smell like, feel like. We have sat in the same room as them before. We won't give up, because we are young, curious and stubborn. Because we must think, much in the same way that we must breathe.
WhyNot.
IN-DEPTH
After the Fall of China's
What happened to the independent media?
After the Fall of China's
Internet Czar:
What happened to the independent media?
On Feb. 29, 2020, Assistant professor Fang Ketcheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHR) was recording a podcast on media representations of the coronavirus pandemic. halfway throught, the other people on the show realized that Fang wasn't saying anything, and thought the internet connection had gone down.
Fang Ketcheng had just heard that the NewsLab account he'd been running on WeChat since 2013 had been shut fown.
More that 300 of his posts had disappeared from WeChat, leaving onl,y the announcement: "Due to complaints, this account has been blocked, and the content are no longer available to view. This account is suspected of violating administrative regulations on the running of public internet accounts." Daily published their three-part report on the wildfire in full pages with pictures – "Red Warnings", "Black Sighs", and "Green Sorrows". Each part was printed separately over several days.
Behind the Scenes of China Media Watch
How is the Chinese media different from the Party mouthpiece? What has the media in China gone through over the past three decades? What has led it to today's situation? Come with us to look for the Elephant in the Room.
IN-DEPTH
Evolving Idealism:
Three decades of change in how China’s universities educate journalistsOn May 6th, 1987, the wildfire in Daxinganling called Black Dragon Fire in swept through northern China. The fire lasted for almost a month. Smoke hung, smothering over the dense forests. Fifty thousand people lost their homes, and 193 lost their lives.
Brandishing a China Youth League referral letter with the seal of the PLA Air Force Operations Department Director, Cgina Youth Daily reporter Ye Yan and three colleagues rode a military airchraft to Qiqihar to cover the story. The journalists then tool a milktary helicopter to Thae, the northern-most country in
IN-DEPTH
Behind the Scenes In the Chinese Communist Party-Controlled Media:
An insider’s storyIn 2016, Chinese president and Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping announced that the media belonged the party and government, and exists to carry out its propaganda work. "The media is part of the party", he said, a phrase that became a catchphrase of the new era of politics under Xi. To be more specific, this meant that the media must "maintain a high degree of consistency with the views of the Central Committee", "correctly adhere to public opinion guidance work", and use positive propaganda to achieve sttability and unity. The key phrase was "correctly adhere to the party's public opinion guidance work" where it applies to news. Wildfire would not be twisted into a hymn of triumph. The disaster would be reported with unsparing honesty. A
IN-DEPTH
Whither Non-Fiction?
How has Chinese non-fiction writing moved away from public discourse?I was thinking about Li Zixin recently, who founded and launched SandwiChina: A Storytelling Academy, and the program that he called China's "first non-fiction writing incubation channel" with a great sense of loss.
By September 2015, China was seeing the peak of a wave of new online businesses across most sectors and industries in China. Non-fiction -- a concept that was once an import in China -- has now been repackaged as content by online entrepreneurs. An inflex of capital has breathed new life into this long-forgotten writing form, and major media outlets have been lining up to start non-fiction
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