Beijing BLOG

19 June, 2009. By Mavic Cabrera-Balleza.

We met with officials of the Communication University of China (CUC) and experienced how it is to be a VIP in China. You are met at the gate, escorted to the meeting place, seated in a very nice room and treated to a sumptuous Peking duck lunch! On a serious note, our meeting with Professor Liqun Liu and her staff proved to be a very productive occasion. We learned not only about CUC’s history, course offerings, facilities, accomplishments and plans but also how China’s media might develop in the future. Even as we already know about media control and restrictions, our conversations at CUC made us realize that China’s role in the world—especially as an economic power, the unstoppable development in China’s information and communication technologies, the growing civil society, and a host of other factors are opening up spaces for alternative views to be heard. I seriously think community media in China is not a far-fetched idea.

We also learned that Professor Liqun Liu is the authority on media and gender in China. She is the UNESCO Chairholder on Media and Gender. She is also responsible for preparing China’s report on the Women and Media section of the Beijing Platform for Action. As I am also very involved in the 15-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action, the professor and I promised to stay in touch.

The CUC staff expressed keen interest in AMARC’s work. They asked numerous questions including how do we operate as an organization, how does one become a member, what is the benefit of becoming a member, what are our activities, how do women participate in community media, what are the barriers for women’s participation, what is the transmitter power for community radio. They are also very interested in AMARC’s training materials and resources. They broached the idea of translating them into Chinese and distributing them to media practitioners in this country. It was a great beginning conversation over Peking duck and 35 other dishes! This plus all the tempura and udon I ate the week before rewarded me with 10 additional pounds.

Many thanks to everyone who made this trip possible –especially our colleagues at AMARC Japan for their generous support.

June 18, 2009. By Steve Buckley.

Community radio is alive in China and operating from a sixth floor office in a residential tower block in south Beijing. One Plus One is an independent Chinese NGO which has established China’s first online radio service run by and for people with disability. Since 2006, One Plus One, has been producing radio for broadcast on local and regional state radio. At the time of the Paralymics in 2008, they launched their own online service and have kept it going since then. With a team of thirteen staff, of whom eight are visually impaired and one is physically disabled, One Plus One is broadcasting three hours a day.
They also produce three programmes - China Disability Observed, One Sound One World, and Bangyang Advice – that are broadcast on around 60 state radio channels.

One Plus One Director, Xie Yan says: “Basically we are building a platform between the public and the disabled people – one which might also be used by other NGOs in the future. We are just starting this online radio and aim to put more content on to it later. The reason we are doing the three programmes and the online radio is the difficulty we face in getting permission in China to do broadcasting. For us it is very popular to make radio for the marginalized people. It actually works better than television.”

Xie Yan and his team are acutely aware of the problems faced by people with disability. Co-founder, Gao Shan says: “If you go into an orphanage, 90 per cent are disabled kids and more than half of them are female. If you are disabled and female you are more likely to be abandoned as a child. Especially in rural areas it is also very easy for disabled women to be sold into marriage. Often this is into rather bad conditions.”

Xie Yan continues: “It is often very difficult for families of people with disability, especially people with mental disability. There are 6.4 per cent of the population with disability and 19.8 per cent are affected by family responsibilities in relation to disability. By promoting protection for the disabled you are supporting the whole family.”

One Plus One aims to be the main platform for China’s civil society to take voice on issues of disability but they also see a wider role in providing media training and support for other NGOs to develop webcasting and podcasting initiatives. In Beijing, people with disability are leading the way in demonstrating the potential of community radio.

One Plus One
http://www.oneplusone.org.cn

Audio: Steve Buckley interviews Xie Yan, Director, One Plus One

Interpretation: Lu Han

June 18, 2009.  By Mavic Cabrera Balleza.

China is very committed to advancing women’s status. After all, it hosted the biggest ever gathering of women worldwide 15 years ago. That gathering, the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, gave birth to the Beijing Platform for Action, the most comprehensive agenda for women’s empowerment. This commitment was again reaffirmed by most of the groups we spoke with during this informal and unofficial visit to China. The Beijing Platform for Action, by the way, is the first international agreement that recognized the role of media in promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality. At the same time, it also recognized the key problems with the media –the negative and stereotypical portrayal of women and women’s lack of access to decision-making structures within the media.

Women’s access to the media means that women are able to create and distribute media materials in ways that best serve their interests. It also means enabling women from different provinces and communities to use the media in ways that are relevant to their context. It also means access to all forms and types of media –especially those that allow them to speak in their own authentic voice. Community media for women in China? That would surely be in keeping with the commitment expressed in the Beijing Platform for Action

June 18, 2009.  By Mavic Cabrera Balleza.

So we’ve been speaking with China’s top bloggers and tweeters in the last couple of days— exploring what the possibilities are in terms of getting alternative voices in the media. As I am wont to do in mix-gender conversations, I asked one of the geeks if there are women in China’s tweeting and blogging community. “Yes, there are some,” he said. “What are they blogging or tweeting about?” I asked again. “Fashion,” he said nonchalantly. Noticing my obvious dismay, the geek added: “Isn’t that what women are only interested in?” Chairman Mao must be turning in his grave as women,— if one is to believe this dude, are no longer interested in holding up half the sky.

June 17, 2009. By Steve Buckley

We travelled to Pi Village in the rural periphery of Beijing, about 40 minutes drive, to visit a migrant workers’ organization engaged in community media. Pi Village has some 1500 native people and around 8000 migrant workers. It is also the base for an effective and independent labour NGO called Migrant Workers’ Home. We were accompanied by Bu Wei, a media scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and her research assistant, Peter. We met with the Director of Migrant Workers’ Home, Sun Heng.

There are around 200 million migrant workers in China. They have played a key role in the economic growth of the country. Under the hukou system there is an institutionalised rural-urban divide which discourages rural migration to urban areas. It operates through a geographical registration system which excludes rural migrants from publicly provided housing, welfare and educational services in urban areas. To assure their education many children are left behind, the so-called “left behind children” to attend school in their rural home community. Others come with their parents but must rely on informal provision or illegally established schools for their education. Migrant Workers Home was founded to support migrant workers in Pi village through self-help, education and cultural activities.

Sun Heng says: “The purpose is to help migrant workers, to address their difficulties like how to find a job, how to find a house to live and how to protect their rights such as ensuring that the migrant workers get paid when the bosses don’t want to pay them.”

“We value the migrant workers culture because when migrants move to a new place they experience culture shock. The migrants need to protect their own culture because the mainstream media overlook their culture, so we have established some community media productions like a magazine, short films about migrant workers and a website. On the website we are able to publish our CDs with recording of our songs and music.”

The organization has four types of media activity– formal publishing (books and pamphlets), magazines (a monthly for Pi Village, and a magazine for migrant workers), music CDs and a website. They also have a band and a popular theatre troupe. They would like to establish community television, possibly using the local cable system.

New Worker Art Troupe:
http://www.dashengchang.org.cn

June 16, 2009 .  By Ashish Sen.

After two and a half days of hearing about pervasive control over media in China, the meeting this morning with Wang Boyong (International Centre for Communication Development) took us back to the future. Discussing issues around media access and community participation in Inner Mongolia, we realised that the humble loud speaker is alive and frequently used to disseminate information in villages.

Unlike other administrative units, residents of a village elect their own leaders and the loudspeakers are used by the local village leaders to disseminate information and events. What’s more, in some cases it seems the loud speaker system is also used by the residents to articulate their needs and concerns.

Against a back drop of state control, the loud speaker might well remain one of the openings for community participation in media – at least in the rural and remote areas.

The thought resonated later when we met Sun Heng in Pi Village, which also has its own loudspeaker system. It seems, in Pi Village, that it is only used for informational announcements by the leadership of the Village Committee. And although migrant workers make up over 80 per cent of the village population, their status means they are not represented. Yet, they have an inspiring programme of cultural activities including music and festivals.

If only some of it could be aired on the loudspeakers…

June 16, 2009. By Steve Buckley

Radio is not the most popular medium in China. According to a 2008 survey by the China HIV/AIDS Media Partnership, only 40 per cent of people listen to radio at least once a week, putting radio in fifth place behind television, newspapers, magazines and the Internet. Radio, like television, is controlled by the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) through a licensing system which maintains state-party control at all levels. Radio stations operate at four geographical-administrative levels – national, provincial, prefecture and county. Each comes under the dual control of the technical management, responsible for day to day operations, and the political direction, which is provided by the propaganda department of the corresponding party office.

“All radios go to hell!” is the slogan of Antiwave - http://www.antiwave.net - the award-winning Chinese podcast pioneer launched on 1 May 2005. Founded by bloggers pingke and flypig the project quickly gathered support and interest. We met with flypig today. He gave us a very candid assessment which contrasted with this rather upbeat interview for Danwei in 2007 - http://www.danwei.tv/tag/flypig/ - With just two producers and a commitment to intensive production standards, the project has become difficult to maintain and no longer distributes programmes on a regular basis. It remains one of the few examples of independent, Internet-based sound broadcasting in China – a platform which could still take off but is yet to find a model for sustainability and development.

Steve Buckley interviews Steven Lin

June 16, 2009. By Steve Buckley

We are sitting in a café on the shores of Qianhai Lake, Beijing when news comes through of a protest this morning in Jiangxi Province, Southern China.

“Let me just check my Twitter”, says Richard Chen, as he thumbs through the news feeds on his mobile before giving us more details – hundreds of people involved, a dispute over a new furniture tax, clashes with the police, three police cars overturned, there are pictures and videos. Such protests are a daily occurrence in China and, with 600 million mobile users - almost half the population - news gets out immediately.

Richard has been blogging for six years and using Twitter since 2007. At least until his site was blocked following coverage of certain sensitive topics including Charter 2008 and Beijing’s “black prisons”. Richard, known as doubleaf, is one of China’s top twitterers. Earlier this month the website Twitter.com was blocked, but only for a few days around the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. And there are ways around it including numerous Chinese Twitter clones as well as using proxy servers or SSH.

“Twitter was made for China”, Richard tells us. With a 140 character limit there is not much scope for detail in Roman script, but a Chinese character tweet carries five times as much information. It is enough for a short news story and, alongside instant messaging and ICQ, it has becoming one of the fastest ways to disseminate news and information.

Here is doubleaf’s blog on our meeting: https://doubleaf.com/2009/06/16/888

Steve Buckley interviews Richard Chen

Ancient China’s libertarian philosopher, Lao Tzu, once said: “a good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving”. In that spirit, three members of AMARC’s International Board – Steve Buckley, Mavic Cabrera Balleza and Ashish Sen – pitched up in Beijing this week, with a few friendly contacts and more than a few burning questions.

AMARC has no members in China. Broadcasting operates under strict state-party control and the Internet is famously guarded by the “Great Firewall” of blocks, filters and content monitors designed to remove material considered dangerous or subversive. At the same time communications in China is changing at a hectic pace, with economic liberalization, growth of the Internet and mobile phone, and increasing confidence of Chinese voices.

What prospects then for community broadcasting in China? What might community radio look like with Chinese characteristics? Who in China needs, demands or might benefit from community media? And who might champion its development in the future?

We set out to understand the context and trends in China for media development, to dialogue with media practitioners, communication scholars and experts, and to identify the prospects and opportunities for deepening AMARC engagement with China.

This is our Beijing Blog.