Mike Chinoy believes that to understand China, one must understand its political ideology. In a one-on-one interview with Annenberg Media, he shared about his time covering China and his thoughts on the media coverage of the country today.
Chinoy has a long-standing relationship with China. He first went to the country as a student in 1973, but he later went on to spend the next eight years in the country working for CBS News, then NBC News in Hong Kong before joining CNN in 1983, where he spent the next 24 years working as a foreign correspondent for the network in different countries. At CNN, he was the network’s first China bureau chief, covering important stories such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Chinoy now works as a non-resident senior fellow at the USC U.S-China Institute.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your experience like working in China during those eight years?
I was in China for an extremely interesting period, which was marked most dramatically by the crisis in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a period when there was a lot of intellectual and political ferment and debate about China’s future path. It was [also] a time before the June 4 crackdown, people advocating political reform to some degree were quite influential. And after the crackdown, the political reformers were sidelined. But by early 1990, Deng Xiaoping had revived this program of economic reform. [By] the last three or four years, I was in China [I witnessed the] early stages of the China boom.
I was able to witness a kind of interesting mixture of China pulling further away from the excesses and extremism of the Mao years and then the Tiananmen Crisis, which led to a bloody Chinese army crackdown on student protesters who wanted faster reforms, and then the revival of economic reforms, which really began to dramatically change the Chinese landscape in the 1990s and afterward.
What’s your most memorable memory out of your eight years stationed in China?
The story that I’m most well known for is the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989. On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army was ordered into Beijing to clear the streets after weeks and weeks of protest. That was kind of in the pre-cellphone era, [and] there was no way to transmit video from Beijing because Beijing was under martial law. On the night of the crackdown, I was on the balcony of the Beijing Hotel. I could see down [from the] top end of the square, and we kept the phone line open for hours and hours and hours to CNN headquarters. I was essentially narrating what I was seeing, and then there were camera crews and producers over in the square, they would periodically bring their videotapes back to where I was, the CNN workspace in the Great Wall Hotel. We had a new machine that will allow you to transmit a frame of video as a still image over a phone line. It took close to an hour to do that.
The next morning, a student intern went out to [the] Beijing airport and found somebody who was flying to Hong Kong and they took the videotapes to Hong Kong and gave the tapes to a CNN colleague in Hong Kong. From Hong Kong, they could book a satellite transmission. And so it was several hours after the videos had been taken before they were actually broadcast. It just gives you a sense of how complex and how primitive it was.
Can you provide a breakdown of how foreign correspondents covered China from before the 70s to now?
In my book “Assignment China,” which is the history of American journalists, there is a kind of an arc to the story because it begins with American journalists having to leave China when the communist party took power in 1949 and then for almost 30 years, most American news coverage of China was done outside mainland China, especially from Hong Kong. And then you had several decades where China became more and more open. But in the last few years, that trend has been reversed. China now is much less welcoming and accessible to American journalists, and more and more journalists today are being forced to cover China from outside China. So it’s as if the story has come full circle and we’re not quite but almost back to where we were before China opened up in terms of the vast majority of American and other Western journalists covering China from outside of China, rather than being able to be there and see it for themselves.
What is the disadvantage of not being physically there?
The most important thing for journalists is for the journalists to be able to witness for themselves what is happening and then tell their listeners or viewers or readers what they saw and what’s going on. And without that, it becomes very difficult to really get an accurate picture of what’s happening in China. There are various tools and techniques that journalists in the old days used, so-called China watchers. [Is a] technique involved studying articles in the Chinese press or transcripts of Chinese radio broadcasts to see what lessons you could learn about what was going on. And there you have a kind of modern-day version of this old-style China watching where journalists are again studying the Chinese press, but they’re also using Chinese Internet, and Chinese social media posts to monitor what’s going on. And they’re also using tools like commercially available satellite imagery. But it’s not the same thing as being there on the ground [to] see for yourself. It worries me a lot because I don’t think we’re getting a complete picture of China as we need to give the country importance.
In the early part of your documentary, it says that American journalists in the 1960s and 1970s had a hard time reporting accurate images of China because of the influence of McCarthyism. A similar thing is happening in Capitol Hill right now with the intense Chinese-American relationship. Do you think that has an impact on the media coverage today in China?
it’s not exactly the same thing as the McCarthy period. But I would say that certainly the prevailing political climate in China is one of great hostility, and you see members of Congress trying to outdo each other to show how tough they are on China. But, I would be careful about characterizing this in terms of journalism, because this is not a case where journalists are permitted or not permitted to cover what’s going on and I think that the American media system doesn’t work that way.
I think a couple of things are a couple of factors here. One is that the tensions between the US and China are central to the political climate in the United States and so journalists have to cover that. It is a legitimate story and I think most serious journalists try to cover it. But one of the problems is that because the Chinese Communist Party has expelled so many journalists, limited visa access for so many journalists. You [see] this combination of a much smaller number of journalists in China who are not able to convey a broader, more complex, more nuanced picture of China as a society, primarily because the Chinese government won’t allow more of them to come. The ones that are face all sorts of difficulties and restrictions at the same time that in Washington the atmosphere is very hostile to China. So a lot of the politicians and other people that journalists would be interviewing are saying highly critical things.
I think nobody in The New York Times or at CNN is saying to a journalist, “You have to be negative about China,” but the negative atmosphere is reflected in the coverage because access in China is so limited, that’s not balanced by a more nuanced portrayal that shows some of the complexities and realities of Chinese society, because journalists can’t go. So together, the net effect is to create an impression in the American press of a much more one-dimensional picture of China that is highly critical.
Students in USC who don’t have an experience like you reported in China live in China. How do you recommend they understand the media coverage today in China?
I think it’s very important for people who care about this issue to become sophisticated and critical consumers of news. Most people who are not in the media don’t really have any idea of what journalists actually do. In [my book] “Assignment China,” you have well over a hundred journalists who have covered China for the American media [for] nearly 80 years [to] talking about how they did that. Educating yourself about how journalists actually do their jobs is important. [It means] when you read the news or watch the news, not just passively looking at it and having an emotional reaction. It means when you read an article, you look at who wrote it and then Google them to see what they do. You look at where the byline is, in D.C. or in China or in Beijing or in Seoul. You break down who they speak with and you look at the quotes that they use. It involves really engaging yourself with the news in a different kind of way. If you can do that, you’ll have a much more sophisticated understanding of what’s actually happening.
Chinoy’s book is out and available for purchase here.
