The "New" China Daily

After thirty years of teaching American literature, Patrick Hazard has turned his sights East.

The editor who was showing me around the headquarters of China Daily, the PRC's two year-old English-language newspaper, pointed out a color supplement issued on its first anniversary in June, 1982. "Children's Day," he explained with a smile. It struck me that the choice of subject for the anniversary supplement was a good one: Everywhere there is evidence of almost childlike enthusiasm for "catching up" with the Western media and an innocent openness to self-improvement, signified by the "self-criticism" bulletin board on which each successive issue is subjected to anonymous critiques.

(Alas, not a little of the criticism by "foreign experts"-read China-sympathizers from Britain, the U.S., and Australia who have helped the fledgling paper get off the ground-consists of rather prissy put-downs of Chinglish, the enchanting dialect born of the marriage of English and Chinese syntax.)

It was last January, while studying at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute, that I paid my call at the decrepit building in Beijing that houses the Chine Daily offices. Decrepit outside, that is, but all high-tech within. At the time of my visit, the six-day-a-week eight-pager had a circulation of sixty thousand, including a same-day Hong Kong edition; a state-of-the-art Compugraphic typesetting system generates the disks that are airlined from Beijing.

Since the paper's second anniversary this past June, a New York edition has been available (China Daily Distribution Corp., 15 Mercer Street, Suite 401, New York, N.Y. 10012; 212-219-0130). Now North American readers can judge for themselves how well Chine Daily measures up to world-class journalistic standards.

As the editors tell it, the paper was initiated to help relieve the claustrophobia felt by American visitors in China. I certainly fit the pattern. A news junky, I had immediately tuned in to the English-language radio service offered by Radio Beijing, but found its presentations extremely curt; and the programs were offered at a time when, after a full morning's study of Mandarin, sleep tended to overcome all other drives.

I became hooked on the newspaper during my winter in the PRC, and even paid $69 for a quarter-year's overseas subscription when the paper promised an advance look at Treasures From the Shanghai Museum"-the exhibit that will be touring the United States for eighteen months. I have never regretted the impulse.

Competition for Gannett's new U.S.A. Today the paper is not. Every issue betrays the agenda not of a news editor but of the Party. We students at the Institute always began with page eight-what we called the "disaster page"-offering news of some natural or man-made calamity back home. Still, on that trauma-ridden billboard one could pick up useful clues from "World Briefs" and 'In the Third World," not to mention the serendipitous ads for Charlie's Cocktail Bar in the New Jianguo Hotel (Oven Fresh PIZZA every week on Tuesday and Thursday); China Asparagus, Flying Wheel Brand; Xuzhou Forging and Pressing Machinery; and China National Machinery Import and Export Corporation, Jiangsu Branch. The presence of advertising, once rejected as a form of bourgeois imperialism, carries its own message.

Page one invariably touts recent Party decisions: 'Shanghai supports inland development" (industrialization is skewed to favor coastal areas In the northeast and south); "Conference on bicycle standards" (China will remain for decades a bikescracy, where mass transit is ruled by pedal); and "China, Rwanda stand for new economic order" (supported by a three-column photo of the president of Rwanda and premier Zhao Ziyang being greeted by a ceremonial covey of children in front of the Great Hall of the People, Beijing).

Page two deals with economics and finance: 'Fodder industry improves China's livestock breeding" and 'Shanghai knitwear sells well in short, a swatch of success stories salted with external signs of instability such as "Major industrial nations warn of energy danger." On the same page one finds a dubious bit of American advertising headlined Non-Resident American University Degrees: 'It is possible-it is honestly possible to earn good, useable Bachelor's, Master's, Doctorates, even Law Degrees from recognized American universities, without ever going to America."This followed by a Mendocino. California, address and telephone number! I am reminded that when I broke my eyeglass frames in Shanghai, the oculist who came to my aid had qualified forty years before by correspondence from the Philadelphia Optical College.

Page three is 'National News: "China develops medical services for 55 minorities." In this, China resembles the Soviet Union: much ado about respecting the rights of splinter minorities while majority civil rights remain in jeopardy. This page also has a revolving regional report, so that Canton, Shanghai, and the Northeast are not too frustrated by the Beijing bias of the entertainment and service features. Page four offers "news" stories--though we in the West would readily call them editorials-and letters to the editor.

The themes that dominate are the reprivatization of the Chinese economy (the so-called responsibility system) and the rehabilitation of intellectuals (read "college trained")- those who, removed from positions of leadership in government, industry, and the military during the Cultural Revolution, were replaced by the politically reliable and rarely competent. It is apparent from such pieces that the process of easing out the Incompetent is now complicated by the reluctance of the competent to identify themselves, terrified lest they be subjected to another such round of frenzied egalitarianism in the future. The slogan "Never Again!" is repeated In China in another context.

Page five is the Culture page, which, in the rhetoric of the New China, includes Technology, Science, and Medicine. One issue tells a chilling story about Tang Feifan (the Western version of his name, F. F. Tang, is given in a picture caption), who attained international renown as the isolator of the virus that causes trachoma. The article ends: 'In 1958 Tang was unjustly accused of being 'reactionary.' On September 30, he committed suicide. His only son, Tang Shengwen, now works in the institute where his father devoted his life to research."

Page six contains 'Life/People" stories and entertainment listings. Mao would turn in his mausoleum to see a story in the same day's issue: "Fashion modeling, Chinese style,"glossed by a photo straight out of a Busby Berkeley movie. Reads the caption: "Members of the Shanghai Fashionable Dress Performance Team model Western clothing at the Agricultural Exhibition Centre in Beijing." Page seven is sports, mainly American, to assuage the gasping US. businessman or government official who just has to know that "76ers edge Knicks, Lakers' blitz wins."

In short, China Daily, for all its journalistic faults, is an honest effort at Sino-American dialogue and a boon for armchair Sinologists.