Examination of Witnesses (Questions 41
- 59)
TUESDAY 13 JUNE 2000
MR JAMES
HARDING, MR
GRAHAM HUTCHINGS
AND MS
LORNA BALL
Chairman
41. Can I welcome our witnesses. You are all
experienced journalists, we look to you to help us to understand
what is happening in China as I understand all of you have spent
some time living there. I thought I would begin by asking each
of you to comment on a text. Some of you may have been here when
we had Professor Yahuda and his colleagues. He said that Communist
Party control is in contradiction with the way the economy is
moving, that a closed society has as its enemy the internet, all
the imperatives of a modern commercial system. Do you agree with
this?
(Mr Hutchings) I agree fundamentally
with it but I think it is a mistake to move from that premise
to the conclusion that the party state system in China is either
close to collapse or will be so in the next ten years or so. Indeed,
I think the contradiction stems ultimately between human nature
and the desire to suppress it which applies everywhere it has
been practised. It applies particularly in China because of some
of the traditional views of authority, the traditional respect
for great leaders, the traditional desire of Chinese people for
a teacher, the insistence of Chinese central governments of every
hue that authority is indivisible, ie not necessarily parcelled
up into legislative, executive or judicial branches, so that you
have here on a grand scale, on a cosmic scale, the kind of contradiction
you refer to.
42. Mr Harding, any contradiction between political
control and economic needs?
(Mr Harding) Not long after I arrived in China someone
explained my job to me very simply as a foreign correspondent
in Shanghai and that was to distinguish between the official reality
and the real reality. This gap widens and narrows and it is not
the case that it stretches to a breaking point. I think I would
probably agree with Mr Hutchings. I do think in areas that have
been talked about this morning it is very important. The fact
that you mentioned the internet, that is a key area where you
are breaking down what has been a tight government lock on information
and forms of expression. One example of how complicated that is
for the government is that in the recent State Council Directive
on how they are going to manage news information flow on the internet,
the State Council's judgment is that only news that has already
been printed in the press can be published on the internet. If
you can imagine how untenable that position is, it shows you the
real challenge they face in managing to maintain official reality
in the hearts and minds of Chinese people. This is a growing gap.
What is significant about it looking ahead is not that this means
a sudden or immediate rupture in the future of the Chinese Communist
Party as the government of China, but what is significant about
it is that it is gradually eroding their control and they are
giving up more and more parts of the economy and more and more
parts of society to real reality, to social forces and economic
forces that are beyond their control.
(Ms Ball) I would agree wholeheartedly with what both
Mr Harding and Mr Hutchings have just said. To take what Mr Harding
has just said one step further on the internet, e-commerce, of
course, is growing and it is important to this country, to Europe,
to the United States and also to China. The Chinese authorities
face the contradiction of wanting the economic growth that may
bring but at the same time desire to control the free flow of
information still. So there are controls about what can be put
on the internet and what sites on the internet are given access
as well.
43. Currently they are seeking to get a single
portal with guards at each door?
(Ms Ball) It is like an intranet for China.
44. With a small door.
(Ms Ball) Where the government controls the ISP, the
internet service provider, that people have access to.
45. How long can that last?
(Ms Ball) That is a very good question. I would say
that it is like trying to put your finger in a dam. In other words,
at some point it will no longer be able to control that sort of
information. This is early days of the growth of on-line in China.
46. Any further comments on the internet?
(Mr Harding) I think they cannot control this and
this terrifies them. There is a wonderful collection of young
internet engineers at Beijing University right in the heartland
who set up a business getting around the blocks and the dam walls
created to try to prevent information coming into China. I think
they are going to have great difficulty in creating a great wall
against the internet.
47. A great wall!
(Ms Ball) I think one further point to add about the
media is that the Chinese media, although it has its drawbacks
and it is controlled, is very lively and competitive compared
to what it used to be. It is not the dull or boring stuff that
used to be there 15 or 20 years ago, it is full of quizzes, soaps,
phone-ins, the sorts of things that we would recognise. That has
produced the contradiction that you have alluded to on the economic
side. On the media side, if you want to control information, as
soon as you have made your media lively and attractive, and Chinese
media carries adverts, it means there is another control of the
media which is nothing to do with the government but everything
to do with economic success. If your television station or your
radio station or, indeed, your internet site is dependent in large
part on money gained from advertising it means that the programmes
and information you give must be attractive. That can lead to
this contradiction that we have been talking about between control
and what is required in China.
Dr Starkey
48. Can I ask a supplementary on what you have
been saying and then I will ask the question I wanted to ask.
Does what you have been talking about apply to the whole of China
or only to certain bits of it? Is it going to spread into the
regions? Is it likely that China will be moving to a situation
of increasing disparity? Will the instability come from the regions
left behind or the regions that are going ahead?
(Ms Ball) Are we talking about economic disparity?
49. Yes, and obviously access to information,
the whole bag really.
(Mr Hutchings) Economic disparities have been perhaps
the most striking feature in strictly economic terms to emerge
from the reforms begun 20 years ago. It is very evident if you
are in, for example, the remote North Western Province of Gansu
compared with Shanghai, where I believe you will be fortunate
to spend some time, where you will be struck—it would be
a dull souled pilgrim who would not be—by the skyscrapers
and the appearances of modern life that are in that extraordinary
city. You would be struck in a different kind of way were you
able to spend a few days in Lanzhou or the cities and towns outside
Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu. This is a very serious problem
and one that the government has tried to address, without very
much success to date, but is now redoubling its efforts with the
strategy known as the Developed Central and Western China Strategy.
I dare say your hosts will present you with some information about
ways in which they intend to raise living standards, which they
regard as a central feature of human rights, in Central and West
China by having tax breaks, sinking government money in, building
roads, schools, encouraging foreign investment and, indeed, encouraging
foreign countries, Britain included, to set up consulates-general
and so forth in the west. So it is a very serious problem, one
that leads to tensions that the government is hoping to ameliorate.
(Ms Ball) If I can just add something on the media
side. Graham is quite right on the economic disparities and the
new programme especially to develop the west, which is foremost
in the Chinese government's mind at the moment. On the media side,
the further you get away from Beijing in particular sometimes
the centre can seem far away and that is sometimes still the case
in China in my experience. Radio stations in particular who are
meant to be funded by the government have had that funding withdrawn,
sometimes up to 90 per cent. So quite a large radio station or
television station will find that 90 per cent of its budget has
suddenly gone and they must make up that money through advertising,
as I said before. You spoke about the disparity when it will reach
the regions. Sometimes when it comes to that sort of control over
the media, the regions can be slightly ahead of an area that is
more tightly controlled like Beijing or, indeed, Shanghai. I do
not want to overstate that because there is a lot of information
that is available in Beijing and Shanghai in particular but one
should not simply see the regions as being far behind on every
count.
50. The main question I wanted to ask is we
talked a lot in the first session about relations between Britain
and China and I would be interested in knowing where China sees
itself in the world in relation to other countries. Who does China
regard as its allies and friends and which states does it regard
as clients?
(Mr Hutchings) A way to approach this is not just
to look at what the Chinese government says or what we think the
Chinese government believes but to approach it from the point
of view of Chinese men and women whom one might meet in the course
of one's work or life in Beijing and ask these questions: who
are the instinctive comparators; who do the Chinese compare themselves
with when they compare their own country and its achievements
with those of others? You might think from GDP levels, from its
position in the economic development cycle, that India would be
a natural choice, Vietnam perhaps, other developing countries,
but that is not the case. It is the West and it is specifically
America. Britain is seen to be an advanced and, to some extent,
different power from America but essentially to be subsumed within
the American category and vision. The Chinese leaders, in my view,
have a rather similar view, they are genuinely representative
of their people in this respect, that the natural comparators
are the rich countries, the powerful countries, particularly the
powerful countries able to assert themselves both in terms of
bilateral relations and particularly in international organisations.
Everywhere you look practically on the Chinese diplomatic, political
and economic agenda they encounter as obstacle or grudging ally
the United States of America. As we have heard this morning, since
they are inheritors of a view about themselves which is exceedingly
immodest, ie that they are at the centre of the world, small wonder
that they regard themselves as the natural adversary of the United
States of America whose position they would like to supplant.
51. Allies and clients, you have not mentioned
any at all.
(Mr Harding) This is a hugely interesting question
because Jiang Zemin has made it his business to manage the foreign
policy of China. While there has been a frenzy of activity in
the last two years in terms of the number of visits, when you
speak to your hosts, and I imagine you will see people from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and discuss with them the volume
of dignitaries they are hosting through Beijing it is a remarkable
management operation and yet at the same time where are the allies
and where are the real relationships? I would argue that Jiang
Zemin has had a real difficulty in creating any real relationships
with major powers. If you look at Russia there were frequent meetings
between him and Yeltsin but there was no real economic basis for
that relationship and there were clearly competing strategic interests
between both Russia and China vis a vis relationships with
the US. The relationship with India was always pretty lukewarm
and obviously deteriorated after the missile testing. The relationship
with the US has been continually dogged by human rights issues,
rightly, and by the Tibet question and also by conflicting opinions
within the US about trade and WTO. The visit by President Clinton
actually served as a lightning rod for those feelings to some
extent and the embassy bombing has once again identified how isolated
China is. The remarkable feature here, and I suppose this is where
Europe and the UK comes in, is actually how needy China is of
strong relationships with the West and with Europe and with the
UK rather than what one might expect to be a very strong set of
relationships and allies.
52. You have not mentioned Japan. I do not know
if Ms Ball wants to bring that in?
(Mr Harding) All I would say is that obviously Japan
and Korea are problems left over from history. They are not natural
allies but if they can be economic partners that is a good start.
(Ms Ball) I think that will be the first way in which
they would view Japan. I do not think one can under-estimate the
problems of history that James has referred to. There is a big
dislike of Japan that is inherited from the Second World War.
53. Korea?
(Mr Hutchings) I was going to say there is a very
incestuous, but that is not the right word, a very peculiar relationship
with North Korea. You will have learned the successor to Kim Il-sung
made his first foreign visit since appointment and he did so in
terms of a secret rail journey to Beijing immediately before the
summit that is taking place now. The other way to consider this
I suppose is what is it in the personality and the character of
Chinese leaders that other countries might admire or find agreeable
or easy to get on with? What is it in terms of the charm and spontaneity
that we recognise as being an ingredient of diplomatic relations
even amongst adversaries and political opponents? What is it in
the particular national policies of China which encourage admiration,
reverence or perhaps even grudging respect on the part of other
countries? What is there in their system that might appeal even—I
use the word perhaps ill-advisedly—to less developed states
in the world? I think the answer in all cases is there is very
little.
Sir John Stanley
54. Ms Ball, with your World Service hat on
could you set out for the Committee what you consider to be the
main impediments to people in China accessing the World Service
and how far are those impediments created by the Chinese government's
restrictions on frequencies and other technical means and how
far are those impediments created by lack of funding of the China
service by the BBC here?
(Ms Ball) There are many ways to answer that. First
of all, I should say straight away that if you want to access
the BBC in China, whether it is listening to the radio, the shortwave
radio, or whether it is accessing the BBC on-line site it is very
difficult from China to do that. The shortwave frequencies into
China that come from the BBC are jammed. Not all of them all of
the time but some of them all of the time are jammed. You can
listen to the radio but it requires re-tuning your radio and a
bit of fiddle-faddle which increasingly in a competitive market
people may not be prepared to do. The BBC on-line site in China,
and we were talking before about ISPs, China's desire to control
them, if you type in a BBC address on the net in China it will
be blocked because of software that the Chinese government uses.
There is a way around that, it is quite easy to sidestep that,
but nevertheless you must know how to do so. These two impediments
to accessing the BBC affect our ability to reach our audience
in China. However, I think it would be wrong of me to say that
is the whole story. It is also true, as I have already mentioned,
that the media in China as far as we are concerned is quite competitive
and it is attractive, it is sophisticated, it appeals to its audience,
especially now that it has the economic incentive to do so. In
most countries in the world when the media is deregulated there
is much less control and there is much more competition as outsiders
come in as well but in China we are hit with a double-whammy,
the domestic media is much more competitive but we are blocked
out from taking part in that competition. That would also be a
reason why we find it difficult to access our audience. Also in
the past the BBC has done programmes that the Chinese authorities
have not liked and as a direct consequence of that our access
into China has been more controlled, more difficult. Our correspondents
who are based in Beijing have to receive permission to travel
if it is a reporting trip and recently that permission has been
quite forthcoming. I think our relationship with the Chinese authorities
has become more constructive, if I can put it that way, which
gives us better access into China. It has been the case in the
past when I have tried to get Chinese BBC journalists into China,
it has not been possible for me to get them into China but in
the last couple of years I have been able to do that. Our access
has improved somewhat.
55. Thank you. I know that BBC World Television
is actually outside your immediate area but it is a source of
continuing interest as far as this Committee is concerned. Have
you any comments you can make to us as to whether BBC World Television
is making any progress at all towards getting back satellite television
access to China from which of course it was dispossessed by the
Murdoch empire with the Chinese government's active enthusiasm?
(Ms Ball) Including, alas, a section of my own department
because we had a Chinese television service as well.
Chairman
56. I am sorry, I missed that.
(Ms Ball) I said including, alas, a section of my
own department at the time because the Chinese service also had
a television department that beamed programmes into China which
also had to finish. BBC World Television in English is now available
in many hotel rooms in China but at the moment it does not have
an official licence to do that. We are hopeful, and I can only
speak in more general, optimistic terms, that a licence will be
forthcoming. The BBC will be asking the Chinese authorities for
such a licence in the next few months. Two weeks ago the Chinese
Culture Minister was over here and spoke in fairly constructive
terms about the relationship between the BBC and China. We live
in hope that licence will be granted.
57. That is into hotels, what about into people's
homes? Is there any means of picking up BBC World?
(Ms Ball) You could do if you had the satellite receiving
dish to do so but the signal is encrypted so you must have the
right satellite receiving dish.
58. With a de-encryption device?
(Ms Ball) Yes.
59. It is probably a criminal offence to have
one, is it?
(Ms Ball) In China you need permission anyway to have
a satellite receiving dish, so if you need a special one with
the encryption device for the BBC that permission will be denied
I think.
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