“Between a rock and a hard place”: How the media can better serve Chinese Australian audiences
A recent Walkley panel on China in the Media argued that coverage of China needs to be more nuanced, writes Kate Prendergast.
On Thursday, May 24 as part of the Walkley Media Talks series, The Walkley Foundation hosted the panel China in the Media. The speakers were Lisa Murray, senior Fairfax journalist and former China correspondent; Wanning Sun, UTS professor of Media and Communication Studies; Philip Ivanov, Asia Society CEO; and Jieh-Yung Lo, a policy adviser and commentator. Having just returned from the Walkley Media Exchange, in partnership with DFAT and the All-China Journalists’ Association, Walkleys multimedia and communications manager Helen Sullivan served as participating moderator.
China had been the focus of significant media attention in the week preceding the event. On the Monday, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had an unofficial meeting with Wang Yi, her Chinese counterpart at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that following the meeting, China issued a statement to stating that Mr Wang had said to Ms Bishop, “Due to the Australian side, China-Australia relations have encountered some difficulties recently, and the exchanges and cooperation between the two countries have also been affected. This is not what China hopes to see.”
In the same week, senator Andrew Hastie used parliamentary privilege to allege Chinese-Australian businessman Chau Chak Wing was funding the bribery of a senior United Nations official.
Although the rising tension between Australia and its biggest trade partner is a naturally newsworthy topic, the panelists agreed that public discussion has become increasingly polarised.
“It’s really unhelpful,” said Jieh-Yung.
“You want to dissect these issues and be able to debate them in an appropriate way, but it’s been very difficult for a lot of Australia-China community leaders — they’re afraid of speaking out because they don’t want to be labeled a sympathiser or a panda hugger.”
Jieh-Yung attracted such a label after sharing one of his articles on Twitter. Having his very allegiance to Australia questioned was “deeply traumatising”, he said.
“I’ve never had that happen before, let alone by my fellow Australians.”
While there have been improvements, the panelists concurred that the media’s treatment of China in the months following Trump’s election was greatly lacking in nuance.
Wanning Sun proposed that the relationship between China Studies scholars and the media can be “uneasy”. Many academics are hesitant or ambivalent to give quotes, she said. Some feel themselves unqualified to talk about general China matters outside of their own specialised focus. Other times, burned by experience, they believe their statements may be misconstrued to fit a story a journalist has already intended to write.
But more than this, “the energy we spend talking to the media, to put it crassly: it’s not part of our KPIs,” said Wanning. “It’s not what gets you jobs.” Her view is that until universities change their policies to include this practice of media engagement as a KPI, doing so is only going to be seen by scholars as added labour in their time-poor schedules, and not without reputational risk.
Subsequently, only a few China Studies scholars were initially willing and available to answer the calls of the deadline-pressed media. These voices were “instrumental in shaping the debate and the media”, said Wanning, even though they were not necessarily “authoritative or representative of the community in general”.
Wanning and other China Studies scholars banded together in March and made a submission to the parliamentary committee on the Foreign Influence Bill. They also simultaneously published an open letter to contest “key claims that have been raised in the course of this discussion of Chinese influence in Australia”. The letter has gathered over 80 signatures. Since then, “a few stories that came up after that have started to quote scholars from the so-called silent majority,” said Wanning.
While the panelists agreed that the media has been culpable of distorting news relating to China, they also concur that the threat of Chinese state influence is far from fabricated.
“Writing about Chinese Community Party attempts to influence the political system or universities or the local media, that is a legitimate story,” Murray noted, to nods from her co-panelists. “There has been some good reporting on that.”
Other issues like Chinese censorship (as recently seen played out on the world stage at Eurovision) and human rights abuse allegations also demand proportionate media scrutiny. But the panel agreed it’s important that such coverage does not contribute to a racialised discourse that sensationalises isolated incidents to manufacture the myth of a mass conspiracy. Especially when the result could be to stigmatise and alienate the 1.2 million people of Chinese ancestry who call Australia their home.
As to calls for a greater diversity of content on China — beyond the constant news of alleged espionage and trade — Murray argued that such content is out there: stories on environmental activist groups, high-speed trains, “an all-female Chinese contemporary artist exhibition in Sydney” curated by former Australian Ambassador to China Geoff Raby. But, due to the nature of the media machine, she said, “it’s the stories that are at the ‘pointy end’ of things that are highlighted”.
The panelists all argued the importance of Chinese-language media in Australia to the Chinese-Australian community. This community feels “wedged between a rock and a hard place,” said Wanning, with two push factors: an increasingly authoritarian China on the one hand and an Australia increasingly hostile to Chinese people on the other.
Independent Chinese-language publications therefore see a need to “express the Chinese community’s sense of fear and anxiety and ambivalence in response to the war of words between the two sides”.
“It fills a void,” agreed Jieh-Yung. But, being too often lumped together with Chinese state media, “it has got a bad rap over the last 18 months”.
“If Australian mainstream media are serious about engaging this particular cohort in the community, there should be more investment in supporting journalists with bilingual abilities. There needs to be more investment in Chinese language resources.”
To celebrate Lunar New Year, the ABC added mandarin subtitles to a selection of iview programs including Four Corners, while also offering four children’s programs (like Peppa Pig) in a Mandarin language version over a 12-month iview trial last year.
“We’ve never been in this situation before,” said Ivanov, “where we have an emergent power that is very different from us — culturally, politically, historically.”
Navigating the changing dynamic between the two nations “is not going to be easy. It’s going to be very difficult. But the last thing our political or cultural leaders want to do is to go to war with one million of our citizens.”
2018 commemorates 200 years since the first Chinese individuals and families migrated to Australia. This ethnic group has been, as Jieh-Yung said, the longest in continuous migration since Federation, resulting in an incredibly heterogeneous community, rich in potential stories for the Australian media to tell.
As Ivanov said, as we tell those stories: “We need to be more nuanced.”
China in the Media was presented in partnership with the State Library of NSW. You can also listen to the talk as a podcast here.
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