On a fast toboggan to China
A dispatch from the Australia-China Media Exchange
This April the Walkley Foundation and the Australian Embassy in Beijing, together with the All China Journalists Association, presented a series of journalism masterclasses led by three Walkley-winning journalists. The group spent a week traveling across three mainland cities, visiting leading Chinese media organisations and engaging with students of journalism and Australian studies in some of China’s top universities.
Accompanied by The Australian’s Chip Le Grand, whose book The Straight Dope won the 2016 Walkley Book Award; the ABC’s Rachael Brown, whose Walkley-winning Trace podcast had more than 2.2 million downloads; and Gold Walkey-winning freelance photojournalist Andrew Quilty, who is based in Afghanistan, I set off for the People’s Republic.
First stop: Beijing, where we visited Renmin University and caught our first glimpse of what would become a recurring theme. We asked the class of about thirty journalism and communications masters students whether they planned on going into journalism. Fewer than five hands went up. At university after university, the response was the same.
Each Australian journalist gave a masterclass on their particular medium. Andrew told the story behind his Gold Walkley-winning photograph, “The Man on the Operating Table”; Chip spoke about covering a terrorist attack in Melbourne and the importance of shoe-leather journalism; and Rachael went into detail about honing the right sound and voice to make Trace feel intimate, respectful and never gratuitous.
Next we traveled to Chengdu, where, in addition to the famous pandas, we visited Sichuan University and Sichuan Media Group, as well as meeting Australians working at the consulate in Chengdu. Over a dinner of outrageously delicious and spicy Sichuan food, the diplomats shared their perspectives on Chinese politics, progress for the LGBTQI community and media.
After a few more classes, where very few students raised their hands when asked who wanted to be journalists, we were pleasantly surprised in Guangzhou. One of China’s three largest cities with a population of more than thirteen million people, here the media landscape was somewhat less restricted. We met students who wanted to be investigative reporters, make radio journalism and documentaries.
Perhaps their openness was affected by two of the journalists trying out a new teaching method. When a student asked how Andrew manages to photograph tense scenes or situations, Andrew responded by acting his work out, with Chip playing the role of wary cop.
The trip also involved visits to several media organisations, including perhaps the most loyal voice of the Communist Party, the People’s Daily in Beijing. It was a meeting that for the three journalists had its dull moments, with no meaty political discussion and a long tour of many informational boards declaring, for example, the number of political leaders who read and write for the paper. But going behind the scenes of a propaganda machine was fascinating, in a way, too.
And this compared to Nanfang media group, again in Guangzhou, where the journalists had no shortage of questions, admiring and critical, for the Australian journalists. Andrew asked what they felt foreign journalists got wrong about China. They responded that their bigger concern was that these foreign journalists won awards for their reporting on the country, while local journalists received little recognition.
Everywhere we were blown away by the scale of the skyscrapers and the cities, whose giant buildings continued far into the horizon. We ate Peking duck, which in Beijing is, understandably, called Beijing duck. Rachael, Andrew and I tobogganed down the Great Wall of China.
We had ventured out on our first day, a cool Sunday in early spring, while Chip, who had been to the wall on a previous trip to China, explored the Forbidden City. We climbed many stairs, passing small patches of unmelted snow which resembled the few cherry trees coming into blossom amid a landscape of otherwise bare winter branches. At the top, we walked the lengths between watchtowers, where bees flew in and out of ancient windows, and eventually sat down for an overpriced but, we decided, totally worth-it beer.
An hour or so later we were moving down a windy metal slide, stopping and starting as we tried not to crash into each other. I thought of that ride often as the trip drew to a close. The fitful pace of the slide seemed like a perfect metaphor for the week’s many conversations and lessons. Navigating translation, politics and culture we would gain understanding little by little. Then, having picked up momentum we would understand a lot very quickly, before applying the brakes again, slowing down to take so many new things in.
Helen Sullivan is the Walkley Foundation’s communications and multimedia manager. Follow her on twitter @helenrsullivan. For more Walkley Magazine stories, follow the Walkley Foundation on Medium and Twitter @walkleys.
