I felt good and ready to go today! After breakfast at the hotel, we visited Yuyuan, a gorgeous garden for the royal family during the Ming Dynasty.
Then, we went to the City Temple. It was interesting seeing so many people praying there. I guess I wasn’t expecting the Chinese people to be that religious before I came to China, for one reason or another.
Next, we had lunch at the oldest Vegetarian restaurant in Shanghai. Everything was really good, and as Evan mentioned, the vegetable “beef” tasted a lot like real beef.
After that, we went to the Shanghai Public Library and listened to the librarian; give a lecture titled “Shanghai in the Past Century.” She divided her talk into three sections – “Ancient Shanghai: A Traditional Town in the South of China,” “Modern Shanghai: A Treaty Port City,” and “Contemporary Shanghai: An International Metropolis.” Some interesting tidbits I learned about modern Shanghai (the librarian showed us a wonderful, witty video during her lecture):
– It is the 8th largest city in the world
– It has been described as the “Paris of the East”
– While it is the largest Chinese city, it has the lowest fertility rate in the nation
– Shanghai is sinking at a rate of 1.5 centimeters per year… yikes
– Shanghai is the birthplace of Chinese theater
– Shanghai consumes the most sugar out of all the other places in China
– Shanghai’s Marriage Market – Google it
Next, we listened to someone from the Shanghai Documentary Channel. She showed us a portion of a documentary she had directed about Ürümqi, China, the place furthest away from an ocean in on the entire Earth. During her talk and the Q&A afterwards, I learned some interesting things about TV media in China:
– The Chinese government owns TV stations, although the state is not responsible for the TV station profiting
– Virtually no TV stations are privately owned in China
– Each channel has a different team working on the corporate content
– Not all documentaries are for governmental interests (the word used during the Q&A was “propaganda”)
– Someone looks over the final product (documentary, in this case), but not for checking that a certain message has been sent to the public
– Nowadays, the government outlines boundaries as to what TV media can’t do, as opposed to saying they need to do “x,y, or z”
– People in the industry feel that the process of journalism/TV are moving more towards an open avenue
– According to her, air pollution is not a very prohibited subject, as long as the government does not get the blame for the environmental issues
These points have painted a better picture of so-called press freedom in China than I expected going in, but I still raise my eyebrow at the Chinese government 1. owning all TV stations, and 2. outlining boundaries. This is, even if on minimally invasive level as her implied today, still press censorship. A free media is not obligated to answer to any third party but the public.
One of the most interesting things I learned from her was that when deciding on a topic to make a documentary out of, the documentary team will ask a range of half a pool of experts from various fields for suggestions. One thing Professor Fang mentioned is that even if experts propose things with no apparent third party hovering over them, they probably self-censor. Which brings me to…
At the end of the day, don’t all journalists self-censor? George Orwell put it interestingly – “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” Writing for the campus newspaper, I don’t come across many stories that warrant me getting information someone else would “not want printed,” as people aren’t generally defensive about the location and details of the upcoming homecoming dance or sexual assault information talks at orientation week. But, I would imagine that covering more controversial stories would require a degree of self-censorship for the sake of getting at least some information to the public – for instance, if I were covering a new famous upcoming product, I would be able to find out details about its release and basic functions, but probably not its name, if the company was waiting for a big reveal. Therefore, the increase my chances of getting the former information, I would either wait until the end to ask about the name, or not ask out all, after feeling out the situation and determining where everyone stands.
On a more obvious level, journalists self-censor all the time because journalistic writing – pure, ethical, journalistic writing – is supposed to be objective. Being unbiased requires self-censorship; it requires holding back your own thoughts and opinions on the subject matter at hand.
Afterwards, we went shopping and sightseeing at Tianzifang, and we had Taiwanese food at a nice little restaurant in the area.
