World Audience Watches as an Open Door Closes

For the diehard Western journalists still in Beijing, the process of covering China has reverted back to the pre-Open Door days of the “China watchers,” who sat in Hong Kong pouring through newspapers looking for any small clue about what was happening behind the “iron fist” of the Communist government.

So says Michael Chinoy, CNN’s Beijing bureau chief, who has been covering China on and off for more than a decade and has seen China go from from its most open and forthright period in its modern history to one its most closed and restrictive in less than a month.

“The days when we could march through the gates of Beijing University with our cameras rolling and get Chinese students to give us an honest answer about how they felt are gone,” Chinoy said in a phone interview from Beijing Thursday.

“There is a real shortage of information. You can’t just call up Deng Xiaoping and ask for his take on things. So we are left with reading the Chinese newspapers and watching who appears on Chinese television and then analyzing what it means. It’s all surmise and conjecture and admittedly not 100% accurate, but it’s following in a long line of tradition of covering China that I grew up with in the ‘70s. We are truly now operating in the blind, both in terms of television because we have hardly any pictures to show and that we have no hard information and have to rely on subtle changes in statements (made by various government officials) that we pick out of the newspapers.”

It’s a radical change for journalists who only one month earlier--when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing and Chinese students occupied Tian An Mien Square--enjoyed unprecedented freedom to shoot video and talk to anyone on the street. In those days, before the June 4 massacre of students and the occupation of Beijing by the Chinese army, reporters such as Chinoy provided some of the most dramatic television in the history of broadcast news.

Now what we see on American television is far from dramatic and equally far from the whole truth.

Chinoy, who is fluent in Mandarin, expressed frustration that his job has been reduced to trying to figure out what it means when Premier Li Peng appears one day on television meeting with some foreign ambassadors in a Western-style suit and then the next day another high party figure appears in an old-style Mao suit.

Another clue came last weekend when a statement buried in an article in a Chinese newspaper made by one of the men Deng had gathered around him to break the democracy protests seemed to disavow not only political reforms but China’s economic reforms as well. This statement seemed to indicate, Chinoy reported to CNN viewers, that some of the men at the center of the current government were even more conservative than Deng.

Since martial law was imposed in Beijing--and especially after the military crackdown-- shooting any fresh video has become difficult, though Chinoy said that CNN and the other television networks are able to shoot tape as long as they are discreet. But he said journalists still operate under a cloud of danger and anxiety. Several journalists have been expelled or detained by the Chinese government and tensions will remain high for all Americans in Beijing as long as Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi remains in sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy and Sino-U.S. relations remain dicey.

But perhaps more disturbing, Chinoy admitted, is that the Chinese government has used American television reports to track down and arrest at least one citizen who was brave enough or foolhardy enough to speak out. Last week, ABC broadcast an eight-second sound bite from an eye witness to the June 4 slaughter. Chinese officials apparently lifted the shot off the satellite feed, and then showed this same person being arrested and recanting his statements on Chinese television a few days later.

“The Chinese citizens are extremely wary of all foreigners now,” Chinoy said. “It’s hard to get anyone to go on camera, even if they agree with the government line.” Chinoy said that CNN did not have any specific policy about protecting the identity of anyone he is able to speak to and he did not want to go into any specifics about how or if he has been getting around this journalistic bind.

Nor was he sure why the Chinese government was even permitting Western journalists to remain in Beijing at all.

“We only have theories,” Chinoy said. “Maybe the government is just not organized enough to take greater action against the Western media. Maybe they think we are adequately bottled up by the strict limitations and that we end up reporting what the government wants said from what we see on Chinese television. And they are trying to say that everything is back to normal. They do not want to close the Open Door.”

Chinoy opened CNN’s Beijing bureau in 1987, but he has been covering events in China and Asia since the early ‘70s. Over the past month, he has become a household name for regular viewers of CNN, filing dozens of reports a day during the height of the crisis.

While the networks rushed in their heavy-hitters--including CBS’s Dan Rather, ABC’s Ted Koppel, CNN’s own Bernard Shaw, and most recently NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who returned to New York last weekend after 10 days of reporting from China--to cover recent events in Beijing for a short time, Chinoy is there for the duration or at least until his current contract runs out in the fall of 1990.

Though the story has lost its extraordinary television drama, Chinoy said that he is still filing at least one taped report and several live phone in reports for CNN each day.

“There might be a diminution of interest about this story in the U.S. and at the big networks, but it still is a story of great importance for the people of China and China’s dealings with the rest of the world. They are one-fourth of the world’s population and I have always felt that China has not received the coverage that it deserved. This situation is momentous with tremendous implications. Even though the return for our work is not as meaty now or as gratifying in terms of television drama, it’s still the most extraordinary story I’ve ever seen.”

Even if it has become one of the saddest. The hunting down of student protesters and other dissidents continues, and this week the government executed at least 27 people for their roles in the democracy protests.

“It has become a terribly depressing story to cover and it is much more difficult to keep going than it was during the heady days before the crackdown. For someone who has watched China struggle to extricate itself from the turmoil and violence and rigidity of the Cultural Revolution and then to see all the progress put in jeopardy is terribly sad. But that’s our job, and even with the restrictions, you just hope that you get it right more times than you get it wrong.”