The View from Inside: An American Enters the World of Chinese Media

[NOTE: The following was originally published on May 6, 2019. To read how my new CGTN colleague, host Liu Xin, went viral across China - and how I watched it unfold from my front-row seat - please click here.]

By Michael J. Jordan

BEIJING – My young Chinese colleague didn’t ask me in an aggressive or insulting way. Instead, I sensed genuine curiosity from her, if a bit blunt: “Why are you here?”

Now one month into my new job, I can confirm: this was too unique an opportunity to pass up. Indeed, I’ve become one of the few Westerners to work inside the belly of China’s state-run media.

This is no ordinary media, mind you. In the world’s most-populous nation, and its second-largest economy, China Central Television (CCTV) is arguably the most powerful TV empire on the planet.

Critics, of course, paint it all as propaganda, primarily aimed at defending the government. As a Western journalist, I once shared their view. However, I now see a reality that’s far more nuanced.

Specifically, I’ve begun a one-year assignment at the English-language China Global Television Network – which is how CCTV re-branded its CCTV International operation – as a News Editor and Scriptwriter for one of its leading current-affairs programs: The Point with Liu Xin.

This show, though, symbolizes much more than news and opinion from a Chinese perspective. China is currently investing billions of dollars in its foreign-language media, as part of a broader effort to win the hearts and minds of more foreigners around the world. Since our show is primarily aimed at that international audience, I suddenly find myself on the frontlines of China’s “soft power” campaign.

For me, this gig also represents more than a mere “job.” It marries three of my career’s consuming passions: international storytelling, journalism teaching and global communications. I now bring each into the newsroom, applying them in different ways.

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First of all, it’s an exciting chance to return to my roots in media, especially in international journalism. For 20 years, I was a freelance Foreign Correspondent, at various junctures reporting from across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the United Nations, and, most recently, from Southern Africa.

From 30 countries, I’ve produced stories for outlets like Foreign Policy; French news agency AFP; the Christian Science Monitor newspaper; Harvard’s Nieman Reports; South Africa’s Mail & Guardian; and many others. Before China, as the lone Western correspondent living in Lesotho – a tiny African kingdom – I covered the 2014 coup-attempt and the months of turbulence that followed.

In August 2015, I moved to Beijing, and have since focused more on my university teaching and Communications consulting. The closest I’ve come to “real” journalism is as the self-appointed “Editor-in-Chief” of the webzines I’ve created for my Chinese grad students and professional trainees, to provide them a platform and showcase for the storytelling projects that I guided them to produce.

Before China, I was an international educator, as well, teaching students on four continents: from New York to Hong Kong, from Prague to Maseru. Since 2015, I’ve been fortunate enough to teach International Journalism at some of China’s finest schools – like Renmin University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Communication University of Zhejiang, Shanghai International Studies University and Hong Kong Baptist University – where I taught as a seven-time Visiting Scholar.

After sharing my own skills and strategies with more than 1,000 Chinese grad students over the past decade, this move to CGTN feels like a logical next step: a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder with young Chinese professionals. Happily, there’s also the opportunity to coach and even train them, now and then.

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In fact, my new job already feels like I’m fulfilling a dream hatched more than 25 years ago. This dream, though, was borne of a deep disappointment with my own lack of mentors, as a young reporter. After graduating from university, I entered the news business by writing for a small daily paper in Southern California, for two years. Then, for one year at a weekly paper in Northern California.

Every day, I’d research topics, interview sources, write my stories. For sure, I was learning from the best possible teacher: experience. Yet something was missing. A mentor. I’d typically turn over my story to the editors, who always seemed frantic, on deadline. Their feedback to me was usually brief: my piece was either good, or no good. If “no good,” I rarely received guidance in how to do better.

At the time, I blamed two culprits for creating unrealistic expectations: Hollywood and my journalism school. So many American movies have portrayed the lives of a crusading journalist – who “couldn’t have done it alone.” Classic films, like All the President’s Men.

That filled my head with the romanticized notion that once aboard a newspaper staff, if I stumbled in pursuit of a hot story, a grizzled old editor who’d “seen it all” would bark at me, to get into his office. (Back then, in the early 1990s, my limited imagination could only imagine men in that role.)

From the bottom drawer of his desk, he’d pull out a bottle of whiskey – and pour us both a glass.

“Kid,” he’d tell me, reassuringly, “pay close attention. I’ll show you the ropes.”

My college days further fueled such dreams. At the University of Missouri School of Journalism – the world’s oldest such journalism school – our professors were our editors. Our editors were our teachers. I loved the practical, hands-on education. Yet, I didn’t fully appreciate that our faculty was also paid to guide, coach and mentor us.

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Thus, the table was set for my disappointment, even frustration, with real-life editors. At both of my first two newspapers, though, I was fortunate to have editors who were absolutely stellar pros. But they were also harried and over-worked, focusing on their own daily survival – with litte spare time to coach me, too. That’s why I had to settle for my only available option: “Experience is the best teacher.”

But at some point, I vowed to myself: One day, I’ll provide the kind of mentoring to others, which I never get enough of. I was just 23 or 24, yet I’d daydream of a quaint, journalistic life in my middle-age: married with kids, working as Editor of a small-town daily, somewhere in provincial America.

My staff, I imagined, would be comprised of young reporters. I’d take each one under my wing, cultivating them to produce the kind of meaningful journalism, and impactful stories, that would make a difference in our community. Moreover, the skills and lessons I’d impart would leave a lasting impression on these young adults. Later in life, they’d remember me fondly … as a source of inspiration.

That was the dream, at least. But I’d soon put that on hold, as a more urgent dream crystalized: to report from overseas. I moved to Budapest, Hungary, in 1993. Since then, I’ve spent 21 of the past 26 years living in Europe, Africa and Asia. That small-town-editor dream is so distant, I’d nearly forgotten it.

That is, until a variation of it magically came to life for me … in China, of all places.

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Now one month into this CGTN job, I’m already planning my first series of skills-centric workshops – for members of our own team, or anyone else at the network who’d be interested.

But beyond my return to media, and the opportunity to coach, this job offers a third appealing benefit: the communications challenge. Upon arriving in China, in 2015, I also branched into Strategic Communications, consulting and training Chinese communication staff in how to reach foreign audiences, more effectively and persuasively. This is enormously important for China, and I see how every. Chinese company and organization struggles with it: no one here seems to know how to do it well.

Why’s it important? Simply put, China matters. In every way imaginable, on the international stage: economically, politically, militarily, diplomatically, and so on. Take, for example, the Belt & Road Initiative – the massive, Chinese-led infrastructural project that has so far attracted 126 other partner-countries. It’s already building new highways, bridges, ports and train-lines around the world.

However, within the foreign media, the skepticism and suspicion of Chinese intentions is palpable. That may be understandable, but now I’m seeing “the Chinese side of the story” more clearly.

It’s also enabling me to comprehend one of the most common laments that I’ve heard from Chinese officialdom over the years: “We must do a better job of explaining ourselves to the world.”

However, the need goes both ways. While China wants to “explain itself” more effectively to the world, its emerging “superpower” status means that the world also has a powerful self-interest to better understand China, and the Chinese people, as much as is possible.

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That’s why I relish my new role within Chinese media: as a human bridge, trying to connect the Chinese perspective with the foreign audience. For two decades, I myself have grappled with how to effectively reach this audience. Two audiences, in fact.

First, there are the editors who act as the “gatekeepers” of publications to whom I pitch my story ideas, trying to convince them of the value of my stories: why they should allocate precious space to publish it; why they should allocate precious budget to pay me for it; why they should even pay my travel expenses to produce it. These are high standards, indeed. Next, there are the readers themselves: I must persuade them why they should read the actual story I wrote from some faraway land.

My foreign audience, in general, has always shared certain traits: unlike the vast majority of people around the world, who are largely incurious about international affairs, ours is a more “elite” audience – smart and curious, yet mostly non-experts on the countries from which we’re reporting. Moreover, they’re generally skeptical: we must supply them with credible “evidence” – in the form of verifiable facts – to convince them that we mean what we say.

As I explain to students, colleagues and wider audiences, when it comes to China, I’ve come to view our generally smart, curious foreign audience through an additional lens. I lay it out as a spectrum, of three distinct categories of people:

1)     Those who are anti-China, for some reason. Virtually nothing “positive” they learn will change their mind about China. So, we within Chinese media can basically write them off.

2)     Those who are pro-China, for some reason. Virtually nothing “negative” they learn will change their mind about China. No need for us to “work hard” to persuade them, then.

3)     Finally, the third cohort, in the middle. Perhaps they’re on the fence, but could swing either way. To register some desired impact on this viewer – to not see China in black-and-white terms, but rather in nuanced shades of gray – it’ll depend on how strategically, effectively and persuasively we deliver our words, messages, arguments, etc.

In short, our outreach to them should also rely on “evidence-based” communications, as that’s the only way to convince a skeptical mind – a mind that is at least open to potential persuasion.

How exactly to do that, then, is another challenge that excites me. It explains why I’m embracing this new gig as a hybrid of sorts: one part journalistic media, one part Strategic Communications.

These are just some of the insights – in how to touch our target-viewers – that I’m now sharing with my well-meaning Chinese colleagues. Which leads back to my new co-worker’s initial question: Why are you here? She followed up with: Why not work for foreign media in China, instead? Why us?

Sure, I probably could have. But there’s no shortage of foreigners doing that job, and thousands more who have done it before them. On the other hand, the chance to work on the inside, for CGTN, side-by-side with the Chinese? That’s far more unique. And, potentially, more meaningful.

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