ON NEW SOCIAL MEDIA, THE SURVEILLANCE OF THE EVERYDAY, AND THE FUTURE OF CHINA

A DEAN Interview with David Wertime

Source: Eli Meir Kaplan

Fei: What is your own background in media? What drew you to media?

David: I came into it as somewhat of an amateur. I had no formal experience except for my involvements as an editor at my weekly student paper when I was an undergraduate a thousand years ago (laughs). So really Tea Leaf Nation was my first foray into I guess what you call “real journalism.”

Fei: How did you get interested in China?

David: I went there right after graduating [college] as a Peace Corps volunteer. I went to a city called Fuling 涪陵, which is part of Chongqing 重慶.

Fei: Is that the same place that Peter Hessler went?

David: Yes. I think he preceded me by maybe five years.

Fei: Did you have similar experiences as Peter Hessler?

David: To some extent. I knew almost nothing about China; I hadn’t studied it in anyway nor had I studied Chinese. Most of what I learned was because my mom bought me River Town, it was good because it reset my expectations, because I had a mental image of China as much more pastoral. The China [Hessler] depicted was gritty and urban, and a place of great change and upheaval that can be confusing to any observer, not to mention the people who live there. So that was very helpful. I had my expectations more in line with reality. I didn’t know I would be sent to Fuling, but I might have had an inkling that that would happen after reading River Town.

Fei: Did you have a partner with you as well?

David: I did. I had a so-called “site mate”, which was just someone else in the Peace Corps, and also they have two years worth of volunteers at many sites. So at any given time, there were three volunteers and I was one of the three. I would say that I didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time with them, because I wanted to experience and get a sense of where I was. But it thought what Peter Hessler described was broadly correct. I mean it squared with my experience.

Fei: Why did you pick the Peace Corps in China when you didn’t have a background or interest in the country at the time?

David: That’s a great question. I guess there’s a list of one hundred countries about which I knew little or nothing about, and many of the Peace Corps countries were those countries. I had spent some years as a kid in Italy, but there wass no Peace Corps in Italy. With China, my older brother had already spent a decent amount of time out in Asia. He was living in Thailand at the time so he showed me it could be done; you could live abroad and be okay. And I also had college friends coming back from research or summers spent in China, and they seemed to be describing a place that was changing very fast and that was very exciting to me. So I thought with all that and China being the biggest country in the world, I’d check it out.

Fei: So after Peace Corps you came back to the States?

David: So my experience with Peace Corps ended very abruptly because of SARS. In 2003, I got a call from the Peace Corps doctor out of Chengdu, and he said, “Are you sitting down?” and I said, “no, why?” and he said, “You have less than 24 hours to leave. If you miss the flight out of Chengdu, you are stuck in Chengdu, because this is the last commercial flight we could availability on.” Because commercial airliners, from what I understand, were worried about liability, and the insurance companies were not willing to insure the planes. The idea was that the planes would be contaminated by SARS. They were shutting down these flights, so I had a quick goodbye with my students – a lot of tears were shed – and then I took the law school admissions test and lived in Chongqing proper for the better part of the year while I applied to law school.

Fei: Wow, that’s a crazy way to leave.

David: Yeah, it was a huge adjustment. In a way, spending a little bit of time outside of the US made me appreciate what I had here more; to see your home with new eyes was a real experience. But I had been in China for two straight years, and in a pretty isolated part of China as well, so it would have been nice to have had more time to prepare myself for my reentry into the US. When it happens so abruptly, it can be a pretty bizarre experience to wake up from your flight and have it be like, “you’re back home.” They did put us up at a hotel for a couple of days and debriefed us, but I could tell I handled it reasonably, though it was undoubtedly a really bizarre experience and really tough on some other volunteers because it was such a jarring change which we had had no time to prepare for.

… So you don’t have any hardball questions for me? I’m ready!

Fei: I had question I asked Isaac earlier, but he said you probably would know more about this...

David: Uh-oh, you might be wrong (laughs).

Fei: It’s about social media in China. You mentioned that when you first started journalism, your source was Weibo微博, and there was a lot of stories not being covered. Earlier, I was saying media in China is decentralizing as young people are on the Internet and have gained access to sources for information other than CCTV. Like for example, even during the SARS episode that you mentioned, that was a major time that people were passing on information they couldn’t get from the central government. Where do you see this trend going? What is the potential for social media and Weibo? Is there something young people in China can use to pass on information and maybe empower themselves?

David: I think it’s very hard to predict what exact effects social media will have. It depends on so many factors. It has to do with what the government allows to exist, and [right now] the government manages what exists, what private companies pick up the slack, and what individual opinion leaders have to say in terms of what they want to write about. So I’ve learned never to try to predict really anything at all about China. But I will say that I think social media has already fundamentally changed the media equation in China and that, short of a full government shutdown of the internet (which is essentially impossible for political but also economic reasons), the genie will never be fully put back in the bottle. The Chinese internet is a space where counter-narratives often emerge to the party line: it’s a space where people can go, even if they’re not representing their own opinion, to see what diversity of opinions exists. The people who hold the minority opinions now have a way to see that they’re not to the only ones holding that opinion.

The Chinese internet is a space where counter-narratives often emerge to the party line: it’s a space where people can go, even if they’re not representing their own opinion, to see what diversity of opinions exists. The people who hold the minority opinions now have a way to see that they’re not to the only ones holding that opinion.

So it’s a powerful engine in a lot of ways, with effects we can’t fully predict or quantify right now. But I do think it’s important in all those regards. It also means the central government has a lot of more work to do. Back when Chinese authorities had complete control over what information was made available to the public, they could basically engage in propagandizing and censoring at the same time because there were no countervailing voices, so what they chose to write is what people saw.

Now not only do they have to put out their own information, but it now has to compete with other sources of information of counter-narratives of Western media that sometimes get snuck in through the Weibo back door. They have to contend with people responding to and sometimes denigrating the official message. Whether it’s a CCTV exposé that they don’t find convincing, or a front page of the People’s Daily that seems to be eliding an important fact, they have to contend with the backlash playing out publicly: they have to realize (and I’m sure they do) that it is very hard to control your message on social media, and some of their efforts with new media will surely backfire.

And finally, what I believe doesn’t get discussed as much as it probably should is the existence of social media and the fact that the Chinese government does censor it means that censorship is now a personal experience for most Chinese people. So when a People’s Daily editor in the mid-90s was told to write or not write something, the average reader had no way of knowing that; he or she might intuit that the People’s Daily represented a certain viewpoint, but that would be it. But now millions of Chinese and perhaps tens of millions have had their own writing censored in some way, and so the machinery and power of the state is more visible and in a way more naked , and I think this affects the people’s perception of government. They become more cynical and will hopefully help them ultimately become savvier consumers of information.

Shucao: How do you see that being related to possible political changes in China?

David: This is where it gets hard, right? Putting aside whatever I’d like to see, it’s hard to say what will happen as a result of all this. It wasn’t long ago that Weibo seemed a force unto itself that was forcing officials in very high places to respond and have the government on its heels. Since then, the government has been more strident in its efforts to manage Weibo and other social media platforms,, and they’ve been able to get away with it. And for his part, President Xi [Jinping] has also shown some degree of success in putting out his message via new media.

So the Chinese government has shown that it knows how to play in that ballpark. But they can never completely carve out heterodox speech, and the flexibility of the Internet as a medium and the Chinese language is such that it’s almost impossible for the government to be half a step behind netizens in terms of discussion of these sensitive topics. So it’s a cat and mouse game, or maybe the better analogy is whack-a-mole: As soon as the Chinese government has deleted one meme or term online, Chinese citizens have invented another one that [the government] has to figure out. Even if it only takes 24 hours to figure out - no, they’re not talking about a chocolate bar; they’re talking about a Chinese official - how many people have seen it, passed it on, seen their opinion is not an outlier?

So over time this does have an effect, but will it be a transformational effect? That’s hard to say. For most Chinese citizens, censorship is a fact of life; it becomes an inconvenience. As an American, I say that’s completely unacceptable and impugns the freedom of speech which is guaranteed in the Chinese constitution, and there’s no doubt that that’s true. But what is clear is that the Chinese state has been able to censor the internet in China and to some extent this is tolerated. [Predicting] whether and when it reaches a tipping point where people find it intolerable is totally impossible to predict. Most of what happens both in the real world and online takes us all by surprise. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

Fei: What do you think are some of the biggest things to watch for this year regarding China?

David: That’s really interesting. Well, Zhou Yongkang周永康will be an interesting one, and I think the Chinese authorities will probably say that they have lost control with the message of the Bo Xilai薄熙來trial. It will be interesting to see how they will attempt to learn from that and manage the message surrounding Zhou Yongkang. Or do they decide to punt on that and simply, you know, take Zhou and his associates out of the picture without any kind of formal announcement or formal trial? That could be another approach.

You know, a lot of what happens, as I was saying, will be by surprise, and I can safely say that by the end of 2014, we will look back at the top ten media stories about China and eight or nine will be totally be by surprise. And the other things to watch are just, I think, questions to watch in China generally. So [for example] how reform is received, because reforms create winners and losers; how that plays out in the media on and offline will be fascinating.

Fei: Air pollution and ethnic tension and everything.

David: Absolutely, and those will be spaces to watch online and offline. It will be interesting to see what happens with WeChat and some other new platforms and some older standbys like Douban豆瓣 - these social networks that are still big but not as massive as Weibo or WeChat. There’s also the different types of Kickstarter equivalents, my understanding is Alibaba has started a new movie and TV crowd-funding platform called Yu’ebao餘額寶where people can crowd fund basically what you would call artistic productions.

Shucao: Recently, Zhifubao支付寶(Alipay) got censored.

David: Again, censorship doesn’t necessarily bring down these platforms, but it’s a fact of life. There was a spate of censorship on WeChat some weeks ago that caught some users by surprise. It’ll be interesting to see which of the platforms flourishes, and which, if any, are repurposed for uses they were not intended to fulfill. Particularly WeChat.

Fei: WeChat is so ahead of every other messaging app that people are using.

David: There are so many different functions. In addition to everything, you can use it to send people cash. So it’s a pretty versatile platform.

Shucao: Is there a Chinese counterpart of Tea Leaf Nation but directed towards a Chinese audience about getting western media information?

David: That’s a great question. I’ll simply say that such a thing should exist if it doesn’t already. I think it would be fascinating. I mean, there are some online accounts that kind of cover quirky American news in Chinese. But I haven’t seen a straight up Tea Leaf Nation equivalent in the Chinese language yet. The other thing to keep in mind is in the US, we are more an open book than in China. We have a freer media. If you want to know what’s going on, you can read The New York Times and the like. To some extent, Tea Leaf Nation was in some ways responding to an opacity in China and to fill that gap.

Fei: I was wondering whether you have any thoughts on the differences in how US media covers China versus other western media, whether it be Germany or the United Kingdom, if you follow that.

David: I’m probably not qualified to comment because I don’t follow those outlets regularly. I do know that Al Jazeera has done a number of hard hitting pieces on China, it is known for being relatively unstinting in its coverage of the country. You had mentioned Der Spiegel and Russian Today earlier? I would assume that they would have a very different take, and I would probably treat their coverage with a very healthy dose of skepticism.

Fei: Do you have a primary source or feed where you get your information?

David: Oh gosh, there’s so many sources and so much good stuff out there now. I use all sorts of sources. I mean, you know, Twitter is a great tool for learning what’s breaking, assuming you follow the right folks who you trust. I will say I really think you should read FP because we have stuff [before anyone else has it]. The New York Times remains, of course, a must read, but on Twitter there’s a lot of good stuff. I would recommend people follow Bill Bishop (@niubi). He’s gotten more about China than I’ll ever know. There’s a lot of sources that don’t get as much credit as they should. Actually [now that I think about it] there’s Tech in Asia: they have really good stuff about China, whether it’s covering new payment platforms, entrepreneurship, and innovation in the country. So they might be something like a less traditional sources.

In the morning I still hop on Twitter as a default, but I’ll take a look on Weibo to make sure I’m not missing anything. Weibo used to be more low-hanging fruit, because it was less censored and Western media wasn’t as keen to its importance. Now it’s less promising that way, but it’s still worth a look.

Fei: Who do you follow on Weibo? Just one or two people.

David: Oh gosh, I can think of plenty of “Big V.” The truth is though, at this point, it’s less about what any individual Big V is saying, especially because there’s been a crackdown on the Big Vs. It wasn’t ever formally announced as a crackdown, but it was wildly interpreted that way. I think it’s more important to look at the totality of the conversation. It used to be that you could look at big spikes in the top ten posts and discussions that revealed something valuable, but nowadays the top ten lists are more curated, so you have to do more reverse searches, where you go in, and say “okay, I’m interested in sentiment on MH370 and do a search on those terms and then try to see which way the wind’s blowing. So it has gotten a bit harder.

Fei: What kind of journalistic needs do you see Tea Leaf Nation and FP filling?

David: I think readers in the West can always use more information about China just because it’s so important yet so opaque. In terms of a specific needs, we do try to reflect sentiment on the ground in China, which I think is valuable in terms of understanding the country, and in terms of a policy predictor. And I think we focus more on the nexus, not just China and the West but within the greater Chinese sphere, including some of the tensions involving Taiwan or Hong Kong. We focus more on those interstitial spaces than other media, and that’s something we have been and continue to be the best at. Let’s end on a modest note (laughter).

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Fei Gao and Shucao Mo recently graduated from Duke University in 2014.

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