The ever greater constraints placed on news reporting by Xi Jinping mean many Chinese journalists see no point in pursuing a media career<\/p>\n
Tom Phillips in Beijing
Thursday 11 February 2016 21.59 EST<\/p>\n
When a 7.9-magnitude earthquake ripped through Sichuan province<\/a> in May 2008, Lin Tianhong, a 29-year-old reporter at China Youth Daily<\/a>, was one of the first to volunteer to head into the disaster zone.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone wanted to go,\u201d he recalled. \u201cOtherwise, why be a journalist?\u201d<\/p>\n Hours later the Beijing-based reporter was flying towards Sichuan\u2019s shattered countryside for what would be one of the most horrifying and defining moments of his short career in journalism.<\/p>\n For the next two weeks Lin trawled the disaster zone writing a series of devastating frontline dispatches. One article, Back Home, told the story of a couple who carried the corpse of their teenage son, Cheng Lei, home for burial<\/a>after digging him from the rubble of his six-storey school.<\/p>\n \u201cHis mother wanted to put new clothes on him, but Cheng Lei\u2019s body had grown stiff,\u201d the journalist wrote. \u201cThe couple knelt before his corpse, stroking his hands and feet, calling out his name over and over again.\u201d<\/p>\n The heart-wrenching article earned Lin the respect of his editors and the adulation of a generation of Chinese reporters. But fast-forward seven years and the former high-flier has abandoned his notepad and pen and given up on journalism.<\/p>\n \u201cBoredom,\u201d says Lin, who now works in PR on the 19th floor of Beijing\u2019s World Profit Center, when asked to explain his decision. \u201cOne day I woke up in the morning [and] asked myself: do you still think it is fun doing the same thing over and over again each day?\u201d<\/p>\n Beijing\u2019s decision to expel the French journalist Ursula Gauthier<\/a> in December has thrust the dispiriting situation facing foreign correspondents in China into the headlines. But Chinese journalists are facing far greater challenges \u2013 and many reporters are simply turning their back on the profession as a result.<\/p>\n David Bandurski, an expert on Chinese journalism from the University of Hong Kong, said an exodus was now under way from the country\u2019s newspapers as talented young journalists decided there was no future in the profession.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have reporters in their 30s and 40s who generally would be at the height of their professional careers in journalism who have left,\u201d he said. \u201cThe mood is quite dismal right now in China\u2019s media.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts say two key factors are driving the hollowing out of Chinese newsrooms. One is the increasingly bleak financial situation facing newspapers as they struggle to adapt to the digital age. The other is the ever greater constraints being placed by President Xi Jinping\u2019s increasingly authoritarian Communist party on what can and cannot be reported.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really a kind of double whammy,\u201d said Bandurski, who traces the current political chill to Xi\u2019s rise to power in late 2012.<\/p>\n Since Xi became leader, Beijing has launched an all-out assault on freedom of expression, jailing journalists, bloggers and outspoken civil rights lawyers such as Pu Zhiqiang, who was recently convicted for sending seven sarcastic tweets<\/a>.<\/p>\n In one of the most notorious cases a 70-year-old journalist, Gao Yu, was jailed for leaking state secrets<\/a> after she allegedly passed an internal Communist party document to the foreign media.<\/p>\n Another journalist, Wang Xiaolu, a business reporter for one of China\u2019s top financial magazines, was arrested and forced to make a televised \u201cconfession\u201d<\/a> for writing a story about last year\u2019s stock market turmoil.<\/p>\n China fell one place in last year\u2019s Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking<\/a> and now occupies 176th position out of 180 countries.<\/p>\n Lin, who now works for a film company run by the billionaire Jack Ma<\/a>\u2019s Alibaba group, denied politics were behind his decision to quit journalism, instead pointing to the dwindling readership and influence of Chinese newspapers. \u201cNowadays, nobody reads your stories,\u201d he said. \u201cNowadays, readers are all living inside their smartphones or inside WeChat.\u201d<\/p>\n But his frustration with censorship was evident in a blogpost in 2014 when he lashed out at the destruction of Southern Weekly<\/a>, the once respected liberal broadsheet that he said had inspired him to become a journalist.<\/p>\n \u201cAll these years, people like us have seen our articles killed and our voices silenced, and we\u2019ve started to get used to it. We started to make compromises and to censor ourselves,\u201d Lin reportedly wrote at the time<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019ve gone too far, as if we have forgotten why we had chosen this industry to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite such problems Lin, who resigned from his last journalism job in April 2014, said it was still possible to write worthwhile journalism in China<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s just like a person has 10 fingers. There is one finger you can\u2019t use but the other nine all work. There is one story you can\u2019t write but there are still nine others you can.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked what the 10th finger was, Lin laughed. \u201cIt\u2019s the same for you,\u201d he replied. \u201cI guess I don\u2019t need to say it out loud.\u201d<\/p>\n Other young journalists are far less optimistic. \u201cBeing a journalist has no meaning any more,\u201d said a thirtysomething editor from one of China\u2019s leading news organisations. \u201cMy greatest feeling is that in recent years the industry\u2019s freedoms have reached their lowest ebb in history.\u201d<\/p>\n Before the Xi Jinping era, editors at least had the autonomy to choose their own headlines, the journalist complained. Now newspapers and websites were forced to conform to a tedious monotony of praise for China\u2019s Communist leaders. \u201cThe top headline must [always] be about Xi Jinping and the second must be about [prime minister] Li Keqiang,\u201d the editor said. \u201cIf you read one website, you have read them all.\u201d<\/p>\n