The strange things that happen in a Beijing newsroom | Jul. 30, 2006. 01:00 AM IAIN MARLOW | SPECIAL TO THE TORONTO STAR

Like a dove flying a gauntlet, my article flew out of my hands at 6 p.m. and landed in the next day’s paper a flightless, ugly thing. It sailed the jet streams of copy editors, senior editors, and night editors, both foreign and Chinese, losing a feather here, a quote there, a harsh edge, a word, a thought, an idea, and, eventually, its point. What I read the next morning was still, in its discussion of political theory, riskier than the state-owned China Daily’s usual fare, and that consoled me a little. But it had no bite.

Soon after I arrived as an intern at China Daily, I was asked to profile Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He teaches political philosophy, a touchy subject in China. After a few emails and our first encounter, it dawned on me that I would need to tread controversial territory. First, there was only one reason his academics focused on China: He fell in love with a Chinese woman in the tense, pre-tragedy moments of May 1989. Second, though a communitarian and a critic of both U.S. policy and American values, he has less than glowing praise for the Party and continues to encounter various forms of censorship.

Bell had written about his teaching experiences in Beijing for Dissent magazine, a leftist American academic journal, and the article was later translated into Chinese. This prompted a storm of online commentary. A Chinese-language newspaper — the weekly Freezing Point supplement of China Youth Daily, whose editors a few months ago got “clearing-housed” for political reasons — had profiled him already. When I was done my first draft, one editor began to point out tidbits from that article mine did not include. She repeatedly asked me to insert them. Among such crucial detail was him lecturing at the Central Party School in Beijing and being called handsome by some girls in the audience. She also asked me to find out if he had Chinese furniture in his apartment.

Mentioning that Bell had experienced some censorship in China was itself censored, and bizarrely at that. The word “censorship” was removed and replaced with “restrictions” by one editor. Even that euphemism was obliterated in the copy that made it to print. The editor who axed the censorship sections of my article, while listening to me list the mistakes that had been edited into my draft, turned to me and said, “I thought the most interesting part of your article was that he owned a restaurant.” The word “revolution,” used in a quote, underwent the strangest transformation. Bell told me that May 1989 was a heady, passionate time — that on one hand he was in love and on the other “… she was cancelling dates for the revolution.” This was juicy and I included it.

However, after the sentence had made it through several editorial levels, it became “`cancelling dates’ for the goings-on at the time.” I’m not kidding. One editor tried to edit that ending into the direct quote. Eventually, even the reference to the month of May was removed, and it simply became 1989 — not passionate or particularly heady of the night editor, an Indian expatriate formerly of Singapore’s pseudo state-owned The Straits Times. He was not the one, however, who aborted the entire section on Singapore’s authoritarian oppression; it was removed far earlier than that, though the editor made a point of noting I had not, in discussing Singapore, violated “the cardinal rules” of China Daily. I replaced the section with a less detailed, more softly worded critique, which made it through.

Hong Kong was, obviously, changed to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and China (in the same sentence) to “the mainland.” This was, as an editor offhandedly remarked, not a politicized change but a matter of style. I promptly consulted the China Daily style guide. Oops. On other points of “style,” the guide instructs its followers to use quotation marks around the title of any government official from Taiwan. And also, that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.”

By this time of course, the whole thing was turning into a farce. My enthusiasm at Trojan-horsing a meaningful article at this non-meaningful paper was waning. It was only such edited-in gems as “… U.S.-style democracy, as a social model to be imitated, is not so widely embraced in Asia,” that kept me going. I read that phrase and burst into tearful laughter.

“Some people in Asia embrace it,” an editor later told me without looking at me.
I knew I was asking for trouble with most of the article. This is China Daily, after all. But what could I do? They asked me to profile someone inspired to come to China by a horrible massacre and who writes about human rights. These are slightly more than trifling, removable details. An English copy editor called me over to clarify some details; he then separated vast swathes of my article, turned to me, and said, “This is China Daily. We just don’t, you know, say this.” It seemed that some foreigners were almost more anxious to axe controversy than our Chinese colleagues.

I was in my apartment the evening before the article’s publication when I received a call from the night editor. A solid guy, that night editor. He made some good comments about cultural inaccuracies. He then made no changes to my cultural inaccuracies, but tore my copy to shreds and replaced an uncontroversial sentence with a Strunk and White-soul-destroying diamond: “It was 1989 and among the Chinese students he was hanging out with was someone he met and fell in love with: Song Bing …”

The next morning I read the awkward headline grinning at me like a naughty child: “Communitarianism, Confucianism: He’s got all that figured out.” I am, perhaps, not alone in thinking this reeks of an entertainment magazine for children heralding a new boy band, and not of a national newspaper. Near the end I included the professor’s suggestion for Confucian-styled democratic reform: a bicameral legislature with two houses, the highest being elected by competitive exams. Sexy, huh? Strangely, this was left untouched. The editors probably assumed anyone among China Daily’s readership who made it that far either would not understand it, would not care, or would have grown up under a democratic system. They probably had nothing to worry about, I suppose: No one gets to the end of articles anyway.

Iain Marlow is a Canadian journalism student working at China Daily.