KEY POINTS:
Regular readers of this column will be aware that I have expressed doubts about the quality of Western media coverage on China.
It's not that most journalists are stupid or lazy. It's that Western journalists have grown up in a different paradigm of journalism to that which is
needed in China.
I subscribe to newsfeeds from the world's leading newspapers and the type of story being written now is pretty much the same as two or three years ago. You know: Pollution, corruption, human rights, will the yuan de-link from the United States dollar and so on.
These questions are all worth commenting on but they don't seem to tell us anything new about China.
The way journalists are trained in the West produces a set of skills that are effective in a democracy, where the media is respected and feared, but much less so in China.
In the West, it's all about using your brain to process large amounts of information quickly and accurately. The problem is too much information. There is little trouble in securing interviews with company executives, financial analysts, government regulators and public relations people.
In China, it's all about filling the information gap. Journalists spend huge amounts of time being frustrated by their inability to get quick and accurate answers to basic questions: How much did the company earn; how high is GDP growth; which regulator is responsible for this area.
It seems to me that journalists cluster around these areas, trying to replicate what they can achieve in the West.
Yet when I speak to my Chinese friends, I find this is not what they are looking at. They are less obsessed with hard data and statistics. They take a far more subtle view of things and they place human relationships at the centre of their strategy.
This is how Western journalists can get the wrong end of the stick.
Ching Cheong is the unfortunate Straits Times journalist who has been imprisoned for spying for a Taiwanese organisation. The Western response was to immediately raise the topic of human rights and press censorship.
Yet Chinese sources said the case was far more about the struggle between former president Jiang Zemin and the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.
It turns out that Ching, a man respected in China for his patriotism and leftist leanings, had actually been commissioned by an aide to the Hu-Wen Government for various research projects. So his arrest can be seen as a sign of the weakness of this Government to the allies of the former Government.
Western journalists also pay far too little attention to the bureaucratic system that overlays business in China. Every executive at a state-owned enterprise is a Government civil servant, answerable to a host of pressures that have little to do with his underlying business. Thus, it may be inappropriate to look at the underlying business for an answer as to why the civil servant/executive is acting in a particular way.
Bureaucrats who have come through the same organisation may be natural allies. Last week, the China Life supremo Yang Chao was supposed to be transferred to PICC Property and Casualty, a less attractive company. Yang is a civil servant so he should simply have packed his bags and left. In fact, he did something rather unexpected, going to the Party Organisation Department (which sorts out personnel matters) and getting the order rescinded. In doing so, he showed he was able to kick against the Chinese hierarchy - which raises the questions of who helped him in that department.
Such a surprising development also raises the question of who is calling the shots inside the Government. One friend told me that Hu and Wen's remit not only does not extend beyond Beijing, it barely extends beyond Zhongnanhai (the elite Party compound in west Beijing).
