tim's experiment

Anopther mysterious and fascinating piece of journalism on Friday’s SCMP front page. Headline: “Xi calls for end to chaos and mud-slinging”. Secondary heading: Beijing’s leader-in-waiting (My insertion: Xi Jinping, currently Vice President, is expected to step up soon) tells congress delegates to consider the bigger picture – an apparent reminder to chief executive candidates to exercise self-restraint”. An apparent reminder?

First paragraph: “Vice President Xi Jinping yesterday essentially called for an end to the chaos and scandal-mongering in the city’s chief executive election”.  Well well. When I was a reporter people sometimes called for things. Sometimes, if this was surprising, we reported that they did not call for things. But they did not “essentially call” for things . What does “essentially” mean in this context? Coming later. In the meantime we have a quote from Maria Tam “Xi told delegates to the NPC … not to focus on personal interests but to take care of the overall well-being of the city,” which seems like a harmless and rather unspecific call for self-sacrifice, patriotism and other platitudes. Not, however to our intrepid reporter, who discovered that “Politicians and analysts said that Mr Xi’s remark was code (!) intended to remind the supporters of both front-runners … to refrain from further smear campaigns”. OK, the mud-slinging was in the code; when do we get to the chaos?

Well we don’t, actually. First we get a real quote from Maria Tam, quoting Mr Xi: The vice president said that patriots … should serve as role models to prioritise the overall interests of the country above their personal interests, to stand tall and look at the bigger picture when contemplating the city’s development.” So who says this means “chaos and mid-slinging”? Enter “China affairs expert” Mr Johnny Lau Yiu-sui. Before we get to Mr Lau’s code-breaking, a word about who he is: Google the name and you get a succession of Press pieces in which he is referred to variously as “political pundit”, “Hong Kong-based veteran China-watcher”, and “veteran political commentator”. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, though, Mr Lau is a journalist.

Here he goes on the code: “When Xi asked the people to stand tall and look at the bigger picture, he meant the people should make sacrifices for the greater benefit of society. The series of scandals is not only causing chaos for the election, it is putting Beijing in a difficult position.”  I take it, in other words, that Mr Xi was calling for sacrifices. The mud-slinging and chaos is Mr Lau’s gloss on the situation, effortlessly transferred by sleight of journalistic hand to Mr Xi.

Well we were promised “politicians and analysts” in paragraph 3. Mrs Tam is a p0litician and Mr Lau is an analyst, so we should have one of each to go. Actually we get two more politicians. One NPC deputy said Xi’ s remarks showed the Central government was concerned that the election was becoming an “ungentlemanly contest”. And then we come to our beloved Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai … who said that Mr Xi was not talking about the election at all!

Now let us sort out one little verbal point first. The use of the words “mud-slinging”and “scandal” should be reserved for cases where the items being slung are phony. Nobody has been spreading scandal about Henry Tang: the emergence of every story is followed by a press conference at which Henry admits all, asks us to forgive him, or his wife, or both of them, and then carries on as if nothing had happened. People who want a CE with a big basement have been trying to come up with something on CY Leung but none of it has amounted to much so far.

Another point: in the days when it was difficult to visit China and even harder to get people there to talk to you, there was a valuable role for people who sat in Hong Kong and provided a verbal sauce to slather over whatever tiny morsels of information you had managed to glean. This is no longer the case. Mr Lau may be right in supposing that the Communist Party leadership fears “chaos” in Hong Kong but he helps nobody by imparting that interesting thought to Mr Xi’s speech. Even allowing for the amount of translation going on in the generation of this story, the resulting exegesis seems to have so fragile a connection to Mr Xi’s reported words that it could have been attached to almost any comment on Hong Kong that was not about our football team.

I realise that many hands go into the construction of a news story. Also I have on occasion, when a front-page lead was wanted and no prime candidate had appeared for the slot, been reduced to a desperate effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as they used to say. Still, there are limits. It seems to me that if readers are told in the headline “Xi calls for an end to chaos” they are entitled to a good deal more than an interpretative quote from another journalist. Mr Xi will soon be the only person in China who can exercise complete freedom of speech. He does not need distant strangers to say on his behalf things he did not say himself. Perhaps the SCMP, also, needs to “stand tall and look at the bigger picture”.