tim's experiment

Reporting from China is still a funny game. People doing it can travel much more than they used to when foreign correspondents needed permission to leave Beijing. There is much more access to mainland media, including a lively if heavily censored internet. Chinese people are, I suppose, much more outspoken than they used to be about “sensitive topics”. Yet still you get the impression that in reporting about China a great deal of speculation is perching on a rather skimpy foundation of established fact.

The irritating consequence of this is that some items appear in many stories as catch-all explanations for almost everything. The latest addition to this list goes by the label of “China’s once-in-a-decade leadership change”, or some shorter version of the same thing. This has been cropping up in news stories for the last 18 months and apparently has a couple of months, at least to go. China’s political system does not have the calendrical regularity of the American one, so we could still be reading about the upcoming leadership change next year.

The interesting thing about the leadership change is that it can be adduced in a speculative, non-verifiable sort of way to explain anything. It appears in stories about crackdowns and loosening-ups, about officials being prosecuted and officials getting away with it, about economic initiatives and about economic non-initiatives. It adds nothing to these stories. It is included, I surmise, simply to tell readers that the reporter concerned is an observant and omniscient China hand, who knows what is going on and has read all the latest rubbish produced by his peers.

Of course we cannot object to people writing about the leadership change itself. After all this is an important and interesting topic by any standards. Unfortunately as the number of people actually making the decision is in single digits it is quite likely that they will succeed in keeping their collective thoughts to themselves.  Under these circumstances it is as well to bear in mind that you can produce a pretty accurate weather forecast by saying that tomorrow’s weather will be the same as today’s.  The new leadership will be pretty much like the old one.

Boring.

Sorry.