The politics of compassion: Journalism, class formation, and social change in China

Xu Wenyin, a 21-year-old peasant pregnant woman lives in a mountainous village in Sichuan province, central China. When her labour pains started, her husband set out to carry her to the town hospital several kilometres away. Reaching the town, they got a lift to the hospital. However when the van was only about three hundred from the hospital, it was stopped by the traffic police requesting a routine vehicle and paper work check. In spite of knowing that a pregnant woman in labour was in the van, the elaborate checking process dragged on. Xu’s husband and the van driver, witnessed by people in the street, begged the police to hurry up. Finally, after twenty minutes more, and goaded by sympathetic and enraged onlookers, the police eventually gave them permission to go. Xu arrived in the hospital too late: she had lost consciousness and both her baby and herself died soon after arrival.

This is the one of many stories of Jiaodian Fangtan (Focal Point), the highest-rating television show on Chinese Central Television (CCTV).1 The death of a woman in labour, broadcast in September 2000, can hardly leave the audience untouched. Jin Yidan, the well-known presenter of Focal Point ended the story with this question for her viewers:

What could have been a happy family is now full of misery and despair. What sort of image should our law enforcers give to the public? Let’s hope that apathy and coldness will no longer be associated with our legal system and the people who enforce it.2

Focal Point is known for its exposure of injustice and corruption.3 The show has a consistent concern with exposing the inhuman and less than compassionate aspect of society. Targeting corruption and abuse of bureaucratic power, the show has its fair share of stories of human tragedy. Whether it is violent and abusive individuals, or fate that sometimes plays cruel jokes on people, or inhumane bureaucracy, the victims are usually the same: they are people who are weak, powerless and unable to defend or protect themselves, and in Chinese society today, they tend to be 'peasants' including both those who are on the move and those immobilised by disadvantage. Xu’s tragic death is dramatic and emotionally provoking, and powerfully mobilises our sympathy for the 'little people' in society. Apart from its strong affective dimension, compassionate journalism usually also has a dramatic narrative structure and sharp narrative closure. Whether it ends tragically or not, the reader/listener/viewer has heard a 'good' story.

Not all the compassionate stories have a tragic ending. Focal Point often runs stories which evoke a humanist sense of warm fuzziness. The story of two children, lost and found, broadcast on Focal Point in September 2000, the highest rating current affairs show on CCTV, is typical. The couple in the story are rural migrant workers from Anhui trying to find work in Beijing. According to the story, seven years ago, two boys, aged 3 and 4, of this Anhui couple went missing while playing outside the migrants’ residential compound. Separated from their parents who had since then left Beijing and gone back to their village in Anhui, the lost boys were taken in by an orphan’s home in Beijing. Seven years later, the two boys told their story on the radio expressing their desire to find their parents.

A few residents of Beijing, upon hearing the story of the two boys, took it upon themselves to find numerous missing links in the jigsaw puzzle, which finally established the relationship between the boys and their parents now living in Anhui. The story also mentioned a DNA test result, which proved beyond doubt the biological relationship between parents and children. The story ended with the Focal Point reporter asking one of the Beijing residents: ‘You are not related to these boys and don’t even know them. Why were you so committed to finding their parents for them?’ To which a middle-aged Beijing woman answered: ‘I can’t turn a blind eye to them simply because they are migrants. After all, we all know what it is like to be a mother, and we are all Chinese.’

The moral of this story is simple: ‘With a bit of love from everyone, our world is a beautiful one’, as a popular song in China ‘A Sacrifice of Love’ goes. The boys’ reunion touched viewers by its kindness and generosity. Other stories can be gentle tales of the vicissitudes of human life and aim to restore faith in humanity in an era when human compassion is found wanting. Hughes (1968) calls these stories ‘perennial stories’, which often involve orphans, lost children and hurt animals. Both the tragic story of the pregnant woman and the happy story of the boys lost and found, however, call for a concern with and sympathetic care for those who live at the periphery of ‘our’ existence – the peasants and rural migrants, the most economically disfranchised, culturally inarticulate and socially marginalised group in Chinese society.

Investigative reporting

Having said that, it is also worth noting that a great deal of compassionate journalism, particularly stories in the print media, consists of investigative reporting about issues, problems, phenomena and trends in society. Print media is better at this form of reporting since it is less constrained by the technological imperative of presenting exciting visuals and a clear-cut story line. One example of compassionate journalism which advocates a humanistic spirit and sympathy for marginalised social groups is the Southern Weekend’s (Nanfang Zhoumo) consistent attention to the living and working conditions of rural migrants.4 The paper regularly runs ‘issue’ or ‘problem’ stories, calling urban readers’ attention to the gross injustice and inequality experienced by this community, hence making the invisible visible.

A leading story on 26 October 2000 is one story of this kind. Entitled ‘The bedroom of migrant workers’, the lengthy story calls readers’ attention to a serious social problem in a most mundane form. According to the story, thousand of migrant workers from inland and northern provinces now concentrating in southern industrial areas such as Shenzhen live in extremely basic unisex dormitories which offer no privacy and little comfort. Due to the excessive long working hours, stringent management regulations and low pay, married people have no opportunities to live as husband and wife, and young people have few opportunities to socialise and be together alone. The editor’s note says:

We must pay attention to this marginalised and exploited community. They exist at the bottom of our society and their basic rights as a private citizen are being taken away from them. Yet nobody can deny that these people have already sacrificed too much for the development of our society. They deserve more sympathy and care (Sun, 2000).

Southern Weekend, like many other ‘metro’ papers and evening dailies, are considered to be the articulation of sensibilities of the emerging middle-class and urban readership. They are likened to the American penny press in their attention to everyday life and ordinary people (Zhao, 2000). Central to this middle-class sensibility is a sense of compassion for the weak and poor, a strong ‘just-must-be-done’ philosophy and a set of news values that strongly privilege the notion of human interest. Stories such as the ‘Migrant workers’ bedroom’ elicit sympathy rather than identification from readers, hence inducing compassion rather than action. Migrant workers frequent this discursive field but only as objects to be represented. A middle-class sensibility is also articulated through a privileging of individual rights and desires, including sexuality, personal freedom and privacy, however these stories do not point to the fundamental social and economic inequalities which gave rise to the violation of individual rights.

Politics of compassion

Compassionate journalism, I argue, is a product of a Dickensian inequality and injustice that has arisen to articulate middle-class sensibilities and a humanist conscience in times of increasing social stratification. Increasingly, professionalism lies not only in the courage to expose evils and wrong, but also to the capacity to sympathise with and care for the weak, the poor and the downtrodden. In other words, journalists are considered to be the guardians of justice, fairness and moral conscience. Talking about her perception of the defining quality of some of the most popular papers and shows in the Chinese media and their relationship to the audience expectation, Zhang Jie, the producer of News Probe, another CCTV news and current affairs show, has the following to say:

Expectation of a show or paper is closely linked to the defining feature of the product. Audiences of Tell It As It Is (shihua shishuo) expect Cui Yongyuan (its host) to be witty and humorous; those of the Focal Points expect bad people and bad things to be exposed; readers of Southern Weekend (weekend edition of the Southern Daily – my note) see evidence of the editors’ and reporters’ conscience and humanism (liang zhi) (Zhang, 2000, p. 332).

Some media outlets, such as the Southern Weekend, are particularly known for their sympathetic attention to the suffering, misery, and hardships of the victim. In some cases, the victim has a turn of luck due to the public awareness of his/her situation and public support. More often than not, however, the power of social conscience reporting lies in raising awareness among audiences, many of whom are middle-class and urban residents (Zhao, 2000), of the growing disparity and inequality between people. Shows on state television like Focal Points and commercial print media such as Southern Weekend resort to the practice of ‘bao guang’, involving aggressive interviews, hidden camera and witness accounts, and ‘guan zhu’, paying close attentions to social issues.

Although compassionate journalism is hardly new as a cultural practice – one would do well to remember the rise of the penny press and metro papers in the age of industrialisation in the West in the 19th century – it is nevertheless a recent important media practice in China today. It is also worth noting that the compassionate journalism one sees in China is different from its historical Western counterparts in that it has to exist with a strong state on the one hand and unprecedented forces of globalisation on the other. Though championed by commercial print media, stories of compassion are found in newspapers, weeklies and magazines but also on television and radio. Stories featuring the misfortunes and struggles of the weak and the powerless are no longer exclusive to commercial media outlets such as Southern Weekend, but are plentiful on television and newspapers which still operate as the ‘throat and tongue’ of the Party and government including Focal Point.

Compassionate journalism consists of three components which incidentally can be summarised into three ‘guan’s, namely ‘guan xin’ (be concerned with), ‘guan zhu’ (pay close attention to), and ‘guan huai’ (show loving care for). I argue that these three types of affect go together in re-working the social imagination of the urban consumers but at the same time encompass various degrees of emotional involvement. While showing concern is a conceptual activity, giving loving care may involve actions, such as sending donations to the victim or writing to the media to express moral support. The audience’s relationship to compassionate journalism may vary according to their willingness to empathise with victims. The role of media exposure and publicity is crucial in facilitating public’s awareness from one stage to another. In other words, without the media showing concern, the attention of the public cannot be drawn to these ‘invisible’ people; and without the public’s knowledge, it is difficult to generate public support and mobilise loving care.

Compassionate journalism is similar to the ‘yellow journalism’ of the penny press in that it produces perennial stories from human interest angles and satisfies urban middle class curiosity about the other – poor, immigrants and the disadvantaged, hence becoming part of urban folklore sharing similar motifs from literature. Its marketability comes from the feel good factor. Apart from the warm fuzziness of human interest stories, compassionate journalism appeals to the public’s sense of justice (zheng yi) and moral conscience (liang zhi), two most frequently used words in social discourses in contemporary China. Compassionate journalism has attracted a growing number of urban readership by producing a kind of popular literature with mass appeal, hence it profits not in spite of, but precisely because of, its compassionate attention to the socially disadvantaged. Since both metro papers and station television rely for the size of audience for funding, mass appeal of the audience is crucial.

Given this, the question of why these stories sell needs to be looked at. What kind of reader pleasure is being generated in the reading of perennial stories such as these making them appeal to the urban consumers? Here I speculate that the pleasure of the middle-class reader can be attributed to a feel-good effect, which consists, on the one hand, of seeing that at the end of the day, justice is done, the weak are protected and evils punished, and on the other hand, of being assured that it is not ‘us’ but ‘them’, the ‘other’ that has to struggle to survive in this tough and sometimes ugly world. The feel-good factor works in a number of ways.

Moral outrage

Stories of gross injustice and human tragedy such as the death of the pregnant woman elicit moral outrage. Moral outrage, which can be both a rational and an affective response, is closely linked to the feel-good factor. This is because stories of ‘baddies’ and ‘demons’ in the urban media resonate with a ‘good verus bad’ structures in literature and folklore, since, like literature and folklore, they have the function of validating and confirming one’s moral beliefs and values. To feel outraged or righteous gives one the opportunity to occupy a moral high ground and the same time experience the pleasure of being connected to many other like-minded though anonymous readers. It is thus a pleasure which comes from not only being able to make moral decisions about what is right and wrong but also from knowing that one’s moral position is shared by other members of the community.

The feel-good effect is also closely related to the do-good capacity. Contrary to Lei Feng, the exemplary do-good soldier, the icon of socialist heroism during the Mao era, audiences of compassionate stories, unburdened by the high socialist rhetoric of altruism, have more modest incentives when they help others. One of them may be simply to live up to one’s good conscience, as evidenced in the responses of Beijing residents who helped migrant workers from Anhui to find their lost sons. ‘I simply couldn’t sit there not lifting a finger knowing that I may be able to help a mother find her long lost children’. Another related incentive can be a thrill coming from feeling generous by doing a morally uplifting deed of helping for the weak, the poor and the powerless. They may have done so because it made them feel good to be able to extend their kindness and generosity to someone unknown and unrelated. In other words, although their generosity may have made a difference to the victim, they themselves also benefit morally and emotionally from such an action.

Stories of misfortunes of the poor, the weak and the powerless may also appeal to a less noble but understandable motive: the curiosity of one social group about the other. Writing about the penny press in the USA towards the end of the 19th century, Hughes (1968) talks about the middle class and the wealthy in the city becoming increasingly curious about the poor and the immigrants. Such curiosity is also an important incentive for perennial stories printed in the Chinese urban metro papers and even on national television. While the gap between the rich and the poor widens, the life of the socially invisible - their poverty, misfortune and change of fate – become object of intense curiosity and staple fodder for contemporary urban folklore. Although victims of crimes – the innocent and the duped – deserve sympathy and care, urban audiences cannot but help a tinge of superiority: how unfortunate that such things could help to anyone, but thank God that that we are not one of them.

Side by side with an intense curiosity about these 'foreigners' – the Other – is a palpable anxiety about them. After all, rural migrants in the city are reported to have caused unemployment, prostitution, traffic, and a less safe neighbourhood. Migrants are often described as threatening, being liumin (floating population), unorganised, unaffiliated and hence unruly (Rozelle et al, 1999; Dutton, 1998). The images of violence and backwardness are often juxtaposed with a perception of their un-modernness. They are hardly literate, unclean, and uncouth (Pun, 2000). Compassionate journalism, which aims to dispel these stereotypes and advocate a humanist approach to the treatment of fellow citizens, sometimes works as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can appeal to the conscience and sense of justice in the audience; on the other hand, however, the tragedies and misfortunes of these ‘unruly mobs’ may generate a schadenfreude effect, reinforcing stereotypes of another socially disadvantaged group in the socially complacent urban consumers.

Strengths and limitations

Globalisation, mobility and commercialisation have created a thin layer of wealth, life-style and cosmopolitanism contrasted with tens of millions of of rural migrant workers in a ‘floating population’. As a dominant framework of telling stories about an emerging underclass in contemporary Chinese society, compassionate journalism operates as a double-edged sword. Although its popularity derives from its capacity to cater to the curiosity and anxiety about the other, it nevertheless has a pedagogic, instructive role to play in its articulation of a middle-class sensibility around the issue of individual rights, citizenship, and freedom. Media teach the population about modernity by providing information, knowledge, guidance and advice on modern life. Media not only teach individuals how to become modern, it show citizens that part of becoming modern is about learning about one’s rights and responsibilities as citizens.5

On the other hand, the discourse of sameness, fraternity, civility, and humanism of compassionate journalism renders invisible the issue of class. These strategic positions allow urban middle class media – both media practitioners and audience – to claim inter-subjectivity with the disfranchised groups, thus speaking to and on behalf of them. Consequently, the ‘other’ groups, cast in the light of difference, however sympathetically, suffers a deprivation which both social and discursive. In other words, compassionate journalism struggles to negotiate a tension between a discourse of sameness on humanity and fellow citizenships and an innate narrative structure of ‘wedom-versus-theydom’ (Hartley, 1992). The ‘migrant’ is a shadowy figure oscillating between being the object of public derision and that of sympathy.

The renewed emphasis on social justice, fairness and moral conscience, the essential ingredients of compassionate journalism, is a reaction against the growing social and economic disparity among the population. It is also a reaction against the rampant and palpable presence of injustice, stratification inequality, and erosion of conscience, a consequence brought about by both the demise of collective ideology and a Dickensian industrial capitalism. My discussion suggests that the political and social role of compassionate journalism is ambiguous. Although it targets inequality, injustice and social oppression, its purpose is not to question the legitimacy of the state but to work towards social amelioration by accepting the premise of the status quo. Injustice and inequality are usually presented as universal and unavoidable, thus exonerating the state, which instigates the reforms, of which social stratification is the natural consequence.

In addition, by framing stories of justice as an aberration against humanism and seldom questioning the social structure and processes which condition these social disparities, compassionate journalism elides the question of the responsible state. Furthermore, by raising the consciousness and sympathy for the disadvantaged fellow citizens, compassionate journalism functions to help defuse social tensions and resentment and reduce social instability, smoothing the way for the state-instigated and -endorsed economic reforms, and at the same time, mending the political legitimacy and credibility of the government.

In addition, as some observe, compassionate journalism is an articulation of the sensibilities of the emerging middle-class in urban China (Zhao, 2000) and indeed, like educational journalism in the modern era, being didactic and elitist (Judge, 1994), it aims more to teach and guide than to inform. And it is maybe for this reason that although the ‘mass appeal’ media speak for the weak and powerless, they seldom speaks to and are inevitably shy of mentioning class. Peasant migrants in cities, the abuses of working girls, and urban residents’ apathy and hostility often are reported and sensationalised in the mass appeal papers for the sake of 'news value', but the social and economic causes which condition these stories are seldom questioned (Dai, 1999). Indeed, the ten of millions of ‘floating population’ in urban China have to this day no institutional forms of representation in Chinese society.

On the other hand, by appealing to the finer sentiments of the urban middle-class and advocating compassion towards an under-class, the urban metro press is doing more than catering to the curiosity and addressing the anxiety of the urban readers about ’foreigners’ in town. Their involvement in compassionate journalism points to an important way in which citizenship can be constructed. The public’s participation in the construction of citizenship through media takes place in two ways: through writing to media expressing moral support for victims of crimes and violation of citizen’s rights, and through more direct involvement with victims through media by offering help in numerous tangible ways.

Considering media consumption and citizenship together in this way is not to argue against the social stratification or trivialising the real political struggle for democratisation in China. Rather it is to highlight the peculiar situation whereby too much power delegated to the media by the state is a sign of both a desperate lack of and, a possibility for, democratisation. The Chinese media audiences’ unprecedented interest and to varying degrees involvement in compassionate journalism as media consumers, their well proved capacity – if not power – to seek justice through recourse to media by exposing certain practices and individuals are an indication of both political awareness and willingness to participate in the public life.

This article reinforces the argument that what has come to exist between the official and the civic spheres in China is not so much a public space but more of a ‘shared space’ (Dai, 1999), or in Zhao’s words, ‘a multifaceted’ relationship, in which the state and the market are mutually constitutive of each other and simultaneously ‘reinforce and undermine each other’ (2000: 21). It is important not to forget the complex and complicit relationship between the state and media, in terms of ownership, access and ideological convergence, and in spite of the fact that compassionate journalism is a product of the growing urban middle-class and often denies the agency of the weak and poor – the very object of compassion. At the same time it is not only possible but also crucial to recognise the democratising and modernising potential brought about by recent changes in media practices. Compassionate journalism constructs discourses which are both limiting and emancipatory, and both supports and contradicts dominant social forces. It is within this framework of paradox and ambiguity that the role of compassionate journalism should be considered.

1. Focal Point (Jiaodian Fangtan), is a daily current affairs show on Chinese Central Television. Broadcast every day right after the prime time nation-wide news bulletin, Focal Point is the highest-rating television show in China, having a regular audience of 0.3. The show is well-known for its regular exposure of corruption and bureaucratic misconducts.

2. Jin Yidan is one of the well-known anchor women on Focal Point. September 2000.

3. I talked about the importance of expose journalism using the case of Focal Point somewhere else. See Asia-Pacific on Radio National, December 16th, 2000, Program 141, Saturday edition. http//:www.abc.net.au.

4. Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo) is the weekend edition of the Nanfang Daily, a most popular and widely respected commercial newspaper in contemporary China in the Nanfang Daily publishing conglomerate. Along with a daily paper and a weekend edition, Based in Shenzhen, southern China, the conglomerate also publishes a pictorial, a magazine and its own publishing house. By late 1990s, Southern Weekend has established a nation-wide reputation for its compassionate coverage of the poor.

5. John Hartley argues this point forcefully in his book Uses of Television (1999).

References

Dai, Jinhua, ‘Wenhua Dixin Tu Yu Meijie Quanli’ (Cultural Cartography and Power of the Media), ‘Media and Local Cultural Production’, the Second Luce Popular Culture Workshop, Beijing, December,1999.

Dutton, Michael, Street Life China, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

Hartley, John, The Politics of Pictures, London, Routledge, 1992.

Hartley, John. Uses of Television, London, Routledge, 1992.

Hughes, Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.

Judge, Joan, ‘Public opinion and the new politics of contestation in the late Qing, 1904-1911’, Modern China, vol. 20, no.1, 1994: 64-91.

Pun, Ngai. ‘Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls): The Politics of Identity and Difference in Reform China’, The China Journal, 40: 1-18.

Rowe, David. Sport, Culture and the Media, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1999.

Rozelle Scott. et al, (1999) ‘Leaving China’s Farms: Survey Results of New Paths and Remaining Hurdles to Rural Migration’, The China Quarterly, pp. 369-393.

Sun, Baoluo, ‘The migrant workers’ bedroom’ (Dagong zhe de fu qi fang), Southern Weekend, October 26, 2000, p. 16.

Sun, Wanning, ‘Expose journalism and the Chinese Media’, Radio National, Asia-Pacific, November 16th, 2000.

Zhang, Jie, ‘On the nature of News Probe’ (xinwen diaocha de pingzhi), First Site (Di yi xian chang), eds. CCTV News and Current Affairs Department, Southern Daily Press, 2000: 332-335.

Zhao, 2000, ‘From commercialisation to conglomeration: the transformation of the Chinese press within the orbit of the Party state’, Journal of Communication, Spring, 2000: 3-24.