Black, white and Red all over

SHANGHAI -- What is a free press? It has to be more than a prolific media industry. After all, there are plenty of newspapers here in the People's Republic, great stacks of them on every corner. But all newspapers are censored by China's Communist Party, and so no newspapers criticize the government even as mildly as Western papers do.\nI don't know Chinese well enough to read newspapers in the original form, but the English-language Shanghai Daily and the China Daily mainly reprint translated articles from the Chinese dailies. They provide a revealing glimpse into the Chinese media, its sanitized vision of China and its highly critical view of the United States.\nIn last weekend's editions of both papers, the six-party talks in Beijing on the future of North Korea's nuclear program received front-page attention. From the two papers' articles (neither directly quoting a single American), I learned China, Russia and North Korea were being reasonable and sincere in working for peace, but "Americans maintained their consistent insistence on a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the (North Korea's) nuclear programs," as the Shanghai Daily puts it. Imagine that.\nInside the Shanghai Daily, I learned all about China's accomplishments: Zhejiang Province will soon build China's biggest ship repair center for 2 billion kuai ($240 billion); a beggar disguised as a monk was arrested in the same province; and Xujiahui Park in Shanghai will have three new basketball courts opening next month. Other articles detailed the Shanghai subway's plan to reduce delays and the police's success in capturing thieves.\nThe China Daily provides some biting commentary about the United States. Writer Yan Xizao attacks "the part-time human rights preachers in Washington" for criticizing China's record on protecting basic liberties. He contrasts Beijing and Washington's human rights records. China, of course, wins every comparison.\nYet while Yan's article appears to be an overblown critique of America's (real) human rights problems, there's more to it than that. Beijing only beats Washington, in Yan's view, because China's constitution will soon be amended to protect private property, because the government has promised to respect individual liberty, and because non-communists have been elected to local people's congresses.\nIn other words, China's human rights record is getting better because ... the country is becoming capitalist and democratic. This is true -- but it's shocking to read it in a paper vetted by the Chinese Communists (who, last I checked, were still opposed to bourgeois capitalism and Western-style democracy in theory).\nThere are several explanations for Yan's harsh tone. In part, the anti-American commentary is merely the most recent expression of the anti-foreign sentiment present in Chinese discourse since the Manchus overthrew the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s. And President Bush has hardly endeared himself to Beijing's Politburo.\nBut there's more. The subtext of Yan's article (which is a typical example of the two papers' commentary) is that the United States is flawed for not living up to its ideals, not that those ideals are wrong. That in turn implies Yan is criticizing Beijing, too, because the Communists are obviously falling short of that goal.\nIf freedom of speech means anything, it means the right of the people to openly criticize their government. But when that freedom is denied, when speaking against the government means possibly being imprisoned or worse, writers and artists must be more subtle. This is why art produced in repressive regimes is so allegorical. If it weren't, there wouldn't be many artists left. The same process may be at work here, with attacks on the United States used as proxies for attacks on China's government.\nOr Yan and the average reader could simply dislike the United States, maybe even honestly believe America is less free than China.\nI can't say for certain. I only know what I read in the papers.