ABSTRACT
The outbreak of SARS in 2003 saw Chinese urbanites reconstituting themselves as co-authors with journalists in narrating media stories about their everyday experience, through talking, linking and clicking. New media have been appropriated to transform networks of communicative practices and refigure subjectivities so as to articulate alternative political discourses. Such transformation and refiguration has enabled the confluence of media consumers and producers (as ‘prosumers’), and of professionals and amateurs (as ‘proams’) in media production. In fact, journalists and intellectuals – as professional media and culture producers – play a prominent role in initiating and leading the discussion on identity and citizenship. This chapter examines Chinese professional journalism in the context of
modern Chinese intellectual politics, through case studies on SARS reportage in 2003. As a news event, SARS reportage refers to a constellation of news and events related to SARS. Breaking news on SARS constitutes SARS reportage. Reporting the case of Li Siyi can also be considered as part of the SARS reportage on account of its close relation with the sociopolitical context in China’s war on SARS: Li is a 3-year-old girl starved to death in her own home in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in June 2003, after her mother was arrested for shoplifting and then sent to a drug rehabilitation centre upon testing positive for drugs, and the local police officers neglected the mother’s plea for help. SARS reportage describes a series of ‘hijacked’ events during China’s acclamation of its new leadership at the beginning of the SARS battle and the celebration of victory over SARS at the end of it. SARS reportage thus provides examples of the media work of Chinese journalists, who, as some of the most important social and political players, mobilised cultural, historical and technical resources to express their narratives about SARS and the politics of SARS. This chapter locates the everyday practices of Chinese journalists (repre-
sented by investigative journalists) within the context of SARS reportage, and examines Chinese journalism from a historical perspective. Through examining SARS reportage, I argue that Chinese journalists are becoming
mediators between the state and society in reporting discordant social dramas in contemporary China. As mediators, journalists, while representing themselves as professional, resort to non-professional means to articulate an intellectual interpretation of contemporary Chinese political culture. The professional journalism they represent is a mediation journalism built on a strategy I will call ‘double-time narration’. Barbie Zelizer (1993) applies the concept of ‘double time’ in re-framing
journalists as an interpretive community in the US context. She draws this notion from Homi Bhabha (1994: 145), but reapplies it to journalism and uses it as the interpretive framework and narrative practice of American professional journalists. Zelizer argues that journalists constitute themselves, on the one hand, as objects of news accounts through a local mode of interpreting history and, on the other hand, as subjects of reflexive accounts of the earlier reportage through a durational mode of interpreting history. Double time guarantees journalists a double authority as both eyewitnesses of history and historians. Double time, for both Bhabha and Zelizer, encompasses narrations in and of the past and the present. Thus, double time renders the agents of history (post-colonial people in Bhabha’s work, and American journalists in Zelizer’s) as both objects and subjects of the narrations of the nation. I will argue, with Zelizer, that the notion of professionalism alone is
inadequate for examining the operational and behavioural patterns of journalists. Journalists use more elaborate mechanisms than professional ethics to construct reality. The notion of local and durational modes of interpretation, which is implied in the double temporal positions of journalistic productions, is also useful in the Chinese context. The double-time narration that I use in this chapter builds on Zelizer’s contribution to journalism studies. I view ‘double time’ as an inherent characteristic of journalistic productions within any single mode of interpretation. It is realised through a doubly temporal and spatial arrangement. In other words, double-time narration a narration as events unfold and another when they are retold, and a narration of the official time and another of the unofficial time, both through double spaces – the official space (the mainstream media such as television) and the unofficial space (the Internet for example). Double-time narration is therefore doubly spatio-temporal. Through the doubly spatial and temporal modes of narration about SARS
in both traditional and new media, double-time narration helps Chinese journalists open a new field of power play with the different forces that impinge upon them. In the efforts to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between the conflicting forces and discourses, they are developing their craft as mediators between the state, society and the market. Mediation signifies intervention, compromise and expansion. As mediators, journalists function as an organic part within a complex of relationships, producing and using knowledge for change. Mediation defines and confines contemporary Chinese journalist and intellectual politics.
