Inside the People’s Daily

Lately we had the pleasure of a tour around the most widely circulated and influential newspaper in China, the People’s Daily. Established by Mao in the early 1950s the newspaper has remained the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China ever since.  More than 3,000 staff produce the newspaper and most live on site in a massive compound right in the heart of Beijing’s business district. There’s a hospital, a barber shop, two restaurants, a post office and a school. There's even a park with cute pagodas and pavillions.

 

We got a tour of the older offices but were not allowed into the nerve centre, a shiny new building opened a few years ago houses the main production centre. There’s a fancy drive up and a musical fountain for whenever Party top brass such as Hu Jintao come to visit. The other modern building on site is the only place foreigners are allowed to work here, subediting the online edition of the paper, which is published daily in English and several other foreign languages. 

There’s nothing fancy or imposing about the offices we saw. Rather a threadbare East bloc kind of offices with bare concrete corridors and bare, fetid bathrooms. There are however shiny new computers on the desks. One is for surfing the World Wide Web, the other for the Intranet. There’s a feeling of paranoia and stiffness to the extent that we have to break into two groups, one of the Caucasians and the other of the Asians in the group, to diminish suspicions of the various soldiered checkpoints. On leaving, some stern looking young soldiers stood at the gate and warned us that once out we couldn’t come back in.

 

None of the dozen Chinese (of various ages and professions) I polled last week said they read the People’s Daily because it’s too “boring” and “serious” they variously said. The People's cadres must envy the more colourful, flashy tabloids and more news-driven papers like Beijing Times and Beijing Youth Daily. Both run oceans of adverts, sold on the strength of readership. There are taboos too for these papers – politics – but they make up for it in stories of lurid divorce cases, food scares, ripped off tourists and Internet fraudsters.

 

The People’s Daily overseas edition is slightly less stiff than the national edition but still a tough read. Amid verbatim chunks of Party speeches there’s photos of token foreigners dancing with smiling minorities. In a recent edition an English woman is photoed visiting heritage sites in Guizhou province. She and another foreigner, visiting Chengdu, are both full of praise for the country’s development.

 

There was a nice slice of irony was when we sat down to eat in a private room in one of two cafeterias on site. Our host is the newly appointed editor of the environment pages - environmental sustainability is currently all the rage in Chinese officialdom – and then we were served the centerpiece dish, shark’s fin soup. Sharks are being hunted to extinction for their fins, a cruel trade where the rest of the big fish thrown back into the sea to die a long, slow death. The dish we were served may or not have been the real deal but was described as “very expensive” by our host I can only assume it contained at least some shark’s fin.

 

You wonder how long the old organ can survive these brashly capitalistic times. Certainly there’s plenty of real estate developers salivating at the prospect of building a forest of skyscrapers on the site. The People’s Daily may already be in on the act itself: long term staff got the chance to buy their own apartments in several beige-coloured apartment blocks built overlooking the paper’s private park several year’s ago. They’re a major improvement on the cold, blackened concrete of the original digs, built in the 1950s and which, we were told, now house extra workers hired to run the print works: the People’s Daily has begun publishing newspapers on the country's auto and real estate industries (read: loads of advertisements).