Bifurcated Images of Japan: Liberal Commercial Chinese Newspapers' Production of Japan-related News

Abstract

Japan is one of the most important foreign countries in China’s international relations as she is one of China’s closest neighbors and most important trading partners. However, due to war history, political friction and geostrategic rivalry, news narratives about Japan are closely monitored by the state, but often contested by different actors in the political system. This research aims to examine what kinds of news narratives about Japan were produced by the Beijing News, the Oriental Morning Post, and the Southern Metropolis Daily during 2009- 2015. Chinese news media workers perceive these three commercial newspapers as having a liberal stance in the Chinese ideological spectrum. Through in-depth interviews with reporters and editors who are in charge of producing these reports, this research seeks to explain why such kind of news narrative was produced. The existing scholarly work has focused on how the historical war image of Japan in Chinese media was manipulated to defend CCP’s regime legitimacy (Blair, 2007; Dirlik, 1991; Downs & Saunders,1999; He, 2007a, 2007b) and how the anti-Japanese public opinion was manipulated through controlling the Chinese media to serve CCP’s Japan policy (Reilly, 2012, 2014; Stockmann, 2010; Weiss, 2013). Although illuminating, this body of research “stressing on the linkage mechanism of the media” (Baum & Potter, 2008) has oversimplified Chinese media as just CCP’s propaganda toolkit. They did not look into how and why such the portrayal of Japan was produced, furthermore, they ignore the numerous news coverage on Japanese social issues. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the perspectives of the news producers themselves, especially when considering that not only the drivers of propaganda, but the market and localized journalistic professional logic also drive Chinese media in general. This research is based on the media sociology perspective (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996, 2013) and adopted the news production ethnographic approach (Cottle, 2007; Ilan, 2015). It examines the journalistic “field environment” (Lei, 2016) of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou and analyses the narrative of Japan-related news of three newspapers. In-depth interviews with a total number of 29 current and previous journalists and editors were conducted. This research shows the reports about Japan are not always the result of state-mandated censorship but often reflects the interaction of both market forces and the constraints of the journalists’ professional competence. When covering sporadic issues to Sino-Japanese relations, for example, the Sino-Japanese island disputes and the wartime history, the news narrative stands for the “national interests of China”. This “less-informative' narrative stems from reporters' lack of Japanese language training, readers' popularly accepted frames of Sino-Japanese war history, and the self-censorship of newspapers. The image of Japan as impenitent was amplified. When the three newspapers depict Japanese social issues, the selection of news topics is based on journalists and editors’ intention to provoke reflections on China’s own problems. The ‘self-otherization’ of China motivates journalists to cover such topics as Japanese environmental issues, soccer system, and the aging society. The multifaceted and bifurcated image of Japan was presented in these three newspapers.