One cannot assume that the differences in the way the Chinese and American media sources deal with the same topic are all indicative of differences in values or priorities regarding that topic. Many other important influencing factors should be considered. The following is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather a few factors that are particularly salient in examining this textual corpus.
First, American and Chinese news audiences differ considerably from each other. While in theory the Chinese readership had a general knowledge of the problems faced by migrants in southern China, as well as an understanding of the average living and working conditions for factory workers in China, the average American reader can be assumed to be unaware of these things. Because of this fact, journalists writing to an American audience have much more freedom in creating context for their articles. If the journalist chooses to frame the Southern
Weekend reports as diatribes on the deplorable factory conditions at Foxconn, the average
American reader will take what is written as truth. The average American reader has never been to a factory in China, and has no idea how much better it is for workers to work at Foxconn, with its international standards of corporate social responsibility, than to suffer the
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awful working conditions in many smaller Chinese factories. Also, the average American reader will have no access to the original article, and therefore relies on the journalists to present its contents accurately.
For example, article A11 claims that Liu Zhiyi “reported that workers were stuck in grueling, repetitive jobs and working long hours for minimal pay”.145 While from a Western
perspective these facts are true, this was by no means the main point or final conclusion of Liu Zhiyi’s reports. Liu Zhiyi is much more accurately quoted in article A9 which says “Liu Zhiyi…doesn't decry the long working hours as atrocious; he actually praises them as a way to make more money. Nor does he cite any human rights abuses. But what Zhiyi notices is that workers enter the factory intending to save up and start their own business, or go to college. Those dreams become impossible to achieve amidst the long hours and low pay, and the revelation is devastating.”
The average Chinese reader, on the other hand, can easily access the original reports, if he hasn’t read them already. This, combined with the average Chinese person’s knowledge of standard working conditions in China, leaves very minimal freedom for journalists to bend the truth in citing and paraphrasing the original reports in the way article A11 does.
Second, there is a great difference between the American and Chinese journalists reporting on the Foxconn investigation by Southern Weekend. The Chinese journalists are almost
guaranteed to have read the original reports before writing about them. The American
journalists, on the other hand, rely on secondhand information in most cases. While one of the
Southern Weekend articles was translated into English (see S4), the translation is riddled with
grammatical errors, uses direct translation of many non-English phrases without explanation, and, perhaps most importantly, is written assuming the reader has the basic knowledge and cultural context of a Chinese person. Though a few of the journalists that reported on the
Southern Weekend investigation have a background in Chinese culture and language (For
example Nan Duan146, the writer of articles A1 and A8), most appear not to. This means that, in many cases, the American journalists are simply not well enough informed about the issues at stake to offer commentary on them.
145 Chen 2010.
146 Duan is the last name. For all persons whose identity is primarily classified as Chinese in this thesis (for
example the authors of the Chinese reports and articles, Chinese scholars, Foxconn workers and administrators) I have used traditional Chinese name order in my text, with last name first. Nan Duan, however, writes for the American media and uses the Anglicized name order in his byline, so I have to also written his name in this way.
33 There are several example of this phenomenon, but the most clear example is, once again, article A11, which actually refers to Liu Zhiyi (a male) using the feminine pronoun “she”, clearly indicating a lack of familiarity with the original source reports. Less obvious, but perhaps more dangerous are the articles that neglect to mention context in citing information. A12, for example, cites Foxconn workers’ monthly salary as $130—to Western ears an appallingly low figure. The article neglects to mention, however, that this is the wage for beginning workers only. Further, this wage is legal and well within the national norms of wages for factory workers. While the original report had no need to mention these facts, since they are common knowledge in China, this context is crucial for American readers and yet is often unavailable in American articles.
When it comes to freedom to criticize the Chinese central government, however, the Chinese press is quite limited. While Foxconn, a Taiwanese corporation, can be fairly safely criticized, in many cases the obvious shortcomings of Chinese labor policy are only visible in the
subtext of the Chinese articles. They can point out facts, but when the facts indicate that the government should take a more active role in labor rights legislation, Chinese journalists have to leave the conclusions to the reader. This is possibly part of the reason that The Workers’
Daily did not write its own articles on the Southern Weekend investigation as mentioned
above. The Southern Weekend investigation revealed that national labor policy shortcomings are at least part of the problem at Foxconn; dancing around this issue is difficult.
The American press was not limited in this respect, however none of the American articles in my corpus used Foxconn to make a major critique of Chinese labor policy. This is quite likely due to a lack of awareness rather than any desire to protect the Chinese central government from criticism.
Finally, the journalist’s personal values and priorities play an important role in how data is analyzed and, in turn, how topics are presented and explained. In the next chapters of this thesis I will analyze the specifics of how these values and priorities reveal themselves.
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