Traditional media against new media?

A few days ago Federico Rampini, Repubblica's former Beijing correspondent, reported on his blog that, according to a Pew Research Center's study, the 95% of the news circulating on all medias, traditional and new, have their source in the press. Some months ago, commenting the demise of the Los Angeles Times, he asked his readers: "If one day the dropping in the profitability of the press should push the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many others (including us) on the same slope of Los Angeles Times, who will provide the raw materials with which millions of blogs in the world work? Who will actually be on the field to tell what's going on in Afghanistan or in Ruanda, in Birmania or in Tibet? Who will have the means, the structure,who will invest money to go checking personally if the orginal information is reliable, verified?".

Personally, I don't share this kind of pessimism on the information coming from blogs and, more generally, from the web. In my opinion, and I say it with some regrets, the age of the journalist on the field, always in the front line hunting the last news, has become a mith of other times, of the epoch in which, as Tiziano Terzani wrote, a correspondent left his country at the beginning of a war and arrived on the spot when the hostilities were already over. If in the past a solid and widespread web of correspondents was undoubtedly necessary in order to obtain an accurate and well-timed news on what was happening in far away countries, in the age of the Internet the structure of the correspondent office, at least as it has been intended up to now, seems to be outdated.

It is true that, as Federico Rampini writes, a blog cannot afford to open correspondent offices abroad, but it is also true that the people who write on a blog usually are personally and professionally integrated in the society they describe. Very often, they have an awareness of the reality they live in far higher than a correspondent who is sent on place from his desk in a far away editorial office in Rome or Milan. Let's take the case of Global Voices Online as an example. Started in 2005 with the support of Harvard University, today it has a basis of more than two hundred bloggers who write about realities they know very well, often translating original voices. They are not "professional" correspondents, but the information they make is of enviable quality, to such an extent that they often become the unnamed source of "inspiration" of more than one correspondent.

Local voices are a fundamental component of the information in the Internet age. Netizens, journalists, commentators, opinionists, common citizens: their words are all at hand with a simple click or a phone call. An attentive eye, able to follow the dialogue of an entire society through the voices of its members, can penetrate deeper than any correspondent does. Talking about the Chinese case, do we really believe that the greatest scandals in last years have been discovered just for the intervention of some foreign journalist? Personally, it's hard for me to recall any news recentlry reported by foreign journalists which had not appeared before on the web or on the often vituperated Chinese press. In the age of Internet, the foreign correpondent appears to be something more like a filter for already existing news, than a person actively looking for first hand news.

With this, I am not denying the importance of an information "on the field", I'm just observing how an information of this kind is not the direction in which traditional media seem to be moving to, at least in Italy. It seems to me that traditional media are obsessed with the competition with the web in terms of immediacy and swiftness. Instead of exploiting the potential of one or more people working on the spot, focusing on a kind of investigative journalism which goes in depth, the editorial offices are clinging stubbornly to compete with the Internet, a struggle which often leads to a superficial and rushed work style. If the press will go on walking this path, I doubt it will be able to maintain the fidelity of its readers for long. Conversely, is so absurd to think about a press focused on investigation and a web centered on a fast flow of informations?

If the figures of the Pew Research Center on the prevalence of the press as a source of information are reliable (and I can't tell, since I haven't read the report), the Chinese case would be a remarkable exception. According to the "Analysis on Internet Public Opinion in China 2009", a study published a month ago in the Blue Book of China's Society in 2010, on 77 incidents that last years had a great influence on Chinese public opinion, 23 (about 30%) originated from the web. As the authors of the report wrote: "The public opinion on Internet already has a deep influence on traditional media. The journalists of the press, the editors and the hosts of TV shows have already the abitude of surfing the web in order to find leads for news; the Internet 'opinion leaders' are willing to write columns for the press and appears on TV shows for interviews. Explosive materials exposed on the web is being taken up by traditional media, with the latter conducting in depth interviews and comments, raising the reliability of the news and drawing a greater attention by the government; besides, critical reports on negative social phenomenons published by traditional media have a great echo on the web, swiftly coalescing the popular will and creating a big pressure by the public opinion. This relation of mutual strenghtening between traditional and new media pushed forward the resolution of many social problems".

If in the Chinese case the high number of scandals which originated on the web may be dued to the greater severity of official control on traditional media, it's hard to deny the potentialities of the Internet as a source of informations. The strenght of the web resides in its swiftness and its rootedness in the territory. It's thanks to the diffusion of the web even in the deepest countryside that now we can gain access to realities that before remained in the background, unnoticed not only to any foreign correspondent, but often also to the Chinese citizens themselves. In this age, everyone can act as a correspondent from his city, his town or his village. Of course, verifying the trustworthiness of the informations takes times and a greater effort, but here is where the traditional media come to play. The potentials of this virtuous circle seem to be almost infinite. Maybe it's time that we stop talking about traditional media against new media.

Having an university degree and not being able to find a job

On the campus of the Beijing Foreign Studies University some days ago in a space on the notice board - which usually is reserved for student job offers - there was a couple of sheets with the title: “Announcement for recruitment to the army for this year graduates”. This document, aimed at students who will complete their studies this academic year, announced that the graduates who, after obtaining their degrees, decides to enlist themselves for three years in the army, will enjoy some kind of preferential treatment at the end of their service, and either they’ll decide to find a job in public bodies at grass-roots level or they’ll chose to continue with their studies. Xiao He, a student who is currently studying for a Masters at the university, attentively studies the contents of the notice: “I stopped just to see if there was any interesting job offers, I didn’t expect to find this. As far as I know, in the past, the army mainly tried to enlist boys who were from the countryside as well as those youths who were waiting for jobs in urban centers”.

This notice is just the umpteenth demonstration of the growing concern by the Chinese authorities towards the phenomenon of intellectual unemployment, a problem which has only recently started affecting the country and which has only been worsened by the present financial crisis. As often happens when it comes to China, the numbers involved are huge. When in December 2008 the specialists from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences published their “Blue Book”, the annual forecast on the trends of Chinese society for the following year, they estimated that at the end of 2008 about 1,500,000 graduates would be unable to find a job, and anticipated that by 2009 the situation would only get considerably worse . This is because there has been uninterrupted growth in the number of new graduates from Chinese higher education institutions in a period of time where the economy is clearly contracting.

If we consider that, in China, higher education has traditionally always been reserved for a narrow elite of “Mandarins”, how could this happen? Bai Limin, senior lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, shows no doubts in tracing back the reasons of this situation to the Asian crisis of 1997. Her research highlights how, at the time, in order to avoid a new wave of high school graduates from pouring into a labour market already on the verge of collapse - and, even more, to stimulate internal consumptions to guarantee a safe way out from the crisis - Chinese authorities decided to extend the access granted to higher education, a process which is famous as kuozhao in Chinese. In just an year, from 1998 to 1999, university enrolment raised from 1,080,000 students to 1,537,000 students, an increase of 41,7%.

Since 1998, year by year, the Chinese authorities have ceaselessly been extending the access they grant to universities, and so as a result an “elitist” higher education system rapidly became a “mass” system, to such an extent that this year Chinese universities will produce about 6,110,000 graduates. Nevertheless, as Bai Limin writes, “China’s socio-economic conditions and the structure of the higher education system were unprepared for such a rapid growth in enrollment in tertiary institutions”. It cannot be doubted that this was an epochal decision. But, as a matter of fact, it has been made rather carelessly, without weighing with attention the exigencies of the labour market: the supply of labour force which today comes out from Chinese universities in no way reflects the demand from local and foreign enterprises. As Liu Kaiming, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Organization of Shenzhen, remarks: “This phenomenon demonstrates how at this stage of development Chinese workplaces concentrates on labour-intensive and low wage sectors, which are absolutely unfit for graduates”.

The Chinese press contributed in more than one way to create a climate of alarm. Already in April 2007 on the pages of the People’s Daily there was an article rhetorically entitled: “Should our graduates work as street cleaners?”. In the second half of 2008 there were a lot of stories appearing on Chinese media about the working fate of Chinese graduates, which worried more than one parent. First of all, in November 2008 there was the news that over 1300 master-graduates in Guangzhou would have shown up for a job offer as pig meat sellers. On that occasion, even if the annual salary was as high as 100,000 yuan and the job required to sell meat just for a few months before rising to higher managerial positions in the company, the media seized the opportunity to tell the story of these graduates so “desperate” that they would have accepted to become butchers. When in December a company of environmental services in Dongguan joined a job fair in Southern China offering well paid positions as sewage workers on the condition of being a graduate, cries of indignation arose on the web and in the media in defense of the “violated dignity of university students”.

After the first signals, local and national media reported a spate of stories like these: female university students employed as back-rubbers in public bathhouses in Beijing for 58 yuan an hour; recent graduates willing to work as domestic servants in Shenzhen; “turtles from over the sea” (a popular way to indicate students who, after obtaining a degree in a foreign institute, decide to move back to China) working as estheticians in hotels in the capital; crowds of hundreds of graduates competing for a few jobs as motorway toll collectors in Zhejiang province; thousands of educated youth fighting for some positions as cashiers in supermarkerts in Henan province; tens of graduates ready to work as administrative secretary in a court in the countryside of Jiangsu province. All of this on the background of job fairies crowded as they had never been. The message was very clear: nothing can act as a guarantee to a Chinese graduate that the future will be much better than that of a common migrant worker.

Beyond the media alarmism, there are serious reasons to worry about the situation. As Liu Kaiming said: “The real victims of the financial crisis in China are not the migrant workers, but university students. The crisis has put a lot of foreign export-oriented enterprises in trouble and this has affected many other sectors, clearly reducing their working opportunities ”. From the already cited “Blue Book” of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, we can apprehend that already in 2007 the unemployment rate for graduates was about 12%. As a matter of fact, even the ones who are able to find a job have not much to be happy about: according to figures recently published by the Chinese Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, about 70% of the employed graduates find a position in small and medium enterprises, in private enterprises, through self-employment or in flexible ways, while just 17% is absorbed by State bodies or big State-owned enterprises, the most coveted job destination for Chinese students who long for a life of stability.

The Chinese authorities have already devised some strategies to remedy this situation. The first of these strategies, which is reminiscent of the post-Cultural Revolution practice of sending educated youth to the countryside, consists of sending graduates to work for three years as rural cadres in the rural or disadvantaged areas of the country. It is a very popular measure among the university students in the capital, judging from the fact that this year in Beijing over 20,000 students presented their candidature for just 1,600 available positions. But why should a young Chinese graduate today voluntarily give up the comforts of the urban life and go to live in the countryside? Unlike what happened before, when political propaganda played the main role in society, it seems that today the main incentives are occupational. In a survey, open to the public, hosted on the Xinhua News Agency’s website recently, it was found that of 83 Beijing graduate rural cadres whose contracts will expire this year, 41 of them are planning to take the examination to become a public servant (gongwuyuan), 17 will stay in the countryside and 12 will accept a position recommended by the State. Although these figures have no statistical value, they seem enough to demonstrate how the promise of a job inside the States bureaucratic system, after three years of service, is fundamental in motivating Chinese youth to take leave for the countryside.

A second strategy, which has already been widely experimented in the west, is about guaranteeing a greater flexibility to the labour market, an objective which is followed not only through the gradual elimination of the barriers to internal mobility caused by the hukou system, but mainly through the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs as salaried trainees reserved for graduates. In an interview released last December in Jingji Cankaobao, an official economic publication, Hu Angang, a Qinghua University scholar who is an authority in the field of Chinese occupational policies, affirmed: “The nucleus of employment protection lies in guaranteeing more flexible jobs to the youth and in establishing more youth-friendly occupational policies”. Even if many specialists look favourably upon this kind of policy, seeing it as an effective tool in either alleviating the pressure on employment and reducing the burden on enterprises, others objected that it is clearly contradicting the provisions of the new Labour Contract Law, which came in force in January 2008, and so they are campaigning for the adoption of adequate “temporary” support measures. Nevertheless, apart from the academic debate, Chinese authorities are moving with rapidity and resolution, as we can see from last April the decision promulgated a three-year plan which calls for the creation of one million of the jobs as salaried trainees between 2009 and 2011.

The consequences of this crisis will last long. There are some signals which point out how Chinese youth have already started experiencing a lack of confidence towards higher education. Since a university degree is no more a guarantee of a steady and well-paid job, less and less students are willing to undertake four tiring years of studies, while many parents hesitate when it comes to the burden of extremely high school fees. When, a few days ago, Chinese provincial governments revealed the figures of the applications for the gaokao (the annual higher education entrance examination) for 2009, it was possible to ascertain how this year the number of participants has had a great drop. According to official figures from the Ministry of Education, if from 2002 to 2008 the number of students enrolled for the gaokao has uninterruptedly grown, rising from 5,270,000 to 10,500,000 candidates, this year there has been a drop of at least 3.8%, equal to 300,000 students. Even if demographic reasons have surely played an important role in this change of trend, Chinese authorities cannot underestimate this new development, all the more since some provinces have experienced a real collapse. In some cases this collapse has resulted in a figure higher than 10%, especially in Shandong and Henan, which respectively lost about 80,000 and 29,000 candidates.

The point is that the policies adopted by the Chinese government do not get to the core of the problem, they just delay a necessary solution. Young people are persuaded to leave for the countryside, to join the army, to go on studying for a master or a PhD, but what will happen a few years from now, when all these people, then in their thirties, will again flood the labour market? The Chinese government can create only a limited amount of jobs within its bodies and, although it’s licit to hope that an improvement in the economic situation will create enough new jobs, the risk of deterioration in the public order is real. If, for now, it seems that young graduates do not blame the government for the hardships that they are enduring, nobody can foresee future developments, especially in the case that intellectual unemployment join hands with other sensitive problems like the rise of prices, official corruption and labour exploitation, something which already happened at the end of the 1980’s. As a matter of fact, in a time of crisis being young and owning a degree is not of much help. Not even in China.

Chinese workers lose more than jobs

“Has your boss run away without paying your arrears? Have you been fired? Has your salary been cut? With the necessary knowledge and by protecting our rights, we can overcome this crisis”. It is a leaflet currently distributed amongst the thousands of migrant workers in the Longgang district in Shenzhen.

Then there are more questions, followed by brief explanations: what to do if your salary is not timely paid? If the factory interrupts its activities or calls for a long vacation? If your employer decides to cut its workforce? If someone forces you to resign? If the factory is being tranferred? The answers include long quotations from Chinese labor laws explained to common workers in plain and clear language. At the end, a box highlights the phone number of the authors: the Centre for Workers’ Health and Safety, a local civil society organization founded by Huang Qingnan, a former migrant worker who had his face disfigured by acid thrown by a jealous colleague back in 1999.

While a string of bankruptcies hit the giants of the global financial market, millions of migrant workers of the Pearl River Delta industries, the “world factory”, are trying hard to weather the storm and save their very shaky jobs.

“After the beginning of the financial storm, protecting workers’ rights has become harder; now even doing our job is much more difficult,” Yu Huimin, a collaborator of Huang Qingnan, declares over a cup of tea. Following the crisis, a lot of factories closed down and, worst even, labor standards have plummeted for those workers who staid in the job.

“Before it was easy for me to find jobs with a salary of 1.260 yuan including free board and lodging, now at most they offer me a base salary of 800 yuan”, said Li, a young migrant worker from the northern province of Henan. Last June the electronic components factory where she worked for over six years suddenly went bankrupt, leaving hundreds unemployed. In a few days Li was able to find a new position, but after six months even the new factory was closed and the production moved elsewhere. She is in the mid thirties wit two little children. She is still full of vitality, but in the world factory being thirty means that you are already old. “Laoban only wants girls younger than 25 and even if you have got a high school diploma they don’t want you. How can I compete with them?”

In the delta area, presently the real vexing problem seems to be not the shortage of jobs but the fact that salaries have dramatically dropped. From 2006 to 2008 the average wage of Shenzhen’s workers raised more than 30%, from 2451 to 3233 yuan per month. Now there are wage reductions of 10% or even 20% compared to the levels of last year. But cuts in workers’ wages are hardly an effective measure to solve company problems, say labor activists. Yu Huimin argued: “salaries count as a minimal part of the production costs of an enterprise. It’s absolutely meaningless to harm workers’ interests in order to protect the company, firstly because this is not so useful, and secondly because workers already have a difficult life and an increase of the pressure on them is just another possible cause of instability”.

For Chinese workers the crisis is actually “the storm”, so they call it. It is a tempest, indeed. According to official estimates 20 million migrant workers, about 15% of the total 130 million migrants to the coastal cities, would lose their jobs this year. However these cold figures underestimate the ongoing systemic change. Liu Kaiming, a well-known specialist head of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a civil society organization based in Shenzhen, said: “This is just an estimate. According to my calculation, in the manufacturing industry of coastal areas about 20 millions workers went back home. On top of this, we should add about 16 millions workers in the building industry and an unspecified number of workers in the services and in other industries, amounting to a sum total of somewhere between 36 and 40 millions workers. Every one of them will come back to the cities looking for a job. I think that even though workers in the building industry won’t have particular difficulties in finding new jobs, thanks to the big projects started by the government, it won’t be the same for the workers in the industries of manufacturing and services. The 20 millions might well be just the people unable to find a new job”.

A person who understands very well the impact of this economic crisis on Chinese migrant workers is Zhang Quanshou, better known in the zone as “the commander” of migrant workers. On his name-card is written “National People’s Congress Representative” in red letters, a position that he obtained in 2008. Arriving in Shenzhen from Henan province as a common migrant worker in the Nineties, a decade ago, he found a way to make a life finding jobs for his fellow villagers in cities like Shenzhen. In 2000 he founded a company mediating between migrant workers and factories: he takes a percentage of the earnings of every man he helps.
Zhang receives his guests guarded by large uniformed bodyguards in a luxurious office in a working class neighborhood of Pinghu town, north of Shenzhen. On one wall there are dozens of plaques with prizes, honors and titles from government bodies, on the other walls there are photos of him with the high ranking officers. Before the crisis, every year about 12,000 workers passed through his company and the prospects seemed so pleasing that he set the goal to double the number in 2009. In July 2008 the factories started not wanting “his” workers anymore and in some cases they sent back the people already hired. Moreover, workers stopped to rush to his office. After the Spring Festival there were just 5,000 new arrivals, half the number of the previous year. Many migrants decided to stay at home waiting for news.

According to Zhang, employers in the area prefer to hire young women between the ages of 16 and 23, because they are more disciplined and hard-working than their male counterparts. Among the most evident consequences of the crisis on his activities he counts the fact that recently, because of the uncertainty on future orders, he can only sign labor contracts of no more than three months. Previously, it was normal to sign agreements for at least one year. However, he says he didn’t notice any influence of the crisis on workers’ wages, which have remained substantially unchanged. “In late spring there will surely be new jobs, otherwise the whole world will go wrong”, he commented.

Paradoxically, the financial crisis hit Chinese workers right in the moment when hopes of raising labor standards were at their peak. In 2008 alone, three new laws on issues fundamental for workers such as labor disputes and labor contracts came into force. The financial crisis cast a shadow on all those improvements, at least for now.

Hua Haifeng, an activist of the Chunfeng Service Center for Labour Disputes, a civil society organization providing free legal advice to migrant workers in the Shenzhen Bao’an district, told me that the first months of 2008 saw an exponential rise in the number of workers who, reassured by the new legislation, had decided to sue their employers. But since the end of last summer there has been an abrupt shift in this trend. From internal data of the Chunfeng Service Center, it’s possible to see that the requests of consulting had peaked in April 2008 with 90 cases, while in October of the same year the number dropped to only 14. Nevertheless, there are still many workers filing suit with the state service of free legal counsel or with improvised “civil representatives” (gongmin daili) who, without any qualifications, promises miracles for little money.

Beside individual cases there are still many larger labor disputes. In early 2009 one involved the furniture company DeCoro, originally from Italy. The company, leader in the manufacturing of sofas, started off over a decade ago by paying salaries above average. However, recently a string of incidents and labor disputes tainted the company reputation. According to Xu Shilong, a lawyer contacted by many DeCoro’s workers, a serious incident occurred in March 2008, when 1,784 employees decided to recur to legal counsel to claim their overtime pay. After that, disputes surged as the company turned down growing requests grounded on the new labor laws.
Since last January, Chinese media paid growing attention to the DeCoro. According to local media reports, because of the collapse of orders from the USA, since October 2008 the company was having serious financial problems and 2,239 employees were left without pay in November and December. The Shenzhen government tried unsuccessfully to mediate, the workers went on strike and, on January the 15th, Luca Ricci, the company CEO, fled the country with all his foreign staff, leaving Chinese authorities to deal with the enraged workers.

“I would have never imagined it, nobody thought that our boss was such a person. Many workers still think that he’s going to come back, I have dreamt that he’ll come back very soon too”, said Chun, a 30 year old worker who worked in the administration department of the DeCoro factory for eight years. Now herself, her husband, also a former DeCoro employee, are at home without a job, with their two year old daughter. Facing two thousands enraged workers the local government paid part of the due arrears, almost 11 million yuan. “A case like this is very representative of what is going on in these days”, commented the lawyer Xu Shilong.
The official concern over instability is tangible. On February 17th the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, China’s only official trade union, a colossus with over 200 millions members, issued a warning. Its vice president Sun Chunlan said: “In the present situation it’s necessary to be on guard against hostile forces inside and outside the country ready to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by some enterprises in order to infiltrate migrant workers and cause damages”. Beijing is worried that workers dissatisfaction could lead to large anti government demonstrations.

To forestall this predicament the government is trying to extend more welfare benefits to migrant workers. In the last months, the Chinese media have been carrying news of new benefits for unemployed migrant workers hastily passed by local governments, of new regulations which would pose the basis for a national unified pension system, of huge re-employment projects launched by the provincial governments, all of this on the background of the forthcoming passage of China’s first Social Security Law.

The aim is a swift reform to give migrant workers the possibility to share the benefits of China’s fledgling welfare system. In fact even today in China living in a great city without permanent local residence (hukou) is the root of many problems. People without local hukou are not entitled to receive state assistance. They have no free medical assistance, they have to pay higher school fees for their sons, in case of occupational problems they cannot receive benefits, and so on.

It is still too soon to make an assessment on the impact of this financial crisis on Chinese workers. Many analysts say that it will be necessary to wait at least until the end of May, when the Chinese companies will receive their orders from abroad, to see the real effects of the crisis. Now, in the cities and in the countryside, everything is silent, quietly and anxiously waiting.


[I have to thank Francesco Sisci for the editing and his precious advices while I was working on this article. This article has also been published on Asia Times]