China Central Television was the venue for a 2-day Workshop on British journalism organized by China Media Centre in October 2009. Speakers were Hugo de Burgh, CMC Director, Kevin Sutcliffe, C4’s Head of Current Affairs, Steve Hewlett, presenter of BBC’s The Media Show, Zhang Jie, Editor of CCTV’s News Investigation and Yang Rui, Presenter of CCTV’s Dialogue.

A one-day CMC seminar was held in the Houses of Parliament to address the implications of China’s management of its environmental challenges for government policy and British business. It was hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on China and sponsored by Norton Rose. 170 people attended, from business, the policy world and media.

One of CMC’s research themes, along with regulation, journalism and innovation in the media, is the relationship between media and environment. This seminar is one of several initiatives connected with this theme, including a workshop at Caijing magazine in  Peking, producing a report on journalism and the environment for International Media Support and being knowledge partner for the October Wilton Park Conference on China’s environment.

• Programme: 090625OnDayProgramme2x
• 306009 Speakers biographies

This is a conference of the China Media Centre for the APPCG, with Knowledge Partner, Norton Rose LLP. With assistance from the Chinese Embassy and Chinadialogue http://www.chinadialogue.net/

Boris Johnson

The Mayor of London and former MP for Henley

伦敦市长Boris Johnson中国之行

In 2006 the CMC arranged Boris Johnson MP’s first trip to China, when he was Conservative Higher Education Spokesman. He and the Director of CMC travelled together to Shanghai and Peking where they were filmed by BBC Newsnight.

Photo: Boris Johnson in China

2006年，时任影子内阁高等教育部发言人、现任伦敦市长Boris Johnson 在中国传媒中心的安排下，与中心主任戴雨果教授一起，展开了他的首次中国之行；他们在上海和北京的行程由BBC的新闻之夜栏目（News Night）摄制成专题节目在黄金时间播出。

Steam-rollering into the future (Review of Hugo de Burgh’s China: Friend or Foe?)

Boris Johnson

Spectator, Wednesday, 28th June 2006

You’d better hurry if you want to see any of old Beijing. The lovely higgledy-piggledy brick hutongs are being blitzed in readiness for the 2008 Olympics. Even in the Hou Hai district, supposedly one of the last zones of ancient tranquillity, the imperial lakes are fringed with trashy bars and ugly black sound systems spilling on to the pavement.

Not far away tourists are taken to inspect the old codgers playing chess and mah-jong, surrounded by caged birds. The oldsters like to look at the birdies, the tourist will be told in a whisper. It was one of the simple pleasures that Mao destroyed. The dictator took it into his head that it was an act of bourgeois decadence even to admire birdsong or plumage. So children went around banging tin trays and the birds were driven from the trees.

Photo: Boris Johnson joining in exercise at the Peking University.

As you look at these elderly victims of Maoist insanity, you can’t help wondering whether all the pundits are right about China. This is a place that still refuses to acknowledge the evil of Mao, and where his visage still hangs, fringed with tassels, from the rear-view mirror of buses. Are those mole-covered jowls really the face of the new China? Is it possible that this one-party state will achieve the kind of global dominance that some have recently forecast? In this clear, concise and fact-stuffed summary, Hugo de Burgh gives you all you need to make a pretty shrewd guess.

For those who think we’d all better take crash courses in Mandarin, the statistics are terrifying. China now consumes more red meat than any other country, and in the next five years will become a bigger trading nation than the US. Last year there were 50,000 miles of three-lane highway under construction, and new metro systems were being constructed in 26 cities, as well as 30 nuclear power stations. Shanghai has the world’s tallest hotel, the biggest shop, the highest television tower and the fastest train.

The Chinese middle class is exploding — I expect a thousand or so have been added to the ranks of the bourgeoisie since you began this article — and will number about 200 million this year. These are of course buying ever more cars, clothes and electrical appliances, and Goldman Sachs estimates that within ten years the Chinese will be buying 29 per cent of the world’s luxury goods. The Chinese are rapidly expanding their educational system, and they continue to excel in the crunchy subjects that British students find so off-putting. Almost 60 per cent of Chinese undergraduates study the sciences or engineering, compared to 36 per cent in the UK. How can they lose?

Well, as de Burgh points out, China is still a developing country, with per capita GDP of about $1,000 per year. We all have it in our heads that China is the world’s economic powerhouse; and yet the country is still afflicted by such poverty as to qualify for the world’s biggest slice of World Bank assistance. Never forget that the Chinese must feed a quarter of mankind with only 10 per cent of the world’s cultivable land, and with only 25 per cent of the global average per capita water supply.

That is why so much of China has been deforested or turned into a desert or a dump for nuclear waste, and the forced march to capitalism is producing anguish that can be every bit as painful as the Cultural Revolution. Villagers are killed if they protest against the expropriation of their land for development. In 2004 there were 74,000 protests of one kind or another, and yet there is no democratic outlet for these feelings.

Every university department has a party leader, every newspaper editor is under party control, and judicial decisions are subject to political review. Corruption is everywhere, tax is raised in a pretty arbitrary fashion, and a rickety social security system must cope with what promises to be the mother and father of all pensions crises — because each mother and father is only allowed one child, with the result that 27 per cent of the population will be over 60 by 2050.

Feed all these factors into your equation, and you begin to see why there is a case for a moderate sinoscepticism, a belief that all this hysteria about China may be slightly overdone. As Hugo de Burgh rightly concludes, there is no reason to fear China. She is no foe. He provides ample evidence that her march to global dominance will take much longer than some are currently predicting, and that in the meantime her integration to the capitalist system has been, on the whole, good for China and good for us. It’s Win Win, as some snazzy new Beijing nightclub has no doubt been auspiciously named.

Conceived and organized by:

Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication and Director of India Media Centre at the University of Westminster, London

Supported by:

Mass Communication Division of the ICA and by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University for Pennsylvania

Call for papers:

The transformation of communication and media in China and India – the world’s two most populous countries and fastest growing economies – has profound implications for what constitutes the ‘global’. Jairam Ramesh, currently India’s Environment Minister, is credited with the notion of ‘Chindia’, representing what has been termed as the ‘rise of the rest’. Trade between the two Asian neighbours – negligible at the beginning of the 1990s – grew to $40 billion by 2008, with China becoming India’s largest single trading partner. Such economic exchanges have coincided with cracks within the neo-liberal model of US-led Western capitalism. The combined economic and cultural impact of ‘Chindia’, aided by their worldwide diasporas, is creating globalization with an Asian accent, a phenomenon that is likely to influence globalized media and its study.

With more than 70 dedicated news channels, India has one of the world’s most linguistically diverse media landscapes, while China has emerged as the planet’s biggest mobile telephone market, having the world’s highest blogger population and as the largest exporter of IT products. The study of media and communication is rapidly growing in both countries: more than 700 communication and media programmes are operational in Chinese universities, while the opening up of the media and communication sector in India has led to mushrooming of media institutes. In addition, both countries provide a considerable number of media and communication postgraduate and research students to Western universities.

Though both countries have experienced different trajectories of growth in recent decades and represent two distinct political and media systems, they also demonstrate interesting similarities. The rise of ‘Chindia’ offers exciting opportunities as well as challenges to media and communication researchers. This preconference – a pioneering intellectual venture – aims to bring together scholars from around the world, especially from China and India, to examine and explore this phenomenon.

Among the topics we wish to cover are: The rise of ‘Chindia’ and its impact on international media research; globalization of Indian media and cultural industries; China’s soft power; communication and cultural exchange between China and India; re-envisioning diasporic and developmental communication; Chindia – cooperation or competition?

The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) of the University of Westminster, which was officially rated in 2008 as the UK’s top media research department, is home to both the China Media Centre and the newly established India Media Centre. This unique combination of expertise should ensure high-quality international participation, especially from China and India. A selection of papers presented at the preconference will be published in a special themed issue of the Sage journal Global Media and Communication.

Speakers to include: Professor Yuezhi Zhao, Simon Fraser University, Canada; Professor Daya Thussu, University of Westminster, UK; Professor Ang Peng Hwa, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Professor Bella Mody, University of Colorado in Boulder; Professor Hu Zhengrong, Communication University of China, Beijing; Professor Vibodh Parthasarathi, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi; Dr Xin Xin, University of Westminster; Professor Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bowling Green State University, USA and Professor Joseph Chan, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Registration: Participants are required to pay a fee of $100, which includes tea, coffee and lunch, and the payment goes through ICA.

Prospective participants should submit an abstract (200-300 words) to Professor Daya Thussu (D.K.Thussu@westminster.ac.uk) and Ranita Chatterjee (R.Chatterjee@westminster.ac.uk) by 7 December 2009.

The CMC director, Hugo de Burgh, joined the Chinese Ambassador Ms Fu Ying on a panel which also included the Lib-Dem Leader in the Upper House, Lord McNulty, and the Shadow Foreign Affairs Secretary Michael Moore MP.

WILTON PARK

The CMC partnered Wilton Park (an Executive Agency of the Foreign Office) with a conference called Working in China on Sustainable Growth — The Climate Change, Environment, Energy Nexus. The Vice Chancellor, Prof Geoffrey Petts, Visiting Professor Hu Zhengrong (Deputy President, China Communications University), Prof Hugo de Burgh and Dr Zeng Rong participated and represented University of Westminster. For further information please click on the link below.

Report on Wilton Park Conference WP1000 Final 281009

CONFERENCE ON BRITISH JOURNALISM

CUC and CMC are holding a conference in Beijing in October 2009. CMC is supplying 2 celebrity UK journalists Stephen Hewlett and Kevin Sutcliffe (paid for under the IMS contract) and its Director to speak at a CUC conference in October 2009. Steve Hewlett both presents The Media Show and writes regularly for The Guardian. He has a terrific track record as reporter and producer as well as in newspaper journalism.  Kevin Sutcliffe is Deputy Head of News & Current Affairs at C4 and has been responsible for the renaissance of the investigative series DISPATCHES. CUC has undertaken to provide an audience of influential media managers from the mainstream

FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR

Copyright by Frankfurt Book Fair

EU Commissioner Orban and Chinese Minister for Culture, a French Diplomat and the CMC Director are the speakers at the EU-China Forum at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 15 October.

STATE COUNCIL

The highest-level ever delegation from China’s State Council Information Office undertook a three week course designed for the China Media Centre by Simon Goldsworthy and Visiting Professor Trevor Morris, experts in branding and PR. Among the highlights were a colloquy with Lord Bell and senior figures at Chime Communications plc; visits to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office, the BBC and the Guardian Newspaper; talks about advertising from Sir Chris Powell and on the use of new media from former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson MP; and a lecture in Edinburgh from John Brown, a PR expert who formerly shared an office at Scottish TV with his brother the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and CMC Director Professor Hugo de Burgh.

SUMMER SCHOOLS

The China Media Centre has held its first 2 Summer Schools for Chinese media students. In July this was directed by former Reuters Editor Paul Majendie and in September by TV producer Dr Richard Wright. The students both learnt about the European media and undertook practical tasks, making TV features under the direction of Journalism Head of Department Geoffrey Davies. Both summer schools were managed by Alja Kranjec, who hopes to hold at least two each year from now on.

INNOVATION 1

In October CMC launches another first, a course specially designed for Chinese TV executives by Dr Zeng Rong entitled Innovation, creativity and programme development in UK television. This course is full; if successful CMC expects to offer it twice each year.