Treading a Fine Line by Teaching Journalism in China

The memorial’s walls bear descriptions of the killings during the decade-long campaign that Mao Zedong began in 1966 to eradicate what were considered bourgeois elements. Like the memory of the revolution itself, the memorial, which opened in 2005, exists in a gray area. The local media rarely write about it. Few who live in Shantou know it is there.

“I bring all of my classes here,” said Mr. Arnett who has visited the site at least a dozen times. “They need to know the truth. It is something they should know.”

Mr. Arnett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent who has covered conflicts from Vietnam to the Middle East. In 2007, after he finished his final reporting tour in Baghdad, he moved to China to take up a post as a journalism teacher at Shantou University. He has been teaching at the school ever since.

“I have great difficulties explaining this to my former colleagues, who laugh and say, ‘How can you teach journalism in a country where the government controls the media?”’ Mr. Arnett said. “I base my teaching on my career, about challenging authority. I tell the students: ‘You want to know about sacrifice? Why we do it? Because we believe in finding the truth in society.”’

Mr. Arnett is one of a growing number of foreign journalists teaching at Chinese universities, in a country conflicted about its relationship with the international media. On one hand, foreign correspondents can face pressure; one recent example is the removal of Melissa Chan, an outspoken correspondent for Al Jazeera. On the other hand, the Chinese government is pouring billions of dollars into state-run media, which are opening bureaus worldwide as part of a strategy to create news agencies that can compete with CNN or the BBC.

Caught in the middle are journalism schools in China, which, according to academics, now number about 1,000. At the more progressive campuses, there is a struggle between two ideologies: one that says that the media should serve the state, and another that sees them as an independent monitor.

In journalism schools from Guangdong Province in the south to Shanghai and Beijing, there is a desire to improve the quality of the education, which is why many foreign journalists are invited to teach.

“Yes, Western ideology is the dominant ideology here I think,” said Zhang Zhi’an, an associate journalism professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong. “There is not a gap between our school’s education and the Western education but we are still monopolized by our party, and we are still on mainland China.”

“The idea of freedom of speech in the way we conceive it, it does not exist here at all,” said Chris Hawke , a Canadian journalist who teaches reporting at the Communication University of China in Beijing. “It is deeply embedded in the culture, so when I am teaching, I have to take that into account.”

Most foreign journalism professors seem to avoid the subjects that are at the heart of international media covering age in China. Few say that they have been told what and what not to say; but they feel they can accomplish little by discussing subjects like Tibet, the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, dissidents or human rights.

“I have broached subjects about independence of media, dissidents, things that are not considered kosher by the Chinese government,” said Arielle Emmett, a U.S. journalist who teaches at the China Agricultural University in Beijing. “One student reported me once, went to the local administrator who is a very staunch member of the Communist Party and told her I was talking about ideas she found strange.”

“They said they were going to send a monitor to watch me, and I said, ‘If you do that more than once, I am going to quit,”’ Dr. Emmett said.

No monitor ever showed up.

“I think the progress in China is, we can tolerate some people who are talking about some things that are different in front of our kids,” said Steven Guanpeng Dong, director of Tsinghua University’s Global Journalism Institute in Beijing. “The new progress is everyone can talk, and you can talk about your values, but the question is whether the students will accept it or not.”

Tsinghua’s journalism school has a partnership with the Washington-based International Center for Journalists and frequently invites journalists from Reuters and the BBC to lecture. The Global Journalism Institute, according to Mr. Dong, aims to replicate Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation and the Florida-based Knight Foundation , both of which promote freedom of information.

The emphasis is on “internationalization or globalization,” Mr. Dong said. “It is definitely not Westernization.”

One foreign journalist who wished to remain unidentified for fear of professional repercussions, said that he often addressed issues that could be contentious.