Poor public relations in grand press rooms

• Source: Global Times
• [21:26 September 07 2009]
• Comments

By Zhang Yong

Last year, I attended a press conference at the Main Press Center (MPC) of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

It was held in the most spacious, even extravagant, press room that I have ever seen, even after being a journalist and world traveler for 15 years. An MPC interpreter who had worked at many previous Olympics supported me. He said that Beijing had the biggest and best ever press center in the history of the Olympic Games.

During the past two decades, China may have constructed the best press conference rooms in the world, thanks to the government's attempts to build a good public relations system. Sitting in those big but sometimes empty press conference rooms, I was often transported back to my trip to the US years ago. Then I was surprised to see how small and modest the White House press conference room was, yet that had never prevented its voice from being heard across the world every day.

I have no problem with those world-class press conference rooms in the country as long as they are cleverly used by smart people, as happened during the Olympics.

However, even with these fine facilities, we are still far from establishing an effective public relations system in the country and that has led to a number of major crises in China lately.

A current example is China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China's largest oil and gas producer and supplier. An online forum disclosed recently that the State-owned enterprise (SOE) had bought some 1,000 apartments for its staff at a price with 70 percent off. Internet users immediately launched an assault on CNPC, accusing it of misusing state-owned money and questioning its "under the table deal" with the developer.

This escalated into a headline "scandal" after traditional media followed up. As an independent observer, I don't see any CNPC wrongdoing from a business perspective; however, as a media professional, I think CNPC has made a grave mistake by burying its head in the sand.

In the weeklong buildup of a national storm of anger, CNPC has just kept its mouth tightly shut, with no press conference held and no official spokesperson thoroughly explaining its position or reaction to the public.

Days after the CNPC scandal emerged, a high-ranking government official called on the SOEs to establish an effective spokesperson system. What a shock! CNPC ranked 13th in the 2009 Fortune 500 list and was also ranked second among the latest list of the top 500 Chinese firms, it has yet to make its spokesperson system effective, if it has one.

While the CNPC scandal only makes me laugh, the absence of spokespersons in some government departments has always made me angry because their apathy puts our national interests in jeopardy.

A few weeks ago, I watched an exclusive BBC interview with the Dalai Lama on TV. It was not surprising to see that the monk accused China as he usually did, and misled the world that he was not seeking Tibetan independence and he would like to talk to China.

What has astonished me is that the BBC contacted the Chinese embassy, but the embassy refused to comment. I firmly believe that there must be a spokesperson in that embassy, but that person had chosen to give up the opportunity to defend China.

One of my colleagues once told me frustratedly that while the Dalai Lama's representative in India was always available for telephone interviews, it was very hard to find a spokesperson in Beijing and it was even more difficult to make a spokesperson utter a word. They may ask you to send your questions in a fax, and then give you an answer a week later.

This may partially explain why China is not effective in countering the Dalai Lama's influence in the Western world. Today, it is trendy to talk about China's soft power. The flawed public relations system has become one of the shortest planks of the barrel containing China's soft power. China is in desperate need of people who can represent it well to the media, but I am not optimistic that change will happen soon, unless the country makes a real effort.

It is no easy task to be a spokesperson, which needs eloquence, courage and a sense of responsibility.

Zhao Qizheng, who served as the Vice Mayor of Shanghai before working as the spokesperson of the Chinese government, told me in an interview years ago that he found "publicity work is much more difficult than economic work."

He may be right.

The author is managing editor of the Global Times