In last May, Newsweek launched a special report entitled "The China Century". Chinese film star Zhang Ziyi wearing a broad smile appears on the front cover of the magazine, against a background featuring China's Great Wall and the Oriental Pearl TV tower in Shanghai. The magazine devoted 21 pages to the interpretation of a country, in such aspects as commerce, education, film, auto culture and the Olympics. The international reports are unprecedented in scale, marking a new wave of world media coverage on China.

From fragmentary to all-round reports

This round of media craze report on China actually started from the latter half of last year, when a string of media giants--Fortune Magazine (US), The Globe and Mail (Canada), the Guardian and Financial Times (UK) all sent their competent staff to various parts of China for news covering and brought out a series of reports with China as the theme. In last March, BBC even moved its site for a current affairs debate program to Shanghai. Philip P.Pan, the Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief, says he himself alone writes two to three articles on China each week, and his colleagues in China are doing almost the same amount of work.

Meng Jian, professor with School of Journalism, Fudan University, believes mainstream Western media are shifting from fragmentary to all-round, in-depth reports of good designs done on their own, some of them even sent formidable teams to China for news covering and reporting.

Cao Jingxing, senior current affairs commentator with Phoenix TV, says that foreign media are making a wide range of reports on China, basically in the form of serial reports or in special subject designs.

On top of the unprecedented amount of reports, Meng points out, some Western media are also shifting from publishing articles defaming China to making relatively just and objective reports. For instance, an article appeared on Canada's Globe and Mail on October 23 last year, said: Although some people are worried about China's outsourcing and the competition from that country, China's economic boom has long been helping Japan out of the postwar longest sluggishness, and enabled the United States to recover from its recent recession.

Foreign readers show increasing interest

Foreign media's concentrated reporting on China is the general trend because "the country's international position is rising annually in economy and other fields", said a Japanese reporter. For Japan, he added, China is already one of the most important trade partners. On the DPRK nuclear issue, a matter of concern to Japan, China as the host country of the six-party talks also plays a vital role. "So, Japanese citizens are paying more and more attention to China, which cannot be mentioned in the same breath as before."

Philip P.Pan said, among the international news reports of "Washington Post", news about China has become increasingly important. Viewed from readers' feedback, they show growing interest in questions about China. There are several reasons for this, said Pan, for instance, China is the most populous country in the world. Moreover, its economic achievements gained in the past two decades have made China a country of great interest to foreign investors, companies and even common workers.

On the evening of October 28, last year, China's central bank announced it would increase both the lending and deposit interest rates by 0.27 percentage point as of the next day. The announcement came right before the opening of European and American markets. Despite the small margin of the interest rate hike, prices for raw materials such as crude oil, copper, aluminum and gold traded that day all dropped. An article entitled "China's first interest rate hike in nine years rocks global market" immediately appeared on the front page of UK's Financial Times published that day, saying the decision on interest rise by China's central bank, the first in nine years, sends the global financial market reeling.

This testifies to the fact that the impact of China's development on the world has come to such an extent that suffices to command full attention and active response from world media, Meng noted.

Worries lurking behind increased concerns

The latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly (June) ran two articles about China, one is "How we would fight China" and the other is "How to cope with China's rise". The former is by renowned American writer Robert D. Kaplan, who once reported widely on the Third World in the 1970s.

Such pessimism about the future of China-US relations from such a comparatively objective journalist as Kaplan revealed profound worries hidden behind American concern over China, Cao observed.

While explaining reasons for the growing concern about China as shown by the American public, Philip P.Pan also mentioned particularly that "the Americans want to know how on earth China will head for, and whether this will harm US interests."

Clearly, more attention paid by foreign media to China may bring a negative effect. At a certain time, media comments may magnify Chinese influence, thus possibly giving rise again to "China threat" claims, Cao said.

Despite increase in the number of Western media reports that objectively reflect things in China, Meng believes their way and ideology in reporting China have not changed fundamentally. Taking textiles as an example, actually the sales volume of Italian textiles on the French market is larger than that of China's, but French media only keep "rattling" on Chinese products.

By People's Daily Online