Writing With Tied Hands

Dezheng Zou, a Chinese radio commentator, is an almost perfect product of her Communist government's media philosophy. She says the press must work with the government to propagate its policies and should scrutinize officials' work for incompetence and corruption for the benefit of society.

Dezheng Zou (DOT-son ZOE) a fellow at Harvard's Nieman Foundation this year, acknowledges that the Chinese government has erred in the past. She cites the tumultuous Cultural Revolution during the sixties as an example. She even questions the party's current policies towards women's rights. Still, she is reluctant to criticize the Communist government's initiatives and voices her disapproval of young people in China who sometimes actively protest party policy.

The primary duty of the Chinese media, Zou says,-is to explain the party policy, "to make it clear to people."

The 52-year-old commentator for Radio Peking is spending her year at the Nieman Foundation taking courses on American foreign policy. She has spent her past four years at Radio Peking commenting on American and Soviet policy.

Zou has worked as a journalist in China for three decades. She began her career in the country's domestic radio network just two years after the Communist government took power. She worked for the system until 1973 when she was transferred to Radio Peking, Communist China's worldwide broadcasting service.

This criticism of government officials is a new movement in the Chinese press, since the Chinese government began to relax its censorship. Zou claims that the Central Broadcasting Station she once worked for now criticizes government officials as high as ministers and even the vice-premier, but this is unusual, Zou admits. "You still have to have courage, much courage."

The mission of Radio Peking and hence its practices are different from those of the domestic broadcasting service, Zou notes. She points out that, while domestic radio now criticizes government officials, Radio Peking generally does not. "There's no sense to broadcast this to people abroad," she says. Broadcasting critical stories to foreign audiences would not be helpful, she explains, because they are meant to spur improvement within China.

Whether her station participates in the new movement in media. Zou supports the new freedoms. "I think we should have more freedom to criticize the practice and the things [officials] do wrong," she says. But Zou draws the line at criticizing the policies of the state. When asked it the press should be critical of government policies, she dodges the question, always answering with what the press can do.

"No, I don't think we can do that," she says. "I don't think we can criticize the policy we have already decided."

When pressed, Zou can think of one instance in which the media should have taken a critical view of the government and its policies the Cultural Revolution, which Mao launched in the sixties to purity the spirit of the Communist revolution. During the movement, many city-dwellers were relocated to the country side and hands of bands of vigilante. "Red Guards" interrogated suspected counter revolutionaries.

"At that time, if you have the courage your newspaper should [stand]...against the government. But we didn't dare at that time. They would have put you in jail if you in jail if you did that," she remembers.

Zou and her colleagues wrote stories supporting the Cultural Revolution throughout the period even though they disagreed with the government's policies. Zou, like the current Communist leadership, describes the whole period as "just awful."

Zou feels it was very difficult for reporters to do their job during this period. "We were very depressed during the Cultural Revolution," she says. She adds. "We usually just made an excuse, not come into the office, say we were sick...We were absent a few days because we didn't [want] to propagate things [with] which we disagreed, but if you're going to work, you have to."

Today, Zou questions Chinese policies on women's rights, especially as they apply to her profession. Managers for Radio Peking, she says, generally give men jobs as correspondents even though more than half its writers are women. She notes that editors are reluctant to send mothers of young children away on assignment but do not follow the same policy with fathers. "We argue about this, but it's no use," she says.

But she still hesitates to call these practices discrimination. She points out that this policy is not entirely unreasonable. She observes, for example, that it is more dangerous for women to walk around alone at night in many foreign countries.

After the Cultural Revolution and the many shocks of that period. Zou has become suspicious of such movements and hopes for stability in China. She says the current regime is trying to reform the nation in an orderly fashion.

Zou is critical of some young people who she thinks are undermining this stability. "We don't want young people shouting all the time, making trouble....We are tired of all those movements," she says.

She attributes the young people's dissatisfaction to the Cultural Revolution. Children growing up at this time were told that everything Mao did was right and later that he had made mistakes, she continues. Because Mao was wrong, some of them think that communism is wrong and that everything in the West is good, she says, "so many of them would like to come over to America."

Zou disapproves of this attitude. She proudly points out her two sons are not like this. They came to the United States before her for graduate school, and will return to China when their studies end.

"You should not change your country." Zou says. "No matter what happens in your country that's your country, That's your mothers land... You should love your country."