What do China’s journalists want more than anything? A new job

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They take up their pens and microphones hoping to change the world – or at least, their own country. But they soon find themselves agents of propaganda and deliverers of altered truths. It's no wonder, then that of all the things China's journalists want, top of the list is a new job.

Just 19.6 per cent of Chinese reporters, editors and anchors expect to stick with journalism, according to a survey of 1,300 journalists published by China's Youth Daily newspaper Thursday.

In other words, a big majority of Chinese journalists, many of them young and just beginning careers, already want out.

Why?

The state-run Youth Daily cited salary and work stress as big reasons – its own reporters presumably would not decline a few extra yuan or a shorter work-week.

But the deep dissatisfaction comes as journalists, alongside artists and activists, have found themselves under heavy new pressure from the Xi Jinping government and its new campaign to batten down free speech. Like anywhere, journalists in China wed themselves to their notebooks for altruism: the survey found that 50.1 per cent "entered this profession for the sake of their ideals, and out of hope they could push forward social progress."

They haven't found much outlet for those ideals under Mr. Xi, who has sought to nationalize cultural expression, including in the news media. Last year, an internal Communist Party document listed a free press as among a short list of "false ideological trends" that must be opposed.

It is wrong to promote "the West's idea of journalism, challenging China's principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to Party discipline," the document said. Last month, Gao Yu, a celebrated septuagenarian journalist in China, was sentenced to seven years for passing that document to foreign media.

Also last year, Beijing rolled out a series of rules that barred journalists from engaging in "critical reporting" without prior approval, banned the possession of anything deemed a state secret and also sought to preclude Chinese reporters from passing information on to western journalists.

China ranks 175 out of 180 on the Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index. But that hasn't slow it from assembling vast journalistic empires. In Beijing alone, there are roughly 8,000 journalists, 36,000 editors and 1,000 anchors and hosts. The China Daily newspaper is distributed in 150 countries, while the Xinhua news agency operates in virtually every country on earth.

Those media outlets are central elements of China's "soft power" push – but journalists in China are only too keenly aware of the limitations of their system, readily admitting they work not for media but for the government.

For some, the goal is to spring from the reporter's desk into a higher position in the bureaucracy. Liu Yunshan, one of the seven members of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee, worked as a reporter in his late 20s and early 30s, before attending the Central Party School and then climbing his way up through propaganda agencies.

But the new survey shows that for most, journalism has hardly been a dream come true in a country whose faltering steps toward openness often lead to a repressive retreat, as they have under Mr. Xi.

Journalism has some perks – in China, press conferences go unattended unless local journalists are provided gifts, meaning many build up stashes of freebie goods. Nearly 85 per cent of Youth Daily survey respondents said, too, that they feel their jobs provide "above average" social status.

Still, more than a third want to switch careers to be teachers – a career aspiration that carries a share of irony. In China, after all, teachers stand next to journalists as instruments of propaganda: The country's school curriculum, overhauled after the 1989 protests, has been its most potent tool in moulding minds to think like the Communist Party.