In November 2019, the YouTube channel of China Global Television Network (CGTN) uploaded a video titled "Zheng Wenjie, you are shameful".
Recently, the human rights organization "Protection Defenders" released a report "CGTN - Seeing the Difference: Focus on Global Television Under the Chinese Party-State System". The report interviewed eight former CGTN foreign anchors, copy editors and producers. One of them is the editor of the news that humiliated Zheng Wenjie.
This manuscript comes very late. “It was only about half an hour before the live broadcast, and we had already finished all the manuscripts,” the editor recalled. “…It wasn’t until I saw the manuscripts that I understood why they did this. They knew it was wrong.”
This CGTN report refuted Zheng Wenjie's torture experience told to the BBC, saying that he was detained for 15 days in administrative detention "in accordance with the law" for soliciting prostitution, and broadcast his confession - in fact, this was a forced confession under the threat of violence.
The report confirms the process revealed in "Screenwriting and Staging: Behind the Scenes of Forced Confessions on Chinese TV" released by Protection Defenders in 2018: The police will threaten family members or promise leniency as conditions for detainees to confess in front of the camera; the confession script is written by the police or written by the client under the guidance of the police; the client is put on camera clothes and told how to read the "lines", sometimes recited, sometimes using a teleprompter, and sometimes written on a card off-camera; CCTV and CGTN Receive footage completed by the police, sometimes sending a camera crew to assist with filming.
These false, illegal and degrading videos were packaged by CGTN reporters and editors using their "professional skills" to appear to be genuine confessions, which were then broadcast around the world and perhaps permanently disseminated on the Internet, even though they knew otherwise, even though "they knew it wasn't right."
"There's no point resisting something like this. If the boss calls us and tells us to broadcast it, we have no choice but to broadcast it. If our supervisor refuses, she will get into big trouble."
"This is arguably the worst thing I've ever edited," he said.
I have to say, the word "terrible" is too light a word. It is a shame for media workers and this media to use fake news obtained by forced confession to slander a person.
The video is still available on CGTN’s YouTube channel, which is a shame for the platform.
The shameful one is not Zheng Wenjie, but you!
All the victims who were forced to confess are not ashamed, it is you who are ashamed!
Can anonymity mask shame?
Another copy editor said in an interview that he thought he would not mind the publicity too much. After all, he was just a copy editor whose name did not appear in the news and his face did not appear on the screen; but such publicity really bothered him - embarrassment, shock, disappointment, and disbelief at the complete disregard of journalistic standards. He called the propaganda he was involved in in the name of journalism "nonsense."
It must be said that the former CGTN employee who was willing to be interviewed by a human rights organization afterwards to reveal the inside story of the autocratic regime’s propaganda machine was already regarded as a “respectable person” among media practitioners within the system and had a respectable side.
But the mindset this editor talks about, that anonymity can mask shame, is still very common.
This summer, I once again spent a lot of time in Berlin visiting various exhibitions about the Nazi and East German communist dictatorships and looking at relevant archives. One of the strong impressions is that many people who thought they were ordinary people who performed their duties at the time, or secret workers who were strictly protected by the autocratic system, appeared on display boards and printed in books due to the collapse of the autocratic regime and the declassification of archives. They used their short lives to leave permanent shame for themselves and future generations.
Many people don’t understand that in an organization like CGTN, it’s impossible for people to work anonymously. On the contrary, everyone is registered and strictly monitored.
Even if one can become temporarily invisible, working anonymously to promote authoritarian propaganda is costly. As the report reveals, all eight people interviewed remained anonymous; many more who were contacted were afraid to be interviewed at all. There are two reasons: his family is still in China; and he is worried about affecting his career prospects in other international media - CGTN on his resume is a stain that needs to be covered up.
When the rights and interests of its employees are threatened, CGTN's choice may be to abandon it like a worn-out shoe and put another foot on it. One example is what happened to foreign anchor Cheng Lei.
Before the incident, Cheng Lei was already a senior anchor who had gained the trust of senior executives and was given the gift to perform off-script. Others had to read the script verbatim. Even if they needed to handle the off-script reasonably for publicity, they would be immediately blamed and even punished. However, she was blindfolded and taken away by national security officers in the summer of 2020 and isolated from the outside world in a secret facility for six months. Her employer did not report the news, nor inquire about her legal rights, nor care about her life or death. Instead, she was erased from the website within a few days, as if she never existed.
Perhaps regrettably, the report pointed out that it was not completely wiped out - the 2016 anchor photo page is still online to this day, and she is still in it.
Xinjiang songs and dances hit the conscience
“Most of the time I don’t have to say no, I can just leave it on the schedule and let someone else do it,” one interviewee said of his strategy.
The greatest harm to a person from cooperating with a dictator is to suffer the torment of his conscience every day—if he no longer feels this torment, the harm will be even greater.
The report on Xinjiang finally broke through the bottom line of what the editor could bear.
In early 2018, when the outside world began to reveal that China was detaining religious minorities in Xinjiang in concentration camps on a large scale, CGTN broadcast more "joyful" reports on Xinjiang to counteract this. A study shows that from 2018 to 2020, CGTN’s Xinjiang-related content on the YouTube channel flooded the platform with a large number of “positive news” such as development, culture, and nature to drown out criticism and divert international attention.
"There are more and more reports about Xinjiang, especially dubbing news - copy editors also have to dub these reports. These contents are really not what I want to polish and process. I don't want to package these reports to be more suitable for foreign audiences." Like other colleagues, the editor also submitted his resignation.
Some viewers believe that showing Xinjiang dances, enjoying Tibetan songs, and broadcasting desert scenery and plateau scenery on TV screens is support for these oppressed ethnic groups. The facts revealed by the former editors of CGTN show that on the contrary, this is a cover-up for the evil deeds of concentration camps that are suspected of crimes against humanity as stated in the United Nations report, and it is a blind eye to and secondary harm to the suffering endured by Xinjiang and Tibetans.
Of course, like the CGTN editorial team, a large number of artists in China do not understand this truth, but they are just dancing with autocracy without conscience.
But I believe, as the archives from the Nazi and East German era show, even if these people were able to paralyze their consciences for life, their descendants would be ashamed of it.
Changping is a senior media person and current affairs commentator. He is currently a columnist for Deutsche Welle, executive editor of China Digital Times, and chief curator of the June Fourth Memory·Human Rights Museum.
