How I Spent Two Years Working for a Chinese Government Mouthpiece

And why I don't regret it

Work is the new religion. This is what I learned as I was completing full-time education in my early twenties. It was a particularly unpleasant lesson to learn, because the things I wanted to dedicate my life to (original music and creative writing) had practically zero chance of ever becoming lucrative.

To get a non-menial job that paid more than the minimum wage, I would not just have to devote my time and energy to it, but it was made clear that I had to be passionate about it. Recent Pew research found that finding meaning at work beats family and kindness as the top ambition of today’s young people, as a career is now expected to provide not just an income, but transcendence and community. To get a high-status job, you have to care as much or more than others competing for it.

Despite finishing my bachelor’s degree in 2005 and master’s in 2006, it was not until 2011 that I found a paid job that was related to my passion for literature, and it was in grotesquely compromised circumstances – as a copy-editor for an English-language newspaper in China. It was staffed by brilliant people, and had a lot of merit as a product, but ultimately it was a propaganda rag for a dictatorship.

Censorship and Discipline

Creativity is at its best when it is constrained. I thought this even before I started working for this heavily censored paper.

The closing scene of 1930’s ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ was made at a time when filmmakers were severely limited in how much violence they could portray. And it is even more powerful than the beach-landing scene in ‘Saving Private Ryan’:

Seth MacFarlane’s shameful song ‘We Saw Your Boobs’, performed at the 2013 Oscars, underlines that the screen beauties of the early and mid-twentieth century had far more mystique than female stars from the 1970s and beyond. This was because much more was left to the imagination.

Due to all the censorship at the Chinese newspaper, writing my weekly opinion pieces was a hugely enjoyable creative challenge, when it came to getting my point across. And I was getting my name in print and being paid for it. Which is more than most aspiring authors ever achieve.

I learned a lot about myself, and one of those things was that I am not a dissident or an activist.

Every Monday afternoon, there was a whole-staff meeting, that discussed the previous week’s papers, what was praiseworthy and what could be improved. And when that meeting was over, the foreigners were asked to leave, and that is when they held the party directives meeting.

These directives revealed to the Chinese staff which stories must be buried, and what should be emphasised. In January 2013, the deputy police chief of Guangzhou, a nearby city of 18 million people, committed suicide. This story was only given one paragraph, and not on the front page.

A better publication would have dug a lot deeper into how and why this happened. But I did not get annoyed. Why bother playing a game that is so heavily rigged against you?

My first year at the newspaper coincided with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Both movements were led by people who like me, were born in the 1980s, like me were university-educated, and like me were not very employable. But for me, changing the world was not a priority.

Every Friday, the paper published a ‘People’ feature on an extraordinary local person who had achieved something impressive and/or heartwarming. Polishing these pieces made me melancholic, and even anxious. What did I have to show for my almost three decades of life?

Work doesn’t have to be empowering

By the second year, I could more or less do the job on autopilot. I had plenty of time to read, practice guitar, mess around and be creative. This was when I finally stumbled upon musical comedy as the right art-form for me.

If I had worked at a more prestigious news organisation, like the BBC or The New York Times, this would not have been possible. I would have had to be so sharp-elbowed, hardworking and squeaky clean that work would swallow my life. Shortly after I left the paper, they published a ‘People’ feature about me and my songwriting. This was a nice coda. The China Daily also published one.

Many people think that to work for China Daily, or Xinhua, or The Global Times shows a lack of moral judgment. The Chinese government does do monstrous things, but then so do many of the world’s biggest employers, McDonald’s, Nestle, Amazon, Walmart, etc. Those organisations also enable millions of people to function in society and feed their families.

Where a person works says practically nothing about their moral character. One of the most controversial observations made by Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl in ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ was that some of the most decent people he had ever met were guards in the camp, and some of the most despicable people were inmates.

If someone works for Greenpeace or Amnesty International, does this mean that they are by definition a good person? If working for an altruistic organisation is so noble, then why did Oxfam get into a sexual exploitation scandal in Haiti?

We’re all just butlers

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’. When asked why he chose to have a butler as the protagonist, Ishiguro explained that almost everybody is a butler. That is, they dedicate their working lives to serving some institution that is much more powerful than themselves.

The main character learns too late that the person he spent his whole life serving was not a good one. However, this does not mean that anyone who has ever worked for an unethical employer should be ashamed of themselves. My conclusion is that anyone who sees themselves in a noble light just because of where they work or who they work for is a jackass.

Looking back at the job at the propaganda rag, I rather liked it. But not with religious fervour. This quote from ‘Trainspotting’ sums up how I felt about it, if you replace the word ‘English’ with ‘Communist Party’ and ‘colonised’ with ‘employed’.