Destination du Jour: China

Although freelance magazine photographers have been documenting China's new economy for nearly a decade, newspaper photographers are now chasing the story with more frequency?and local perspectives.

The Seattle Times, The (Tacoma, Washington) News Tribune, and the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times are among newspapers that have published pictures stories on China in recent months.

"Because of China's size, and coming influence in the world, newspapers are thinking: People that make whatever product locally are marketing it in China, and our governor is going over there because it's part of his Pacific rim tour, so there's got to be a way for us to get there," says Portland Oregonian photographer Ben Brink, who has done stories on China for the paper in the past.

A major draw is the photogenic glitz and glitter of Shanghai, by now the cliché of China's new market-based economy. Preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing are another potential hook. And China's vast rural interior, off limits under decades of communist rule, is ripe for exploration.

But the language, culture and government restrictions pose tough challenges for U.S. journalists trying to look past the shine of the major cities.

"If it wasn't for our fixer, we wouldn't have gotten out of Hong Kong," says St. Petersburg Times photographer Bob Croslin, who spent a month in China last summer with reporter Kris Hundley. "There are cultural differences, and a language barrier. You either know the language or you're stuck. I've never felt so unsure of myself as photographer, or as a person."

The Times decided to do a special report on China's new economy because of its effects on the lives of the paper's readers: China is driving up the price of gas, pushing down the price of consumer goods, and taking jobs away from the U.S., Hundley explains in the online version of the story.

"We didn't go over to do stories on big bad China and how it's going to eat America's lunch. That's been done to death," Croslin says.

Instead, they focused on the new prosperity and Westernization of many Chinese citizens, starting in the city of Shenzhen. "The jobs that are leaving the U.S. are improving their lives," he says. But to show the costs of Western demand for cheap consumer goods, Croslin also documented worker injuries resulting from poor training and lack of workplace safety regulations.

Croslin also couldn't resist photographing the Three Gorges Dam project, which has been covered by many photographers in the past. "Many of our readers haven't seen that story, so it was worth taking a second look at," he says.

Through the fixer, Croslin and Hundley arranged to interview a Chinese activist seeking compensation for those forcibly relocated by the dam project. That's when they got into trouble. "The authorities took our passports, and we were detained for several hours," Croslin says. "They wanted to scare us." They also took his camera disk, but not before he had substituted his full disk for a blank one.

Others who have done picture stories in China include Wenatchee (Washington) World photographer Don Seabrook, who went in the fall of 1994 to do a story on the Chinese apple industry. "[Apple growing] is the largest industry in our area, and the Chinese apple industry is taking away some of the export market," he says.

Seabrook photographed the Chinese apple harvest ("They use what are 1940s and 1950s growing practices to us," he says), but notes that he only managed to get two or three good days of shooting from the 17 days he was there, because his visa sponsors?Chinese businessmen who invited him and a reporter to see their operations?had their own agenda for the story. "I saw a lot of good images from the window of a car," says Seabrook.

More recently, News Tribune staff photographer Dean Koepfler accompanied Washington State officials on a business development tour to China at the end of last summer. Koepfler focused on the glitter, consumerism and rising living standards of Shanghai workers, but also showed the growing divide between rich and poor in China.

And Seattle Times photographer Alan Berner shot what he calls "sense of place pieces" about Beijing and Shanghai when he visited last fall. But his primary mission was to do a story about the rampant piracy of intellectual property in the open marketplaces of those cities. The local hook for the story was Microsoft's losses to software piracy in China. Berner photographed not just illegal trade in software, but the sale of pirated movies and fake Rolex watches, among other coveted consumer goods.

Chinese officials love the publicity they get when foreign journalists come to photograph Beijing and Shanghai skyscrapers and other signs of the new economic prosperity, so they readily grant journalist visas to those places. But Fritz Hoffman, founder and owner of Shanghai-based news picture agency Document China, is puzzled. "That's an old story. What's the use?" he says.

The emerging stories?about the country's environmental problems, its urban/rural political divide, corruption and grinding poverty, for instance?are playing out in places that are difficult to navigate, or off limits to foreign journalists, or both.

"The journalist who covered the AIDS situation in Hunan mostly lived in China," Hoffman observes. "Europeans who tried to cover the story were hauled out by the police."

Journalist visas to places other than Shanghai and Beijing require sponsorship by someone in China?usually a business with trade connections to the U.S.?and can be difficult or impossible to obtain. Berner says he didn't even bother applying for a visa to do a story in late 2004 about Boeing's outsourcing in China, because he was told by would-be sponsors that he wouldn't be given access to the airline facilities and plants in China. (The Seattle Times eventually did the story, though, using images shot by a Chinese freelancer.)

Some journalists are avoiding the tight time and location restrictions attached to journalist visas by entering on tourist visas instead.

"The advantage is you can move more freely and go to more places. Your movement is not limited by the visa," says Huang Yong, a fixer popular among U.S. journalists. "But the problem is that you're not supposed to do any reporting or interviewing. If you're found out, local authorities have right to detain you, confiscate your notebooks, film, and deport you."

The only foreign journalists who really have freedom of movement, according to both Huang and Hoffman, are the foreign correspondents and freelances who are based in China. But it takes them two or three years "to build a perspective that takes you beyond the glitz and neon of the new China," Hoffman says.

And it's not just because of the language barrier or government restrictions. Chinese are often mistrustful of foreign media. "It's all based on contacts. You have to know someone who knows someone who knows someone. A lot of times people just don't want to talk to you," he says.

But such obstacles aren't stopping newspapers from sending photographers. The story of a capitalist superpower that strikes both excitement and fear in America's collective heart, combined with all the other unexplored turf in China, is too alluring.

?David Walker



To read fixer Huang Yong's tips on working successfully in China, visit our feature story this month on <www.pdnonline.com>.