The Chinese-language People's Daily website. Picture: BUSINESS DAY
The Chinese-language People's Daily website. Picture: BUSINESS DAY

I RECENTLY spent time with journalists from different countries in Africa, on a media tour to China, as a guest of that intrepid herald of official thought and action, the People’s Daily, China’s biggest newspaper with a circulation north of 3-million — and that’s on a slow day.

If you like the idea of Atul Gupta striding into your newsroom to dictate the day’s sports briefs, that would be nothing compared with the prospect of Chairman Mao himself in the chief sub’s chair, tinkering with an editorial, or changing a headline or two.

Far be it from the likes of me to dwell lightly on other people’s organs, for the Daily was, after all, once Mao’s own organ. Few would dispute, though, that there’s not exactly a riot in the streets of Beijing to get one’s hands on the latest edition of the People’s Daily.

Together with colleagues from at least 10 African countries, I visited the offices of the People’s Daily, and about a dozen editors in crisp white shirts with short sleeves were on hand to take our inane questions.

First up, everything has to be translated, both the English and the Chinese, which makes even the slightest exchange like a formal debate in the Politburo. It’s exceedingly difficult to follow what any of these gentlemen are talking about, ever. Perhaps much of the nuance is lost in translation, but somehow when you’re on your fifth flagon of green tea, served by an unctuous waiter posted behind you, it’s tough to keep an eye on the detail, let alone the whole blurry picture.

The editors insist they and their publication are free to pursue journalism, which in China I imagine to be about the equivalent of roaming at will in a huge cave, but with only a box of matches to help you see. And for every written rule, there’s a half-dozen you’re just meant to know.

Whereas we in the print media like to think print has a gravitas beyond what the web can offer, in China if it is printed, there’s a good chance it’s a lie. And because there’s no free media, there’s no market in information, so there’s no way of attaching a price, or value, to news.

While the print media promotes a world view that is deferential, unquestioning, accepting of the official explanation — no naked emperors here — the web is where one goes to find out the real story of China, and that’s what China’s "netizens" do, in their tens of millions.

Online censorship is "real time" and relentless, so while the Americans spy on Angela Merkel, the Chinese monitor the old guy on the 38th floor complaining about the air pollution on Weibo.

Anyway, I’m with these journalists from Africa, and as President Jacob Zuma might have put it, they’re thinking like Africans, and it’s the usual riotous assembly. No Malawians, thankfully, but in any event enough of the official stuff already, and now we want beer, food and rest. So after more hand-pumping and half-understood farewells, we pile back in our bus.

After a day or two, names have been discarded in favour of country of origin. So tour members become known as "Zambia" or "Sierra Leone" or "Nigeria". If we’re waiting but someone is missing, then one might hear: "Where’s Sudan?" Another might mutter, "Sudan’s always late!"

As has become habit, South Africa and neighbouring states sit at the back of the bus, West and East Africans somewhere near the middle, and North Africans at the front where, invariably, they speak French to each other. Liberians, if more than one, have to stick together because it is almost impossible to follow what a Liberian is saying. For ease of comprehensibility, Liberians are the Scots of Africa.

Unfortunately for our Chinese hosts, their thinking about Africa is about 50 years out of date, and perhaps they’ve been told too much what they want to hear. In their official mythology, the "colonial experience" is the central explanatory narrative of Africa, let alone that most Africans have no direct knowledge of a phenomenon that passed 50 years ago in most states. Of course, the Chinese like to play up colonialism because they think what they’re doing in Africa is somehow different, presumably due to their claim not to interfere in the internal affairs of African states.

It’s make-believe, really.

For all its development, there’s more freedom in Blantyre than there is in the whole of China, so it’s little wonder that the African journalists have an altogether more worldly, and less ideological take on world affairs than the Chinese political establishment has. Which is a bit ironic if it’s a case of China uplifting Africa.

In the evenings, the African journalists would find a "little Soweto" on the pavements of a district of Beijing, a place to sit at a table and drink bottles of Tsingtao beer and eat cheap tasty fish and laugh at the events of the day.

There, I think one can safely say, they finally feel free to "think like Africans": in an independent, critical and irreverent way, which is what I presume Zuma had in mind when he urged us not to think like that.

Which I can understand, because that is precisely the sort of thinking that leads people to question e-tolls.

No one wants that, and not China either. It’s the sort of thinking that might even tempt you to cancel your subscription to the People’s Daily and go online.