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Media/Review

BEIJING — Tan Wenrui stands
in front of the rows of framed photos
and documents in the display hall and
points to a small reproduction of a
newspaper page, framed in black and
hung at the bottom corner. of_ the
exhibit.

“There,” he says, “is the most dis-
honoured front page in our paper’s
history.”

The paper is China’s People’s
Daily, the daily newspaper of the
Communist Party of China. The edi-
tion he is pointing to was one of sev-
eral million copies published during
the worst years of China’s Cultural
Revolution.

Throughout most of the. years of
that period, says Tan, now the editor-
in-chief of People’s Daily, the paper
was an ardent proponent of the eco-
nomic and political excesses of the
Mao-inspired revolution.

Tan himself, then an international
affairs reporter and commentator,
was accused of being a “capitalist
roader” and sent out to the country-
side to work as a agricultural labourer
for “cadre re-education purposes.”
Two of his predecessors were “hound-
ed and persecuted by Red Guards for
their views,” until they committed
suicide.

For Tan, a journalist of 43 years
standing and a People’s Daily staff
member for 39 of those 43 years, the
Cultural Revolution is a dark, bitter
memory. But there is also a lesson in
it.

“Our paper plays a key role in
influencing people when the Com-
munist Party is on a correct course”
he says. “But it was also influential
when our party made its mistakes.”

Like China itself, however, Peo-
ple’s Daily has undergone dramatic
changes in the last decade, the direct
result of the reform policy launched
by the Communist Party’s central
committee in 1978. >

Originally founded in June, 1948 in
Hubei Province in the pre-revolution
liberated area of China, the paper was
moved to Beijing following liberation
in 1949 and formally became the
Communist Party’s journal in August
of the same year. This year, it cele-
brated its 40th anniversary with the
installation of new. U.S.-made laser
scanning equipment similar to that
used by the Globe and Mail.

As with Communist Party papers
in other socialist countries, People’s
Daily has suddenly become a sound-
ing board for public reaction to
government policy, particularly on
the sweeping reform program.

Tan notes that there are frequently
as many as 2,000 letters each day from
readers, prompting editors to devote a
full page and sometimes even more
space to the publication of letters in
each eight-page daily edition.

In dozens of cases, the letters spark
investigative reporting by the paper’s
staff which in turn has often resulted
in changes in government policy, at a
national as well as regional level. Even
where letters are not published, they
are referred to members of the 2,000-
person staff at the paper for follow-
up.
"Unlike the experience in the Soviet

Letters fill a page
in ‘People’s Daily’
under China’s reform

Union where the economic and politi-
cal reform program sparked an
increase in the circulation of Pravda
from some eight million to 12 million
readers, however, the readership of
People’s Daily has actually fallen to
some four million from its high of six
million in 1976.
The number is surprising, consider-
ing the Communist Party’s member-
ship of some 47 million, but Tan
points out that in 1976, when Mao
Zedong had died and the country was
in political turmoil over the Gang of
Four, People’s Daily was one of the
few voices of the Communist Party
and thousands of people looked to the
paper for answers. Many local and
regional CP papers had been closed
down during the Cultural Revolution.
Since that time, he says, many of
those papers have re-opened and
many new ones have started up, draw-
ing readers away from People’s Daily.
But the relatively low circulation
also shows that the “cultural level is
still quite low,” Tan notes. “And

TAN WENRUI

China still has 200 million illiterates,”
he adds.

On a more practical level, China is
a country with relatively few news-
stands —only 200 in Beijing, for
example, with its population of eight
million — although People’s Daily is
striving to change that.

As part of the reform program, the

paper is trying to reach a bigger

audience, widening its connections

with readers, improving the content

of the paper and adding new technol-

ogy. The paper is now printed in 23 -
centres in China, including Beijing,

using satellite transmission and has

added to its Chinese and overseas

news bureaus.

Three years ago, a Chinese-
language overseas edition was launch-
ed, aimed at overseas Chinese and
foreigners of Chinese descent. It is
printed in Hong Kong, New York,
San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris and
regularly features a business section as
part .of the campaign to attract
investment.

— Sean Griffin

10 e Pacific Tribune, October 17, 1988

PHOENIX, HIRSCH, LAHTI, ABRY ... in family scene from Sydney Lumet'’s latest
release.

Politics ‘ambiguous’

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in well-paced drama

RUNNING ON EMPTY. With Judd
Hirsch, Christine Lahti, River Phoenix.
Directed by Sidney Lumet. At local thea-
tres.

Danny Pope is his real name, although he
never uses it. When he bicycles home after
playing a losing game of baseball one after-
noon, something is wrong. Two dark

: sedans are circling the streets of his neigh-

bourhood. Only 17, Danny nonetheless
knows what is afoot.

A short time later, Danny and _his
younger brother Harry are standing by the
road outside the place where their parents
are emerging from a Greenpeace meeting.
The parents take one look at the youngsters,
hop into their van, pick the boys up and ina
spray of gravel, head for the highway, leav-
ing their home forever.

This intriguing scene opens Running On
Empty, a well-paced drama that balances
an ever present sense of danger with emo-
tion packed interpersonal relations, topped
with capable acting. The story of a family
constantly on the lam because of the par-
ents’ past political doings, it is the latest
from Sidney Lumet, a director who fre-
quently contributes films with social themes
to the U.S. mainstream cinema.

The filmmaker who gave us the award-
winning Serpico presents the story of Artie
and Annie Pope, and their sons, Danny and
Harry. As with another previous film,
Daniel, this film is about the left-wing activi-
ties of parents and how these come to affect
their children’s lives.

Artie and Annie (Judd Hirsch and Chris-
tine Lahti) were anti-Vietnam War activists
back in 1971. That year they blew up a

university laboratory responsible for re- '

search into napalm, the hideous incendiary
chemical that killed and scarred so many
Vietnamese. The then young activists, in the
manner of the times, publicly declared their
involvement in the action and then went
underground.

The Popes have always maintained a
tightly-knit family unit, raising their child-
ren with a mixture of individual freedom
and caring discipline that seems the ideal of
Sixties-generation parenting. But the unit
starts to unravel when the family, adopting
the latest in an endless series of new identi-
ties, settles in Waterford, New Jersey.

There, Danny (River Phoenix) meets a
musical teacher who encourages him to
develop his obvious talent on the piano. He
also strikes a relationship with the teacher’s
daughter, Morna (Martha Plimpton),
which provides another necessary outlet for

the growing teenager.

The problem is that Danny is not sup-
posed to draw too much attention to him-
self, such as playing publicly. And
relationships are always threatened by the
family’s need to be secretive and to pull up
stakes on a moment’s notice. The tension
between these necessary restrictions and
Danny’s needs as a human being are the
dramatic fulcrum of this story.

The problem with this film is that its
political questions are never satisfactorily
explored. We know that Artie and Annie
were followers of the direct action school of
left-wing endeavour in the Sixties and early
Seventies. We realize that time and tribula-
tion have mellowed the two: they are noW
involved in activities like exposing the
hazards of a nuclear waste dump on com
munities.

We are also aware that they keep uP
contacts with their underground network.
But why? While the underground helps the
family cover its tracks — and the constant
moving interrupts whatever project they
happen to be working on — it appears to
have no other usefulness, other than to send
an unwanted gun-toting former colleague
their way.

And in setting up the story, the film’s _

creators fall into the usual false dichotomy:
Contrasted to the family’s hectic, tension-
fraught existence is a society that consists ©
comfortable upper middle-class people such
as Danny’s teacher or Annie’s parents,
wealthy New Yorkers and patrons of the
arts. Only Artie’s background — he des
cribes his parents affectionately as “‘old Bol-
shevik Jews” — breaks this mold, and only
ina fleeting reference. In a phrase, working"
class America is absent.

Director Lumet’s approach to the left
therefore remains ambiguous. His symp
thies to their dedication, and at least t0
some extent, the causes they represent,
obvious. In Daniel, based on E.L. Doe
trow’s thinly-disguised novel concerning
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the activists
were compassionate people, but they wel
also American oddities, militants who ha
little effect on the course of affairs. ;

But Daniel also ended with a stirrin8
scene of thousands of people gathered at 4
outdoors peace rally. In Running 0?
Empty — a film with an ambiguous tit
that may refer to lost ideals — there is 2°
such assurance. All we are left with 15 a
picture of an isolated family, forever on the
run, and therefore rendered politically
impotent.

— Dan Keeto#

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