China’s gone from bad to worse in journalism.

It’s sickening: the press lied about how many people were starved during the Mao era, and then immediately proceeded to become a propaganda machine during the Cultural Revolution. The outside world stared and gazed while daily propaganda was fed through the People’s Daily during the revolution.

Deng’s arrival got the media a fair bit excited in the 1980s, and for once, rational debate was the order of the day — some a bit too provocative as well. But when they started questioning if the PRC’s system was adequate or inadequate — when they started throwing the government into question — when they started thinking if “just” four modernizations were enough — the top guys promptly sent them in for “re-education”. During the Jiang era, social issues were given just basic attention while the PRC went all-out for economic growth with double-digit GDP growth.

As we near the end of the Hu era, the media has started to show deep-seated signs of change. On the one hand, anti-PRC, anti-CCP rhetoric is still predictably banned. At the other end, there has been some serious debate about changing controversial policies. The PRC’s Property Law has fueled serious debate, and the present-day 200-ish article version is but a poor start to what could have been a much better law. Challenges to the Hukou, a Chinese “internal passport” of sorts, have been aired on the Web on officially licensed news sites. When two HSR trains banged into each other in Wenzhou this summer, the censored versions of Twitter for China, Weibo, became breeding grounds for a campaign to oust the head of the government organization responsible for railway transport in the Chinese mainland, Sheng Guangzu.

There’s increasing debate in the Chinese media world — a plus, admittedly, and a major improvement over the propaganda we’ve seen about fourty years back. But I smell something disturbing: the re-apparance of labels is one. Popular mainland blogger Han Han is a fair bit of trouble for his sometimes radicalist points of views: and so are those who favour points of views officially regarded as “non-mainstream”. The girl that appeared on a dating reality show on TV, who said she favoured crying in a BMW than riding with her man on a bike, sparked a firestorm of controversy across the whole country. In this day and age when you’ve beggars next to the nightclubs, you just don’t do that (even when you come to realize that the beggars are controlled by organized thug groups). In that sense, the controversial girl holds a “non-mainstream” point of view. But what about folks who want to have their say — and do have their own two pence on what government’s doing right — or wrong? They’re not die-hard dissidents; they merely desire a mic to have their voice heard. Do you mute that as well?

Further afield, the whole Chinese language journalism environment is in a fair bit of doo-doo itself. To be purposefully value, the mainland PRC media is “too red” (except for probably the Guangdong press). The Taiwanese media is politically schizo: the Taipei press (KMT territory) is “too blue” and too “pro-unification”. Press in Tainan (and much of southern Taiwan) are regarded as “too green”, absolutely dying for independence so-called. Chinese-language media overseas are confused: some are led by pro-Beijing groups, others by odd sects who yell at Beijing’s every last move.

And then there are the foreign information media. They stare in awe at China’s HSR system while chronically condemning Beijing on human rights issues. A non-political article about Taiwan always comes with the mandatory line implying Taiwan not being part of China (which doesn’t work on either side of the Straits: Article 6 of the ROC Constitution bans changes to Chinese territory without legal consent). I’ve seen that bit even in tech magazines back in 2003.

Lots of people point a finger at such sensationalist media — like the News of the World. Fact is, much of the mainstream media is now so interested in sensationalism that they appear little different from that very same paper. The News of the World died. Will we see the same for mass-produced sensationalist media? Will we see the same for media organizations who speak for one voice only instead of letting everyone have the microphone?