My experience of working with a Substack run by a Chinese state media employee

Why some "media studios" are like China's Township and Village Enterprises of the 1980s

A noteworthy article has recently come out about the emergence of Substacks made by Chinese state media people. The author is

Whipling

of

Too Simple, Sometimes Naive

.

The article is behind the paywall, and you are encouraged to pay for it, but I will summarize the core content here. According to Whipling, (whose real name is Sean Haines, a Brit who formerly worked for a TV studio of Xinhua), state media people are coming to the Substack platform in “camouflage”. Despite dutifully declaring their state affiliations, they are still not seen as sincere when they claim the newsletter only represents “my personal opinion”. Instead, according to Mr. Haines, documents from their employers, such as Xinhua, seem to suggest their operations are fully embedded in the “system”. The key example that Mr Haines cited was

Jiang Jiang

, or JJ, founder first of

Ginger River Review

and later of

Beijing Scroll

. Mr. Haines cited Jiang’s publicly disclosed appearances at Tsinghua and at local thinktanks sharing about his experience running newsletters, and a now-deleted reference to him in an Xinhua article, among many other things, to insinuate his work is not trustworthy.

Per Mr. Haines’ account, those substackers do not look like humans with agency of their own, but only villainous minions commanded by some mighty dark forces. Because they are not treated as real humans, it seems that Mr. Haines hasn’t even bothered to reach out directly to any of the people he “exposed” for comments.

Throughout the essay, Mr. Haines also failed to do a proper job of providing sources for his cited content. For instance, he posted a picture of JJ giving a lecture at Tsinghua University about newsletters, but forgot to let his readers know that the picture was taken from a publicly disclosed WeChat article. To me, this looks like a deliberate act to insinuate that these are “secret” events that, while in fact they are all wide open and much more mundane than readers were led to believe.

It’s not common to see low-quality character assassination of substackers by other substackers on this platform. This floodgate, once opened, may bring many nasty things.

But let’s forget about that for now. What I want to write about today is not just the blind spots of Mr. Haines’ work. It has to do with something very personal for me. This may be the first time I publicly disclose this fact: back in 2022, I was an early co-founder of Ginger River Review as well.

Unlike Mr. Haines, who has to rely on public information and personal bias to tell this story, I have a unique, first-person view and my own blend of personal bias to tell you my story, the true story.

This is a story about how the young and enterprising generation of China, even within the confines of the state apparatus and despite difficulty in explaining themselves to either side, tried their utmost to achieve something meaningful for themselves, for their employer, for their beloved country, and for peace and understanding of the world.

I believe it will be much more fun than Mr. Haines’ work, and it’s free!

How it started

JJ and I were in the same high school for 6 years, but I don’t think we ever talked to each other back then. We only heard each other’s names. I knew he played basketball, dark-skinned and tall. And that’s all.

After high school, one of the many things I was quite keen to organize was our high school alumni gatherings. One of the largest events at the time took place in Shanghai. JJ happened to be studying at a university in Shanghai. Ever a dependable person, he ended up taking charge of organizing the whole event. That’s when we really started to know each other, and bonded.

After college, I witnessed how JJ embarked on one of the most bizarre career paths I know. First, he was an auditor at Deloitte. And then, for whatever fluke, he ended up working with the notorious Chinese Football Association. I remember JJ once said that before CFA, he had never been abroad. But at CFA, his main job was to take youth teams to football matches around the world.

Then, to fulfill his dream to study in the US, he got into the MBA program at the Darden School of Business of UVA. During the MBA, he got into an internship at a major internet platform in China, and received a return offer there. At the time, he also got an offer from Xinhua. So by the time he graduated in Darden, he was faced with two life-changing choices that could not have been more different: a high-paying, high-stake job into the vaunted but blood-stained Colosseum that’s China’s internet, or a public sector job into the machinery of 体制tizhi - “the system”, with much lower pay, uncertain visibility in terms of career path, high chance to get bored but a non-zero chance of doing something actually meaningful.

I remember the many consultation discussions we had about the pros and cons of either choice. He was really uncertain about this decision at the time, understandably. But in the end, for a reason I don’t fully comprehend, he chose Xinhua. I would not make that choice for myself if I were him.

Fast forward to late 2021, JJ found me one day. He introduced me to the idea of a “Substack”. I was instantly fascinated by the idea and saw the potential value. By the time I had already completed my own transformation from a super-fan of Western mainstream media to someone disillusioned with it (documented here), so we discussed how we could finally use this new medium to express ourselves and to facilitate a better understanding of China from the outside world. And it wouldn’t be too hard to do, because there is already many good content in the Chinese-speaking world, so some simple translation with curation would already be very valuable.

Little did I know then, the reason JJ reached out to me was because, per his memory, I may be the very first person he knew who ever did a newsletter. I almost forgot until he brought it up, but back in my college years, I would email a digest of all the items I found interesting about China to a few hundred people I knew, by hand. So I was always “the newsletter guy” in JJ’s mind.

“Oh, so this newsletter is a real thing now?” I was incredulous.

“Yes, obviously. Quite a big deal.”

“It doesn’t make sense. If this thing is obviously so good and so needed, why are only very few people in China doing it now?” I asked further.

“I don’t know. But that’s the thing, right? Not many people are doing it.”

Almost immediately, I sensed a problem. I asked him straight away how he would present himself, given the fact that “working for state media” will discredit him in the English media. He said he would just disclose his identity. But how would Xinhua think of this, I asked further. I forgot the exact wording, but he responded with something along the lines of:

“They do not know, and I do not plan to let them for now. You know how things work in tizhi. If you ask for their permission for something new, they will never grant you the chance. Things happen because people like us make it happen. After you are successful, that’s the better time to make it known.”

“But isn’t that quite risky for you?” I asked.

“It’s damn risky. But we will not get anywhere without taking risks.”

And that’s damn right.

So we quickly assembled the team. Jiang would be the main editor and take charge of the policy section. I would be in charge of economics and finance. There was actually a third co-founder, someone also outside the tizhi just like me, who would be in charge of the culture section. But being an artist that he is, he never really contributed. So I will not name him here.

One obvious first task is to find the name for this Substack. We didn’t want to use cultural stereotypes like “panda”, “dragon”, or “forbidden city”, but wanted something edgier and quirkier, something that might not make sense at first but would be easy to remember. I believe in the end, it was my idea to translate Jiang Jiang’s Chinese name directly: 姜Ginger, 江River. We all loved this idea, but I remember JJ was hesitant for a few days. He was a bit afraid to make this project too personal. After all, he was still a Xinhua journalist. There might be unknown risks in the future. But in the end, he gave this name his full blessing.

I mainly wrote under my pseudonym

red_wallstreet

(“RW”, of course) and contributed a few pieces in 2022, the first year that GRR was actually launched. Some of my proudest works were my translations of how TikTok came to be (Part 1, Part 2) and a sober essay discussing China’s political system, and a fascinating account of how China once prepared itself for the potential nuclear armageddon between us and the Soviets in the 1960s.

This last one was especially noteworthy. We deliberately published it not long after the outbreak of the Ukraine War. We tried to make a subtle point: Chinese people know who Russians really are, and we will do our best to preserve our own interests. So stop whining and stop agitating for China to take a side.

I consider GRR as a training ground for my later newsletters. For instance, an essay on China’s PE/VC industry that I translated laid the preparatory work for my No.1 popular essay on the demise of venture capital in China.

Note that all of this happened in the pre-ChatGPT age. Deepl, the best translation software at the time, was far from perfect. And most of the articles we translated were, in the words of Mr. Haines, “dense and wonky”. So it was actually quite a painful task, copying and pasting and editing and copying and pasting and editing and... I spent on average 2-3 days to complete a piece.

What made it even more difficult was that both of us only worked on this on a part-time basis. On my part, I have a full-time job. To make it worse, soon after we launched GRR, the lockdown in Shanghai happened. Life was chaotic and uncertain. Fear of hunger became real for the first time in my life.

On JJ’s part, the situation was even tougher. Much tougher. That year, he was dispatched to Xinhua’s office in Islamabad, Pakistan.

In hindsight, I don’t think he mentally prepared for the dire situation there. Precisely because the Pakistani government is extremely close to China while at the same time it’s a highly fragmented country, so separatists and terrorists like to make demands from the government by targeting, and actually killing, Chinese citizens. On the very first day JJ arrived in Pakistan, a car bomb killed 4 people in Karachi, including the director of the local Confucius Institute and 2 Chinese teachers. For JJ, working for China’s national news agency would place an especially high bounty on his head.

In our chat messages at the time, JJ said that every day, during the walk between the office and his apartment, he felt like he was constantly walking naked. Behind every burqa, every veiled face, there could be a suicide vest, and so he literally had to close his eyes while walking, alone among the crowd. To survive this daily ordeal, he had to learn how to get numb about the fact that there was a real risk that he would literally not survive this stint.

But being an entrepreneur, I know very well that it’s often when you are in the gravest danger, when you are at the lowest depth of your hopelessness, and when you are not even sure whether you will live to see tomorrow, that your true potential blossoms and real creativity flourishes.

JJ is essentially an entrepreneur too, and an in-house entrepreneur in tizhi. And like all entrepreneurs, we always believe “办法总比困难多there are always more solutions than problems, and “没有条件就创造条件, “if circumstances don’t allow, then we will try to create our own circumstances.”

So with this high spirit, with me standing on my balcony working on crappy pre-GPT translation tools while peering down the empty streets of a locked-down Shanghai, and JJ walking with eyes half closed to his office for his day-time assignments, and walking back to his apartment with eyes half closed again to work on his newsletter at night, Ginger River Review was born.

How I ended my involvement with GRR

This article was not about me, but I will still need to explain my current relationship with the project. So let me wrap up this part quickly.

GRR took off, but 2022 overall was a slow-moving train wreck that changed the trajectory of my life. Falling market demand, managerial inexperience, and drying up of funding together brought the company I worked for to the brink of collapse. At the direst moment, I contemplate the unthinkable: to become one of those rare cases where someone joined a company, worked for the company, but ultimately was compelled to take over the company. Things moved fast, deals were struck, I took on the job, fired people, and to make it even more dramatic, I almost broke my arm in a major car accident, all while a huge storm swirled outside. Endless Covid PCR tests and fears about losing the “green codes”. Pelosi visited Taiwan. The party congress. People on the streets. The capital market fell from the sky. Ultimately, that tumultuous year ended with mass infections that made the streets empty again.

I will save this story for another day. But it suffices to say I had no more capacity at all to work on GRR.

At the same time, I realized that so long as I was with GRR, I would not have complete control of my own voice. From time to time, many of my ideas were tabled because they were considered too sensitive to be associated with JJ. Being a Xinhua journalist, there are more restrictions on what JJ could write than for me. But GRR is, after all, his newsletter. (I will talk about those restrictions soon.)

But my time with GRR did not go to waste; it served as the inspiration for my next steps. In my own depth of hopelessness about the future of my company, I had a sudden epiphany of what we should do. We are in the information business. We have so much useful data. We should start a newsletter of our own!

And that’s how Baiguan was born. If you are interested in that part of the story, read here. At last, I come in a full circle. My part-time pet project of passion, combined with my main job and became the same thing.

The independence and self-censorship of newsletters written by state media employees

Coming back to JJ.

If you have made it so far in this article, the crucial question in your mind right now must be: Should I trust Jiang Jiang? What exactly is his relationship between Ginger River Review and Xinhua?

Let me share my personal opinions here on how to read those newsletters written by China’s state media employees.

The one I know the best about is Ginger River Review, since I had a personal stake during its founding. I also know somewhat about

Yang Liu

’s

Beijing Channel

and

Fred Gao

’s

Inside China

, but my feeling is they are similar. Although I have not been involved in GRR since early 2023 and may not know the exact details of the arrangement between GRR and Xinhua, I am confident enough to comment on the high-level structures of it.

There are 3 parties to consider here. The first is those substackers. The second is the employers they work for. The third is you, the readers.

Let’s talk about the previous 2 parties first.

Ginger River Review, and the newsletter cohort it represents, is truly unique. When they claim they only represent their own voices and not those of Xinhua, they mean it literally. As far as I know, their exact writings are not reviewed and not approved by Xinhua, and in fact, per internal regulations, they are not allowed to represent Xinhua in their newsletters. (I will come back to this point below.)

During my time working with GRR, I was aware of no instance where Xinhua editors proofread and edited my work. Not a single word was changed or struck out. (Unlike, ironically, my experience with the New York Times.) Could JJ secretly give my work to Xinhua for approval? My personal trust in JJ aside, I don’t think that’s plausible, because I usually just hit the publish button after finishing my work. So, even just logistically, there was not enough time to go through anything.

By contrast, I was involved in some really official state media projects. The amount of editing was heavy, and it can be quite frustrating, which made me leave those projects.

You can also find evidence from the content. If you check closely at the top essays of GRR, you will find that, after so many years, GRR’s most popular article to date, by a wide margin, is one about transgender youth in China. From what I understand about state media, I don’t think that will be a topic that is actively encouraged.

Similarly, when you check Beijing Channel, you will find its frequency of updating is rather erratic. Sometimes, for many months, there is not a single issue. I sometimes joke to Liu Yang that he is too lazy. He just laughs off at this. It just doesn’t seem to me that his state media masters are behind his back, urging him to post this or that.

You can also look at Wang Zichen of

Pekingnology

fame, who really is the key figure that inspires a generation of China-based English-writing substackers, but is curiously shunned by Mr. Haines’s exposé. Back when Zichen was at Xinhua, people also said Pekingnology was a Xinhua asset. A few years ago, Zichen left Xinhua, but

Pekingnology

is still with him. What do you say now?

Certainly, working at the state media while writing on your own sets up unique boundaries that they will not touch on. And JJ has always been quite transparent about this. There was one event when Chinese substackers met with foreign diplomats, where JJ attended. That event was also referred to by Mr. Haines, but again, for whatever motives, he failed to inform his readers that the event was not a secret gathering that had to be hidden, but publicly disclosed as well.

I know what JJ said during that event, because, hey, I was there too! I was representing private sector voices. Can you spot me in the picture below? ^^

During that event, I remember one diplomat asking JJ a very good question about the extent to which he exercised self-censorship. And here was JJ’s response (again, not exact words but my own recollection):

I always try to be honest with what I can say. And I want to provide value for my readers through my analyses and translations. But I have to be frank, there are definitely some red lines that I won’t touch. Let me give you one example: if today you ask me who would be the next Foreign Minister, I would not answer. First, I don’t comment on personnel changes, because I don’t want to create trouble for my direct leaders. Although this newsletter only represents my views, I understand for many people, I am still perceived to represent Xinhua. Secondly, I really don’t know who the next Foreign Minister will be. What I do here has to be based on facts first. Although I can’t touch on any topic that I want, but I can guarantee that, as long as it’s something I sent out, it’s at least factual and can provide value.

When writing my newsletters here and at Baiguan, I also exercise some self-censorship. (I talk in great detail about this here.) But if I can draw some circles on a piece of paper, my boundary of self-censorship (when it comes to China) is larger than JJ’s, but not as large as someone who lives overseas.

But in any case, we are frank and open about this topic, unlike, ironically, many who work in Western media who do self-censorship too, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes on a massive scale, but pretend they are not.

To me, self-censorship is totally understandable and is nothing to be ashamed of. Because ultimately, if you are not someone who completely indulges in your ego, you are always writing for someone else. Yes, you are writing for yourself, but you are also writing for someone else. Those “someone else” are your readers, your subscribers, your clients. What your readers like or don’t know will invariably make you think twice about writing or not writing about something. Understanding who a publication’s clients are is the crucial first step to start reading any publication.

“Jiang Jiang” studio

In my opinion, the most damning piece of attack from Mr. Haines’ essay, which could cause actual concern, was this line he quoted from a deleted sentence from an article by Xinhua:

“The "Jiang Jiang Studio", which operates English newsletters with elite subscribers in the United States and the West as the main target audience, is hatched from the external department of Xinhua News Agency,”

That sentence was later deleted, but was found by Mr. Haines from the internet archives. The original article could be found here. (Again, Mr. Haines failed to provide the link.)

JJ confirmed to me that his name was once there, and it was deleted later. However, several dozen “studios” are still listed there.

Mr. Haines cited this as a key piece of evidence that GRR was not independent. But if the law of least friction applies, shouldn’t it be interpreted as major evidence that GRR is, in fact, quite different from others? After all, why haven’t they deleted the other several dozen studios there?

More importantly, as JJ also confirmed to me, that line about himself was deleted after he requested it. To me, the most plausible reason a low-ranking journalist can have the power to ask state media to delete a line is that, it is just not true. Some of his colleagues may have either misunderstood the situation or possibly tried to take the credit.

I asked JJ further about what a “studio” is. The understanding that I have got is that there are at least two kinds of studios. Here is JJ’s full response:

At other studios, they operate publicly under the title of a Xinhua News Agency reporter, meaning everything they do represents Xinhua as an organization. But my studio is just a name — it exists in name only so that I can keep doing what I’m doing now. I cannot represent Xinhua News Agency as a reporter to the outside world; I can only represent myself.

JJ’s explanation, combined with my overall impression of working with GRR, reminds me of the early days of China’s reform and opening-up period. Students of the history of China’s 1980s must know the concept of “乡镇企业Township and village enterprises”, or TVEs.

As China transitioned from a socialist command economy to a market economy, for a period, ownership rules were very opaque. But private entrepreneurs had already started to exist. To protect themselves in a country where private ownership was nominally abolished, they would have to get creative. That’s when TVEs were born.

By law, TVEs were public enterprises under the purview of local governments, but in essence, they were run by private entrepreneurs themselves. During that transition period, TVEs actually became the backbone of China’s economy, and only naturally phased away when the market economy became more mature and there was no need for them.

“Studios” like that of Jiang Jiang, in my eyes, are exactly like this. It’s an internal experiment, launched by risk-takers who are inspired by a sense of mission and ambition to achieve something valuable. If they succeed, they might usher in a new paradigm. If they fail, they will only have themselves to blame.

And it’s not easy. They carry chains around themselves. I’d say their heaviest chain, by far, is this “sandwiched” position between 2 different sets of “clients” at the same time.

I run a real business, so I know very well that serving different people at the same time is a big, big no-go for any decision. But as a state media “TVE”, they had to serve two client groups at the same time. They have to provide value for external clients, but in the meantime, they also have indirect “internal clients”, in the form of their bosses, colleagues, and, very importantly, competing agencies.

Their studios do not serve those internal clients directly, but in the same way a TVE cannot contradict the government authority, those “studios” can’t contradict their own parent organization either. For a high-profile project like GRR, those “internal clients” are watching. They may not look for results, and they do not need to give any instructions, but rest assured, they will keep watching for mistakes. One misstep would easily cause the death of someone’s career. I think anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation of any kind can instantly understand what I mean here.

But the obligation to simultaneously “serve” internal clients puts them at a major disadvantage while serving external clients. For one thing, they are not very free to speak out for themselves when they are openly and personally attacked.

So their chains are quite heavy. But again, for us entrepreneurs, who are free of chains anyway? In fact, if there are no chains, what do entrepreneurs “entrepreneur” about? And what do entrepreneurs say? “If circumstances don’t allow, then we will try to create our own circumstances.”

How to read their content

In this context, attacking those semi-independent studios like that of JJ is akin to attacking TVEs and refusing to work with them in the 1980s, just because they are, on paper, socialist entities, and by doing so, the attacker could actually become the murderers (or at least the accomplices) who kill the babies in their cribs.

Does this sound fair to you? Does this sound smart to you? Not even a minute is spent on inspecting what those TVEs are actually doing?

And this comes to the biggest trouble I find with Mr. Haines’ work: throughout the article, it’s all character assassination and guilty-by-association. None of the writing actually touches on whether there is any factual problem with GRR or other studios’ work. It’s a classic case of “viewpoints over facts”. For someone like me who was born and raised in a post-Soviet society, I can easily spot these kinds of Red Guard tactics. 你们不就是想把人搞脏搞臭么？

And this finally comes down to the final actor in this trilogy: you, the readers.

What do you care?

I don’t know about you. But for me, when I read Substacks, I care first and foremost about what new information I can get.

If a newsletter provides the useful information I need, then I subscribe. If it doesn’t, then I unsubscribe.

The affiliation of the substacker is very important to know, and I demand that all newsletter writers that I subscribe to make full disclosure about that. I demand to know whether a publication is funded by or written by anyone working for any organization, be it Xinhua, CGTN, or, for that matter, CIA, NED, Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, and so on. (If you don’t already, I urge you to do it as soon as possible, because I will not be merciful if I become aware of non-disclosure.)

This information about the affiliated organization will serve as the rough outlines of what a publication cannot say, so I will always take their content with a grain of salt. But that piece of information is enough for me already. I do not need to know, and I do not care about the specifics.

So when I read GRR, or Beijing Channel, or Inside China, here is what I know and what I am looking for: I know they have more self-censorship than I do. So there are things they might otherwise have said, but won’t say. However, I also know they are among the most accessible as well as the most flexible sources within the official system, so there may be content that the official channels may not be comfortable saying, yet they are allowed to say. This is a great tool for understanding where the wind blows for policy changes. And it’s already enough for me. I cherish them for this reason.

We are all adults. We should always use our own judgment to decide whether to read something or not, subscribe to a newsletter, or unsubscribe. We do not like 爹味 people dictating to us what to read.