China opens press club

Press, 24 April 1984, Page 38

China opens press club

NZPA-Reuter Peking China has opened a stylish press club for foreign correspondents in Peking which aims to encourage previously unheard-of degrees of contact between the foreign press corps and official Government spokesmen. “If you want to speak to official spokesmen of Government Ministries, why don’t you invite them here?” Chen Xiuxia, a spokeswoman for the All-China Journalists’ Association, told astonished foreign correspondents at an inaugural party. io

Only a year ago, all foreign press questions had to be channelled through one telephone number at the Foreign Ministry. Waiting for answers usually took several days. Now the Ministry gives regular, if sometimes terse, weekly briefings to the foreign press, and nearly 40 official bodies have fulltime press spokesmen. In the new club, waitresses in bow ties and trouser suits glide between comfortable armchairs set next to elegant two-tone walls. “I have never seen a press club as luxurious as

this,” one pressman said. On the walls hang huge photographs of a former chairman, Mao Tse-tung, and the late Prime Minister Chou En-lai, relaxing with famous pressmen who have reported China to an ignorant world.

“The experience of the last few years is that more communication will increase understanding,” one senior Chinese correspondent said. In the corner of the club stands an official New China News Agency printer, a comfort for correspondents on long lunch breaks whowant to keep up with

the news. Ranks of recent magazines stand opposite the club’s most important room — the bar. Members can run up a bar tab for two months before paying.

“This proves how inexperienced the Chinese are at this sort of thing,” one foreign reporter said. The club’s atmosphere also contrasted sharply with the official obstacles placed in the way of any contact between foreign correspondents and ordinary Chinese. “Let’s wait and see just how free and easy it is, that is the real test,” said another foreign journalist.