I hadn’t watched this program before, feeling some measure of resentment on account of Stan Grant’s constant shifting within the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It seemed as though every time I looked at the primary digital channel he was hosting a different show. ‘Matter of Fact’, another late-night show, was cancelled after 10 months and then Grant moved to Doha to work with Al Jazeera (which I have problems with).
Now he’s back though it remains to be seen how long the China program will last for. I wonder why Grant is such a butterfly? Is the problem with him or with the ABC? To make ‘China Tonight’ he teams up with Yvonne Yong, who started working at the national broadcaster in 2016 and has also worked with Sky News in London.
Grant worked in China for many years and Yong speaks Mandarin so the two hosts have a good pedigree and what I saw is promising. This type of program is especially important due to the lack of news coming out of China on account of the Communist Party’s iron-like grip on the flow of information. This has gone so far as to spawn new social media platforms for Chinese people, which are rigorous in their obedience to the Party. There is no such thing as a free media in China so Grant and Yong provide an unusual window onto its public sphere. As I’ve written in the past, much of what passes for public debate happens on social media, which can become quite boisterous despite the Party’s hunger for total control.
In the show of 18 October I saw some evidence of a peculiarly Chinese form of cancel culture. Whereas in the West when someone is cancelled it’s at the instigation of random actors who build momentum for action, in China it’s the Party that orders and carries out the cancellation, even leading to actors in movies having their names removed from credits. It’s Orwellian, and I’ve got Grant and Yong to thank for supplying light in a space characterised by darkness.
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