Inside People's Daily

The four-story headquarters of the People's Daily on Peking's busy Wang Fu Ching Street bears scant resemblance to a Western newspaper office. A People's Liberation Army soldier with fixed bayonet patrols the main entrance and bars passage to anyone lacking an appointment. Inside, there is no bustle of copy boys, no chorus of jangling telephones. The People's Daily is plainly not a normal newspaper; it is the voice of the Chinese Communist Party. That fact--plus a circulation of 3.4 million --makes it China's most influential publication.

The six-page paper seems largely a collection of features. A typical assignment for the staff might call for something as timely as coverage of changes in Chinese education. "In such a case," explains Chen Chun, one of the paper's seven chief editors, "we would send out dozens of our cadres all over the country to universities and middle schools to investigate the situation there. Then there would be an article written collectively"--a process that can take up to a month. Once completed, People's Daily articles carry headlines noted for their painful solemnity: HOW TO TRANSFORM ONESELF INTO BELIEVING IN THE MASSES INSTEAD OF ONESELF or LET'S ALL LEARN REVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND GET RID OF EXPERIMENTALISM.

Such hortatory headlines do not convey the most significant message of People's Daily. That comes in the pages devoted to news. So subtle does the process get that foreign readers are better served by a ruler than a glossary. A recent visit by a Chinese medical team to the U.S., for instance, was given more space than a trip by the same team to France, a sure sign--experts claim--of China's priorities in foreign affairs. Several weeks ago, two large, front-page pictures of Henry Kissinger with Chairman Mao Tse-tung confirmed to China watchers that another thaw in Sino-American relations was indeed occurring.

Lest skeptics complain that such analyses are the product of overactive imaginations, Sinologists relate a revealing vignette from President Nixon's visit to Peking. After the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, Premier Chou En-lai went off to a corner. There he was shown the People's Daily front-page layout of pictures of the Nixon trip. That historic issue went to press only after Chou--the world's most famous part-time editor--approved it.

As the voice of China, People's Daily has its own peculiar idea of what constitutes news. The Apollo moon landings did not meet the paper's standards: "In our view," says one editor, "there are a lot of more important things happening on earth." Despite its unusually large staff (about 1,000, including printers), the People's Daily has only two foreign correspondents--one in Tokyo and one soon to be based in London. Most of the rest of its news is provided by China's Hsinhua news agency.

When they are not in the field, People's Daily staffers spend most of their time working out articulations of policies already determined by the party. The daily 3 a.m. deadline is ignored if late-breaking news dictates. But Sinologists find People's Daily worth waiting for; its comments and its attitude toward stories provide a means of looking at the world through Chairman Mao's eyes.

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