Correspondent's Notebook
Covering the National People’s Congress
20 March 2009
Just over a week ago, China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told the National People’s Congress that he was optimistic that the Government’s target of 8 per cent economic growth was still possible.
This week, the World Bank announced a new forecast for China, of just 6.5 per cent.
But as Australia Network’s Beijing correspondent, Tom Iggulden, reports, while China’s leaders grapple with a slowing world economy, it seems there’s one area where they are thriving.
Earlier this month, I reported on the annual National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
The week-long event is the only time of the year China’s leaders come together to pass new laws and it’s a gruelling event to cover.
Speeches and media conferences last a minimum of two hours.
At the end of the congress comes the biggest, longest press conference of all, hosted by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s.
This year it attracted at least 50 TV cameras, three times as many still photo lenses and more than 400 journalists.
At the biggest media conferences in Australia, for the treasurer’s annual budget for example, there might be 100 journalists and seven or eight television cameras.
To get the best camera position for the media conference, the ABC’s crew had to line up outside the Great Hall of the People at six in the morning on a Beijing morning where temperatures were well below zero.
That’s a full four hours before the media conference was due to start.
I’m told the Japanese TV crews showed up at five, proud of their reputation in Beijing’s media fraternity as being first inside the Great Hall each year.
Premier Wen Jiabao never grants requests for media interviews and his press conference at the close of the NPC is his only one for the year.
He began by observing that in these tough economic times confidence was golden.
He politely asked, therefore, that we journalists do our bit by not asking sensitive questions that might upset those listening at home.
He then took 12 questions over the next two and a half hours.
During several intervals he paused mid-sentence to pose for the photographers, which obliged with a volley of camera flashes and whirring shutters.
He announced not a single new initiative, often repeated the same lengthy answers to different questions and avoided others by employing bureaucratic generalities or long-winded tangents that avoided the questioner’s central proposition.
In this I felt he was at least the equal of any democratically-elected political leader facing a free and open press.
Given his skill – I wondered why he didn’t do more press conferences than one per year.
He certainly appeared to be enjoying himself during this year’s effort, and the risk of saying anything that might get him into trouble was very low.
Some of the questions from state run media appeared to be on behalf of his government, and no-one was allowed a follow-up question.
Perhaps most encouragingly for Mr Wen, however, was the round of applause he got from some of the local journalists at the start and the end of the press conference, not to mention when he provided a particularly dexterous answer to one of the few thorny questions posed to him.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s National People’s Congress.
