China correspondent Mary-Anne Toy: On the trail of cold hard facts

Mary-Anne Toy, China correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers in Australia seems like a person who was destined to work in an international setting, in a profession that demands excellent people skills -- given her multicultural background as the daughter of Chinese parents raised in Australia, and her warm and disarming personality.

A career in journalism attracted her from very early on, the reporter says in her profile on the website of The Age. After graduating from Monash University with degrees in Arts and Law she embarked on what to an outsider sounds like a very exciting and eventful career in journalism. Today, she has almost twenty years of journalist work under her belt, including three years spent as Europe Correspondent for News Ltd based in London.

A return to roots

Born in Hong Kong to parents from mainland China, Toy had a strong connection to the Middle Kingdom even before 2006, when she took on the position of Beijing-based China correspondent for two respected Australian newspapers. Shuttling between countries and dealing with people of different nationalities seems effortless for Toy, whom one would like to refer to as a world citizen, a term which the reporter herself quickly disaffirms, saying she is Australian. Despite her Chinese roots, Toy says she had never thought about actually moving to China, but when the opportunity presented itself, she grabbed it.

"I needed a change, and once I started thinking about it, it went from being something I never thought about to something I got really excited about. In journalistic work you have to try to keep being interested and excited," she says.

Toy had visited China briefly twenty years earlier, but when she arrived in her new home town in January of 2006, she found herself in city that had undergone a complete metamorphosis. Her Chinese appearance proved a source a confusion, as her mastery of Mandarin was limited to what she had learned during a six-week intensive course at Monash University.

"A Western-looking person is not expected to speak Chinese. So I think that actually put me off a lot. But Beijing people were so friendly to me and I thought that we've never had a China correspondent who could speak fluent Chinese, although it obviously would be better, so I made the decision to come and I am very pleased I did," she says.

As for her sense of identity, Toy says that growing up in Australia, she was always aware of her different background, which was never an issue, but naturally made her stand out from the main population.

"There are a lot more Chinese in Australia now, but when I was growing up there were really few. So when I first came to China, it was quite exciting to be anonymous. I really enjoyed that," she says.

At the center of breaking news

Mary-Anne Toy's work as a journalist has taken her to the center of some of the biggest breaking news events of the past two decades, including the death of Princess Diana and the inauguration of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In China, she was the one assigned to cover the events in Lhasa in March 2008, after anti-China protests erupted into riots in the Tibetan capital. This assignment has also gone down in her book as the one of the most challenging and controversial ones.

At first, Toy wasn't reporting on the story, and she was only monitoring the events from Beijing. When things escalated, Toy has in the middle of a medical crisis and was not able to run to the airport and fly to Tibet.

The next morning, Toy and her translator took a plane and arrived in a nearby town just before the government ordered a lock-down.

"When you're on the road covering a story like that, it's just full on. You can't register at hotels, there was riot police everywhere, roadblocks... There is a certain element of danger there, but it's also an element of you don't want to be stopped doing your job. You know that if you get detained or arrested, they can keep you somewhere for hours, while you're missing out on doing the story. So you're always conscious of trying to do your job efficiently, because if you can't get the story out there is no point in being there," Toy explains.

"It was sort of a cat and mouse game, because you were trying to do interviews without endangering the people you talked to and also without getting caught yourself," she recapitulates.

"There had been a protest at one of the universities, so we went there to try and find out what had happened. And again it was quite difficult because there were plain-clothes police and cameras everywhere and you didn't want to get people into trouble, but you needed to find out what happened. A lot of the times when we tried to ring up monasteries or towns, the phone lines originally were cut off or interfered with. One town we were at you could no longer make international calls out of that town, you could only make calls within mainland China. At one stage the mobile phone signals were jammed... We had no way of trying to ascertaining where the truth lies, and that's incredibly frustrating," she explains.

On Western media's coverage of Tibet

Mary-Anne Toy says that covering the events in Tibet caused a lot of frustration due to the difficulty of circumstances and lack of information. Afterwards, she and her colleagues have been pondering why the foreign media were not allowed to report on it freely.

"It's been a very emotional and difficult time. Many Chinese think the Western media has been biased and has great difficulty understanding. And the Chinese authorities don't seem to understand that concept of being out to independently evaluate. The last thing you want to do is say 'it was reported that x happened or y happened,'" Toy says, adding that in a conversation with a Chinese State Council propaganda officer she told her that the reporting was what it was because the authorities did not give media access. "It's not that we're biased, it's just that you make it so hard for us," she told her.

"Most Western journalists don't trust their own government, so we are naturally suspicious. If a government or any kind of authority only tells you what they want you to know and don't allow you to talk to anyone else, then as journalists, our bread and butter position is we have to be skeptical. We need to ask and we need to push," Toy explains.

"We try to report as fairly as we can, but mistakes have obviously been made. That does not justify the other extreme: They've taken one group of journalists and a smaller group of diplomats into Lhasa in the last month, but from a Western perspective that's barely above acceptable."

Toy says that this kind of line of action surprises her, considering how far China has come over the last thirty years in terms of reform and opening up.

"Chinese people are much freer than they've ever been and have much more personal liberties and the media is much freer, living standards are generally much better. China has changed beyond recognition from when I first was here. It caught me by surprise at how quickly things reverted back to almost sage mentality, and I'm interested to see how things will play out,” Toy says.

The criticism directed at the Chinese government with regard to the Tibet issue and hosting the Olympic Games is in some cases missing its target, Toy says.

“I think people around the world are horrified to think that Chinese people think the Chinese people are being attacked, as opposed to the government. That has become blurred into one," Toy analyzes.

Voice of the future

As for China's political reforms and modernization drive, Toy says that the Chinese are currently trying to figure out a new form of governance, a "hybrid of capitalism" she says. The defensive stance of the Chinese regime undoubtedly stems from the country's turbulent past, which in her opinion is understandable.

As for the current media environment in China, it is by no means menacing towards members of Western media, Toy says. If anything, when working on a controversial story she may at times feel more concerned for her Chinese sources' and colleagues' safety than for her own.

The loosening of the restrictions on foreign media last year also helped improve the working environment of foreign journalists in China. According to the new regulations, foreign journalists are free to travel anywhere in China, provided that a Chinese citizen is willing to talk to them, Toy says.

“That was fantastic. Before that, technically if you left Beijing, you were meant to get permission. In effect, the government had been very tolerant and tended not to worry about it very much... You just don't have time to get permission every time. That was a very welcome step in the right direction, which makes what's happened in the last month all the more galling. Initially, we were told that Tibet was included in those looser regulations, but when we checked, they said no. Last week, I went to a Chinese government press briefing on Tibet and the governor of Tibet assured us that we were free to travel to Tibet and anywhere, as long as we complied with the regulations. Which is like Orwellian doublespeak, because at the moment the regulations say that we're not allowed anywhere and we don't get permission to go,” Toy explains.

At times, Toy finds herself pondering whether she is been too hard on the Chinese in her stories, but says that those feelings are countered by her meetings with ordinary Chinese people who tell her that they want more from their own government.

“You're trying to interpret for a Western audience, but also trying let the Western audience know how it's being seen from a whole variety of Chinese viewpoints,” she says. “My goal is to write stories as well as I can, as originally and as meaningfully as I can. I just want to tell the stories that I think are important and interesting, and that matter,” she concludes.