TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — Chunjiang Zhao was pleasantly surprised when he arrived in Northeast Oklahoma Monday.

“The scenery is very green, very different from what I had expected,” Zhao said through his interpreter. “It’s more like my home.”

Zhao, 52, is senior editor at the Jilin Daily Group newspaper in Jilin, People’s Republic of China. He was visiting the U.S. as part of an arrangement with the Tulsa Global Alliance and the International Visitor Leadership Program.

As part of his program, Zhao spent Monday in Tahlequah, visiting with the staff at the Cherokee Phoenix and the Tahlequah Daily Press to gain a better understanding of how smaller newspapers are managed.

According to Zhao, Jilin is the third-largest city in the PRC, and the daily newspaper where he works has a circulation of 180,000. He chose to come to visit Tahlequah, as he is interested how the media reports on minorities in the U.S. His particular interest was how the Cherokee Nation operated its own government within the larger U.S. government, and how the media covered tribal issues.

Through his U.S. State Department interpreter, Noelle Xie, Zhao explained how his newspaper is different from those in the U.S.

“I supervise eight editors and 60 reporters who are in a number of geographic locations,” said Zhao. “I edit all the stories, and sign off on them, as ours is a government newspaper.”

Government newspapers in the PRC are distributed through the post office, as a means of controlling the content, according to Zhao.

Zhao has worked for a number of papers in his 20-year career, and began as a staff writer.

“I prefer working at smaller papers, as opposed to the large one where I work now,” said Zhao. “You had more freedom and independence about what you covered and what you wrote. There are so many rules governing what you can write about working for a government paper. We only have one political party, and it dictates what is printed in the large papers.”

While reporting for smaller papers, Zhao’s “beat,” or reporting area, was entertainment, culture, arts and museums.

Zhao asked about the history of the Tahlequah Daily Press, and took a brief tour of the building, paying special attention to the archives.

“Is it OK if I take pictures of your old newspapers?” he asked, gently thumbing through pages of a 1944 Tahlequah Democrat-Citizen.

After receiving the all-clear, he took a number of photos of the archives, the staff and the building.

One thing Zhao shares with many newspapers is the high rate of personnel turnover.

“It used to be very steady 20 years ago,” he said. “People held the same job for long periods of time. Now, with the new policy changes in the government, young people are more interested in changing jobs more.”

While traveling from Tulsa to Tahlequah, Zhao was very surprised at the way farming is handled in Oklahoma.

“You don’t see any real presence in the fields,” said Zhao. “In China, you see lots of people out working the fields. Here, it’s all machines.”

As part of his visit to the U.S., Zhao visited the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. He prefers the smaller communities to the big cities. “It’s peaceful in the smaller towns, and the landscape is much greener here,” he said. “I didn’t care much for Chicago or Manhattan, where my interpreter lives. It’s too loud.”

Zhao’s goals for his trip are to observe the role of a free and independent press; to understand the legal structures governing accountability in journalism; to examine how objectivity, transparency and critical reporting are practiced and encouraged in print journalism here; and to learn about the survival of newspapers and how they ensure their success.

The Office of International Visitors funds and manages the International Visitor Leadership Program, which was launched in 1940. The IVLP seeks to build mutual understanding between the U.S. and other nations through carefully designed professional visits to the U.S. for current and emerging foreign leaders. Each year, more than 4,500 IVLP participants from all over the world are selected by U.S. embassies to travel to the U.S. to meet and confer with their professional counterparts.

According the U.S. State Department, more than 180 current and former heads of government and state, as well as many other world leaders have participated in IVLP, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.



Teddye Snell writes for the Tahlequah (Okla.) Daily Press.