Entries Tagged 'Propaganda' ↓

CNN hasn’t had a good go of things in China recently. Roundly pilloried for allegedly “biased” coverage of the riots in Tibet, they found themselves the subject of a popular website, “Anti-CNN“, and featured in a critical video that went viral in China and on YouTube (and is now part of a running series). At a somewhat more sinister level, the Beijing staff of CNN were temporarily harangued out of their offices by hostile phone calls and faxes.

While the issue has begun to fade in the US, at least until the next incident on the Torch Relay, it still smolders in China. (And not just for CNN — a London-based reader tells Imagethief that protests are being planned for BBC offices in the UK this weekend.) Now CNN pundit Jack Cafferty has poured fresh fuel onto the embers with some words that probably made for great TV in the US, but may have Beijing bureau chief Jaime Florcruz and his crew out buying fresh supplies to board up their windows. From CNN’s own coverage, here is what Mr. Cafferty said on CNN’s “The Situation Room”:

“I don’t know if China is any different, but our relationship with
China is certainly different,” Cafferty said. “We’re in hock to the
Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing.
They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We
are also running hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of trade
deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead
paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to
places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff
that we’re buying from Wal-Mart.

“So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed,” he
said. “I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs
they’ve been for the last 50 years.”

Shanghaiist has video of the offending moment, apparently videotaped on a camcorder by someone who has made a lifestyle out of waiting for them to put their foot in it again. And they’ve delivered. What stands out in this quote, aside from its generally populist sensationalism, is the lack of any polite differentiation between between China’s government and people. This was caught by CNN’s PR people after the fact:

He issued a clarification of his remarks on Monday’s “Situation Room,”
saying that by “goons and thugs,” he meant the Chinese government, not
the Chinese people. It was unclear whether China’s Foreign Ministry was aware of the clarification when it held the Tuesday news conference.

Either way, it’s not mollifying anyone. That Tuesday news conference they’re referring to produced the following incandescent statement from Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu:

China is shocked by and
strongly condemns CNN host Jack Cafferty’s remarks, which maliciously attacked
the Chinese people, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular
press briefing on Tuesday.

Cafferty said in a TV show on April 9 that the
Chinese products are “junk” and the Chinese people “basically the same bunch of
goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years”.

“Cafferty used the microphone in his hands to slander
China and the Chinese people, seriously violated professional ethics of
journalism and human conscience”, said Jiang.

What he did “reflected his arrogance, ignorance and
hostility towards the Chinese people, ignited indignation of Chinese home and
abroad, and will be condemned by those who safeguard justice around the world”,
said Jiang.

“We strongly demand CNN and Cafferty himself take back
the vile remarks and apologize to all Chinese people,” Jiang said.

China Daily has also run a (badly translated) headline piece demanding an apology. There has also apparently been some more grass-roots outrage as well.

I think Cafferty’s words were cheap and, if not actually ignorant at least willfully inflammatory, especially under the circumstances. It strikes me as one more sign of the CNN domestic service’s depressing race to the bottom in order to compete with lowbrow Fox News (the international service is considerably better). But my feelings about quality aside, it’s not CNN’s responsibility to censor themselves for the sensitivities of the Chinese, and nor should they.

CNN’s institutional right to express its opinion notwithstanding, I expect that the Beijing CNN crew is probably not too happy about this latest outrage. This may be especially true of any Chinese staff members they have. Chinese employees of foreign news organizations come in for a lot of criticism as it is, and I can only imagine that their situation has become even more uncomfortable in recent weeks.

The Chinese are entitled to be offended by Cafferty. Whether they’re
right to be offended by CNN at large is debatable. I’ve only seen the
sixty second clip on YouTube, and it’s hard to tell what the overall
tone of the show was, or if any of CNN’s other spokespeople went to bat
for China. But that will be irrelevant in the current situation, where
the Chinese audience is hyper-sensitive and the government has made
outrage at biased foreign media the heart of its PR campaign.

The Chinese audience tends to see Western news organizations as
operating similarly to their own, as instruments of government policy. That’s not the case, and Chinese audiences should get their heads around the fact that as a pundit Cafferty might make inflammatory remarks, but he doesn’t represent an “official” CNN opinion, let alone a sanctioned national one. That doesn’t necessarily let CNN off the hook, but its an important point. As an expression of institutional opinion, Cafferty mouthing off on a panel show is not the same as, say, an editorial in a major newspaper. But it is much more visible (literally).

However, though they might be angry, the Chinese should not be dismissive of Mr. Cafferty’s comments. In their demand for an apology, the China Daily wrote this:

Many, assumingly including U.S.
citizens, are stunned and shocked with such racist and vicious attack
without any cover on a group of people. As a matter of fact, in the
past years, Chinese people are getting on good terms with a huge number
of earth residents, of different color, different language, from
different continents.

[sic]

In fact, Imagethief would wager that Mr. Cafferty’s comments represent the feelings of a broad swathe of American public opinion. You can argue about whether that opinion is justified or not, and whether the media is playing a circular game by stoking that sentiment and then capitalizing on it, but it does exist. To an American audience, CNN’s coverage isn’t biased. It’s bang in the mainstream. The Chinese (whose news organizations are no slouches at casting insults themselves) can condemn CNN all they want, but at the same time they should be asking themselves what they can do to start fostering a more positive public opinion in the United States in the long term. Angry rhetoric and stones through the windows of CNN’s Beijing office will not help.

See also:

Shanghaiist reports on a coincidentally timed crackdown on popular illegal satellite dishes that allow people to receive uncensored western news. I enjoyed mine when I was in Shanghai!

For much of the last two weeks its seemed as if China couldn’t catch a PR break around the Torch Relay. In fact, the New York Times has even gone so far as to publish an article on how meticulous the PR of the Tibetan exiles has been. But it appears that the protesters scored something of an own-goal when they were photographed trying to wrestle the torch away from disabled Chinese athlete Jin Jing in Paris.

Oiwan Lam, of Global Voices, has cited to a post suggesting that the “protestor” may have been linked to pro-China demonstrators. That strikes Imagethief as a touch too conspiracy-theory for his tastes. The simplicity test suggests that the situation was what it seemed: an over-excited protester without the PR nous to realize that images of him looking thuggish and trying to snatch the torch away from a wheelchair-bound young woman wouldn’t necessarily help his cause. I stand ready to receive any conclusive evidence to the contrary.

The incident has been rallied into a major domestic propaganda vehicle:

Actions speak louder than words, however the words of Olympic torch hero Jin Jing trumpeted louder than her brave deeds. “I would die to protect the torch,” she said.

Wow. Strong stuff. The rest of the article is similar, and propels Ms. Jin to lofty heights of heroism (as do several other articles in the domestic media). While Imagethief doesn’t expect this incident to reverse China’s international PR fortunes, Ms. Jin does provide the domestic audience with a powerful, positive symbol at a time when it needed one. And she’s better looking than Lei Feng to boot.

At least it’s a change from another attack on the “Dalai Lama clique”, or current public enemy no. 2, US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

A propaganda gift

See also:

Danwei: Who is winning the Olympic PR war?

A few days ago, a journalist asked me if a grand gesture, like a release of imprisoned dissidents, would be a good pre-Olympic PR move for the Chinese government. I told him that I thought at this point any such maneuver, no matter how positive, would be interpreted as a PR stunt and greeted with skepticism. It would also set expectations that the government might be hard-pressed to continue meeting. This doesn’t mean that I personally wouldn’t welcome such a move, just that it wouldn’t be the magic bullet to solve China’s PR problems.

I don’t think there is a single magic bullet. What I suggested instead was that China not to do one big thing, but to do a thousand little things that would change the tone of communication, defuse some of the current tension and provide better armor for deflecting criticism constructively. Some of these things could directly address criticisms already raised against China by audiences overseas, some could be simple improvements in communication process and content.

So, for example, I’d like to see: A lighter finger on the CNN and Internet censorship buttons (I was glad to see the BBC’s website unblocked — we’ll see if it lasts); less readiness to prosecute dissenters (they should have dropped the charges against Hu Jia last week rather than sentence him, and treated it like no big deal); less blinkering and a less bellicose tone in the Chinese English language media; even greater openness for foreign correspondents and better adherence to the current policy; and so on.

Granted some of the steps listed above are unlikely to be taken any time soon, but even simple improvements in BOCOG’s ongoing PR would help. I’ve asked several foreign correspondents about how BOCOG is doing and I’ve yet to hear a good word. This is apparently not the fault of their widely respected PR agency (gossip has it that they’ve been told their job is to take orders, not to tell BOCOG what to do), but simply Chinese bureaucracy doing what it doesn’t do best.

But that’s a real problem. If you can’t successfully tell the good stories you have, you’re certainly going to have a hard time countering the bad press. Some good steps for BOCOG and other government bureaucracies with foreign press responsibilities would be increased responsiveness to media queries, better spokespeople (more athletes!) and some
effort to humanize a Beijing Olympics for which the current icon is a
magnificent but cold steel-shrouded stadium.

A single set-piece will come and go, but small, ongoing steps could cumulatively help change the tone of communication around the Olympics. Even a little shift would be helpful. The current environment is one of confrontation and defensiveness, and the story thatis taking up column-inches is how well prepared Beijing is to manage the dissent that will inevitably accompany the Games. That’s hardly the best basis for a glorious August.

None of this would overcome the attention that is being paid to Tibet
right now, and much of it is unlikely to happen. But I can dream.

Outside of Young Frankenstein
there isn’t really any such thing as a “good time” for rioting, but
this might be an especially bad time for China to have a bout of
punishing ethnic unrest. It hasn’t really been a banner start to the
Olympic year so far, what with the worst storms anyone can remember,
the Darfur activists on a tear, the bizarre Uighur terrorism story, and now this. Commentators are already linking this episode to China’s Olympic fortunes (see also the LA Times, Time, Asia Sentinel and Newsweek), and the French foreign minister has already been spotted talking about a partial boycott. Even Wen Jiabao has suggested that the riots were calculated to damage the games.

Things
seem to have quietened down in the last couple of days, although that may simply be because reporting has been stifled. Certainly the
flow of news has dwindled a bit, and many publications have shifted
into context and analysis mode.
But we can probably expect bits and pieces of information to dribble
out over the next few weeks, as refugees leave Tibet and a few intrepid
journalists break the cone of silence that that the Chinese government
has dropped over the troubled areas. In the past few days many of our
favorite local correspondents have made a run for the Tibet border, but
blog posts, such as from Tim Johnson and Richard Spencer (and again here), suggest it’s tricky getting any reporting done.

The
Foreign Correspondents Club of China has already petitioned the
government for better access to the affected areas and circulated a
list of incidents in which journalists and camera crews have been
detained or hassled by the authorities. It would seem that Olympic
pledges of greater openness were tested in the breach and found wanting. This, I
suppose, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Old instincts die hard. The Chinese government has also reverted to its common tactic of belittling foreign coverage as intentionally biased. If this happens during the Olympics then, to borrow a line from Gerry Anderson, stand by for action.

Over the past few days,
China’s communication strategy with regard to the Tibet riots has become
clear. It has consisted roughly of the following:

• Ban all international access so that Chinese media can monopolize images and on-site reporting
• Cinch down on the Internet (here too) and international news sources so that messaging to domestic audiences can be tightly controlled
• Demonize the Dalai Lama as the black hand behind the rioting in
  throwback, Cultural Revolution language, and drive the point home with images of
  rioting monks

These three are all true to type. But then it gets more interesting:

• Harness as many Tibetan voices as possible in condemnation of the riots (more here)
• Emphasize brutal Tibetan attacks on Han people (and a Western perspective)
  
• Give Chinese Internet users free reign to vent their rage at ungrateful Tibetans who have bitten the hand that is lifting them into development (see also this AFP story quoting Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn and citing Mutant Palm’s work translating Chinese tweets, and John Kennedy’s Chinese Internet roundup at Global Voices)

For a good overview of the Chinese approach to all of this, see Mark Magnier’s interesting article on China’s PR efforts around the Tibet riots. It includes this damning quote from Chinese blogger and journalist Michael Anti:

“The [Chinese] government is showing more confidence and learning more about
spin,” said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman
fellowship this year at Harvard. “They’ve learned more PR tactics from
Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do
it.”

In some ways China’s strategy has been effective. They’ve certainly
done a good job back-footing the Dalai Lama, who made the mistake of
not condemning the violence forcefully and immediately. Domestically it’s been gangbusters as usual. But the Chinese
government shouldn’t be too proud of itself yet, because there remains one substantial problem: China has invested so much in its narrative of Tibetan development and growth that it is reluctant take any actions that undermine this story. This prevents them from communicating internationally in a way that foreign audiences will be receptive to, and it stores up serious ethnic problems for the future.

China’s prevailing narrative about Tibet is that
China liberated it from feudal brutality and gave it all the wonders of
development. The great mass of Tibetan people understands this and is duly grateful. This narrative has been thoroughly sold domestically, but it has
never been widely accepted in the West.

While there are elements of truth to China’s version, China’s ability to sell it internationally has always been hampered by the
government’s time-honed credibility gap with western audiences.
This is exacerbated by the difficulty of getting independent points of
view. Reporting from Tibet was heavily controlled even before the
riots. Furthermore, International opinion is subject to an effective
PR campaign run by Tibetan exile groups and the charismatic Dalai Lama. It’s safe to say that
International audiences will never be entirely convinced by a Chinese state narrative
that doesn’t even allow for the possibility that there might be
genuine discontent in Tibet. China is much better at dictating ideas to a captive audience than at selling them to an open one.

Historically, it hasn’t really mattered to China’s government
what International audiences think about Chinese domestic issues. But
2007 was the year in which China discovered the importance of
International stakeholders. This began with the product quality
crisis that erupted last summer, and it has gained strength over
the Olympics in the past few months. The reality is that a global,
economically integrated China that has invested hugely in hosting the world’s biggest sporting event is
vulnerable to foreign public opinion. That’s why it stung so much when Steven Spielberg (who must be feeling pretty good about this right about now) withdrew from official participation in the Olympics. If it hadn’t stung, you’d have seen a lot less indignant Chinese press coverage about it.

If foreign stakeholders can boycott
your products, screw up your outbound investment or trash the most
glamorous event you’ve ever hosted, you need to develop some PR game.
Unfortunately the mechanisms that have served China’s government so well over the
years, a combination of explicit control over domestic media and
pervasive state propaganda, don’t translate well to International
audiences, and it has yet to learn a new approach. The need to defend the national narrative at all costs means that foreign media have to be kept away from Tibet, lest they reveal the cracks in the edifice. Heaven forbid that those inconsistencies make their way back to domestic audiences and undermine the national myth of Tibetan success and perhaps even government legitimacy. Tibetan integration –or suppression depending on your point of view– is part of Hu Jintao’s personal legacy as former Tibetan party chief and author of the crackdown on the 1989 demonstration. Unfortunately, nothing says, “We have terrible things to hide” to a foreign audience like detained or harassed journalists.

China’s growing international exposure aside, it must be tempting to wave away international concern as interference in China’s internal affairs. Unfortunately, another problem with defending the myth at all costs is that this approach seems calculated to inflame
ethnic tensions rather than dispel them. Coverage of the riots suggests
that much of the violence was Tibetans taking out their frustrations on
Han who simply had the bad luck to be in Lhasa. That’s a shame, and the Chinese authorities are justified in seeking out and punishing those who have committed crimes against people and property. But the
job of government is to ameliorate ethnic tensions within the country, not
exacerbate them. Xinhua’s heavily spun coverage of the disturbances seems calculated to stoke outrage among the Han majority, and the Internet comment
that has been allowed to stand echoes with that outrage, if not universally at least widely. Much of the Han comment reflects common colonial sentiment toward natives: Tibetans are lazy, ungrateful, intractable. Worrying signs for a country that disavows any colonial inclinations and preaches integration.

This is where the “cost” element of maintaining the myth at all costs really becomes clear. If the national narrative leaves no room for entertaining the notion that regular Tibetans might have legitimate grievances, then there is no hope of recourse for Tibetans and no alternative for non-Tibetan Chinese but to see the unrest as pure betrayal and thuggery. It becomes impossible to even acknowledge underlying problems in any constructive way. All that is left is ruthless crackdown and an ever-widening gulf between the two peoples.

Unfortunately, the more the Han majority sees
Tibetans as ungrateful, violent dupes in the thrall of a sinister Dalai Lama, the harder any kind of real reconciliation will be. Mutual suspicion, hatred and racism-without-end loom. One
wonders what will happen if Dalai Lama dies and
there is still unrest in Tibet. Who will they blame then? There is a harder-line coterie of Tibetan exile leaders waiting in the wings, but none of them will fill the role of China’s “Goldstein” as well as the Dalai Lama does.

The best thing China can hope for now is that things stay quiet and the episode fades from view over the next few weeks. But that isn’t a long-term solution. In the end the situation is a tragedy not just because it was
violent and ugly, but because it was a wasted opportunity. China could
have introduced some transparency, allowed foreign reporters in, and
started earning itself greater international credibility at a time when it desperately needs it. China could
also have used this as an opportunity to move beyond its propagandistic approach to the problem of Tibetan integration, and to kindle a real national
discussion on how to address the concerns of Tibetans in a way that might make integration a reality rather than a propaganda slogan. Done correctly, this need not have looked like succumbing to foreign pressure.

But that’s
not how things are done here. That’s a shame, because no matter what
wishful thinkers overseas want, Tibet will be a part of China
for the foreseeable future. That will lead to continued problems. And as everyone knows, its hard to solve problems if you can’t admit to them.

Horseman of the apocalypse (via CNN)

See also:

• ESWN’s roundup of coverage and blogs, which gets into some of the rumor-mongering and conspiracy theories floating around
• Via ESWN, China Matters on the conflict (B) between the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Youth Congress president Tsewang Rigzin
• Pallavi Aiyar’s Asia Times Online article comparing the climates for dissent in China and India
• China Media Project: Harsh words for Tibetans, a harmonious front for the Hans
• Black and White Cat: Ethnic harmony - or not