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Chinese media: Whom are they
kidding?
By Li Yongyan
BEIJING - Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi
information minister, did not appear to be bothered by
lies. In fact, he lived and breathed them, right up
until the last day before Baghdad fell to coalition
forces. He was best known for his bravado in telling
international journalists such nonsense as "We went into
the airport and crushed the enemies. We cleaned the
whole place out. They were slaughtered," and "The
Americans have started to commit suicide under the walls
of Baghdad. We will encourage them to commit more
suicides quickly." While it is easy to dismiss him as
the joker in a deck of cards, some people may have a
hard time understanding how someone is capable of
denying ironclad facts and at the same time fabricating
blatant, downright stupid lies.
To people
familiar with totalitarianism, however, the above
utterings fail in ingenuity and pale in comparison.
In 1900, a rag-tag band of misfits who called
themselves the Fists of Righteous Harmony, aka Boxers,
took up knives and massacred thousands of Christian
converts in addition to a few foreign missionaries and
diplomats in northern China. When the Qing Imperial
Court, instead of suppressing this rebellion,
participated in the siege against foreign legations,
foreign powers began marching a coalition force toward
Beijing. The Boxers, believing the invaders were not
human beings but devils incarnate, prepared pails of dog
blood and human excrement that they hoped could defeat
the "black art". When this tactic failed to stop the
coalition advance, the Court ordered everyone in Beijing
not to light a candle nor wash his face, because "Three
days without a light, the foreign devils will take
flight. Leave our faces unwashed, and the devils will be
squashed." Of course, the 20,000-strong invading army
squashed any semblance of resistance and forced the
empress to execute a number of officials who did the
Court a great disservice by aiding and abetting the
unwashed rebels.
Fast-forward 100 years. The
face has yet to see a towel. And filth remains a
favorite weapon among the pundits, Chinese style.
A Tianjin newspaper asked its readers to ponder
this question: "Why are 42 percent of American people
indifferent to the Columbia tragedy?" In this report
that could have come straight from George Orwell's
Nineteen Eight-Four, a Xinhua News Agency
correspondent in Washington was quoted as saying that a
CNN/USA Today opinion poll showed that 58 percent of the
people surveyed said they were deeply upset by the loss
of seven astronauts. Hence the subject conclusion.
However, if anybody bothers to check the original results, he will that find the
article was an outrage beyond belief: of the people
surveyed, 58 percent were "deeply upset", 36 percent
"somewhat upset", 1 percent "not very upset", 3 percent
"not upset at all", and 2 percent offered no opinion.
That means 95 percent of the people polled were
upset to different degrees while only 3 percent were
indeed indifferent.
Another article in a
Shanghai-based paper would have us believe that the
United States went to war in Iraq because Washington
wished to destroy the euro, supposedly its second such
attempt to do so. It neglected to add that the first
attempt - the Kosovo war - was initiated by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), all of whose member
states but two are European.
Still better, the US failed to
capture a camel-riding Osama bin Laden despite its vast
array of sophisticated war machinery, mocked one pundit
on Chinese TV, while another theorized in an article
that the terror kingpin is still at large because the US
deliberately has it that way, so that its troops can be
stationed in Central Asia, completing a strategic
encirclement of China.
In fairness, it has to be
said that the Chinese media were not alone in spreading
these conspiracy theories. But what they have in common,
according to the implied Chinese spin, is that
Washington is hell-bent on first destroying China and
then going on to dominate the world. Therefore, there is
a Washington-hatched evil plot under every rock.
The US intervened in Somalia's ethnic massacres
"for the sake of pillaging African diamond mines", but
did not go into Rwanda "because there is no oil to take
from Africa". Logic and coherence are not things to
worry about. Chinese scholars demanded of a US under
secretary of state who was a guest speaker at a
conference, "Why are you adopting double standards on
human rights?" When the man replied that his government
was standing by only one set of standards, that is,
those in the United Nations charters and conventions, a
follow-up question was immediately put to him: "But
different nations have different circumstances and
cultures, so why are you preaching one uniform
standard?" Likewise, Standard and Poor's rating reports
are dismissed as biased and provocative if Chinese banks
receive a low grade. But the same agency is loudly
trumpeted when a favorable rating is given to Chinese
telecom firms angling for a listing in the overseas
stock exchanges.
There you have the picture,
full of blatant lies and hare-brained conspiracy
theories that invariably denigrate the US. While they
may not have been spun out of a central government
budget, they were apparently encouraged to fuel
nationalistic fervor. Totalitarianism is propped up by
two things: force and lies. It works like this: "We know
you don't believe, but we make sure you don't voice your
dissent. So we can keep spinning out 'Newspeak'. And we
are under no pressure whatsoever to explain or account
for anything that we say."
So in the end, the
self-serving rhetoric becomes self-indulging, and
self-deluding. The Iraqi information minister was
serving the daily portion of lies more for his boss than
for the international TV viewers because Saddam wanted
to believe that invaders were committing suicide at his
feet. Apart from this special group of consumers,
everybody else under the system becomes an opportunist,
accepting lies as a part of life like water and air.
For, as a natural byproduct, totalitarianism spawns
cynicism, which threatens to become a national pastime.
The toll on the collective credibility is
enormous, and sad. The same horde of students who threw
ink and stones at the US Embassy in Beijing in the wake
of US bombing of the Chinese mission in Belgrade flocked
back the next week to queue for visa applications. The
brave girl form Peking University who questioned the
visiting US president why he was meddling in China's
"internal affairs" when New York police "beat people up
at will" ended up marrying, of all nationalities, a US
citizen and emigrating to the land of police brutality.
The only sure thing about all this propaganda
and cynicism is that since these nasty habits die hard,
they always die the hard way. From Goebbels to
al-Sahhaf, it runs in the family. Other smaller fries
are but a bad joke.
Li Yongyan is an
analyst of Chinese business.
(©2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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