China has a sense of humor, and it is used there – especially in the escalating battle of ideas with America. And here’s an example: key (once) U.S. publications, including Time Magazine, for example, Beijing has declared state media. Well, not quite so – “agencies controlled” by Washington.
And all this with the consequences of the type of withdrawal of accreditation from journalists or a census of the property of these media in China.
It’s a great story that leads us to think about what the media are in our world in general, what their relations with states, their own and anyone else, can or should be.
It was not Beijing that started the scandal, it was just a response. The fact is that at the beginning of the month, the U.S. authorities recorded Xinhua News Agency, state-run radio and television in publications “controlled” by the Chinese government and asked them to reduce their presence in the country from 160 to 100 people. With a census of property.
But this is really the state media, right? Yes, it is. But the American wording was: “agencies controlled” by the Chinese authorities. Which the latter used very effectively in response.
Behind this ingenious exchange of language are several ideological doctrines that the US is trying to inspire the world. And China, as well as Russia and many others before that, are looking at these doctrines, at least in amazement, and especially at what happens when they are applied in practice.
For example, in America and Western civilization in general, the idea that the media should not be state-controlled at all is being actively promoted around the world. It is a separate branch of government, or rather of civil society, which should not be influenced by the government; moreover, it should be influenced and controlled by the government itself.
Another idea is that a single journalist is a sovereign bearer of truth and whoever hires him or her should not depend on it. And in our current Beijing scandal, the American side explains that Beijing is not denying accreditation to some “representatives” of the New York Times and others, but to independent sovereign individuals who are under contract with the owners.
It is not difficult to see that the first idea contradicts the second one: if a journalist is sovereign, then what difference does it make who his employer is, even if he is a state. But that’s not even the point. It’s easier than that. China is tired of purposeful and well-organized lies about itself, and it already generally does not care who is under whose influence – American journalists under the government, or vice versa. Or which ideology is right – probably the one with less lies.
China’s experience of the last three or four years is as follows. American journalists who worked in this country (and are now being expelled) suddenly unanimously began to build a picture of a totalitarian state doing terrible things. In Xinjiang, schools for the rehabilitation of young jihadists turned out to be “concentration camps”. In the country as a whole, there was “forced labor” of prisoners and others. In Hong Kong, young belligerents turned out to be pro-democracy fighters. And what about the moralizing comments about quarantine in Italy (the country is praised for having “risked its economy in an attempt to contain the worst outbreak of coronavirus in Europe”) and China (whose quarantine “cost people’s lives and personal freedoms”)? The thing is, quarantine measures are the same, the Italians followed exactly the Chinese example.
At first, the Chinese authorities were patiently dealing with each case, and it was invariably found that the basis of the next press exposés were crude forgeries. But the readers of the same “independent” journalists were for some reason not informed about them, or it was done shamefully and imperceptibly.
Needless to say, Russia has experienced (in the sense that it has already ceased to react) exactly the same thing. By the way, America itself and its allies are going through the same thing: suffice it to see how any figures, starting with Donald Trump, are simply mocked there on a daily basis if they do not belong to the Democratic Party or its clones from Europe and so on. In general, there is something wrong with journalism in general, and it is long and boring to know who is under whose influence.
In Chinese media, one can find moral teachings like this: foreign journalists should “play a positive role in promoting understanding between China and the world. Even so, it is clear why there is a special branch of journalism that is international: it is for people to understand each other, i.e. to see the real picture of what is happening beyond their borders.
But these accusations are not the most effective thing. But what works well is, as already said, humor, including Chinese. Our readers are familiar with the story of how Beijing tried to make the world stop calling the virus “Wuhan” and “Chinese”, including training Donald Trump. And the funny thing is how exactly Chinese thinkers started doing it: they say that giving the virus nationality is racism.
A normal person, far from the incandescent ideological atmosphere in Western communities, is able to afford in any such cases to say: maybe it’s racism, maybe it’s not – I’m not interested, leave me alone. But it’s not like that in the United States. There, the rules of the game are that the winner is the one who first accuses someone else of that racism, and the accused must immediately start repenting.