Here in Beijing where I’m currently visiting, the propaganda posters were taken down long ago. There’s less government advertising in the ether than there is in Australia (not that that says much). But the propaganda machine of the Chinese government lives on, and I’m squarely in the target sights. The only English-language channel broadcast in China, the China Central Television English service, CCTV-9 edges out Fox News as the most ridiculously biased “news” channel on Earth - though Fox News is at least entertaining. The mellifluous tones of Edwin Maher, formerly a long-serving ABC Melbourne weather presenter famous for his pointer collection, introduce the lamest puff pieces imaginable.
Every bulletin leads with a short piece about China’s leaders getting feted by some foreign dignitary. APEC, of course, has given all manner of opportunities for such, with leaders from Michael Jeffery (yep, our nonentity of a Governor-General), through John Howard, to Shinzo Abe getting a run. Every meeting is to lead to more harmonious relations, peace, and sustainable development. No word of criticism of foreign leaders passes the lips of the CCTV9 crew; everybody else is working to deepening China-Less Important Country ties, they’re all doing a bang-up job about it, and only the official line is run. It’s the electronic version of the Palace of Endless Tranquility in CCTV9-land. Then there will be a tepid rundown of politically uncontroversial bits of foreign news -Pavarotti’s death, an earthquake in Pakistan, and so on, presented in soporific style. Then there’s a story about children or animals, often pandas being shipped to some foreign location.
So my ears pricked up when I got home, flipped on the TV and caught a story on the Sydney Declaration, the climate change agreement from APEC (ABC story here if you need context). In between the frippery, the presenter described the declaration as, and I quote: “a very modest goal on energy efficiency”. By CCTV-9 standards, that’s thundering criticism. The subsequent panel discussion program - which is similarly soporific - was also on APEC. The second question the journalist put to the panel of academics was along the lines of “The environmental movement says that the Sydney Declaration is inadequate. Our introductory piece describes it as a “very modest goal”. What do you think?”
If CCTV-9 is prepared to bag something in public, it’s got to be pretty woeful.
You seem surprised by CCTV-9. Funny thing is that some of the people who work for it are who I’ve met are as sharp as tacks. They know it’s rubbish, but a career is a career. CCTV-9 is of course smooth and mild compared to the Chinese-language services of CCTV. The reporting of Taiwan is the most bizarre and (almost) funny.
Then again, reporting of China by foreign news organizations can be pretty weird.
CCTV-9 were critical of the Iraq war back in 2003.
That is all pretty sad, especially as it was president Hu who put the brakes on Howards grand environmental plan, by saying that only the UN can make meaningful resolutions on GW.
Sometimes you just have to wear the criticism.
We do have a very modest government, a modest arrangement surrounding our head of state (though Jeffrey himself is a substantial person in himself). Everyone involved in the Declaration and in the governments that hosted it (including the NSW State Government) have a lot to be modest about.
CCTV = is only any good as an insomnia cure.
MH, the fact that it runs the Chinese government line is unsurprising. What is surprising is that it’s so amateurish.
If whomever was in charge realized that propaganda is more effective if people are prepared to watch it, they might have more luck.
It is the English language service Robert. Most of the Chinese who watch it would be doing so to bone up on their English language skills, I would suspect. All the others have CCTV1
Are you talking about Dialogue, Robert? I found it absolutely unbearable. Some Chinese professor on foreign affairs plus a fourth-rate North American academic pretending the KMT is the government of Taiwan and earnestly staging a ‘debate’ in which there could only ever be one side.
It’s funny in one respect but I felt sick whenever I saw it. Propaganda in China may have moved off posters, but it’s gotten a whole lot creepier.
The only English-language channel broadcast in China, the China Central Television English service…
Wow. Not even Discovery or National Geographic or HBO?
GregM: clearly, CCTV-1 is mainly aimed at foreigners, both inside and outside China, pretty much all of whom have access to alternative media.
DM: yes, I was talking about Dialogue. I’ve seen it a few times, and once or twice they have real guests on (Hans Blix, for instance), but the typical scenario is the one you describe. If they were honest they’d rename it Monologue.
But I don’t find it that creepy, because it’s so transparently propaganda-ish, and so awful that nobody’s going to take it seriously. It’s when they start producing something a bit slicker that we’ll have to start worrying.
Down and out: as far as I know, those channels are only available in international hotels. I’m staying in a flat for academic guests attached to a university. Doesn’t matter, I’ve got two series of The West Wing (copied from my own DVDs) on my laptop, as well as some books.
Robert, the impression I got of CCTV1 was that it was incredibly bland although its student debates for its English Language students from its major universities unveiled some awesome language skills. It was fun to guess where the students’ teachers came from as you could often pick up a hint of Oz or UnZud or one of the UK or US accents in their immaculate diction.
Perhaps its propaganda purpose with foreigners is to present China as bland and safe and boring and as not a threat to anyone. That is after all the message their masters are trying to convey to the rest of the world, except Japan from time to time.
Now if only that Chinese football commentator who covered himself in glory during the Australia-Italy game at last year’s World Cup spoke English. He’d certainly liven up their sports coverage. (Best, though, not to make the comments he made when the Australian prime minister is visiting the country- a bit of a loss of face there).
I think this is an underestimate of both the effectiveness of the current media in China and also its current slickness. Indeed, it underestimates the effect of media generally. ACA and TT are tortuously bad, but they reproduce a political agenda powerfully and relentlessly. In the China context, my stark lesson was when I showed a class here the famous image of the man in front of the tank in 1989. There were two young Chinese students in the group and of course they had never even seen the image, let alone knew what it was.
Now if only that Chinese football commentator who covered himself in glory during the Australia-Italy game at last year’s World Cup spoke English.
I missed that. Did he get into the Italians for diving like an Alpha-class submarine, or was it the Aussies for not being able to follow through on their passing?
He expressed in very vivid and excited terms his admiration of the Italian team and his dislike of the Australian team. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Jianxiang#The_World_Cup_Commentary_2006_Incident
Anyone who admired anything about the bunch of pansies who made up the Italian team has got a cognitive problem. (er.. perhaps the Italian boys wore a perfume worth admiring)
MH: I’m not doubting the effectiveness of censorship in preventing Chinese from hearing about the world (and more importantly, perhaps, shitty things happening in their own country). I’m just rather doubtful that Chinese propaganda aimed at foreigners is any more effective than when they were putting out earnest publications about the improved grain harvesting tecniques implemented in the five-year-plan.
GregM’s point is a reasonable one, but the bizarre omissions serve more than anything to remind people that China is not a free or democratic country. At least, that’s what I get out of it…
I forgot to mention the worst of it, Down and Out. He compared us to New Zealand!
Thanks for filling me in on that kiwihater, GregM.
On the efficacy of Chinese PR - it’s pretty lousy to be honest. It’s not just that they get themselves into a petulant frenzy when one mentions Taiwan or the Dalai Lama. It’s that they then start using the word “splittist”, which I believe is not in any standard English dictionary. It looks like half-baked piece of Party jargon, and it grates.
Robert:
ä½ å¥½
Is your chinese up to giving us a headsup on what Kev (陆克文 ? ) was saying to China in the interview at
http://www.phoenixtv.com/phoenixtv/74312709583142912/20050131/497345.shtml
?
How does
阮次山：如果很快的，工党能够执政的�？
陆克文：按照上�。
translate?
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Ha, it’s not the Chinese media who you should be listening to! With a media mastery which would shame Alistair Campbell, the Chinese government has learned to outsource its propaganda to Western media and governments. They happily report and marvel and gush about the “New China”, the transforming China, the billion consumers, the China where we don’t see Communism anymore, all that gumpf without the Party having to do it themselves. It’s so much more effective that way!
Actually, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve written a couple of things on this:
Here:
http://www.chinamediaresearch.net/vol3no1/Article_3_Mark_Harrison.pdf
and here:
http://mharrison.wordpress.com/2005/10/15/zhang-yimous-hero-and-the-globalization-of-propaganda/
By Google’s “translation”:
Tzu (Anthony Yuen): If soon, the Labor Party to power to do so?
Lu Ke-wen: In accordance with God.
And does “Lu Ke-wen” have any meaning, or is it just an approximate phonetic transliteration?
I don’t know, Danny. The autotranslator supplies it. I assume the sound of the ideographs sounds like that.
Unfortunately, I don’t speak any Chinese, but if you want I could ask one of my friends to translate.
Robert Merkel and Danny:
“Lu Ke-wen” sounds like a reasonable transliteration of his name [surname comes first]; very much better than some of the shockers inflicted on unsuspecting, poor dumb Aussie businessmen and dignitaries.
Wonder what his real Chinese name is; the one he uses himself; the one he has engraved on his own chop?
b.t.w. the CCTV network and a lot of the Provincial stations aren’t too bad when you look at what is on offer in Australia thee days.
Graham: I’m thinking “陆克文” is his Chinese name, if his Chinese Wikipedia article is anything to go by. Or would Kevin have another name in reserve?
DownAndOutInSaiGon:
. My 186 computer running 1977 casement-Windows can’t quite handle Chinese characters [traditional, simplified or even pre-QinShiHuangDi oracle-bone ones].
Beautiful arrangement of squares there
Given the circles he moved in, he probably has a common name for everyday use, such as in news items or official documents, and then he might have a more formal name, with subtle meaning, roughly equivalent to our nom-de-plume. I believe the Vietnamese elite have much the same sort of custom or fashion.
Given the circles he moved in, he probably has a common name for everyday use, such as in news items or official documents, and then he might have a more formal name, with subtle meaning, roughly equivalent to our nom-de-plume. I believe the Vietnamese elite have much the same sort of custom or fashion.
I don’t know, Graham; I haven’t heard of it. As far as I know, the head honchos in Hanoi use the same names officially and formally. A few Vietnamese have had pseudonyms over the years, of which the most famous would be “Ho Chi Minh”. But this usage was inspired by Communist contemporaries like “Lenin”.
Still, I’ll have to ask my wife. There’s a lot of I don’t know about the country.
from an online chinese dictionary, we have
陆 lu4 (surname) / shore / land / continent
å…‹ke4 gram / subdue / to restrain / to overcome
æ–‡wen2 language / culture / writing / formal / literary / gentle
There’s a cautionary tale about making the foreign devil mistake of thinking of Chinese as a modular language, the cliche being “crisis å?±æ©Ÿ= danger å?±+ opportunityæ©Ÿ”. (it’d be like working out potatatoes = pot-a-toes, meaning of dropping a saucepon on your foot),
Nonetheless it’s fun to do, and in fact it does happen in the living language as puns, and poetry and wordplay, so what can we get out of above single character transliterations for Kev’s chinese name?
Wins the nation with nerdiness? Yep, he could go with that, methinks.
On the wall of his inner electoral office he has, or at least had, a big character banner, perhaps it’s his chinese name, as above. Next time anyone’s in there, check it out, ask him. There’s a framed picture of Gough too, of course.
BTW, the same written character, different pronunciation (liu4) is apparently an accountng term, a way of writing six that is fraud-proof. I guess that’s the equivalent of the concept of preventing someone adding an extra zero.
On the wall of his inner electoral office he has, or at least had, a big character banner, perhaps it’s his chinese name, as above. Next time anyone’s in there, check it out, ask him.
I’ll ask him by email; he’s my MP, after all. I’ll might even get a personal reply - it sounds like the sort of geekery that Rudd would really get off on.
SaiGon: I’m in his electorate too, we should get our heads together about how to set up a local Electoral Lobby, whereby we get enough members to swing the next elections in our seats, thus hold both the premier and the prime minister to ransom for their jobs.
Danny:
The anti-fraud/banknote/ornamental-numeral characters are in a sub-class of their own [and every foreigner in China would do well to learn how to read them]. The “Lu” for Rudd’s surname is a reasonably common Chinese surname and it comes from the word “land” [as opposed to ’sea’].
DownAndOutInSaiGon and Danny:
[I’m a long way from your electorate but can I join in the fun too? My own electorate is too bland]. A set of well-written characters on an office wall is most likely a proverb, a line of poetry or somesuch. However, if it is a banner as such, possibly a souvenir of an event, then it may have his name somewhere in it - though it is more likely to say something like “We warmly welcome the 94th kangaroo-herders delegation” [Wo-men relie huanying dijiushisi daishu-mumin daibiaotuan].
Robert Merkel:
Just idle curiosity - what are you up to in Beijing?
Developing linkages between our two countries in the field of advanced productive forces in order to strengthen the relationship of peace and harmony our leaders have established….
Seriously, I’m here to visit the Chinese Academy of Sciences to collaborate on some research into how to find bugs in computer software. The complicating factor we’re working on is the “oracle problem” - traditionally, when you test computer software you assume the existence of an “oracle” who can tell you whether the results are what you want or not. However, sometimes you don’t know what the software is supposed to do in the first place (for instance, software to model the Earth’s climate).
The trick is to consider the relationship between the outputs when you run it with different inputs. For instance, with a climate model, if you increase the level of solar radiation coming in, and the model tells you that the world’s climate gets cooler overall, you suspect a problem with your model.
I’m not actually working on anything as cool as a climate modeller, but that should serve to illustrate the basic concept.
Robert Merkel:
Sounds like [a] a ton of fun, or [b] an excellent way of getting grey hair a decade earlier than expected.
No doubt you are having a busy and enlightening time with your Chinese interlocutors …. wonder what they [especially those who have been Overseas Students] think of foreign TV?
[b.t.w. What’s your nearest Ring Road? they were still working on the 4th when I was there]
How about (c) all of the above?
The students I’m working with are all relatively young and haven’t travelled overseas. I’ve tried to avoid heavy political discussions at this stage, because I barely know them, but they spontaneously started grizzling about the hukou system, and were impressed to know that you can live anywhere you want in Australia.
Robert Merkel:
Yeah, nothing changes much. There are ways of getting around it if you’ve got the right connections or if you are cheeky enough. You can pacify your students by telling them that in Australia, determination of place of residence is done by the private sector, not the government one: banks and building societies do it by their arcane unfathomable lending practices; real estate agents do it by their discriminatory renting …. the outcomes tend to be similar for some.
Oh, and yes, I’m on the 4th ring road.
Robert:
Could you nip down to
7/F,Science&Trade Mansion,Shangdi Haidian District,Beijing
tel: (86)010-62977749
and find out how much a copy of the server software at
http://www.iactive.com.cn/EN1025/Meeting.htm
is?
It looks to me just the thing for “Developing linkages between our two countries in the field of advanced productive forces in order to strengthen the relationship of peace and harmony our leaders have established….” given we are pretty much in the same timezone, and therefore well-placed to exploit competitive advantage (cf the rest of the Occident ) in delivering realtime interactive internet-mediated multimedia-rich services, such as , oh I dunno, education.
How do you say “the west in the south” in putonghua?
Danny:
Dunno. How about “nan banqiude Xi Fang”?
Danny: about the Electoral Lobby thing - give me an email towards downandoutofsaigon at gmail d0t com.