China’s Communist Party and Its American Media Enablers
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intpolicydigest.org
Long name: International Policy Digest
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Founder: John Lyman
Founded in: 2011
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It's astonishing to hear Chinese citizens' opinion of their government, even those who have emigrated elsewhere. The look of shock and disbelief when you relate commonly known events of the last 10 years is sad and underscores the power of propaganda.
As an American living abroad, I take offense, if in a very minor sense, when people criticize the US. Doubly so since a lot of the foreign critics have no idea wtf they're talking about.
If I'm a Chinese guy in Vancouver I'm not going to be crazy about the CCP... but also not crazy about a bunch of round-eyes spouting off.
I'm not going to paint a rosy picture of China, but the view you get in most Western media is extremely heavily distorted, and almost completely out-of-touch with what is actually going on in China, what most people in China care about, and so on.
I actually avoid mainstream Western media for news on China, as it frequently bends the truth in their favor, or fails to cover significant human rights abuses.
The news I get (that matters to me) is more from groups with boots on the ground in mainland China.
The one thing from the article I'd agree with is bad is Bloomberg interferring with the journalists reporting at his own company. There should be a strict line between Bloombergs other business interests and the editorial at the newspaper.
Otherwise I think there's a lot of confusion in the article between the conflation of the private market changing products to be popular in China, which is fine and simply reflects their status as a consumer, and actual propaganda efforts.
I think this is where a lot of people would disagree. Once companies give in to demands of censorship or anything that goes against our Western values, you're basically letting China know that they can get away with it. And to me, that's directly enabling their behaviour.
On the other side, if you don't give in to their demands, you're essentially missing out on a huge market, so most companies pick money over morals.
There's a difference between changing products to be popular in China, and censoring words to be allowed to operate in China. Sadly for a lot of companies, one cannot go without the other.
Look at what happened to the NBA, they didn't give in to China's demands, and just like that, they're out. The same goes for any company that's not willing to give up it's morals and values.
That's not competition, that's just extortion.
I, personally, have a problem with this.
It's part of the reason why Hollywood movies have devolved into such pablum--you can't risk pissing of China now that 1/2 of your income is due to the Chinese release.
I no longer consider doing business with China to be "neutral". China doesn't regard it this way either--China is more than happy to throw it's weight around against American businesses--see Blizzard.
So we should treat them reciprocally. It's time to disconnect from China.
You also could never afford to piss America off, which is why every other protagonist in hollywood movies is some Tom Cruise lookalike who combats people who speak English in a broken Russian accent.
Just seems normal to me, the only difference is that the other 95% of the world population now have enough cash to vote with their wallets and American companies learn what it's like to operate in a world where different cultures have different values.
Sure you can disconnect from everyone, but that doesn't sound wise long term, in particular not for Hollywood.
This is different tho. You can produce a movie that pisses off people, and still have it play in theatres.
If you make a movie that pisses of the Chinese government, not necessarily the people, then that movie won't even be shown in China.
Anyway, I think many countries would want to do the same as China but they just don't have the leverage to do so.
But that's the point. It's the reason Saudi Arabia doesn't count. It only matters if they're doing it and are a large enough market to affect the international market. Nobody's changing their movies to capture the 0.4% of the world population that lives in Saudi Arabia.
This is not Chinese citizens "voting with their wallets", it's the Chinese dictatorship dictating what is allowed to be shown in the country. One unilateral vote.
The equivalent is the US government outright censoring and banning movies. It's hard to even imagine how such a thing would play out because it is so far fetched, yet we (well, at least you) accept it from China. Why?
because it's not my job to tell China how to run their country. This is mostly a distinction without a difference anyway because the Chinese would obviously not enjoy watching a lot of movies in which they're the bad guy and Captain America saves the day.
It's like if you make a movie that insults the Prophet Muhammad a lot of Muslims won't like it, and neither will a bunch of autocratic governments, but it doesn't really make much difference in practice. If one of said countries was on their way to become the world's largest economy that'd probably be reflected in film production over time.
The real issue here is that global consumption now more closely reflects the actual demographics of the globalised economy, which means if producers want to serve all those markets they'll have to be more sensitive to different audiences or regulations.
It's like French radio stations demanding that a quarter of all lyrics be in French. If that was a 20 trillion dollar economy you bet a lot of musicians would make more French songs
Are you sure they wouldn't enjoy it? You think people like living under oppressive regimes?
And speaking of not telling people how to run their countries; morality is relative? Imprisoning political enemies and subjugation of their families is ok?
Michael Moore's documentaries get shown in theatres as do others.
Such movies about Chinese bad actors wouldn't get even a single showing in China. And would probably get the director placed in jail.
You can slag on America for lots of things. This isn't one of them.
And, by the way, one of James Bond's enemies was effectively Rupert Murdoch (Tomorrow Never Dies). So, even English enemies appear in Hollywood films.
I remember doing a face-palm when I watched "Gravity." The whole conflict centers around a cascade of space-junk caused by Russia shooting it's own spy satellite. In the movie, the Chinese space station saves the day. In reality, China actually shot down it's own satellite, rendering it's orbit and adjacent orbits unusable for the foreseeable future. [3]
I'm all for international cooperation, but we have to engage with reality.
[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-disn...
[2] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-amer...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
It's intpolicydigest. What did you expect? What you don't know what intpolicydigest is? Yeah me either.
But the article is just the rehash of the same propaganda you see all over social media and "news" sites like foxnews, breitbart, etc.
That china has some pull in media due to its potential lucrative market isn't news. But the idea that they have enablers is laughable. If they had enablers, we wouldn't have had nonstop propaganda about ughyurs, organs, coronavirus, etc for months on end. Israel, Saudi Arabia and britain have enablers in our media. China is on the outside looking in. But I have a sneaking suspicions intpolicydigest isn't going to run hitpieces on israel or saudi arabia.
Speaking of enablers, I would love to see who the enablers of "intpolicydigest" are.
It’s a bit of a stretch to think that the show creators chose Kumail because he was Pakistani rather than Indian. He’s a talented comedian and, at the time, unknown. The showrunners were smart to pick him up.
The reality is that Wuhan has been open for business again for two months or so after China dealt swiftly and efficiently with the pandemic while the US was still in denial about having a crisis while at the same time experiencing the crippling effects on the economy. If you want to use the word incompetence in relation to this pandemic, there's no need to look beyond Washington.
This article is the Republican narrative that this thing that happened on their watch isn't their fault at all because evil foreigners tricked them. It's a blatant deflection of any form of responsibility.
Like most of the world, the US was getting all the signals that bad shit was going down late last year, early confirmations that it was going to be really bad in January, and the rest is just plain incompetent governance, opportunistic posturing by populist morons, wishful thinking, and a generally unprecedented level of ineptness throughout layers of government that Republicans have had no small part in helping to deconstruct in the last decades. If you want to point fingers, use a mirror.
People may disagree about how much power the government should exert over internal processes of the country, but protecting the country from evil foreigners is pretty much job 1 in most theories of governance.
The way China dealt with Wuhan was that of the most extreme surveillance state and restricting every fundamental human right there was. The state claimed private property for its own. Arguably the most draconian lockdown seen in the last century anywhere. No democratic country has that sort of power.
We now know, that Chinese authorities did all of the following:
1. Silenced the messenger, ie. the first doctors who came out with news of this virus
2. Lied to the WHO about human to human transmission
3. Deliberately delayed information about the full scope of the epidemic in their nation, for weeks, while international flights were still running.
No one here is arguing that Trump did not completely mismanage this situation. But the main culprit of this crisis was elsewhere. Trump was the idiot at the gates that let in the Trojan horse. China was the one that constructed it.
Can we stop pointing fingers and just take a break ffs? Everything China does the US does, sometimes with variations in degree but most often just with a different label (occasionally with different timelines, but it’s hard to take seriously the idea that US 70 years ago should just be off the hook while we roast China).
More to the point, you're engaging in whataboutism, and the fact that one group acted poorly a few generations ago does not excuse current behaviour by another group.
I don’t know if it’s whataboutism so much as recognizing that China is back to business and the US really isn’t, China published the genetic sequence and made substantial contributions to fighting the disease while the CDC was busy producing faulty test kits, and the US has been systematically undermining the global health system while trying to put blame on the WHO (actively forfeiting our influence there).
I don’t think it makes sense to shit on China for doing a better job than the US at taking care of it’s people (except minorities, but the US isn’t exactly a model there either).
Just to clarify, I’m not about excuses, but I can’t support hysterically pointing fingers when we aren’t even attempting to get our own house in order.
Criticize the American covid response all you want but spreading this false equivalence that sounds deep unless you think about it is outright dangerous and a shameful disservice to the citizens of Hong Kong and everyone else impacted by the Chinese government.
Here in the US we have crimes like Driving While Black. There was just a high profile execution the other day that made headlines, but most fly under the radar.
We also just killed 100,000 people, minimum, through deliberate incompetence, so there’s that. Technically it’s the past, but in practical terms it’s the present. I’ll remind you that Tiananmen Square was quite a while ago.
Rights are relative, people in China don’t have them, people in the US kind of have them sometimes, assuming they’re the right color or have enough money. In broad strokes it’s better in the US, for now.
I personally like to count the foreign deaths and foreign intervention when evaluating countries-the US really likes interfering with our neighbors, and kills lots of people in the Middle East - 200,000+ innocent civilians. But they’re foreign, so they’re not really people, right? https://theintercept.com/2018/11/19/civilian-casualties-us-w... I won’t even begin with the non-lethal interventions, or more subtle interventions like giving arms to authoritarian regimes and/or terrorists.
But I guess China spies, so that’s really bad. It would be terrible if they stole the NSA’s idea and interfered with network equipment. They do like stealing IP. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
The US does a disservice to the world by not being better in the present. We can’t hold China accountable when we don’t hold ourselves accountable.
Complete hyperbole. Squint as hard as you can but the poorest minority in America is still better off than almost anyone in China. Yes we have a racial profiling problem but on the whole we have our rights much more than "kind of sometimes."
Yeah, we have an incompetent administration this time around. At least we have real elections with more than one real candidate.
Last part is a total non sequitur and would make as much sense flipped around.
For some definition of "real elections" - the voting suppression techniques employed in the US are study material in politics courses in other democracies.
* gerrymandering
* not allowing for remote votes by letter
* having votes on days that are not free for working people - this is interesting because many other democracies used that to discourage working class people to vote, e.g. Germany in the late 19th century. But most countries now mandate that votes have to fall on either sundays or national holidays.
* (Edit:) Felony disenfranchisement - this in combination with the war on drugs is a very effective way to strip voting rights from minorities, e.g. this isn't even visible in voting turnout comparisons between countries.
And the techniques work: The US has one of the lowest voting participation rates of all OECD countries.