China’s Xinhua news agency, which functions as a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and is this year celebrating its 80th year as a disinformation machine, started life in Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) caves in Yanan, Shaanxi Province, and it is still living in a dark cave of a repressive regime, despite its use of glistening, sleek modern technology. Xinhua is fooling no one in the West, despite the enormous sums it is forking out in its attempts to brainwash overseas readers.
It is not going to work. Brainwashing and disinformation are things of the past, which is exactly where Xinhua’s leaders are still living.
Sure, Xinhua purchased advertising space on a giant outdoor billboard in New York City’s famous Times Square, hoping to win friends and influence people.
The sign, while perhaps known as a “spectacular” in the world of US advertising, is not spectacular at all. The LED billboard may be 18.2m high by 12.2m wide and scream Xinhua’s name, but Americans are not fooled by such blatantly deceptive tactics and see the agency for the propaganda machine it is.
Li Changchun (李長春), the No. 5 in the party’s hierarchy and China’s top propaganda official, in a recent speech in Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of Xinhua, said the agency has a responsibility to uphold a recent CCP resolution to expand the Chinese government’s reach into cultural affairs.
To translate that directive into plain English, Li hopes to curb the expanding influence of the Internet and microblogging sites in China in order to keep the people under the control of the dictatorship.
With its high-tech bureaus and Times Square billboard, Xinhua wants to make friends and allies in the West, but it also wants to quieten dissent and stop the free flow of information in China.
This anniversary, like Xinhua and the People’s Republic of China, is a sham. China is in no way a republic of the people, for the people, by the people.
It is a dark dictatorship just like the former Soviet Union. The West is not fooled by anniversary parties and flowery words.
There is more. Li Congjun (李從軍), who runs Xinhua and is a member of the CCP’s powerful Central Committee, has often stressed in his public remarks that Xinhua is deeply loyal to the party and its succession of leaders, from Mao to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
“We must fight for socialism with Chinese characteristics [and] foster a Marxist news concept,” Li Congjun said on Monday in remarks that were widely quoted in the West.
I have news for Li Congjun: “Marxist news concepts” are draconian newsroom ghosts of the past, and they were supposed to die when the USSR finally collapsed in the late 20th century. Evidently, however, they are still alive and well in China.
Let’s see what Xinhua’s 100th anniversary brings in 2031. Will it still represent disinformation and repression or will it stand for a brave new China open to the world?
Dan Bloom is a freelance writer in Taiwan.
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