How China Won the War Against Western Media
The one-two punch of censorship plus propaganda has discredited Western journalism in the eyes of many Chinese.
BY MARCH 4, 2016
Just how biased do Chinese think Western media is against China? Wang Qiu, a member of China’s legislature and head of state-owned broadcaster China National Radio, claimed he had an answer: Sixty percent of all mainstream Western media reports smear China. Wang did not say where he found the absurd statistic, but he did use it to argue that criticism harmed China. “During economic development, it’s normal for a few problems to appear,” he remarked in March 2015 during China’s annual legislative meeting. “If these problems are magnified, China will no longer be able to move forward.”
Many Chinese share the idea that Western media outlets don’t cover China fairly. Chinese state media outlets and Chinese government spokespeopleregularly claim that Western media plays up China’s weaknesses, exaggerates its potential as a regional threat, and ignores its successes. “Why is Western media biased against China?” was a question posed to me dozens of times during the four years I resided there — from street vendors in Beijing to students in Nanjing to taxi drivers in the ancient capital of Xi’an.
Yet it’s odd that, in a country which ranks a dismal 176 out of 180 for media freedoms, comes in last in an 88-country ranking for Internet freedom, and which operates the largest state propaganda apparatus in the world, the conversation regularly centers around perceived media bias elsewhere. The ubiquity of this idea is the result of what has been one of Chinese state media’s most successful propaganda campaigns — so effective that the term “Western media” in Chinese often has a negative connotation.
Even foreign media commentators themselves sometimes echo it. Consider, for example, this 2010 podcast from Sinica, a popular series run by Beijing expats; the arguments presented in this widely read 2015 post by Kaiser Kuo, the director for international communications at Chinese search giant Baidu; and the questions posed in this January question-and-answer with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Barboza.
