The Chinese shoud ignore what foreigners think
Sunday, January 27th, 2008I’m going to take some time to dissect and respond to a recent opinion/commentary article published recently on China Daily by a certain Huang Qing, whose authority comes from being a “council member of China Foundation of International Studies.” Titled “The world warms to China’s peaceful rise,” it is already thick with the suggestive rhetoric that is common with most headlines and narrative reeking of propogandic origins. What really ruffles my feathers isn’t just the language, but also the manipulation of information presented throughout the article. The piece is reprinted in full below with my comments should you not want to jump to the original article:
It is a media tradition to look back at what has happened in the past year and how things will go in the year ahead. For Western media in general, a popular topic in the recent year-ender and prediction season is China.
The Independent (daily newspaper) of Great Britain, for example, ran a series of articles about China on its online edition earlier this month. The authors described China as the world’s newest superpower, the third largest economy in the world, the leading consumer society and an engine of economic growth. They said China’s contribution to the world economy surpassed that of the US, that “Owned by China” will one day be as common as “Made in China” and that China’s culture of innovation will spread to the rest of the world, and so on.
Uh….
- It wasn’t a series of articles. At best, it was two articles and two authors in a sea of articles about the circumstances surrounding the death of Pakiston’s former Prime Minister Bhutto.
- Only one article discussed China as an emerging superpower while the other focused on arts and culture.
- Despite the glowing summary given above, it isn’t too difficult to read the actual Independent article itself in context, which leads us to…
- “Hungriest (and most polluting) consumer” does not mean “leading consumer society” and…
- There is not a single mention of “China’s culture of innovation” much less it spreading to the rest of the world…”and so on.”
…so, not exactly.
