China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday declared total victory in the “ambitious war to shape global opinion” during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Other observers have noted the tremendous influence China developed over global media during the year of Chinese coronavirus, but found it was nothing to celebrate.
The Global Times had nothing useful to say about Beijing’s vast online propaganda network, its aggressive “gifts” of pre-packaged and slanted news content to foreign media, its establishment of an information monopoly within China by deporting or intimidating foreign reporters, or its use of “sharp power” economic leverage to impose Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives and speech codes on foreign corporations.
Instead, the Global Times waved all of these ugly realities aside as smears and “rumors,” claiming China’s “growing narrative capacity in the global arena” was enabled by “quicker response and mature strategies,” coupled with its “successful experience in containing Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus] and assistance to other countries in the fight against the epidemic.”
The article said China plans to use its increased media influence to “stand up against the dominant U.S. discourse hegemony which always seek[s] to portray ‘Chinese stories’ with American stereotypes and reproduce a discourse that is aligned with the U.S. narrative.”
Buried in the Global Times’ carping about “discourse manipulation from some Western countries” and its claims that China proved it was a global superpower by defeating the coronavirus – rather than the global menace that unleashed it – lay an observation about how authoritarian regimes believe they will dominate the Information Age:
In fact, observers say that China’s weight in the international community is rising to levels that are closer to China’s comprehensive strength and great power status of, which has accelerated with the quick control over the pandemic and the rapid recovery of the economy.
However, China has been historically relatively weak in international discourse until recent years thanks to efforts to improve the international discourse power as part of a comprehensive foreign policy with Chinese characteristics.
China and other authoritarians seem to think they have a crucial advantage over free nations because they can unite political domination, military force, economic leverage, and information control into a “comprehensive” strategy that no messy capitalist democracy could ever duplicate.
This analysis is not without merit. It is difficult to imagine any free country could shamelessly, ruthlessly flip the coronavirus narrative the way China did. Political opponents would never let an American, British, or European government get away with concealing the origins of the pandemic; domestic media would not universally cooperate in the kind of disinformation blitz China pulled off; constitutionally elected governments cannot hide behind digital Great Firewalls the way China does.
The Global Times also celebrated Chinese government smears of free nations as a sign that China has “mastered the art of setting the agenda”:
An example of this is when Zhao Lijian, spokesperson from the Chinese Foreign Ministry tweeted in December 2020 a satirical cartoon by Chinese artist, Wuheqilin, depicting an Australian soldier murdering a child, saying that the Australian government should feel ashamed for murdering Afghan civilians.
The satirical cartoon soon became popular across both Chinese and foreign social media with the public condemning the alleged killing of prisoners and innocent civilians in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers and calling for an investigation into the matter.
A malevolent one-party regime like the one in Beijing does not have to worry about horrified opposition politicians ripping into the governing party for vomiting out brutal insults like this, or for spreading deranged conspiracy theories about the coronavirus being an American bio-weapon, another of Zhao Lijian’s specialties.
China also does not have to worry about political opponents and media critics giving hostile powers rhetorical ammunition to use against it, the way China’s representatives have been clobbering the Biden administration with Democrat Party rhetoric and left-wing media narratives. Beijing sees that tactic as enormously effective, a rich payoff for having so many think tanks devoted to studying Western political squabbles and media narratives.
The Global Times article trumpeted that “the number of think tanks in China has grown rapidly between 2019 and 2020, rising from 507 in 2019 to 1,413 in 2020, an eye-catching 178.7 percent increase,” and called for additional funding to create even more such institutions, so they can “play their role of making the world hear the voices from Chinese researchers.”
The CCP is not wrong to look back on 2020 as a formidable achievement in information warfare – the year when China devastated the world with a pandemic, but emerged with a stronger economic and public relations position across much of the globe. What the Global Times celebrated as a triumph should be a chilling wake-up call to free nations that naively believed the Internet would be an instrument of enlightenment and liberation.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.