Communist China Is ‘Struggling to Tell Its Story’

Security personnel stand guard at Zhongnanhai near Tiananmen Square ahead of China's 20th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Oct. 13, 2022. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The South China Morning Post continues to sidestep fundamental issues in its periodic soft analysis of problems in communist China. A recent article is a case in point, as SCMP attempts to explain why the communists are struggling to “tell China’s story well.”

Let us examine the issue and decipher what is missing in the explanation in that article.

The South China Morning Post

One of Hong Kong’s oldest newspapers, the South China Morning Post was founded in 1903 and for years was considered by many to be the city’s “newspaper of record.” Since its founding, the newspaper has changed ownership several times, with media tycoon Rupert Murdock owning it from 1986 to 1993.

The newspaper conveyed a practical and independent editorial line for decades until Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma acquired it in 2016. Mr. Ma nudged the paper in the direction of becoming a promoter of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) soft power abroad, as noted by The New York Times in 2018. That effort has become even more pronounced recently. For his efforts, Mr. Ma was “disappeared” for several months in 2021—probably for “ideological impurity” reasons or the CCP’s desire to “share in his wealth”—and has since seen his commercial empire reorganized out from under him.

As the Council on Foreign Relations noted, soft power was defined by political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. “as a country’s ability to influence others without resorting to coercive pressure [by] projecting values, ideals, and culture across borders to foster goodwill and strengthen partnerships.” Successful exercise of soft power means accentuating the positives and minimizing the negatives to influence key decision-makers and others in targeted countries.

Other phrases for “promoting soft power” that perhaps better convey its true meaning include “propagandizing” and “information warfare.”

In the case of communist China, this involves trying to convince the world that the Beijing regime is benign and no threat to anyone as it assumes its supposed rightful place as the world leader. That is a tall order for those like SCMP who are charged with that mission!

Tell China’s Story Well

The SCMP article cited above explains that communist leader Xi Jinping initiated China’s mass propaganda effort to “tell China’s story well” soon after he assumed power in 2012. Directives to government-run and CCP-influenced media included convincing managers and editors “to have confidence in their own culture, history, ideology and political system so that an international audience can be told that China’s approach is better than the West’s on many issues.” This is another tall order, given the CCP’s sordid past of persecution, genocide, starvation, and death as a result of failed policies since 1949.

The ineffectiveness of Beijing’s soft power campaign to convince foreigners about the CCP’s good intentions is explained (excused?) “because of the bias and dominance of Western media, academics and the public.” Or maybe it is because of simple, self-evident truths that belie Beijing’s peaceful promises, for example, the People’s Liberation Army’s saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese Coast Guard’s use of water cannons and sonic devices to fend off Filipino resupply vessels to outposts in the West Philippine Sea, the periodic skirmishes with Indian border troops along the disputed Sino-Indian “Line of Actual Control (LAC),” and the frequent outbursts from China’s “wolf warrior” diplomatic corps.

Another excuse offered by the SCMP is that “even if Chinese officials or state media are telling the truth, they are often perceived by outsiders as whitewashing.” Why might that be? Perhaps because history has taught that the infrequency of real truth from communist mouthpieces engenders automatic skepticism of any pro-China propaganda.

Speaking of real truth, perhaps the only accurate point in the SCMP article was the statement that “the performance of officials is typically measured by how well they appeal to the domestic audience and if they get approval from their supervisors—not how well they manage to convince the international audience” (emphasis added). That underlying uncomfortable fact (for the SCMP) is that this sentence explains the communist way: Toe the line and avoid at all costs any criticism of China or the CCP or risk being “disappeared” like Jack Ma was (or worse).

Concluding Thoughts

Civilized countries don’t have to resort to government propaganda to “tell their stories.” When was the last time the UK, France, Germany, or Norway (or any other Western country) conducted a similar government-funded (or coerced) long-term information operation? Could it be that those countries actually have generally free and open media that can deviate from the narratives of their respective governments? Could it be that the basic individual freedoms available to citizens and visitors alike remove the need for external-facing information operations because people can form their own judgments without government propaganda?

Thanks to the CCP, Chinese media are constrained to ignore and/or blatantly spin issues that ultimately undermine their own credibility, including the ongoing cultural genocide against Tibetans and Uyghurs, the hiding of medical information about COVID-19 and its origins while making money off selling medical supplies and gratitude for giving supplies and vaccines to third world countries, the aforementioned intimidation of other countries in disputed near-abroad waters and lands, the explanations of Belt and Road Initiative debt traps, and the generally uncivilized behavior evinced by the coercion of overseas Chinese by the United Front Work Department and Chinese police bureaus abroad.

“Telling China’s story,” according to Xi Jinping’s wishes, may be an impossible task for the likes of the South China Morning Post. The history and behavior of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi’s own public pronouncements make it so.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.