According to a popular legend in many countries, “Santa Claus” lives year-round at the North Pole with his “little helpers” (elves) who toil the year away in Santa’s workshop building toys that Santa delivers to all the good girls and boys around the world, using his reindeer-powered sleigh on Christmas Eve night.
In the spirit of the Christmas season, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which operates long-range surveillance radars to detect the flight of ballistic missiles, implemented a “Santa tracker” 60 years ago to track his movements on Dec. 24 each year as he delivers the fruit of his elves’ labor around the world.
Santa’s magical elves are related to the elves that inhabit forests and mountains in Germanic, Scandinavian, and British folklore. Christmas elves were “invented” by Scandinavian writers in the mid-19th century, who first associated these “good creatures” with Santa Claus. Although immortal yet youthful in appearance, popular depictions of Christmas elves (for example, in the Santa Clause movie trilogy starring Tim Allen) show them to be happy and willing workers who toil in good humor while obeying Santa’s every order.
Oddly enough, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a stable of “little helpers,” too. And why not? He probably considers himself to be Santa Claus “with Chinese characteristics”—the supreme benefactor of the Chinese people and deliverer of all things good in communist China. The state-run Chinese media have certainly perpetuated the “cult of Xi” toward that end over the past decade!
Just as Santa’s little helpers are one branch of elves, Xi’s “little helpers” consist of many different branches: communist cadres in China who keep ordinary Chinese in line, “wolf warrior” diplomats who anesthetize the world, the aforementioned state-run media who bamboozle domestic and foreign audiences alike about the beneficence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), foreign “China hands” (academics, diplomats, industrialists, think-tankers, etc.) who are paid to facilitate engagement with China no matter what Xi and company do or say, and foreign media who accentuate the (infrequent) positives and minimize the (frequent) negatives of the Chinese regime.
While Santa’s magical elves serve out of love, duty, and altruism, Xi’s little helpers are motivated much differently and serve him for vastly different reasons, including ideological, careerist, fame, and monetary. All those motivations work Xi’s magic among his elves in Western media, resulting in undeserved favorable reporting on communist China. By way of one recent example, let us examine a recent “newsletter” from the little helpers at Axios China.
Axios logo in Washington on Jan. 31, 2018. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The newsletter claims that China faces the dilemma of “how to let people get back to normal life while preventing COVID-19 cases from overwhelming the health care system.” Axios China alludes to “pressure from Chinese citizens” as part of the reason for Beijing’s relaxation of its zero-COVID policy.
In reality, “pressure” came in the form of street riots in dozens of Chinese cities by people fed up with a policy that ruined lives and businesses. There was no mention of the fact that the Chinese full vaccination rate for COVID is now 89.35 percent. Are Chinese vaccines not effective, and is that the reason that there is a danger that the Chinese healthcare system could be overwhelmed in the future?
Axios blamed China for not using foreign-made mRNA vaccines—implying that those are effective without providing context that independent analyses around the world indicate otherwise (see here and here), and that mRNA vaccine-related injuries are under-reported (and here). Is this Axios’s way of giving the CCP an excuse for the current outbreak while gaslighting American readers by echoing the Biden administration’s mRNA jab policy in the United States?
The newsletter further states that the “U.S.-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation” has predicted that 1 million or more Chinese could die from COVID in 2023 and that a “return” to some of the relaxed restrictions should be considered. No mention of which particular restrictions should be reimplemented, or the fact that zero-COVID relaxations in China are arbitrarily and unevenly applied, or that the lockdowns failed in China just as they failed in the United States. Yet, Axios would apparently “understand” if the CCP reinstated lockdowns no matter the deleterious effect on Chinese citizens.
The next statement is patently absurd in claiming that COVID deaths remain “low” in China based on government reports. Is Axios China deferring to CCP reporting of 5,242 total Chinese deaths as recorded by Worldometers? And where is the context that COVID first appeared in China in 2019, yet 5,242 deaths are all that have been reported out of a population of 1.4 billion in three years? Not much of a pandemic—or else the CCP is lying about the real number of Chinese deaths! More soft reporting by Axios China.
The newsletter claims that “case counts are so high that regular business has been disrupted and supply chains are being thrust into chaos.” What does “high” mean? Again, according to Worldometers, some 3,101 new cases have been “officially reported” over the past few weeks. If Axios has information on the “real numbers” that are causing supply chain chaos, why are they not reporting a number that would substantiate their claims? Which supply chains are being disrupted in which Chinese cities? Axios apparently doesn’t want to embarrass the CCP.
You get the picture. Shallow reporting and lack of context. Nary a bad word about the public health and safety failures of the CCP during the pandemic, not to mention the continuing lies about the numbers of COVID-related deaths and cases, the riots, the starvation, and suicides as a result of harsh lockdowns, and the deployment of police guards to crematoria to hide the number of COVID deaths.
Axios China is giving the CCP a free pass while subtly reinforcing the Biden administration’s narrative about mRNA shots and the potential need for future lockdowns.
Concluding Thoughts
Media access to mainland China is problematic, as Beijing has revoked the visas of—and even imprisoned—journalists who have crossed the CCP through honest reporting of events. See here, here, here, and here for a few examples. But should maintaining that access come at the expense of telling the complete truth not to embarrass Beijing?
Perhaps shading the truth is easier for outfits like Axios, whose natural inclination is to lean left in its reporting. And it’s easier to do when the shaded truths dovetail with the China engagement mentality of the Biden administration and other Democrats.
Xi’s little helpers at Axios China are guilty of sins of omission and doing a disservice to its readership.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Stu Cvrk
Author
Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.
