American Journalists and China

Another book to be donated to the public library - Kishore Mahbubani's Can Asians Think? (Times, 1998), which must undoubtedly be Prof JR Mo's favorite book at one time.

Of interest to this blog was the author's assertion that several American journalists were "blatantly dishonest" during the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

"They would lunch with a student on a "hunger strike" before reporting on his "hunger." They were not all bystanders reporting on an event; several advised the students how to behave. None stayed to deal with the consequences that the students had to face."

The author noted that the biggest indication of how American journalists are affected by US interest in their portrayal of China is to compare their reporting of China in the early 1970s and the early 1990s.

"When Nixon landed in China in 1972, the US media had a virtual love-fest with a regime that had just killed millions in the Cultural Revolution. Yet, in the 1990s a much more benign regime that has liberated millions from poverty and indignity and promises to launch them on the road to development is treated as a pariah regime."

Without going into the purported hypocrisy of the Americans, one thing that immediately comes to mind is how little the Cultural Revolution was understood in the US in the early 70s as compared to the 1990s where scores of writing pertaining to that period became available. If the Americans had known then what they knew later, would it still have made a difference in their "virtual love-fest"? Maybe yes, maybe no. But we'd never know.