Chinese Paranoia

Hong Kongers Break Beijing’s Delusions of Victory

The authorities were so confident of elections going their way that state media filed copy in advance.
BY JAMES PALMER

Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, attends the opening session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on March 5, 2018. 

As the district council election results came in Sunday in Hong Kong, the pan-democratic camp—the loose alliance of parties in favor of universal suffrage and opposed to Beijing’s policies—was ecstatic. 

The democrats had expected a likely victory, though nervous about possible interference and fixing—but not of quite this scale. 

By the end of the night, the democrats had tripled their seats, beating the pro-Beijing camp 389-61 with the highest turnout ever. 

Seat after seat flipped yellow, as establishment representatives fell to a wave of public anger; the more tear gas had been used by the increasingly brutal Hong Kong police, the bigger the movement toward the democrats.
In newsrooms in Beijing, however, the results began a panicked scramble to find a way to spin them in favor of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

In stark contrast to most observers in Hong Kong, editors—and the officials behind them—appear to have sincerely believed that the establishment parties would win an overwhelming victory.

Propaganda is a heady drug, and Beijing got high on its own supply.

I spoke with editors and journalists, both foreign and Chinese, at China Daily, the flagship English-language newspaper of state media; at the English-language version of the nationalist tabloid Global Times; and at the People’s Daily—the CCP’s official newspaper. (My sources universally asked for anonymity.) 

At each paper, copy was filed to editors the night before the Nov. 24 elections assuming a strong victory for the establishment. 

This included predictions of increased majorities (with numbers left to be filled in as needed) for figures such as Junius Ho, whose vicious rhetoric against protesters has left him widely hated but whose comments regularly appear in the Global Times.
The misplaced confidence in Beijing’s victory points to a worrying problem; at high levels within the CCP, officials believe their own propaganda about Hong Kong. 

That’s a frightening prospect for both governance in China and for the future of the city, especially as the system struggles to come up with political excuses for a cataclysmic failure.
In many news organizations, it’s standard to pre-write stories to different outcomes or at least to prepare some copy in advance. 

It’s possible that filing these stories was simply an attempt to make life easier and that the alternative copy, anticipating a democratic victory, was simply unwritable for political reasons. (Chinese office politics are intense, and the mere writing of such copy ahead of events could be portrayed by a rival as a sign of political unreliability.)
But I spent seven years (2009-2016) working as a foreign editor for the Global Times and never saw copy filed ahead of time for similar events. 

Articles published in China Daily and the Global Times in the run-up to the election also seemed to anticipate an establishment victory, saying that the turnout “demonstrated the hope of Hong Kong residents that the chaos will not continue.” 

There was little attempt to preemptively discredit the results or establish a narrative in the event of failure, and the results have genuinely shocked the establishment.
Communist leaders actually believed the line being pushed ahead of the elections by the establishment; ordinary Hong Kongers—the “silent majority,” as flailing Chief Executive Carrie Lam repeatedly called them—were fed up with protest, blamed the opposition for violence, and wanted a return to normality. 

Yet this was a narrative easily refuted by opinion polling, which repeatedly showed a lack of identification with the mainland, massive distrust in the police, and that the overwhelming majority of Hong Kongers, while unhappy with violence, principally blamed the government for it. 

The biggest question in the minds of most analysts was whether the democrats would make sufficient gains to win a majority—while the copy filed in these mainland newsrooms anticipated the establishment increasing its margin of victory.
What caused such an enormous misjudgment? 

The biggest single problem is this: The people in charge of manipulating Hong Kong public opinion for the CCP are also the people charged with reporting on their own success.

The chief channel is the Hong Kong Liaison Office, a government organ that, officially, is in charge of pushing mainland-Hong Kong integration and that in reality acts as the coordinator for United Front policies, coordinating pro-Beijing politicians, CCP-backed newsletters, and the co-option of patronage and business networks. 

At the same time, it also provides intelligence to the central government.

The protests have been a massive failure for the Liaison Office. 

The silent majority narrative was a way of redeeming itself. 

Material supporting it was being fed back to Beijing while any counternarrative was suppressed. 

A similar problem reportedly emerged with the Taiwan office several years ago.
But, of course, the CCP leadership doesn’t rely on just one channel. 

This isn’t a new problem for autocracies; from the Qing princes who told the emperor of fake successes against British forces to the Soviet underlings who reported imaginary harvests, dictatorships have a problem with data. 

The CCP leadership is aware of this and usually receives its information through a variety of methods, including neican (“internal reports”) produced by media staff, especially at the official news agency Xinhua, for the leadership and informal channels—sometimes deliberately circumventing official sources to get at the truth.
The problem is that under the increasingly paranoid regime of Xi Jinping, even these internal reports have become much more geared toward what the leadership wants to hear. 

Reporting on a failed program can be painted as a sign of disloyalty. 

That’s especially the case when it comes to any issue involving separatism—in East Turkestan in 2017, more than 12,000 party members were investigated for supposed failings in the “fight against separatism.” 

Hong Kong is not as politically dangerous as East Turkestan, but it’s still highly risky waters. 

Political incentives cause multiple sources to repeat the same comforting narratives to the leadership, which then becomes convinced of its credibility.

This paranoia can go to extreme lengths. 

In 2016, I began to notice that even positive comments from officials in the media about government programs were being reported anonymously. 

A journalist friend told me the reason: A positive comment about a program backed by a leader who later fell in the rolling political purges under Xi could be very dangerous. 

The fall of Bo Xilai, a prominent leader whom many journalists and pundits once backed, had killed many careers—and resulted in the disappearance of one of the country’s most famous TV anchors.
Outside of political risks for speaking critically, there are more subtle reasons for the group think. 

The need for stability and national unity is so heavily propagandized in the mainland that many Chinese citizens find the idea of backing protests, especially chaotic and violent ones, almost unimaginable. 

Both the CCP leadership and ordinary mainlanders are also given to a crude Marxist analysis that sees material interests as dominant and finds ideological ones—especially those opposed to the CCP—hard to process. 

Mainlander WeChat groups in Hong Kong shared the same conviction that the establishment would triumph and have been shocked by the results.The election has worsened a crisis of conscience in Beijing newsrooms. 

Several current and former reporters, although broadly sympathetic toward the government position and especially conscious of the prejudices felt by many Hong Kongers against mainlanders, spoke of feeling uncomfortable with the extremism of the coverage. 

Two especially singled out the repeated use of the term “traitors,” and one called their own paper’s coverage “toxic” and said it harmed attempts to win over the Hong Kong public.
The result may cause a change of thinking. 

But so far, all indicators are for a doubling down on previous convictions. 

State media has turned to blaming protesters and the United States for supposed electoral interference, furthering a persistent paranoia inside the CCP about foreign intelligence. 

Heads are likely to roll for the failure—but quite possibly the wrong ones.

Greedy America: Hollywood Is Paying an ‘Abominable’ Price for China Access

A kid’s movie has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for DreamWorks.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN 

A scene from "Abominable" taken in a theater and shared by Vietnamese media. 

Hollywood’s China reckoning has come. 

But unlike the NBA’s recent China debacle, this time it’s not the United States but China’s nearest neighbors who’ve had enough.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia have all expressed outrage at a map of China that flickers across the screen in a new film released in late September. 

The animated film, Abominable, is a joint production of DreamWorks and Pearl Studios, which is based in Shanghai. 

The map includes China’s infamous “nine-dash line”—the vague, ambiguously marked demarcation line for its territorial claim over most of the Vietnam East Sea.
The dispute points to a new problem for Hollywood as studios move closer to Beijing’s positions. Silence on China is nothing new—but positively pushing the Chinese government’s view of the world is.
Hollywood’s traditional self-censorship on China has market roots. 

China’s burgeoning market of movie-goers is expected to soon surpass the United States as the largest in the world. 

China’s censors have wielded this power adroitly, mandating that production companies abide by the party’s bottom lines in order to earn one of the 34 coveted spots allotted to foreign films for distribution in China each year. 

That has resulted in a deafening silence from Hollywood on the realities of Chinese Communist Party rule.
In the 1990s, several Hollywood films depicted oppression in Tibet, such as Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, and the Tibetan cause was popular among celebrities, most notably Richard Gere. 

But there hasn’t been a major film sympathetic towards Tibet since Disney’s 1997 film Kundun, for which Disney CEO Michael Eisner flew to Beijing to apologize to the Chinese leadership. 

Gere claims he has been frozen out of major films for his Tibet activism. 

The 2013 zombie movie World War Z altered the location of the origin of the zombie outbreak from China to North Korea. 

The 2016 film Doctor Strange changed the “Ancient One,” a Tibetan character in the original comic book series, to a white character played by Tilda Swinton. 

In the past decade, no major film has portrayed China as a military foe of the United States.
Omitting offending plot lines and characters was once enough to satisfy Chinese censors. 

But pressure has grown to include proactively positive depictions, particularly of Chinese science and military capabilities.
O. In the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Chinese military swoops in to save the day. One film critic described Age of Extinction as “a very patriotic film. It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.” 

The payoff was enormous; Age of Extinction became the highest-grossing film of all time in China, raking in more than $300 million. (It no longer holds that record.) 

China saved the day again in The Martian, the 2015 science fiction film starring Matt Damon. 

NASA launches a special rocket carrying food for an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, but it explodes and NASA is out of options—until China’s space agency jumps into the plot out of nowhere, announcing it also has a special rocket it is willing to lend the Americans. (In fairness, the subplot was present in the original novel, not just introduced by the studio.) 

The Martian brought in $95 million at the Chinese box office.
The growing phenomenon of U.S.-China joint movie productions has also resulted in a proliferation of mediocre films that cast China in a conspicuously positive light. 

The 2018 B-grade shark flick The Meg, co-starring Chinese actor Li Bingbing, was one such coproduction. 

It features an American billionaire who finances a futuristic ocean research station located, in a narrative non sequitur, off the coast of China, run by brilliant and heroic Chinese protagonists.
Abominable appears to be another. 

It features a young Chinese girl who discovers a yeti on her roof. 

She decides to help the yeti find his way back home to the snowy mountains in the west, and they set off on a trek across China. 

It has gotten middling reviews: One critic wrote that the film is “so distinctive pictorially, and so manifestly good-hearted, that it’s easy to forgive if not quite forget the ragged quality of its storyline.”
But the Chinese government’s heavy-handed film regulation department seems to have gone a bridge too far. 

One scene in the movie includes a map of China on the young female protagonist’s wall. 

Nine slim dashes trace a U-shape around the Vietnam East Sea, a resource-rich body of water with numerous land features also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brunei.
China is the only country that recognizes this fallacious map. 

The nine-dash line has no basis in international law, which does not recognize any country’s sovereignty over open waters. 

In 2016, an international tribunal in the Hague also rejected China’s assertions of sovereignty over the Vietnam East Sea. 

Beijing has never clarified the line’s legal definition or even its precise location, likely because to do so would open its vague claims up to further legal challenge.
These issues will come into sharper focus as Beijing begins to demand positive submission, not just omission. 

China’s domestic film market has already shifted from censorship to forced inclusion of propaganda. 

Last year, as part of a sweeping reorganization that saw many Chinese Communist Party bureaus absorb the purview of government departments, the party’s propaganda office took over regulation of the film industry. 

The result has been even more heavy-handed censorship and more overtly patriotic content in films. Over the summer, six anticipated blockbusters were axed entirely, and China’s box office slumped.

Chinese Propaganda

Beijing Is Pushing Hard To Influence U.S. Views Of China
By ROB SCHMITZ

Beijing is mounting an aggressive influence campaign targeting multiple levels of American society, according to a report published Thursday that is written by some of the top China experts in the U.S.
The working group that compiled the report includes scholars who for decades have agreed that as long as the U.S. continued to engage the People's Republic of China, the paths of both countries would eventually converge and that when they did, China's political system would become more transparent and its society more open.
However, as China's economy climbed to unprecedented heights, Xi Jinping has consolidated power, and in the eyes of the report's authors, the idea of convergence has been put to rest.

A different path
As Xi took office in 2013, China "began to take a very different path forward," says Orville Schell, a China scholar who co-chairs the working group that produced the 200-page report, "Chinese Influence and American Interests."
Schell says that prior to Xi, China's leaders viewed their country as in a state of transition, but since Xi's ascendancy, China is seen internally more as a country that has arrived in its own right.
"Then the whole idea of engagement took on a very different character," he says.
The report is sponsored by Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, which Schell directs.
The publication comes amid rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China and just days before President Trump's planned meeting with Xi during the Group of 20 events in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this week.
The report's authors assert that China's Communist Party has launched a campaign aimed at influencing the U.S. as part of a broader expansion of aggressive policies spearheaded by Xi.
"These policies not only seek to redefine China's place in the world as a global player," the report asserts, but also to advertise a "China Option" to the rest of the world as "a more efficient developmental model" in much the same way that the Soviet Union sought to present itself as a viable alternative to the West's liberal democracies during the Cold War.
Schell says that China's doing away with presidential term limits earlier this year, effectively clearing the way for Xi to rule indefinitely, became a metaphor for the leader's expansion of control and power both inside and outside China, firmly placing his country on a separate competing path with the U.S.

The scope of influence
The report examines eight sectors of American society that China's government is attempting to influence — including the U.S. Congress, local governments, universities and corporations. 

While nearly all examples cited have been widely covered by the media and academia, the report aims to add historical context to weave them together and to make concrete suggestions to the U.S. government and institutions on how to handle the growing threat.
One section of the report examines the large amounts of money China's government and Chinese individuals who are loyal to the Communist Party are investing into U.S. universities.
"[Very] often, that money will come not with any explicit prohibitions, but with implicit ones," says Schell.
"If you want to get more money, don't say this, don't say that. In other words," he says. 

As a result, China aims for "modulating and controlling what people say about it and how they view it."
China's government has, with the help of dozens of U.S. universities, established 110 Confucius Institutes on campuses throughout the United States. 

The institutes are forced to use Communist Party-approved materials "that promote PRC Chinese viewpoints, terminology and simplified characters; the avoidance of discussion on controversial topics such as Tibet, Tiananmen, East Turkestan, the Falun Gong, and human rights in American classrooms and programs," the report says.
Several U.S. universities, such as the University of Chicago and the Texas A&M system, have had second thoughts about the Confucius Institute and have closed their branches. 

The report suggests that U.S. institutions rewrite their contracts with their Chinese government partner by eliminating a clause that stipulates Confucius Institutes must operate according to China's laws.

China and Hollywood
Another section examines how Hollywood has come under the influence of Chinese investment and, as a result, now routinely makes films that portray China's government in a favorable light. 

Whereas in 1997, films such as Red Corner, Seven Years in Tibet, and Kundun addressed topics the Chinese government deemed sensitive, now Hollywood studios are teaming up with Chinese partners to make films such as The Martian, a blockbuster hit backed by Chinese money in which the Chinese government saves the American protagonists.
"The rush of Chinese investment into the American film industry," the report concludes, "has raised legitimate concerns bout the industry's outright loss of independence."
Schell says after a year and a half of research, he and his team came to the conclusion "that the relationship between the U.S. and China when it comes to influence is not reciprocal," he says. 

"The open society of the United States gets used for Chinese purposes in myriad ways that are not available to Americans in China."
For example, American universities have not been granted the same access to China as Beijing has received and Chinese media is able to operate freely inside the U.S., while American journalists are severely restricted inside of China. 

The report's authors suggest that the visas of visiting Chinese scholars and journalists be redirected unless American scholars and journalists are able to operate with more freedom inside of China.
The report's solutions urge the U.S. government and society to be more transparent about their relationships with Chinese institutions, and when Beijing limits the rights of American institutions inside of China, the U.S. should consider doing the same to Chinese institutions on American soil.
It also urges Americans to act with integrity when Chinese state-sponsored actors try to coerce them or manipulate America's core principles. 

"Openness and freedom are fundamental elements of American democracy and intrinsic strengths of the United States and its way of life," the report concludes. 

"These values must be protected against corrosive actions by China and other countries."

Chinese Peril: China holds sway over New Zealand's media

New Zealand's Chinese media has gone from being independent to being merged with the servile domestic media in China
By Colin Peacock

Law changes to limit Chinese influence on business and politics in Australia prompted calls for similar moves here this week. 

One of those sounding the alarm tells Mediawatch our government now needs to look at links between China and our media. 

What’s the problem? ​
Australia’s government this week unveiled sweeping reforms to national security laws designed to stamp out foreign influence over local politics. 

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull insisted the moves were not made with any one country in mind, but the media there weren’t shy about pointing the finger at China.
China wasn’t happy. 

Diplomatic protests followed and the Canberra bureau chief of China's state-run news agency Xinhua accused Australian media of "bombing the public with fabricated news about the so-called Chinese influence and infiltration in Australia."
It wasn’t the first time anxiety over this had been in the headlines there this year.
Back in June, the ABC’s investigative TV show Four Corners teamed up with Fairfax Media for a major media investigation which also highlighted the media. 

Four Corners said Australian Chinese-language media outlets have forgone editorial independence in exchange for deals offered by China as part of the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party.

Anne-Marie Brady.

On Morning Report this week, Prof Anne-Marie Brady from University of Canterbury was urging New Zealand to take the issue seriously.
“We can't pretend it's not happening here. All our allies are dealing with this problem and we should partner with them,” she said.
"New Zealand's Chinese media has gone from being independent to being merged with the domestic media in China," she said. 

"When you pick up one of our local Chinese papers or go to Chinese language sites they look a lot like you would find in mainland China," she said.
"I've been reading our Chinese language media since the late 1980s and listening to the radio stations. It was a real delight hearing an authentic New Zealand Chinese voice. We're really not getting that now," Prof Brady told Mediawatch.
All  Chinese media outlets in China are strictly controlled by the state, which is in turn dominated by the Chinese Communist Party.
How does China influence what Chinese New Zealanders are getting from their media?
“Under Xi Jinping's leadership, the CCP is really keen to influence international perceptions and debates about China globally,” she told Mediawatch
Much of this she also covered in a paper called “Magic Weapons: China's political influence activities under Xi Jinping."
"Initially it was through Xinhua. Since the 1990s it's been offering New Zealand's Chinese media free content. More recently the policy has been to 'harmonise' overseas Chinese language media with mainland Chinese media. The links are much closer now," she said.
"That means closer interactions ... and instructions being given to our Chinese language media," she said.
New Zealand Chinese media get instructions relayed by Chinese officials at meetings.
Her Magic Weapons paper says an event at the Langham Hotel in Auckland in June -- attended by CCP media officials and representatives of the Chinese media in New Zealand -- was one such occasion.
Media were given "oral instructions on content and working relationships" at the event, which was also attended by Labour MP Raymond Huo.

New Zealand's Chinese fifth column: Beijing stooge Raymond Huo

Raymond Huo's Labour Party biography says he is a is a regular Chinese media commentator on current affairs and a former Asian affairs journalist at the New Zealand Herald. 

He still calls himself "journalist" on Twitter.
Mediawatch asked him if he saw any discussions about in editorial policy or instructions passed on by Chinese officials at the Langham Hotel event.
"Not at all. I have no idea where that allegation is coming from," he told Mediawatch.
"The presentations I attended were purely on the influence of Chinese language social media," said Raymond Huo.
He said he attended the event because he had returned to Parliament in March and wanted to update himself on matters that were relevant to the Chinese constituency.
He told Mediawatch it was "difficult to say" if Chinese-language media were free to do what they wanted in New Zealand. 

Signs of things to come?

John Fitzgerald.

Chinese state-owned media companies signed six agreements in Sydney last year with Australian outlets including Fairfax Media, the biggest owner of newspapers in New Zealand. 

State-run Chinese news outlet People’s Daily reported it signed a news and video sharing deal with Australia’s Sky News which would create ”a high-end talk show on the Chinese economy.”
China Radio International reached a deal to share news with Australia’s Chinese-language radio station 3CW.
"Individually, the deals offer compelling commercial opportunities. But viewed collectively, they underline the coordinated nature in which China's propaganda arms are seeking to influence how the Communist Party is portrayed overseas", the Sydney Morning Herald's Beijing correspondent Philip Wen wrote at the time.

China Watch.

As if to illustrate the government's influence over Chinese media, a supplement prepared by state-run China Daily newspaper appeared in the Dominion Post the following week. 

It featured the New Zealand visit of the head of China's central publicity department -- Liu Qibao -- and his meeting with the-then Prime Minister John Key just after overseeing those media deals in Sydney.
At the time, Australian expert on China Dr John Fitzgerald told Mediawatch those media deals were "a victory for Chinese propaganda".
Anne Marie-Brady said some of those companies were operating here.
She said China Radio International had a subsidiary called Global CMAG which took over Auckland's 24-hour Chinese-language radio station FM 90.6 in 2011. 

She said it now sourced all its news from CRI and its Australian subsidiary. 

Global CAMG also runs Panda TV, Channel 37 on Freeview, and the Chinese Times newspaper.
Prof. Brady said the Commerce Commission should investigate whether offshore intervention in New Zealand's Chinese-language media breached competition laws and requirements for a free and independent media.

China Spreads Propaganda to U.S. on Facebook, a Platform it Bans at Home

By PAUL MOZUR

HONG KONG — China does not allow its people to gain access to Facebook, a powerful tool for disseminating information and influencing opinion.
As if to demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness, outside its borders China uses it to spread state-produced propaganda around the world, including the United States.
So much do China’s government and companies value Facebook that the country is Facebook’s biggest advertising market in Asia, even as it is the only major country in the region that blocks the social network.
A look at the Facebook pages of China Central Television, the leading state-owned broadcast network better known as CCTV, and Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reveals hundreds of English-language posts intended for an English-speaking audience.

Xinhua has more than 31 million followers on Facebook.

Each quarter China’s government, through its state media agencies, spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy Facebook ads, according to a person with knowledge of those deals, who was unauthorized to talk publicly about the company’s revenue streams.
China’s propaganda efforts are in the spotlight with President Trump visiting the country and American lawmakers investigating foreign powers’ use of technology to sway voters in the United States.
Last week, executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled in Washington about Russia’s use of American social media platforms to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Though banned, foreign social media companies are trying to promote themselves in China. Many Chinese businesses, and the government, use Facebook to reach an international audience.

During Facebook’s time in the congressional hot seat last week, Senator John Neely Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, asked whether China had also run ads to affect the United States election. 
Facebook’s general counsel replied that to his knowledge it had not.
There is no indication that China meddled in the American election, but the Communist government’s use of Facebook is ironic given its apparent fear of the platform.
It also hasn’t been reluctant to use it as a soapbox where China’s relationship with the United States is concerned.
China has been a major priority for Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, has spent years courting it.
Facebook executives even set up a page to show CCTV, one of Beijing’s chief propaganda outlets, how to use the platform during Xi Jinping’s 2015 trip to the United States.
While China’s propaganda channels on Facebook are not nearly as subtle as Russian groups when it comes to influencing opinion, their techniques are nonetheless instructive.
Rather than divisive advertisements, many of the Chinese Facebook posts replicate the sort of news propaganda delivered at home: articles stressing China’s stability and prosperity mixed with posts highlighting chaos and violence in the rest of the world.
A similar blend of stories — pandas and idyllic Chinese landscapes next to heavy coverage of the mass shooting in Texas — has proliferated across China’s official Facebook channels in the lead-up to President Trump’s visit to Beijing, which began on Wednesday.
While much of it is unlikely to sway the average American’s mind, such posts reach people across the world, many of whom are newer to the internet and may have a less sophisticated understanding of media.
China’s state media has Facebook channels dedicated to Africa and other regions of the world, and it seems evident that it is offering itself as an alternative to the Western media for a more global audience.

CCTV, China’s leading television broadcaster, spreads propaganda overseas as well as at home.

Recently, for example, Xinhua posted an article entitled “China’s IP protection system works well, says U.S. professional” — a rebuke of a congressional investigation into Chinese trade policies that critics say encourage intellectual property theft.
A more anodyne post offered a ham-handed attempt to find common ground between China and the United States, pointing to the basketball player Yao Ming, pandas and American students making dumplings as examples of the countries’ close relationship.
A video posted by Xinhua, which already has about 100,000 views, presents a series of man-on-the-street interviews with Chinese people talking about the United States.
It begins on a positive note, with questions about President Trump and what they like about the United States.
About halfway through the video, however, the tone changes and people are asked to describe the problems they see with the United States.
At that point, the interviewees get critical.
“U.S.A. interferes with others’ lives arrogantly,” says one woman.
“Every person and nation has its own culture and customs, no need to interfere.”
Another woman addresses America directly: “Don’t be so self-important and arrogant.”
Even children are asked about the relationship between the United States and China.
“Sometimes they went too far in bullying others,” one says of the Americans.
“They don’t respect China and use South Korea to spy on China,” says another.
“They also sent weapons to South Korea.”
When asked what advice he would give Mr. Trump, one man says: “Let him learn from China.”

Chinese propaganda faces stiff competition from celebrities

By Yi-Ling Liu

In this Saturday, Oct. 21, 2017 photo, Chinese women walk past advertisement featuring teen idol Lu Han, also known as China’s Justin Bieber in Beijing, China. China works to stifle celebrities as it seeks to dictate the values the nation’s youth should embrace. It’s part of the most ambitious effort in years to shape the country’s booming entertainment industry. Instead of selfish, rich stars, the state is promoting performers who are all about patriotism, purity and other values that support the party’s legitimacy, whether in movies about revolutionary heroes or through rap music.

HONG KONG — When the propaganda film, “The Founding of an Army,” hit theaters in China recently, the reaction wasn’t quite what the ruling Communist Party might have hoped for.
Instead of inspiring an outpouring of nationalism and self-sacrifice for the state, it was roundly mocked for trying to lure a younger audience by casting teen idols as revolutionary party leaders.
Viewers more used to seeing the idols play love interests in light-hearted soap operas responded to the film by projecting “modern-day romantic narratives on the founding fathers of the nation,” said Hung Huang, a well-known social commentator based in Beijing. 

“It was hilarious.”
While China’s resurgent Communist Party once pushed its policies on an unquestioning public, it now struggles to compete for attention with the country’s booming entertainment industry and the celebrity culture it has spawned.
“Chinese people are increasingly ignoring party propaganda and are much more interested in movie stars, who represent a new lifestyle and more exciting aspirations,” said Willy Lam, an expert on Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Xi Jinping, who will cement his authority with his expected endorsement to a second five-year term at this week’s national party congress, has placed a priority on stamping out too much Western influence in Chinese society in part so the party can dictate the values the youth should embrace.
Authorities have responded by taking aim at everything from gossip websites to soap opera story lines to celebrity salaries. 

Instead of selfish, rich stars, the state is promoting performers who are all about patriotism, purity and other values that support the party’s legitimacy.
The results have at best been mixed and at worst ham-fisted and out of touch.
One problem is that the party’s values often clash with what young Chinese want to watch.

Among the more popular shows watched by Chinese youth are those that center on palace intrigue, martial arts fantasies, high school romances or single, independent women.
“While the government could once dictate to young people what they should value and how they should lead their lives, they find themselves completely without the tools to do that now,” she said.
In the 1970s, the state was able to promote people seen as paragons of youthful devotion and selflessness, but Hung said that no longer works because young Chinese — like their counterparts in the West — now prefer to follow celebrity gossip and have the tools with which to do so.
Just this month, teen idol Lu Han, also known as China’s Justin Bieber, announced he had a girlfriend, triggering a flood of shares, responses and 4 million “likes” within a few hours that briefly crashed the country’s popular Weibo microblog service.
A recent commentary in The Global Times, a party newspaper with a nationalistic stance, railed against such celebrity worship, saying China had now surpassed the West in that regard.
“It’s unfair that these stars accrue such glory, unimaginable to those who have made a decisive contribution to the country,” the commentary said.
That was likely a reason the government-backed China Alliance of Radio, Film and Television moved last month to cap the pay of actors, whose salaries had hit historic highs as young Chinese and a burgeoning middle class increasingly spend on movie tickets and goods.
In another move earlier this year, authorities closed 60 popular celebrity gossip and social media accounts and called on internet giants such as Tencent and Baidu to “actively propagate core socialist values, and create an ever-healthier environment for the mainstream public opinion.”
The tension between popular culture and state propaganda isn’t new in China. 

In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s lieutenants railed against spiritual pollution. 

But it has gained new traction since Xi came to power in 2012 and officials began a wide-ranging crackdown on perceived societal ills from corruption to dissent to — now — entertainment.
“Xi Jinping has been advocating a revision to traditional, Confucian moral standards,” Lam said. “The definition of what is vulgar or morally problematic has been inflated and expanded so that it has become all-encompassing.”
Shows about the pursuit of great wealth and luxury that used to be tolerated under Xi’s predecessor, aren’t anymore.
The government has demanded that broadcasters “resist celebrity worship” and limit the air time dedicated to film and TV stars.
“The party does not want these entertainment programs to compete with news programs and ‘morality shows,’” said Jian Xu, a Chinese media research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
One example of a state-approved show is “Touching China,” which honors people who have “touched the nation with their tenacity, bravery and wisdom.”
The government has also tried to shape some celebrities into party-sanctioned role models.
Thanks to their wholesome image and uplifting, patriotic lyrics, the TFboys, China’s first home-grown boy band, have risen to fame because of “political opportunities” they’ve been given, Xu said. The band is pursued by adoring fans and has performed twice on the coveted Lunar New Year gala hosted by state broadcaster China Central Television; it has also been promoted by the Communist Youth League.
Stars deviating from the party’s image of purity and moral acceptability, however, have been punished. 

In a high-profile drug crackdown in 2014, authorities publicly chastised a succession of celebrities caught using drugs, including Jackie Chan’s son, Jaycee Chan, and singer Li Daimo, forcing them to apologize on state television.
Beijing may struggle to win over young Chinese, but it won’t stop its carrot-and-stick approach to regulating the industry.
“The government’s method of punishment and praise is very obvious: If you work with me, you will reap the benefits, if you don’t, you won’t. If you’re a good boy, you get candy, if you don’t, you won’t,” Xu said.

U.S. Chinese Fifth Column

Chinese Propaganda in American Higher Education
By Rachelle Peterson

China offers an increasingly lucrative market for American universities. 

It is the leading source of foreign students—who pay full tuition, unlike American students at in-state institutions—and provides more than a third of all international students in the United States. 

China is also home to fourteen American universities’ overseas campuses, many of which the Chinese government helped construct. (Six of them recently reported making money or projecting net revenue in the near future.)
These deepening relationships aren’t necessarily bad, though China has a history of pressing its influence to entrench its international power. 

Another form of Chinese investment in American higher education is more suspect: Confucius Institutes.
Confucius Institutes are campus centers dedicated to teaching and promoting Chinese language and culture. 

Generously funded by China, they offer universities pre-paid teachers and textbooks, along with operating funds. 

Currently, 103 American universities have accepted China’s offer—but at a great price.
I’ve just completed a major study of Confucius Institutes (CIs) in the United States, focusing on case studies of the twelve CIs located in New York and New Jersey. 

I found that Confucius Institutes threaten the autonomy of American universities, jeopardize the intellectual freedom of professors and students and give the Chinese government unparalleled access to American college students. 

Colleges and universities should close their Confucius Institutes, and federal and local governments should exercise oversight.
Confucius Institutes outsource the college classroom to a foreign government. 

They are directly linked to the Chinese government, which exercises authority over hiring decisions, curriculum choices and syllabi. 

The Hanban, an agency within the Chinese Ministry of Education, authorizes the creation of Confucius Institutes and requires universities to seek its approval on all programs and courses. Though an American professor or administrator directs each local Confucius Institute, he or she is constrained to hire teachers from a slate of candidates put forward by the Hanban. 

The Hanban also chooses the textbooks. 

No other nation has such direct control over what American students learn about its history and culture.
Under such supervision by China, Confucius Institutes present a whitewashed version of Chinese political history and current events. 

As taught at CIs, the Chinese government never jails religious minorities, no Tibetans self-immolate to protest China’s insistence on claiming Tibet as a province, no Falun Gong followers have their organs harvested and Tiananmen Square is only a tourist attraction, not the site of the 1989 massacre of democracy demonstrators. 

Embarrassing episodes in the history of the Communist nation simply do not come up.
When I visited Confucius Institutes, I asked staff how they would handle questions about Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and other matters the Chinese regime deems sensitive. 

Most said they could not answer such questions from students—ostensibly because they were “off-topic” or outside the purview of Confucius Institutes. 

In one clarifying comment, the Chinese director of New Jersey City University’s Confucius Institute told me how she might handle an in-class discussion of Tiananmen Square: “I would show a photograph and point out the beautiful architecture.”
China has occasionally admitted its interest in using Confucius Institutes to develop its soft power abroad. 

In 2009, Li Changchun, then the head of propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party, called Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 

A new documentary, In the Name of Confucius, by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Doris Liu, showcases footage of Chinese bureaucrats discussing what they hope to accomplish through Confucius Institutes. 

The director general of Confucius Institutes Headquarters, Xu Lin, brags on Chinese television that her office has set up Confucius Institutes so that top-tier institutions “work for us.”
In what ways might American universities “work for” the Chinese government? 

Their positions of power and prestige in American culture lend China a veneer of respectability. Other nations send teachers abroad, too—France has the Alliance Française, Germany the Goethe-Institut, and Spain the Cervantes Institute. 

But these nations operate independent nonprofits in separate offices and market extracurricular courses. 

China alone locates its Institutes at college campuses, where they can feed off the colleges’ reputation and offer classes that count for college credit.
But the college classroom is a place for academic debate, not foreign propaganda. 

Colleges and universities should close their Confucius Institutes—whatever the financial perks China may offer. 

It is in principle inappropriate and in practice harmful to intellectual freedom. 

The Chinese government has no place in American higher education.

The Manchurian President

Is Trump On China's Payroll? If So, Impeach Him
By Anders Corr

Wednesday brought a wave of news about Trump’s increasingly cozy relationship with China, including on his indirect financial connections. 

The press digested, uncomfortably, Trump’s claim that “Korea actually used to be a part of China.” 

He repeated that Chinese propaganda to the press after he got it direct from Xi Jinping. 

Also Wednesday, reports revealed that Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire gambling boss with casinos in Macao, China, gave $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. 

This is the largest single gift ever given for a U.S. president’s inauguration. 

Journalist Matt Isaacs has asked, “Is dirty money spent by corrupt Chinese officials at Macau casinos flowing into our elections, at least indirectly? ” 

The mix of Chinese money and Trump’s softening on China is worrisome, and if a causal relationship can be proved, Trump should be impeached. 

He isn’t good for the Republican Party, and the Democrats will oblige.
Frames of Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are display in a photo shop in Beijing on April 17, 2017. 

Trump’s administration is softening on China’s ally North Korea, and according to experts, might accept a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear weapons development, rather than an outright ban. 

That would be no real change, as North Korea’s decades-long pattern of playing the U.S. is oscillation between promises of a freeze, and breaking those promises. 

Trump’s phantom aircraft carrier strike group supposedly steaming toward North Korea didn’t help. 

Since Mar-a-Lago, Trump has had mostly good things to say about China. 

He seems to have forgotten that China is sacking U.S. technology to build its military, and the military of North Korea that now threatens us.
Trump’s offer to give China a good economic deal if China helps with North Korea is a chump deal, and we are the chumps. 

It will not be popular with Republican voters. 

It rewards China for the threat China created. 

Rather, Republicans should hold China responsible for anything North Korea does, including nuclear strikes. 

Trump should demand of China that it start acting responsibly and uphold the international laws to which it, and its allies, are already bound. 

Trump should call China’s bluff. 

No more Mr. Nice Guy. 

Obama tried that, and it failed.
But Trump has become the quintessential Mr. Nice to China. 

He doesn’t seem to notice that countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, since Trump’s election, are getting increasingly authoritarian. 

That President Duterte of the Philippines, whose drug war has been responsible for up to 6,000 extrajudicial killings, likens himself to President Trump, should be a warning signal. 

An impeachment complaint has been filed against Duterte, who is under China’s influence. 

Trump’s fate could be the same.

Trump was sitting pretty at Mar-a-Lago with Xi earlier this month. 

Like Duterte, Trump did not appear to care much about China’s human rights abuse or lack of democracy. 

“Donald Trump’s first meeting with Xi Jinping was all about business,” declared the Economist.
Let’s face it. 

Trump is soft on China. 

Trump denied it on April 18, four days after press reports that he was getting chummy with pro-China business interests, including Boeing. 

But 55 percent of voters in a February poll doubted his honesty. 

The Trump family business connections to China exploded shortly after his election. 

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, almost sealed a $400 million deal with a Chinese company for investment into a New York property. 

This was mixed with Kushner’s back-channel political deals with China’s Ambassador to the U.S.

After the election, Trump met with Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Henry Kissinger, who has taken a consistently pro-China stand and has served as a liaison between China and international business interests. 

All that business talk seems to have had an effect. 

Trump flip-flopped on calling China a currency manipulator, and on the One-China policy. 

Rex Tillerson’s proposed blockade of China’s militarized South China Sea artificial islands was toned down and now seems forgotten.
To ice the cake, on Wednesday China’s Foreign Ministry jumped to defend China’s speedy granting of trademarks to Ivanka Trump. 

She got them on the day she sat at dinner with Xi. 

Donald Trump, too, got his brands trademarked in China shortly after the election. 

That’s all worth money, and it raises a question. 

Is China trying to put Trump on its payroll, even indirectly? 

If China succeeds, the American people are getting reamed and should fight back hard. 

This includes impeachment.
Sadly, the swamp has come to Washington like never before, and Trump appears to be the blond creature most at home in its increasingly surreal waters. 

It is not a run-of-the-mill, money-green swamp. 

It could be a red tide. 

We need a Constitutional Amendment and a new set of tough laws that will keep money and foreigners out of U.S. politics, before foreigners start running the show. 

This especially applies to Russia and China.
Vice President Mike Pence is a clean Republican who would make a great President, and could get elected for two more terms. 

He could pardon Trump, who would return to cable with better ratings, and more Twitter followers, than ever. 

Except for Xi, that’s a win-win outcome for all.

Chinese Peril

Dalian Wanda: China’s Propaganda Puppet
By RICHARD BERMAN
China's Goebbels Wang Jianlin

AMC Entertainment. Carmike Cinemas. Legendary Entertainment. Lionsgate Corporation. Paramount Pictures.
They are mainstays of America’s movie industry, either producing content or distributing it to the masses. 

But these film studios and movie theater chains are tied tighter together through a Chinese businessman with infinite ambitions: Wang Jianlin, the founder and chairman of Dalian Wanda.
To most Americans, Dalian Wanda, a Chinese firm owned by Wang—China’s wealthiest man—remains an unknown. 

Yet Wanda has emerged as a global player determined to consolidate the U.S. movie industry under one parent company. 

In 2012, Wanda bought AMC—the second largest movie theater chain in the country—for $2.6 billion. 

It purchased Legendary—the producer of The Dark Knight Trilogy—for an even heftier $3.5 billion in January of this year. 

Wanda-owned AMC now plans to buy Carmike for $1.2 billion, forming the country’s largest chain with 8,380 screens in more than 600 theaters. 

The company has also shown interest in buying at least a portion of Lionsgate and Paramount—if not all of Hollywood’s “Big Six” studios.
On the surface, Wanda’s motivations are monetary. 

Wang strives to turn Wanda into “a juggernaut” in the movie industry through high-dollar mergers and acquisitions—granting him greater control of major production and distribution channels. 

Wang’s incendiary rhetoric against Disney—one of Wanda’s major competitors in the entertainment tourism space—confirms his relentless pursuit of greater market share. 

In his words: “We want to smash them. It’s not personal—it’s where the interest of the company lies.” (Wang has likened Disney to “one tiger” competing against his “pack of wolves.”)
But his ambitions transcend buttered popcorn and glitzy theme parks. 

A former Communist deputy, Wang has steered at least $1.1 billion in government subsidies to Wanda. 

He has sold company stakes to relatives of China’s most powerful politicians and business executives, including the business partner of former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s daughter and relatives of two members of the Politburo—the Communist Party’s principal policymaking committee. 

Qi Qiaoqiao, the elder sister of  Xi Jinping, was also an early Wanda investor.
Wang’s connections to China’s political elite signal his broader agenda: Promote Chinese propaganda. 

In recent years, Xi has vowed to promote China’s “cultural soft power,” specifically in the realm of “international communication.” 

To that end, Communist officials have pledged government support to Wanda and other companies making cultural inroads abroad. 

As Wang admits, the soft-power policy—spreading favorable and stifling unfavorable depictions of China—is “very beneficial” to Wanda’s bottom line.
It blurs the line between Wanda’s interests and the Chinese government’s. 

Shortly after acquiring Legendary in January, company officials called it “China’s largest cross-border cultural acquisition to date.”
With it, Wanda acquires the ability to influence the development of movie scripts, heaping praise onto the Chinese government and tempering criticism where Wang sees fit.
History is rife with examples of movies altered pre-release to appease Chinese censors, which force filmmakers to rewrite scripts according to the Communist Party’s wishes if they hope to gain entry into China’s lucrative market. 

Pixels—the 2015 action-comedy flick—initially depicted aliens blasting a hole in the Great Wall. 

The scene was removed entirely from the final version of the movie. 

Similarly, the 2012 remake of Red Dawn originally featured Chinese soldiers invading an American town. 

Producers changed the invaders into North Koreans without even receiving a formal complaint from Beijing.
Wanda seeks greater sway in the creative process. 

Wang’s company recently bankrolled Southpaw’s $25 million production budget, becoming the first Chinese firm to “solely finance an American movie.” 

And it left fingerprints everywhere. 

According to David Glasser, who helped produce and market the film, “(Wanda was) involved — it wasn’t just a silent investment.” 

Glasser went even further: “They were on the set and involved in production, postproduction, marketing, everything.”
“Everything” includes distribution, which undergirds Wang’s interest in an AMC-Carmike merger. Controlling America’s largest movie theater chain allows the Chinese businessman to dictate much of what gets shown in the U.S.—and what doesn’t. 

It’s no surprise that AMC’s cinemas showed no Chinese films before Wanda’s takeover, yet now put on double-digit productions every year. 

As Wang points out, “More Chinese films should be in…theaters where possible.”
Could that include a new war movie called South China Sea?
All signs point to no.