Here's an ITN news clip about a small protest in Shanghai against the lack of 'food, work, housing and fairness' [edit: clip no longer available - sorry!]. Such criticisms are of course widespread across China and have led to frequent explosions of large scale unrest in recent years. Nevertheless, news features such as these leave an unpleasant aftertaste. Even where such protests are genuine (and not the work of foreign agents), Western media inevitably exploit their propaganda potential in a way that can only be regarded as hypocritical.
Yes, as the lady interviewed in this clip notes, China is a 'one party dictatorship' - but so, too, are liberal capitalist countries such the UK and US, where, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, there is just one party: the business party (albeit divided into two or three factions). And yes, the Chinese authorities may be 'ruthless' - but such adjectives are seldom used to describe the deadly imperialist violence of Westerngovernments. And when it comes to the 'policing of the media', Western states have little to learn from China.
We can perhaps understand all of this in terms of Slavoj Žižek's notion of 'lying in the guise of truth': although Western media criticisms of China may be factually correct, the motives for levelling them are false. While Western journalists pour scorn on what they risibly call 'communist China' for its human rights abuses, they do not - and indeed must not - hold 'their own' nation states to the same moral standards. Nor would it do to draw too much attention to the material cause underlying such one-sided reporting: the bitter economic and geo-strategic rivalry between the Western powers and their Asian competitor.
Yes, as the lady interviewed in this clip notes, China is a 'one party dictatorship' - but so, too, are liberal capitalist countries such the UK and US, where, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, there is just one party: the business party (albeit divided into two or three factions). And yes, the Chinese authorities may be 'ruthless' - but such adjectives are seldom used to describe the deadly imperialist violence of Westerngovernments. And when it comes to the 'policing of the media', Western states have little to learn from China.
We can perhaps understand all of this in terms of Slavoj Žižek's notion of 'lying in the guise of truth': although Western media criticisms of China may be factually correct, the motives for levelling them are false. While Western journalists pour scorn on what they risibly call 'communist China' for its human rights abuses, they do not - and indeed must not - hold 'their own' nation states to the same moral standards. Nor would it do to draw too much attention to the material cause underlying such one-sided reporting: the bitter economic and geo-strategic rivalry between the Western powers and their Asian competitor.
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