Two media misconceptions on China - Kaiser Kuo
Kaiser KuoKaiser Kuo gets a nice chance from uberblogger Shel Israel to explain the basic misconceptions of Western media (including bloggers) when it comes to China. Part of a lengthy interview:
- The assumption that Chinese political authority speaks with a single voice. China is a continent-sized country, and its enormous, parallel hierarchies of Party and state are not the perfect transmission lines that run from Beijing down to every village that some people imagine. There's a lot that goes on at the sub-provincial level that has little or nothing to do with the Party line from on high. Even within the Party there are a wide range of viewpoints on the burning questions of the day, to include issues of personal freedoms. But there's this persistent notion that any time someone's rights are violated in a small town thousands of kilometers from Beijing, the order must have somehow come down from Hu Jintao himself.
- The myth of continuity. When someone like Jack Cafferty on CNN calls the Chinese leadership "the same goons and thugs they were 50 years ago," he's simply wrong. China underwent a momentous, revolutionary change 30 years ago when Deng Xiaoping inaugurated his reforms deliberately reshaping the leadership to create one of the most thoroughly technocratic regimes the world has ever seen.Jiang Zemin, his successor, continued to change the very nature of the leadership by embracing capitalists and entrepreneurs--the "most advanced forces of production"--who had had been excluded previously. And now the leadership under President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have shifted emphasis and are addressing many of the excesses of earlier freewheeling market-led development.
The interview is part of the preparation for the China2.0 tour where US-based internet gurus come to meet their counterparts in China, later this year. The tour is organized by the China Business Network and will pass by in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
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Kaiser Kuo is one of the celebrity speakers at the China Speakers Bureau. If you are interested in having him as a speaker, do get in touch.
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3 Comments:
Personally, I remain mixed on this guy. I think he runs a slick blog operation and has good comments regarding tech issues, but I find him incredibly arrogant each time he pens something about the western media. He seems to assume that a journalist or blogger must be nothing less than a complete expert (who understands China the way HE does) in order to comment on issues within the country.
The western media is a generalized medium which spans the entire globe commenting on thousands of issues at the same time utilizing a cadre of journalists and editors who are often shuffled around different beats and countries. These are not academics, nor are they producing peer-reviewed academic work requiring years of work into a story. It is a daily deadline-based system which is going to produce a general overview most likely rife with mistakes and gloss.
I can turn this around and easily claim that he knows jack sh*t about what goes on in my small country - but that doesn't bother me at all because I wouldn't expect him to - and if he did make a comment, I would take it for what it was.
Relax dude.
@ BC - Thanks for your comment and your kind words about the blog, and I'm sorry to see that you think my comments on western media coverage are arrogant. Your point about the day-to-day of the reporting world is very fair. Point taken. But I was asked specifically to talk about misconceptions I saw, so that's what I did. But not without a lengthy caveat I'm not sure you read. The paragraph that precedes the excerpt from that interview printed on Fons's blog reads as follows:
First off, I want to make clear that there are many, many Westerners, whether academics, journalists, bloggers or pundits, who "get" China--who get it as well as anyone can, anyway. On balance I believe the media--especially journalists who live here in China and have taken the time to learn the language and cultivate excellent networks of contacts--do a laudable job reporting China. (I'm referring to Anglo-American media outlets; I don't read other Western languages). That said, their excellent work still can't overcome some deeply-rooted misconceptions. The sad truth about people is that they'll come away from the most balanced of news stories with their own misconceptions reinforced. Social media community members are no exception. Social media lets us choose our own communities and we tend to move in even more like-minded circles than we might in our offline lives. So the same misconceptions persist, are often amplified and continue to color and inform the western sides of citizen-to-citizen dialogs that happen between denizens of the Anglo and Chinese online worlds. Here are a few that I see crop up a lot:
Hope that takes some of the edge off the arrogance for you.
heh heh - I didn't expect to be engaging in text conversation.
Thanks for clarifying - I'm more of a blog lurker than commenter, but I guess that topic struck a cord. I kept thinking to myself "god, this IS still being debated?" Where else can it possibly go?
I suppose a trend that I noticed sharply during my last year in China was the rapid increase in criticism of 'western' media - it wasn't the criticism per se, but rather the idea that everyone seemed to be jumping on this critical bandwagon highlighting how much "they" knew vs. how much the mainstream didn't know and therefore credibility existed on their side. Kind of like a cardiologist preaching to a general practitioner.
Just a pattern I had noticed (based on standard china blog reading list) and it appeared that one couldn't develop any street-cred in that particular blogging community without first creating a disclaimer claiming that they 'didn't trust the mainstream media' or more specifically - the western variety.
Even during my time in China I found it difficult enough to follow prevailing options regarding current events and situations. Having returned to my own country I find that this endeavour is even more challenging and difficult and I've found myself falling rapidly behind on those same issues - I feel very dated even commenting on this website and other China related portals and blogs.
Priorities change, and I believe that epitomizes the world of journalism.
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