The Wall Street Journal should stand firm in the face of China’s action last week to rescind the media credentials of three Journal reporters and order them to leave the country.
Chinese authorities said the expulsion was over the Journal’s publishing a commentary by academic Walter Russell Mead headlined “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” which addresses the communist nation’s economic fragility and the worldwide effects of a possible Chinese collapse.
The Chinese government claimed that use of the term “Sick Man of Asia” in the headline of the Feb. 3 article was racist toward the Chinese people.
Next, 53 employees of the Journal signed a letter demanding that the newspaper paper apologize and retract the original headline. They did this even though it is widely known that the Chinese government manipulates the media credentialing process to influence American news outlets to avoid criticism of “sensitive” topics.
The Wall Street Journal should not apologize. This is a ploy by the Chinese government that attempts to exploit Americans’ fear of political incorrectness to stir up racial outrage and gain power over the U.S. media.
Yes, the “Sick Man of Asia” term could be interpreted as archaic as some Asian activists alleged. Nevertheless, it is much closer to a historical term than a racial slur.
Unlike clear and obvious slurs against Chinese people and other racial groups (which are well-known), “Sick Man of Asia” has been used in many nonracist historical contexts as well as in current affairs. In fact, the first recorded use of the phrase was in 1896, in a Chinese newspaper called the North China Daily News, to describe the country’s humiliation.
Since then, the phrase has made its way into many scholarly works and journals. A 2011 article written by Foreign Affairs correspondent Yanzhong Huang describes China’s health crisis with the headline “The Sick Man of Asia.” Scholars have used the same moniker to describe other Asian countries.
Although not a flattering term, it’s probably the rhetorical equivalent of calling an African country “screwed up” or calling Russia a “kleptocracy.”
Naturally, however, the Chinese government has weaponized criticism of the Journal article’s headline to attack the free press and whip up a nationalistic frenzy against the United States.
The forced expulsion of U.S. journalists, including one who currently resides in Wuhan to report on the deadly coronavirus, forebodes a strong push to restrict critical media coverage in China as many residents continue to seek out ways to get noncensored news, especially on the coronavirus and the Hong Kong protests.
This is Exhibit A of the Chinese Communist Party’s propagandistic media strategy: First, conflate criticism of the government with criticism of the entire Chinese race. Then, stir up nationalistic rage and gain leverage over the American media so they steer clear of reporting on the Communist Party’s systematic curtailment of the people’s rights.
It is apparent that Chinese government is desperate to distract the Chinese people from its own free speech issues and economic turmoil. As The Washington Post reports about the Feb. 19 expulsions: “The authorities also appeared to be attempting to stoke nationalist outrage in China at a time of extreme duress for the ruling Communist Party.”
Several weeks ago, a Chinese doctor named Li Wenliang tried to warn fellow citizens about the then-infant coronavirus, but he was suppressed and told off by Chinese police. Now Li is dead from that same coronavirus, and the Chinese people are not able to gain access to his potentially lifesaving information.
When Chinese citizens took to the social media site Weibo with the trending hashtag “We want freedom of speech” (#WeWantFreedomOfSpeech), the government quickly censored them.
As Mead argues in the “Sick Man of Asia’” article in the Journal, along with the Communist Party’s unprepared response to the coronavirus epidemic, China maintains a unitary power structure that may prove too brittle to handle unexpected “black swan” events such as viruses, terrorist attacks, and mass protests.
If the Communist Party fails, there indeed is little to stop China from going into a meltdown, with deleterious effects on the rest of the world.
Mead writes:
Given the accumulated costs of decades of state-driven lending, massive malfeasance by local officials in cahoots with local banks, a towering property bubble, and vast industrial overcapacity, China is as ripe as a country can be for a massive economic correction.Americans should not buy the Chinese Communist Party’s line. We should be allowed to criticize an increasingly oppressive, fragile government of an unfree...
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4 comments:
What about critizing israel? It's time to be allowed to to this OPENLY!
Instead, laws are being created to prevent speaking about israel and its genociding of the Palestinians, et al. Laws now in Virginia and Florida, and other States.
Maybe if the "Palestinians" would stop teaching their children to murder anyone not Muslim, the violence would stop!
BTW,
Mohammed was a pedophile.
in Germany, if you want to influence some policy or political person, you threaten their money. same for Swiss.
In China, you threaten the public image of the party leadership or the Peoples Liberation Army leadership. In china, it is expected that the lowest possible level bureaucrat would take the hit for criticism of the leadership. If they won't, there is always the organ banks for them.and speaking of organ harvesting from political prisoners, no one seems to say a word on where the harvested organs are going too.
It is believed that a guy having actual facts to be presented as criticism of some person or organization or country such that those facts are believable and not mere gossip or innuendo or libelous, should be accepted for publication. On the other hand, such criticism lacking physical evidence, no first hand knowledge, witness' who's testimony is outside the realms of reality; perhaps that criticism should be discounted for what it is.
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