Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

CONSTRUCTING HISTORY
Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji agreed to enter the WTO on condition that
its market should be more open to the West than the mature capitalist
economy of Japan. The former deputy foreign trade minister and chief
negotiator of China’s entry into the WTO, Long Yingtu, declared that
the day when the world’s major car manufacturers all settled their
production in China would be the day China’s motor industry won
(http://www.fhy.net 2006). The development of special economic
zones and the huge state investment in cities like Shanghai and Beijing
are considered by some as designed to Europeanize China’s south
coast cities at the expense of what is referred to as ‘Africanization’ of
the rural heartland (Zhang Peiyuan 2006).
Media agenda and identification with the West
That the Chinese political and intellectual elite are willing to identify
with what they perceive to be advanced Western values can also be
seen by how very often the Western, especially the US, media set the
agenda of what is news and what is important for the Chinese.
Twenty-four hours, day and night, for 20 days a billion Chinese
viewers sat glued to their television sets as soldiers fought in
Iraq. They watched live coverage of government leaders’
speeches one after another, government press conferences one
after another, official slogans and national flags one after
another. They were watching government and militaryapproved
journalists travelling, eating, sleeping, chatting and
laughing with soldiers. These journalists were broadcasting live
with ‘their’ troops. You might have thought it was just the
classic propaganda of the communists and the communistcontrolled
media. In actuality, the Chinese were watching CNN
and Rupert Murdoch’s channels. From the first day of the war,
the Chinese government handed over the country’s five most
popular TV channels to CNN and Murdoch. All the images and
messages the Chinese audience got from their TV sets were
filtered by CNN and Murdoch’s people.
(Li Xiguang 2005).
The Chinese official media has done an excellent job in promoting
positive images of the United States. For instance according to one
study (Sarabia-Panol 2006), the tone of coverage of the 9/11 attack on
the United States by the Chinese daily newspaper the China Daily was
25 per cent positively pro-America, 75 per cent neutral and 0 per cent
negative whereas the percentages were 9 per cent positive, 41 per cent
neutral and 50 per cent negative in the India press and 19.6 per cent
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