World

think of China as being quite an industrialised place witha huge workforce.2nd: Is that not Japan?1st: No, I don’t think so. Look at half the things we stillbuy, they all say made in China on them. I mean theycould potentially be one of the most powerful forces in theworld, the West is afraid of them now.Moderator: What makes you think that?1st: I was watching one of those, it wasn’t the World atWar, but one of those long history of the twentieth centuryprogrammes and it was talking about the growing powerof China. I can’t remember what channel it was on but itwas very good. It looked at all these countries in relationto each other and how the world order was changing.3rd: Yeah, I suppose you must be right. You see loads ofChinese people here now, here to get educated and they’reall doing medicine and law and the like. That countrymust have money to be able to send those kids all the wayhere. (Retired, London)There were differences between those respondentswho saw China as a ‘poor’ country and those who viewedit as being highly industrial. What was common thoughwas that none of the respondents really ever mentionedChina as a developing world country (in the same waythey clearly did with Africa). Within these groups therewas no substantial knowledge about the political andcultural history of China, apart from references tocommunism. The respondents found it easier to discussChina in relation to fictional programmes or films(rather than factual news or documentaries which theystated there were not many of). As such, referencesparticularly to (unnamed) war films or films such as TheLast Emperor were made to discuss what they thoughtChina may have been (or may still be) like.It was only the Chinese group who differed in theiropinions on this area and who highlighted the fact thatmany of the images shown of China were perhaps dated.They did not think viewing British media images wasconducive to understanding. This view was perhapssupported by the fact that none of the other respondentsin this section could discuss China, its problems orpotential solutions in the same way they could aboutother countries:1st: Having come from China, in China we saw somepropaganda and the other side. Here it is all the other side.Join them together and we will understand what is reallyhappening..(Ethnic minority, Chinese, Glasgow)While in China they were being offered mainlypositive images of life, here it was felt that the mediacoverage centred on disasters and political unrest withno historical context. They did, however, have a verypositive response to Shanghai Vice.THE INFLUENCE OF SHANGHAI VICE ON IDEASABOUT CHINAThe Chinese group believed that Shanghai Vice was a wellmade programme which was good even though it hadchosen to show selective images of Chinese life. Theystated that the people involved were at least ‘normal’everyday people, something which you did not see inother types of programming. The remainder of thegroups had a varied response to the programme. As hasalready been stated the 15 year-olds showed no interest inthe programme’s content, apart from a section showingthe consequences of an earthquake on a village. Theirinterest in this stemmed from a general liking of ‘naturaldisaster’ programmes which they stated they commonlywatched.Other groups claimed to have liked the format andwere interested or amused at some of the clips theyviewed For instance, the retired group related to a sectionof the film which showed a group of middle-agedChinese people singing western songs:1st: Oh yes, we know all those songs, we used to sing all thetime before there was TV and that. I used to love that songMona Lisa2nd: Oh don’t start singing now, please...1st: Very funny, but really, I didn’t realise they weren’tallowed to sing western songs though, that’s quite sadreally.2nd: Well they wouldn’t be would they, I mean they wereunder communist rule then and everything fromAmerica or here or wherever was seen as bad, like Russia.It’s amazing though that they still got hold of all the wordsand kept on singing.3rd: But we did that as well. That’s just a human thing.In times of strife people always pulled together like that.They still do all over the world, that will never change.Moderator: Having seen these sections of theprogramme if you saw something like that advertisedwould you sit down and watch it?1st: I probably would I think. There was a lot to do withhistory, but it was all about normal people, not politiciansor diplomats or whatever. They were just people like us,ordinary people just trying to get by.DFID – July 2000 135