Like Tree17Likes

SCMP: Rebranding China Abroad

Closed Thread
Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 1 2 3 LastLast
  1. #11

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652

    Fluff pieces like the below make the paper unreadable. If the aim is to make China look like a country that doesn't have the ability to critically assess issues to drive improvements etc then it really is succeeded. It reads like propaganda - not a good thing to promote yourself.

    https://www.scmp.com/business/china-...inesses-survey


  2. #12

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652

    fluff pieces like this make for painful reading.


    https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight...it#add-comment

    This feels a tasteless way of of writing

    "the world’s longest sea crossing was fraught with problems like ballooning costs, fatal accidents, fraud and delays during construction, it is now a majestic showpiece"

    Gatts likes this.

  3. #13

    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Posts
    2,254
    https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/...-morning-posts
    Along with its growing China desk, the SCMP’s China coverage has been bolstered by the addition of political economy and tech news teams. The newspaper has also launched three electronic products in the past year focused on China...
    Hi Carrie Lam, thanks for praising us, could you make sure you plug our 3 new electronic products by name which very few have heard about?.”

  4. #14

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652

    Not sure what the purpose of the SCMP is now. It really does just seem to be the China Daily with added HK bashing.

    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/poli...ng-tidal-waves

    shri likes this.

  5. #15

    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    Sin bin
    Posts
    1,896
    Quote Originally Posted by East_coast:
    Not sure what the purpose of the SCMP is now. It really does just seem to be the China Daily with added HK bashing.
    Appearing to have some semblance of carefully calibrated balance is important in propaganda targetting more educated readers or viewers. In developing world even cruder forms of propaganda can be pushed. Alibaba is trying to appear as a first world megaphone for the CCP, I mean "China", while trying to please their domestic propaganda machine and thus the result is somewhat schitzophrenic.


    A very good read from earlier this month:

    The Guardian:
    The long read - Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign


    Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to ‘tell China’s story well’ – as part of a worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition.

    By Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin


    Such blatant exhibitions of power indicate the new mood of assertiveness. In information warfare – as in so much else – Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxim of “hide your strength and bide your time” is over. As the world’s second-largest economy, China has decided it needs discourse power commensurate with its new global stature. Last week, a group of the US’s most distinguished China experts released a startling report expressing concern over China’s more aggressive projections of power. Many of the experts have spent decades promoting engagement with China, yet they conclude: “The ambition of Chinese activity in terms of the breadth, depth of investment of financial resources, and intensity requires far greater scrutiny than it has been getting.”

    As Beijing and its proxies extend their reach, they are harnessing market forces to silence the competition. Discourse power is, it seems, a zero-sum game for China, and voices that are critical of Beijing are co-opted or silenced, left without a platform or drowned out in the sea of positive messaging created by Beijing’s own “borrowed” and “bought” boats. As the west’s media giants flounder, China’s own media imperialism is on the rise, and the ultimate battle may not be for the means of news production, but for journalism itself.

  6. #16

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652
    Quote Originally Posted by Mefisto:
    Appearing to have some semblance of carefully calibrated balance is important in propaganda targetting more educated readers or viewers. In developing world even cruder forms of propaganda can be pushed. Alibaba is trying to appear as a first world megaphone for the CCP
    I may be biased but it reads like blunt cheerleading propaganda a lot of the time coupled with articles that insist Hong Kong must 'learn' from other cities in China to be successful and have harmony. It is not that subtle or informative anymore.

  7. #17

  8. #18

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652

    And another article about skin colour based on the naive writings of a 1700c German 'anatomist'.

    https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opini...ed-them-yellow


  9. #19

    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    Sin bin
    Posts
    1,896

    Alongside nationalism and various other eventually violent political ideas the Chinese elite imported from Europe from mid 1800s onwards were racism and racial supremacism. These were floating around when the republic was founded and later Mao was apparently a subscriber too. Several of his deadly policies had a tinge of eugenistics about them and IIRC he also wanted his scientists to prove that the Han were a single unified "race", although DNA analysis would later reveal distinct northern and southern populations (with northern male DNA increasing in the south due to repeated invasions and their obvious repercussions).

    I wouldn't be surprised if Xi Dada subscribed to the earlier nationalists' racial ideology and this is what we might now see in the PRC's propaganda media.

    The worry for me is that the great Chinese masses are criminally ignorant of actual world history, including the racial theories and crimes of the Nazis. Even in some corners of the West the lessons have been forgotten and new racist fires are being stoked (often by foreign bots), but at least in the West there's civil society and free media to counter the rise of race-based hate ideologies. In the PRC the growing focus on "race" - and all media material with political effect is disseminated because the Party has so decided - can have very different consequences.

    East_coast likes this.

  10. #20

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    猴山
    Posts
    23,652
    Quote Originally Posted by Mefisto:
    I wouldn't be surprised if Xi Dada subscribed to the earlier nationalists' racial ideology and this is what we might now see in the PRC's propaganda media.
    The probability of 3 articles in as many days focussing on the difference in skin colour and the prejudices etc that such a simplistic approach can create doesn't feel like an unlucky co-incidence for the CCP's most respected English language mouthpiece.