MOIRA WEIGEL - My Life and Times in Chinese TV

By Dilip -
The tower housing the Shanghai Media Group looks like the future pictured in an old movie. The front of the building curves inward, slightly, between frames that peak in enormous antennae. Pollution has grayed its white aluminum cladding. But at the top of twenty-six stories the turquoise logo of the group shines. 
The grounds where it stands, on Nanjing West Road, once lay at the edge of the Shanghai International Settlement, the port on the Huangpu River that British generals forced the Qing emperor to hand over in the treaty that ended the first Opium War. A real estate magnate named Silas Hardoon first developed this property in 1903, as part of a twenty-six acre fantasy estate. Born penniless in the Jewish slums of Baghdad, Hardoon came to Shanghai via Bombay, and died the richest man in Asia. His gardens were based on a sketch that a Buddhist monk had drawn of paradise.
My contact had given me instructions in painstaking English. I was to present myself at the SMG gate at ten. Someone from HR would meet me and take me up to the sixteenth floor to sort out paperwork. I was not to forget my passport or the three hundred yuan (about fifty dollars) that I would need to leave as a deposit for my ID. 
It started to drizzle as I tramped from the subway to the wrong entrance. When I tried to shortcut across the parking lot and a man in a suit shouted at me “You’re in China!” (meaning, follow rules), I hardly flinched. I was too busy practicing the two sentences that I had prepared to say to the Communist Party official who has invited me to spend this month inside one of the biggest companies run by the Chinese propaganda department. Mr Feng I of truth am too happy to meet you! Thank you for giving me that good chance to penetrate your so excellent company!
Out back, at the proper entrance, an HR employee in a thin pink poncho was waiting for me, frowning through the rain. Introducing herself as Sunny, she led me past the babyfaced army guards, then held me back to let a pack of soldiers running laps around the parking lot grunt past. By the time I was through security and on the sixteenth floor standing still for her colleague to take my picture, the back of my carefully starched blouse was Rorschached with sweat. Sweat had curdled the vanilla body lotion on my sternum. 
Sunny Xeroxed my passport and student visa and gave me a document to sign, promising in both Mandarin and English “not to do anything against the Communist Party” for the duration of my stay. Then she showed me to where I would sit. While she went to find me one of the bottles of SMG branded water that stood on each of the empty desks around me, I looked around. This was where the propagandists worked. For the next four weeks I would be one of them, but at 10.30 AM on Monday, the newsroom was deserted. So much the better. I had promised not to do anything against the Party, but my plan for the next four weeks was to be as diligent a double agent as possible. I was going to learn how rising China spins its story to itself. 
After winning the Civil War, in 1949, one of the first tasks Mao Zedong set upon was to build a propaganda system. Headed by a member of the Politburo, with Propaganda and Thought Work Leading Groups at the central, provincial, city, and district levels, the supra-bureaucracy he created controlled the political department of the People’s Liberation Army, state-run sectors like culture, technology, and media, and mass organizations, like the Journalists Association. It also placed cadres in every other state agency. This spy network acted as the ermu houshe—“ears, eyes, and tongue”—of the Party, delivering directives and reporting on anyone who failed to comply with them. 
Television was not very important during the Mao era. The first national TV broadcast only took place ten years after the founding of the PRC, on May Day, 1958. Beijing Television, the precursor to China Central Television launched on September 2 of that year. (CCTV has remained the most powerful broadcaster in China; today, it has forty-five channels and reaches over 1 billion viewers.) The first regional station, Shanghai TV, followed in October, with Liaoning, Zhejiang, and Guangdong provinces close behind. Only 26,000 TV sets were manufactured between 1958 and 1965, and most were placed in public settings, where people gathered to watch broadcasts resembling illustrated lectures that aired for several hours, several days per week. 
Starting at 7 PM, after a long, static shot of Mao’s portrait with the de facto national anthem, “The East is Red,” playing in the background, Beijing TV viewers would see a talking head praising Party heroes, and reporting on visits from foreign dignitaries or the struggle of the North Vietnamese against American imperialists, occasionally cutting to official footage. Sometimes a movie about the War of Resistance against the Japanese or the Communist triumph over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army followed. 
This pattern might have continued indefinitely. But economic collapse after the failure of the Great Leap Forward stalled the development of broadcasting infrastructure, and during the Cultural Revolution many stations shut down altogether. The ones that remained became less ambitious with their programming. A British journalist who visited China in 1970 recalled that Beijing TV’s evening news show devoted eighteen of its twenty-six minutes to scrolling quotations from Mao. By 1978 fewer than ten million Chinese had access to a television. The economic opening and reform that began that year would change this. .. 
See also
Chinese Journalists resist censorship: Timothy Garton Ash on The Southern Weekly affair

Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on

The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The crises of Party culture become clear with a single glance. The CPC is called the ruling party, yet it operates according to secret party rules: this is an identity crisis. Its formal ceremonies and slogans are like those of an extremist church, and it has long lost its utopian doctrine that stirred the passion of the people: this is an ideological crisis. It tells beautiful lies while accepting bribes and keeping mistresses: this is a moral crisis. The totalitarian system is in the process of collapsing, yet political reform is not in the foreseeable future: this is a political crisis. It has corrupted traditional values and also rejected universal values, rendering Party members and government officials at a spiritual loss: this is a crisis of values.





Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more