It's the boob tube in China, too
On Channel 6, a young woman wearing a garish pink dress addresses a studio audience and the audience at home through wireless microphone she holds in her hand. On the screen, lines of small bright blue text scroll across the bottom, while large blocks of flashing yellow text suddenly appear covering the woman’s face with three exclamation points. Next to her is another host, a man in an all white suit and pink turtleneck waiting for his turn to speak into his own microphone. They are introducing the next singer on Super Star, the Chinese edition of American Idol.
Channel 8 shows a woman with pigtails tied with large blue bows holding the arm of a man in a suit and tie. They are speaking softly about the man’s imminent departure; he stops and turns to face her, and, as tears begin to moisten her heavily made-up cheek bones, the man says, “I must leave, I’m sorry.” The woman brushes passed his left shoulder crying loudly, “I love you!”
I’ve dubbed Channel 8 “The All-Army Channel” for its 24-hour bombardment of military-themed programs. From World War II dramas featuring heroic Chinese soldiers brazenly fighting evil Japanese “aggressors,” to “Monkey King,” an episodic drama depicting the life of a simian-man warrior who rules over a flock of other man-beast characters in 14th-century China, Channel 8 is an ideal stage for overdramatic battles that affirm Chinese dominance and pride.
While this may appear to be thinly veiled propaganda, there is more than one channel distributing its content with an unmistakable bias: state-owned CCTV.
China Central Television operates 15 different channels broadcasting throughout the country. Some run Chinese soap operas, others have cultural programming; there is one sports channel and three news stations.
In total, I can watch 19 television channels on my university-provided Changhong television set. For pure, unadulterated English-language Sino-centric propaganda, I turn to CCTV 9 (on Channel 4). The news on this channel is not as sensationalized as you would expect from a counterpart in the United States, like a Fox News or CNN, but the slant is undeniable. The difference is most Chinese view that slant as if it was parallel to the truth; there is no National Public Radio or New York Times to balance out the coverage.
With one side receiving all the coverage on Chinese news stations, and other channels broadcasting happy-go-lucky glorified karaoke and melodramatic gobbledygook, it is no wonder that dissent is conspicuously absent among the majority of the Chinese public.
This has made itself apparent on a number of occasions, but none so poignant as this past week and a half. Coverage of the protests-turned-riots in Lhasa, Tibet, started as a trickle of details coming from the official sources, CCTV and The People’s Daily newspaper. Comparatively, and despite foreign journalists being barred from entering Tibet (there was only one foreign correspondent in all of Lhasa during the events of last week), international media reports were gushing rivers of information, some based on unconfirmed reports and others substantiated. Where Chinese media called the event “unrest” that metastasized into “violent riots against innocent people,” the British Broadcasting Corporation (which I can find on Channel 19 because of foreign privilege, although the Web site is blocked), The New York Times and The Guardian newspaper from London painted a different picture, citing claims that 100 people died as a result of “violent clashes between China’s security forces and protestors.”
Western media outlets called the events in and around Tibet “peaceful protests” and described China’s response as a “violent crackdown on protestors.” China has not denied acting with a firm response, but there has been no mention on CCTV of the alleged deaths of 100 people, although it has confirmed that 22 people have died at the hands of the protestors, part of the story that I have yet to see mentioned by Western media.
I have the advantage of nearly unfettered Internet access (I have found a way to circumvent Internet censorship), and I receive the BBC World Service on television. I have been able to click between CCTV coverage and Western coverage to get many sides of this story. Only twice did the screen go black on the BBC channel when it reported on the events in and around Tibet, presumably instigated by Chinese censorship.
It seems, however, that both sides are offering an obvious bias. On one hand, China does not want to appear the aggressor, and on the other, the West is desperately trying to remain on top, seeking ways to make China appear evil.
So what, or where, rather, is the truth?
Does it even matter?
Even if both the Chinese and Western media have agendas to feed to the public, do people even care to know the whole story? Or would they rather just move on with their lives and laugh at cute girls in ugly dresses dance across the screen, satisfied and complacent that the “official” version tells them all they need to know?
This, perhaps, is the real question, which I find curiously familiar.
It was around the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. I remember something about “weapons of mass destruction,” “Al Qaeda” and other bits of rhetoric. I eventually took that rhetoric for granted as the truth. Our so-called watchdog media never questioned it, and I had more important things to do, like laugh at Jessica Simpson’s “Chicken of the Sea” silliness.
But watching the television in my room in China has sent me back in time, and I see many parallels between what is broadcast here and what we saw on our television sets at home.
The game shows are the same, the soaps are the same, and I can even draw parallels between the “The All-Army Channel” and many of the programs on the History Channel and the Sci-Fi Channel. It seems the message is the same, too. It goes something like this: “Everything is OK, nothing to worry about, be entertained, stay blind to the atrocities our government is committing against our own people and people in faraway lands.”
The government shows little effort to hide its ruthless suppression of dissent, and there are very few accessible alternative sources of information. Besides, the breakneck growth China is experiencing and the quality entertainment showcased on CCTV’s 15 stations effectively squashes any need to complain anyway.
That sounds very much like home, although without the screaming yellow text.
Chris Gauthier is a recent Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts graduate spending a year in China teaching English at Hebei University. He writes regular columns for The Advocate during his stay in China. To read all of his Advocate columns, visit blogtheberkshires.com. Readers can also read more about his experiences on his own blog at chrisinchina.wordpress.com.