Chen Zhu: The American Media’s New Chinese Poster Boy
The Chinese health minister chose to ignore Melamine poisoning reports, but that hasn't stopped the liberal U.S. media from singing his praises.
Once again, a major outlet of the American media is fawning over the latest “rising star” in the Chinese government. He is someone who doesn’t quite fit our perception of a Chinese government official dressed in drab colors, sporting a bowl-cut, and spewing Maoist maxims from the seat of his bicycle. Rather, he’s a modern sort of fellow with dapper Western business attire and a smart haircut who speaks colloquial English with just a hint of an accent. In other words, someone like us.
Considering that the generally left-leaning media often promotes the virtues of multiculturalism and an appreciation of those things that make us different, it seems a bit hypocritical to heap praise on a Chinese leader based on his Western qualities rather than those things that make him uniquely Chinese.
Perhaps you remember last year’s favored Chinese-guy-that’s-not-really-a-Chinese guy, Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation. His firm manages about $200 billion of the nearly $2 trillion that the Chinese have invested in the U.S. economy. Gao famously warned Americans in a December ‘08 interview with the Atlantic that we should “be nice to the countries who lend you money.”
He sounded a tad threatening, but we shouldn’t worry; the Atlantic says he is really one of us. The personification of a Red rags to riches, Horatio Alger, up-by-your-combat-bootstraps-capitalist. Sounding like People magazine, the Atlantic went on to say that Gao is, “55, fit-looking, with crew-cut hair and a jokey demeanor rather than an air of sternness.” During the interview he wore an “open-necked tattersall shirt, muted plaid jacket, dark slacks, scuffed walking shoes [and] rimless glasses.” And “as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution Gao worked on a railroad-building gang and in an ammunition factory.” There was even a photo fixed atop the story with Gao looking like your fantasy grandfather — caring, sweet, and ready at any moment to throw you over his knee and tan your hide for your own durn’ good. Who would worry that he held so much sway over U.S. policy making abroad?
But that is so last winter. Spring is here and Newsweek brings us the latest Chinese poster boy for our self-congratulatory pleasure: Chinese Health Minister Chen Zhu. The headline and tagline read: “China’s Best Westerns: Chen Zhu is a new model Chinese leader, a non-communist who trained in the West.” Following the pat on our own back that Zhu studied in the hallowed halls of the western education system rather than that backwater that is China, the boilerplate profile ensues. “He worked in a small Chinese village as a “barefoot doctor” from 1970 to 1975 and is part of the “new generation of leaders [that] were trained in the West and are heavily influenced by Western trends.” And worry not ladies: “Chen, 55, is no bland bureaucrat. He’s only the second Chinese minister not to be a member of the Chinese Communist Party in 36 years.”
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Bobby McGill is an American journalist based in Asia. He can be reached through his website at www.idlewordship.com.
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6 Comments
1. Dougf:I have no great love for the People’s Republic or its leaders. But any objective analysis must surely allow that they are currently far ahead of their loutish and brutish Maoist predecessors.
Frankly China HAS made great strides in the past 20 years, but it may never be an oasis of ‘liberal democracy’. China appears to me to be a very consensus’ type of society and may always be a little more comfortable with a little authoritarianism in its system. Governments in the West have also sometimes arranged to bury ‘unfortunate’ news so this is not just a Chinese thingy. This is not to excuse the mistreatment of its own people who suffered from the poisonings. That is an real affront. But at least they were not treated as deviationists for complaining. Maybe in another 10 years if another problem occurs, justice rather than face will be the more important consideration.
Oh and by the way—- It IS always a good idea to treat nicely those who are loaning you the cash to support an unsupportable lifestyle. Politics has nothing to do with it. America wanted to dance away eternity while never having to worry about that darn piper and his annoying bills and it designed a system where that appeared to be possible. You can but be grateful that China is currently joined at the hip with you, but nothing lasts forever, and at some point China will have to start treating the US as a ‘bonus’ market, instead of as THE MARKET. When that happens I wager you will really have something to complain about, Chinese-wise.
Apr 5, 2009 - 4:05 am 2. Vinny Vidivici:This is SOP for Western media. I’m trying to remember the name of that smooth-talking apparatchik Ted Koppel used to have on Nightline frequently during the Cold War. And Andropov loved jazz, blah, blah, blah.
It’s never acknowledged that while Western media offer the apologists of police states the opportunity to ‘explain themselves’ to Western audiences, the reverse is never true, except under extremely controlled circumstances, or when the Western can be relied upon to be sufficiently self-critical and obsequious.
Apr 5, 2009 - 8:36 am 3. Northern Light:My personal theory on Chinese business is that after a generation or two of indoctrination in Karl Marx that the Chinese have animpression of what capitalism is based on German capitalism in the 1840s because that’s what Marx described when he discussed capitalism.
Fast forward to the late 1980s when China (under pressure from the West) began to abandon communism in favour of capitalism. What form of capitalism did they establish? Between child labour, suppression of workers rights, and the marketing of poison Chinese capitalism seems little different from the type of capitalism that was prevalent in the 19th Century.
The mistake we made when we opened up China to market-based reform (capitalism) was we thought we were establishing a market for our goods when due to globalization we were actually sending our industry to whatever country had the cheapest labour. This turned out to be China. As a result, instead of selling manufactured goods to China, we are now buying manufactured goods from China.
This leads to balance of payments imbalances which means that China owns the US debt.
I think this was a huge mistake.
Melamine and lead-painted toys are just the tip of the iceburg. Chinese industry has done other horrible things just as the robber barons of The Gilded Age did.
The big difference is the people here demanded change and we don’t have the abuses that 19th Century capitalists were known for.
Anyone in China demanding change would be shot.
Apr 5, 2009 - 9:40 am 4. Pee Wee Herman, Community Organizer:Shades of Gorb.
Apr 5, 2009 - 10:07 am 5. Jose A. Garcia:Any blue collared guy in America coulda told you it was a bad idea to start down this whole “global economy” b.s.
Democracy is become mob rule. To me oligarchy doesnt look so bad, so long as we’ve got some decent oligarchs.
Apr 5, 2009 - 6:03 pm 6. seansarto:Another point America’s liberals need to realize is that the “Chinese” (especially the ambitious,immature young girls who China is exporting to horny, middle-class, Anglo-Amreican college boys)”love” Africans because they are not in China…but a helpful tool in America.
Apr 6, 2009 - 2:18 am