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.
While Newsweek sings the praises of Chen and Beijing’s recent moves to improve health inspection systems, it makes no mention that this is the same Chinese health agency that chose to ignore early reports of Melamine poisoning for fear of losing face during the Olympics. This is the same government that pressured news editors to adhere to official copy from the Communist Party mouthpiece, Xinhua, and then later quashed efforts by parents whose children were affected by Melamine-tainted products to pursue complaints against the government.
But why taint a good yarn? The way Newsweek describes Chen and the new generation of Western-educated leaders that “returned home with a newfound sense of confidence and independent thought,” you would think that in just a few short months the sagely, Westernized newcomers would usher the heavy-handed Chinese bureaucracy into an era of kinder, gentler leadership, with open Internet access, freedom of speech, and a cute pair of bunny slippers on everyone’s feet.
Cue the children’s chorus.
And let’s not forget the clothes, the hair, and our beloved Horatio when judging Chinese leadership. These qualities are the seeming litmus test for whether they are one of us or, you know, Chinese. Thankfully, Chen passes with flying red, white, and blue colors:
Chen has refreshingly rough-hewn air. He’s wearing a suit this day while making his rounds, but his rumpled mien somehow makes him look less like a CEO than the farmhand he once was. The son of two Shanghai doctors, Chen was sent to a dirt-poor village in Jiangxi province as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution.
Don’t you feel better about China’s ambitions already?
So the next time you read about the Chinese government cracking down on a democratic protest, cracking heads in a renegade province, or cracking the whip on prison laborers before their inevitable execution, remember: America’s own are behind the scenes working toward a brighter tomorrow.
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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