Chinese Reports From America Reflect Negative Propaganda Campaign

It has been a busy few weeks for Chinese journalists in the United States. There has been a lot of bad news there to cover.

In recent weeks, Washington correspondents for the official New China News Agency have been spending their time on a U.S. Justice Department report about violent crime and another one about the prevalence of heart disease in America.

On Jan. 19, the news agency’s New York correspondent, He Chengzhang, tried his hand at the sort of local story that would not ordinarily be covered by the Chinese: a Long Island Rail Road strike.

“Thousands of stranded Long Island commuters today must find alternative ways of getting to work. . . ,” his story began.

These are but a few examples of the decidedly negative new approach that the official Chinese press is taking toward the United States these days.

Showing Dark Side

For the last month, Chinese newspapers and radio and television stations have devoted increasing amounts of time and space to showing the Chinese public the darker side of American life.

Diplomats here say it is evident that the Communist Party is directing a new propaganda campaign against the United States.

The Chinese press campaign, however, is not limited to the United States. Other Western nations, too, are getting bad reviews these days, apparently as part of a new Chinese government policy.

According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Chen Ming-xiang, a journalist covering West Germany for Beijing radio, was summoned to the Chinese Embassy in Bonn last month and asked to comply with a directive from China. The directive called upon Chinese journalists to report in negative terms the situation in capitalist countries such as West Germany.

Chen has reportedly sought political asylum in West Germany because of a dispute over this policy.

Earlier, the New China News Agency gave considerable space to a report from London showing that pay increases there over the last seven years have been larger for higher-income groups.

Reaction to Protests

The press campaign is a reaction to the series of demonstrations here in December and early January in which students called for freedom and democracy, using the United States as their primary model. During the protests, some Chinese students held up pictures of the Statue of Liberty and quoted Patrick Henry, the American patriot who said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Communist Party newspapers that have no correspondents in the United States have come up with their own handy source of bad news about America--the newspaper USA Today. For the official Chinese press, the main advantage of USA Today is that its articles are relatively short and easy to translate.

The Shanghai newspaper Liberation Daily in mid-January reprinted a USA Today story about the elderly in America, under the headline “Many Older Americans Living Alone.” To ordinary Chinese, one of the most shocking things about the United States is that many elderly people do not live with their children.

About the same time, the Communist Party paper Workers’ Daily carried another USA Today report, this one about the job market in the United States for new college graduates. “This Year’s College Graduates in America Face Difficulty in Finding Jobs,” said the headline in the Chinese newspaper.

Similar Articles in Past

This is not the first time the official Chinese press has gone on an anti-American binge.

When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping traveled to the United States in 1979, Chinese television stations indulged in a sort of “American euphoria.” A few months later there was a backlash, with a series of articles suggesting that socialism was still superior to capitalism.

Similarly, at times when relations between China and the United States have been tense, Communist Party newspapers have vilified the United States.

After Chinese tennis star Hu Na defected to the United States, in 1982, one party newspaper said that President Reagan had “seized a Chinese girl from her parents and offered himself as her foreign father.”

Still, U.S. officials here say that in general the trend in recent years has been for the Chinese press to portray the United States in a more balanced way.

“These recent articles are clearly a divergence from that trend and can’t be related to anything other than the concern about (the student demonstrations),” one official said.

Like others, he said he was not sure how long the campaign will last.

Warmer Tone for Soviets

In contrast to the treatment being given Western countries, the Soviet Union has come in for some unusually warm press coverage. The more favorable tone is part of China’s current emphasis on the importance of socialism.

On Jan. 18, the People’s Daily said that the success of the Russian Revolution “gave birth to the first socialist country in the world, and even the forerunner of China’s bourgeois democratic revolution, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, regarded Russia as ‘his teacher.’ ”

(It has only been in the last couple of years, as tension between China and the Soviet Union has eased, that China has allowed the Soviet Union to be called a socialist nation. For two decades before that, it officially took the position that the Soviet system did not qualify as socialism.)

The change in Chinese coverage of the United States began in December, with emphasis on the nature of American democracy. As students here campaigned for Western-style democracy, the official Chinese press began to portray the U.S. political system as dominated by oil companies and financial institutions.

“Presidents and Cabinet members who get into office with the support of such institutions cannot possibly, in their actions and policy-making, violate the basic interests of the monopoly capital class,” the People’s Daily said.

Based on U.S. Sources

In recent weeks the negative coverage has begun to touch on all aspects of American society. The Chinese articles are usually based on official reports or sources that portray the United States in an unflattering way.

“Nearly 10 million American children suffering from emotional or other mental troubles are not receiving appropriate treatment,” the New China News Agency said last month. The account was said to have come from a study by the Office of Technology Assessment in Washington.

Despite the outpouring of articles, the Chinese press has so far avoided the flights of rhetoric in which it indulged when Communist Party propaganda organs were under the influence of hard-line followers of Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

A decade ago, a year-end review of events in the United States included an explanation that “under the cover and with the connivance of the U.S. authorities, the U.S. Ku Klux Klan and other racist gangsters have brutally persecuted minorities everywhere.”