Propaganda Blitz Unleashed : In China’s Media, Official View Is the Only Message

Day after day, hour after hour, Chinese government television shows waves of mostly youthful protesters attacking army trucks, tanks or armored cars.

The only dead seen in the broadcast videotapes have been three charred corpses identified as soldiers. Every one of the injured shown so far has been a military man recovering in the hospital.

In all the broadcasts, no shot fired by troops has been heard on the sound tracks, although witnesses heard and saw plenty of shooting June 4, when soldiers moved in force into the center of Beijing.

China’s media are in the midst of a propaganda campaign of a kind not experienced here for more than a decade--and perhaps not matched since the 1950s campaign against what the government called rightist critics.

Television especially is saturated with stories supporting the government version of events two weekends ago, when the army stormed into downtown Beijing and used live ammunition to roust pro-democracy demonstrators from Tian An Men Square. It has also emphasized the protesters’ “criminal” nature with long reports on arrests of “thugs” throughout the country.

The campaign is a textbook example of the official view here of mass communication more as a tool of unification and pacification than as an approach to the truth.

In this time of crisis, persuasion appears to be secondary to another goal: letting everyone know what it is permissible to think. As a farmer in Tailing, a village outside Beijing, told a reporter: “Television says that the attacks were made by thugs. That is all I want to know.”

That is not a general attitude, at least here in the capital. Interviews with Beijing residents over the past nine days indicate that the effects of the propaganda deluge are more unpredictable than the government might like.

One wild card is the role of the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corp., both of which beam news in the Mandarin dialect to China. Foreign radio has proven a formidable competitor to the official broadcasts. In random conversations, many citizens of the capital say they listen to one or both of the foreign outlets.

In the case of the Voice of America, China has launched a large-scale effort to discredit its broadcasts by accusing it of deliberate misreporting.

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, said Monday that the VOA could “hardly hide its excitement” over news of the protests at Tian An Men. It accused the radio of “spreading rumors,” including exaggerated casualty tolls and stories about splits in the military.

“VOA spread too many rumors,” the People’s Daily said. “They played their part in helping counterrevolutionary revolt in Beijing. . . . It is time for the VOA to take a rest.”

The government is also trying to head off the foreigners’ practice of sending in news clippings and leaflets by telephone fax machine. In radio broadcasts, the authorities said that they have stationed police by fax machines in China to intercept the messages and that any printed material “containing distorted propaganda” must be turned over to Beijing’s Public Security Bureau.

Intercepted Material

In another example of state control of all communication, Chinese authorities have intercepted unedited ABC News material that was being transmitted to the United States by satellite and used it to arrest a man who spoke to an American news crew shortly after the martial-law crackdown.

The intercepted videotape was broadcast on state-run television Saturday evening, showing a middle-aged man speaking vehemently about the killings of protesters. The man admitted under questioning by a foreign journalist that he had not seen the killings himself. He then attributed his information to the Voice of America and added inaccurately that the American broadcast had reported 20,000 deaths. The Saturday night broadcast concluded with a plea for citizens to turn in the “rumormonger” to authorities.

The man appeared again on the Sunday night news, this time in police custody.

Identified as Xiao Bin, 42, the man declared before police officials and a television camera: “I confess that I was guilty of making up rumors. If you call me a counterrevolutionary, I admit it.”

A spokesman for ABC News in New York objected strenuously to the interception of its material and the use of it “for political purposes.”

In response, U.S. television networks say they have begun to obscure the faces of dissidents interviewed here to prevent identification and retribution by authorities.

“We began to electronically disguise all people interviewed in Beijing on our Sunday evening news programs,” an ABC spokesman said from New York. CBS started to “blank out” faces in interviews, and NBC said it is showing only silhouettes of those who feared reprisal.

Chinese have reacted to the propaganda onslaught in a variety of ways. Some simply dismiss the information--at least in the privacy of their homes.

During one news broadcast, residents of a small courtyard home in the capital’s Qian Men district yelled “False! False!” in response to every official account of the events at Tian An Men Square.

Even Communist Party members, in private, may be heard to reject the official line. “The party should not lie to the people,” said a four-year member who told a reporter that he was sickened by the army violence.

Other Beijing residents have been merely skeptical, especially if they have heard foreign reports. Sometimes, when interviewed by a foreigner, Chinese are much more interested in finding out what a reporter knows than telling him what they think.

There are those who are wary of expressing themselves, such as the farmer in Tailing, who viewed the state account as a guideline for staying out of trouble.

Some would prefer not to hear any version. “I don’t go outside to see or ask, and I don’t watch television,” said a proprietor of a small, private dumpling restaurant just a block off Tian An Men Square. “The way I look at it, the less you know, the better.”

Firsthand Accounts

It has not yet been possible to independently locate anyone in Beijing who is convinced by the official reports. This is due in part to the number of firsthand accounts of heavy shooting that have spread through the city.

On government news programs, however, there have been numerous interviews with disgusted citizens who blame the students and other “counterrevolutionary rebels” for unprovoked attacks on soldiers and the state.

One woman, interviewed in Shanghai, told state television that she watched news broadcasts of the mayhem in Beijing “four or five times a day.”

“It made me extremely angry, the burning of those buses and military vehicles,” she said. “On top of that, people are spreading rumors, like it was the People’s Liberation Army that burned the vehicles. Our army would never do that kind of thing!

“Watching television . . . isn’t it clear that it’s the thugs who did this kind of destruction?” she asked. She began to cry as she added, “Yesterday, I saw that soldier who was burned up that way, and I felt terrible inside.”

Interspersed among such interviews were scenes of affection between common citizens and the army. In one, soldiers paid visits to a school and helped children wash windows.

“Thank you, uncle,” the children said.

A peasant delivered three live pigs as a gift for one encampment of troops deployed in the capital. The perhaps obligatory scene of soldiers helping an old lady cross a street has been aired several times.

The testimonies and tributes followed days of repetitive broadcasts of selected events from the June 4 weekend in and around Tian An Men Square that appear to throw full guilt on protesters.

For instance, along a stretch of Changan Avenue in front of the Military Museum, a remote-control, black-and-white video camera recorded what appeared to be wave after wave of mob attacks on army tanks, armored cars and trucks.

The date and time of the action was shown at the bottom of the screen. Sometimes, from segment to segment, the clock would jump forward two hours, then backward five and then forward to the next day. No explanation was given for the unsequential editing, and only mob violence was shown.

Youths identified as eyewitnesses in Tian An Men Square said all student demonstrators escaped unharmed. No mention is made of the violence on Changan or other thoroughfares or of the flatbed carts that were seen bearing bodies away.

The one-sided slant is but an extreme example out of modern China’s long history of communication at the service of the state.

Officialdom’s view of the media as mainly a propaganda tool predates Communist rule. As early as the first decades of the century, pioneer journalist Liang Qichao considered public opinion and its manipulation as a contributor to a stable state, not as a means of expressing contending views.

The Nationalist government, which ruled China for a time after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, routinely censored books and newspapers critical of the government.

The late Communist leader Mao Tse-tung argued that the role of the press was “to bring the party program, the party line, the party’s general and specific policies . . . before the masses in the quickest and most extensive way.”

When in the late 1970s and early 1980s the Chinese press entered an uneven era of revealing public wrongs, a Communist Party leader in Canton warned editors and reporters: “Exposure of our dark side should not be too frequent nor too highly colored. Otherwise, people might get the wrong impression, weakening the party’s prestige among the masses and affecting stability and unity in ways that are not beneficial to socialist construction.”

Since the Tian An Men incident, at least, the “dark side” of government has received no exposure at all.