You Can Say Anything In China
No one in China will hear it unless it is approved by the government.
Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post reports that Access to Obama Remarks Blocked in China.
This visit was big news in the West [not as important as a certain book tour, but big], but it only got a minute on the nation-wide Chinese evening news, near the end of the broadcast. The Chinese aren’t covering the book tour, so that was a plus.
Obama’s town hall with students in Shanghai was almost as tightly controlled as one the Shrubbery’s events, but the handpicked audience was given the official responses to everything that was said within hours of the end of the event so they would know what to say if they were questioned later.
If a tree falls in China it only makes a sound if the Party approves.
2 comments
I especially liked the comment on the CBS news site, “Gosh, I didn’t know the Bush/Cheney regime still had so much power in China!” LOL!
China’s leaders are interested in one and only one thing: retaining power. The unspoken deal they’ve made with the Chinese people is, “we’ll give you prosperity in exchange for your freedom.” And the majority of the Chinese people have gone for it.
As a friend who worked out of Hong Kong noted, the Chinese listen to everything you say and hear what they want to hear.
It will take decades, if ever, for things to shift in China toward more real freedom for individuals, because it isn’t part of their culture, and never has been.
If change happens it will be due to the displacements and mixing of various groups, because, even among the Chinese in this country, the emphasis is on their group identity, not their individual identity.
People forget how long it took for Europeans to move to representative democracy and expect everyone else to have the same value system. The world doesn’t work that way. There are an amazing number of Russians who want to return to the Soviet system that didn’t require them to think. Freedom and democracy are hard work if you weren’t born into the system.