On Chinese Cultural Diplomacy post-Brexit/Trump

In February 2017 I was invited to deliver the opening address to a two-days conference on Chinese cultural diplomacy in Prague. This is the text.


We are told that the Chinese have a saying: May you live in interesting times. And I understand this is intended as a curse rather than a blessing.

Every generation claims its own interesting times. Every generation embraces what it assumes is the uniqueness of its experience.

I can say without a doubt that I am now living through some of my own most interesting times. It is difficult to recall such an unpredictable, volatile, and often frightening moment since the we lived under the shadow of imminent nuclear war in the early 1980s - a time of unchecked populism, sweeping racism and bigotry, a time when being an "expert" is suspect, a times when "alternative facts" bleed into everyday narratives. The normalisation of abnormal politics is perhaps the most disturbing and distressing development of all.

At such times, we must turn to and depend on the Arts to make sense of our world and our place in it. Culture is not only a sanctuary from chaos - who doesn't want to see La La Land to escape the dismal Trump Land - but Culture also provides another voice to challenge the powerful and give succour to the powerless.

Of course this is not new. At every troubled turn in history, pain, confusion and terror have been the catalyst for artistic achievements. In the 20th Century alone think of Picasso's Guernica, the novels of Erich Remarque, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi and John Steinbeck; Arthur Miller's The Crucible, the music of Shostakovich; and the whole wave of artistic expression that reflects and comes to terms with the trauma of the Vietnam war. Here in Prague, Franz Kafka is a justly celebrated figure, and much of today's political turbulence might well be labelled Kafkaesque. Meanwhile, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a seminal account of life during the Prague Spring. Since President Trump's inauguration the 20th January, no book has been referenced more than Orwell's 1984, with 'alternative facts' resembling Big Brother's Newspeak. In the UK, 1984 has experienced an increase in sales of over 90% since January,

Sometimes the dry treatises of philosophy and political science speak to us with less urgency and less relevance than Culture.

In opening a conference examining Chinese cultural diplomacy I make no apologies for these reflections - for what may seem digressions from the subject we have all gathered to discuss.

For since the unfortunate turn of events on 23 June 2016 when a majority of my fellow countrymen decided we should leave the most successful and peaceful trading alliance in recorded history, I've been returning again and again to soft power and I have reason to question my longstanding agnosticism. What is soft power? How is it accumulated? How is it exercised? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we maintain and nourish it? And in unpacking the concept into its component parts it seems we must pay far more attention to cultural diplomacy and cultural relations than we have in the past.

Certainly in the first few weeks of what will be an interminably long Trump Presidency - four years might as well be forty - US soft power has been challenged and undermined at every turn. For soft power is about moral authority, the legitimacy and credibility of a government's actions that is rooted in how a government treats its own citizens and how it behaves abroad. I don't need to labour the relevance of Trump, nor of Theresa May and Boris Johnson for that matter. How can the US and UK with any degree of credibility continue to lecture countries like China on the need to advance universal rights and values? When the Foreign Secretary likens the French President to a Nazi POW officer, how can we take seriously his - and British - moral authority?

In a speech to the UN in Geneva in January 2017, the Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the world to "build a community of shared futures of mankind and achieve shared and win-win development." While Xi advanced a compelling commitment to China's economic growth, exports, and overseas investment, he also said: "We always put people's rights and interests above everything else and have worked hard to advance and uphold human rights".

In the past, such claims would have met with ridicule, having little credibility among those who know the full extent of the Chinese government's commitment to human rights.

But these are interesting times ... And the US's credibility in upholding moral values or exercising moral authority is weakening by the day. Why should we judge Xi Jinping's claims to be any less legitimate than Donald Trump's?

 Soft power RIP ... almost ... but not quite.

First, the eruption of protests around the world in response to some of the more disturbing policies of the Trump administration demonstrate the formation of new ways of understanding soft power - one that arises spontaneously in civil society and challenges the defilement of cherished values. The democratic spirit embodied in these protests is a powerful narrative that has resonated around the world; they have created new relationships, new senses of community and empathy - the very embodiment of of cultural diplomacy and cultural relations.
And secondly, as I noted, culture often thrives best in troubled times. Art feeds off tormented souls.

And speaking of souls ...

The US State Department once said that 'Cultural diplomacy reveals the soul of a nation'.

It is the act of telling stories about ourselves to others, defining who we are and from where we have journeyed. This is why thousands around the world have chosen to highlight the inconsistencies in American values forged in history (and values which have contributed to both soft and cultural power) and American actions.

While there is no settled definition of cultural diplomacy, words that crop up in all discussions include 'mutual understanding', 'tolerance', 'respect', 'challenging prejudices', 'shared interests'. Cultural diplomacy is therefore a normative project.

Former Chinese President Hu Jintao alluded to a more sinister understanding of cultural diplomacy and talked about culture and tradition as areas of international conflict. In 2012, he wrote in the magazine Qiushi that "we must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields", he said, "are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration ... We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarm and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond".

This view echoed  Lu Shulei from the Central Party School who warned China about "some powerful nations" who "wish to use culture as a weapon against other nations" and urged China to "work hard to raise our country's soft power".

Even Xi Jinping and the present leadership declines to discuss "mutual understanding" as a goal of its cultural outreach, preferring instead to continue to lament our allegedly distorted view of modern China. His talk of a "cultural renaissance" to rejuvenate Chinese values, strength, and moral superiority over western values is designed to renew what he calls "cultural self-confidence".

Thus taking Hu Jintao's assessment of the risk of western cultural imperialism one step further, Xi Jinping has linked this cultural renaissance to a nationalist agenda through the China Dream. Artists have been instructed to make the Chinese nation central to their work to spread Chinese values and promote the Chinese spirit.

For example, China's Film Industry Law which came into effect on 1 March calls on movies to "serve the people and socialism". It will not allow co-operation with foreign organisations engaging in what are considered to be "activities damaging China's national dignity, honour, and interests, or harming social stability or hurting national feelings," and subjects that "defame the people's excellent cultural traditions" are banned.

As one of my MA students noted when we discussed this in class, this is a method of regulating both content and access by foreign organisations to the Chinese market unless they meet politically-accepted and ideologically-driven criteria. What those criteria are remains anyone's guess, as the vagueness of the regulations is what gives them power. National dignity, defamation, the national feelings can be whatever the Chinese state wants them to be and under whatever circumstances.

And this politicisation of culture appears to be working. The Pew Opinion Poll organisation found in 2016 that around three-quarters of Chinese who responded to the poll (c.77%) believe there is a real need to protect China from foreign influence. Contrast this with a mere 37% who see the widening gap between rich and poor as a major problem.

It is unfortunate that China has chosen not just to politicise its culture in this way, but also to situate Chinese culture within a perceived global competition for cultural hegemony. Perhaps I am naive in rejecting such claims and dismissing the twin threats of Americanisation and cultural imperialism.

I prefer a more complex picture of the world where culture flows in multiple directions, and where the original source is often forgotten or is irrelevant. It is rare I disagree with my literary hero, George Orwell, but I cannot accept his conclusion that all art is propaganda; and therefore I cannot accept the Chinese view of cultural conflict.

At the same time, it would be naive to pretend that power and culture are not bound together. Questions that arise from any discussion of cultural diplomacy must include, Whose culture is represented? Who gets to decide?

As a Brit I am all too aware that the image of my country abroad is dominated by the Queen, Castles, Shakespeare, poor food, warm beer, Harry Potter, Sherlock, and cricket. But this is a tiny snapshot of a complex cultural landscape that covers four different countries, not to mention socio-economic experiences within them. Why would Shakespeare represent the working class community in which I grew up? His concerns are universal and timeless - love, death, cruelty, power, superstition. But might the films of Ken Loach or the television scripts of Paul Abbott have greater resonance and narrate those themes in more appealing ways?

For a country the size of China with huge demographic and ethnic differences, the question of Whose culture? is perhaps more relevant. Who has the authority - and the legitimacy - to decide whose cultural experience is communicated and for what purpose? This is a question I would ask any nation-state promoting a cultural agenda. For China, the answer is clear and straightforward: the CCP and Xi Jinping gets to decide.

The current Chinese commitment to resisting western culture is a form of Occidentalism, a way of understanding the intersection of identities and cultures that complements the Orientalism associated with Edward Said. In historical terms, there is little difference between the way Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping have viewed western culture and, for example, the Japanese scholars who gathered together in Kyoto in 1942 to discuss "how to overcome the modern". And the modern meant to the Japanese, as it does to the Chinese today, the west. We are told in accounts of this meeting that the participants compared Westernization to "a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit". One film critic advocated a war against "the poisonous materialist civilization". Writing on Occidentalism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit observe the following: "All at the conference agreed that culture - that is, traditional Japanese culture - was spiritual and profound, whereas modern western civilization was shallow, rootless and destructive of creative power ..." Such sentiments certainly echo Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping and all the others in modern China who rail against western culture as poisonous, who describe Chinese culture as superior, and call for the protection of Chinese culture from western influence.

When such Occidentalism determines cultural policy in China, the situation is bad; when such Occidentalism justifies terrorist atrocities committed by Al Qaeda and Islamic State, it becomes reprehensible.

In 2010, outspoken journalist and blogger Chen Jibing discussed the limitation of China's international outreach:

[I]f we truly want China's voice to gain a foothold on the stage of world public opinion, I am afraid it is far from sufficient to put our energies into communication channels and the technical side alone. ... But the difficulty lies in making the world accept China's viewpoints. In the final analysis, the origin of the influence of the media or any cultural product lies in the true and credible nature of the facts of the news and in moral values with appeal.

The moral and credible nature of the facts ... Suspicion of experts and the media ... alternative facts ... fake news ...

In short, as I have said on many occasions when speaking about this subject, there is no obvious correlation between enjoying and liking China and Chinese culture, and liking the Chinese political system and its behaviour at home and abroad.

And so we arrive back at our starting point: That soft power is about moral authority. We do well to remember that while the moral authority of governments is weakening, the renewed importance of art and Culture, relocates soft power away from the political centre and in civil society and the cultural industries.

May you live in interesting times indeed ...

Silence is not always golden: The communication of Taiwan's democracy

As the keynote speaker at the 2013 annual conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), Professor T.J. Cheng of  William and Mary College delivered a characteristically interesting paper on Offshore Democracies: An Ideational Challenge to China. His intention is to understand how Taiwan is perceived in mainland China through examining the official and non-official discourses there about the island's democratic institutions and procedures. Two sections of his talk provoked a response from a soft power and public diplomacy perspective.

First, T.J. outlined the sibau minzhu, the 'quartet of evils' that define the official view about Taiwan's democracy. Discourses about the 'evils' are framed by key-words that focus on the more disturbing side of Taiwan's political evolution - black-gold, party-splitting etc.

From a PD perspective, such official discourses constitute part of the environment in which Taiwan must operate. It is unfortunate that China chooses to view Taiwan in such an out-dated way - the problems of corruption are now far worse in the mainland than they are in Taiwan where there is much less electoral corruption than previously - but the question that Taiwan must confront is how to respond and work within the constraints? Taiwan is not in a position to change the Chinese conversation, so must pay far more attention to its soft power capital and the quality of its public diplomacy strategy than previously. The external environment frames the architectures, methods, success and failures of Taiwan's international communications and determines their impact on elite audiences and mass opinion. I have talked about this many times in published papers and in blogs, and this argument forms the core of the book I am now writing which examines the interaction of structure and agency to understand Taiwan's soft power.

I felt that T.J. had inadvertently stumbled on a set of contradictions when he claimed that 'Taiwan's democracy is like a silent movie, more palatable than soundbites', and he applauded Taiwan's government for not hectoring the PRC about human rights abuses. T.J. is right to isolate the practice of democracy as a particularly useful communications strategy - in Public Diplomacy, actions really do speak louder than words - and by providing a model Chinese democracy, Taiwan is demonstrating the fallacy of so-called Asian values: There really is a political alternative for China. However, silence is not an option for Taiwan, and measured, strategic soundbites do have their value. Why be silent when the world is not listening to you anyway? For a state facing Taiwan's predicament, silence means an absence of attention, and so the government does not/cannot challenge the dominant narratives conducted in Beijing. Silence will not undermine a depiction of Taiwan which centres on 'the quartet of evils', circulating within a tightly controlled media and education system.  

T.J. is correct to commend the absence of hectoring and pontificating in Taiwan's interactions with the PRC, but such methods of communication are neither strategic nor desirable as they can backfire on the source of the message. Rather, Taiwan must strike a balance between silence - letting the story of Taiwan's democracy speak for itself - and making sure that story is heard by audiences conditioned to have a very different perception of reality. 

Another speaker on the Senkaku/Diayutai dispute prefaced her paper with a reference to 'manipulation' by the international media on this subject, evidence for which is provided by the fact that the media concentrate overwhelmingly on Japan and China and ignore Taiwan's claims on the islands. This sounds very similar to claims by Beijing that the international (read western) media deliberately demonise China, and that this accounts for the continuing popularity of the theory of cultural imperialism in China. As a communications scholar, I would reply that the international media know and understand China and Japan; their frames are familiar. Taiwan, however, is largely unfamiliar to international media consumers who have no real understanding of Taiwan or why Taiwan matters. The media will choose to sideline Taiwan because of the competition of voices, interests, stories and news-space, but also because journalists are denied the kind of structured and continuous interaction with diplomats and press officers that may yield coverage. My research reveals that Taiwan is passive in its acceptance of this situation - that its public diplomats and press officers sit back, see a crowded market place and believe that change is impossible. Being voiceless therefore becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

These comments connect with my discussion of T.J.'s paper and the consequences of accepting a 'silent movie' approach. Again, the international media are not necessarily ignoring Taiwan; Taiwan is not getting the message out and its voice heard because of the inadequacies of the public diplomacy structure.     

Digital Diplomacy

The Economist this week  (22-28 September) includes a brief discussion of what it calls 'virtual relations' and 'digital diplomacy'. The article reviews how 'Foreign ministries are getting the hang of social media.' We are told that the US State Department has 'spawned 194 Twitter accounts and 200 Facebook pages':

About 20 British ambassadors are now on Twitter. Russia's foreign ministry is said to have more that 40 Twitter accounts. Israel has announced it will make more use of e-diplomacy. Even China, which heavily censors social media at home, is interested in using them as a diplomatic tool abroad.
       [Barack Obama's Twitter audience] of nearly 20m followers dwarfs the one of Venezuela's autocratic Hugo Chavez (3.4m) and Russia's prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev (1.5m).

I remain an e-agnostic. For one thing, these statistics tell us nothing about content: in public diplomacy does size really matter? I understand the motivation for wishing to participate in an already overcrowded information landscape, and I do not agree with critics who claim social media are another 'Trojan horse' for cultural or political imperialism. This is a naive argument that gives the social media too much power. Besides, audiences will always interpret messages in ways that may surprise the source and contradict the original motivation for the communication. In soft power, the power is rarely in the hands of the source and almost always resides with the audience.

When it comes to diplomatic activity and communications, I believe that we must be cautious in advocating the use of social media. Mere presence in the virtual sphere is meaningless without substantive content. Just as public diplomacy is not a panacea for bad policies, e-diplomacy is not a solution for poor presentation and communication. Governments looking to participate in the world of the social media must identify first the reasons for doing so, and second the expected outcomes.  Mere presence in an overcrowded information environment is an insufficient reason. As Joseph Nye wrote in The Future of Power (2011: 103): 'Plentiful information leads to scarcity of attention. When people are overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting them, they have difficulty knowing what to focus on. Attention, rather than information, becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from background clutter gain power.'

Sifting the 'background clutter' is not easy when we are faced with both information overload and time scarcity. Gone are the days when we could casually 'surf' the internet in response to Microsoft's question, 'Where do you want to go today?' Authority, trust and credibility of information is far more important than ever before and training users of the internet - especially diplomats - to think critically about the authenticity of both the source and the message is more urgent than at any time in the past. Most of us access very few websites every day and tend to rely on established print and television media - even if we no longer buy a newspaper from a vendor but instead access it online - for our news and information. We will still depend on 'old' media to guide us: Wikileaks was most valuable when its cables were republished in the Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel. The second tranche of cables which were not published in the press met a more muted response: the newspapers were able to contextualise the information for its readers, analyse it and explain its importance. We had time and space to digest what we read. Without this process of mediation, the relevance of such information is lost.

Hence, it pays to be cautious and not be too optimistic about the contribution of the social media to the gathering of intelligence, especially about public opinion. Reading China's Weibo may offer a far more raw, accurate and thorough insight into how its users think and feel about certain topics than any of the official mainstream media. The Economist article calls this 'diplomatic preparedness.' While it will remain difficult to predict events, despite what the article thinks, monitoring seriously the social media does provide the extra information that can supplement the intelligence diplomats should be gathering from elsewhere. However, there is still a need to contextualise the information and understand its source: how representative is Weibo if the majority of its users are young, University educated Chinese living on the eastern seaboard? Diplomats will never find a perfect substitute for leg-work, for getting out into the streets and talking to people face to face. It sounds simple and easy: I wonder how many diplomats actually still do it?

A thorough discussion of how American diplomats use the social media as a source of information, and to facilitate public diplomacy activities, is provided in William Kiehl's edited volume, The Last Three Feet. See my blog http://wwwpdic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-last-three-feet-ed-william-kiehl.html.
    

Flying the Flag: Branding UK Aid and Public Diplomacy

On 25 June 2012 the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) unveiled plans to re-brand British overseas aid. "From today," declared the department's website (http://www.dfid.gov.uk/News/Latest-news/2012/New-logo-uk-aid/), "the new UK aid logo will be applied to items like emergency grain packets, schools and water pumps."  From now on, all recipients of aid will see the Union Flag and a statement that the aid comes "From the British people." 

My first thoughts on seeing this news were decidedly negative: surely such branding detracts from the act of giving? Don't we keep telling our students that in public diplomacy actions speak louder than words? 

Moreover, there is something faintly imperialist not only in using the Union Flag in this way, but also in reminding the recipents of the aid to be grateful to the British people - that they owe their clean water, health care, schools, etc. to the generosity of the developed world. 

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A thoughtful commentary by Rob Crilly, the Daily Telegraph's Pakistan correspondent, questioned the value of branding British aid and considered that it might actually do more harm than good; that it may in fact undermine the credibility of the programme and that the "unbranded brand" has been sufficiently powerful and successful. He advocates, and I initially agreed, that we should let the aid speak for itself (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/robcrilly/100168222/why-union-flag-branding-is-a-step-backwards-for-british-aid/).    

However, having thought through the possible consequences of this decision for British public diplomacy, I had a change of heart and concluded that perhaps this rebranding exercise may just have a positive payoff after all. When the media correctly focuses on the problems caused by the invasions of, and continued wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention having to deal with the legacy of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib - public diplomacy disasters in their own right - the British and American governments have let slip through their fingers countless public diplomacy opportunities to remind audiences about their assistance to Muslim communities across the world (for example, NATO's intervention in Bosnia; the response to the 2004 tsunami in the Indian ocean). This is needed to help counter the prevailing narratives that the UK and the US have co-operated in a war against Muslims and Islam.  So it is possible that the the new logo will go help to demonstrate to the international community that international assistance does not come from a faceless bureaucratic machinery or from governments, but from the people who have too many times been the victims of terrorist atrocities. It may have come too late - I am writing this blog on the seventh anniversary of Al-Qadea's terrorist attack in London - but it is a small step in rebalancing public diplomacy efforts towards a people-to-people strategy. Perhaps better late than never.

Yet flaws remain, and the most serious problem is that the British government has not explained the rebranding as a way of boosting the UK's public diplomacy. Rather, it seems designed to make the British people feel better about themselves. Unveiling the new logo, the International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said:"For too long, Britain has not received the credit it deserves for the amazing results we achieve in tackling global poverty.... It is right that people in villages, towns and cities around the world can see by whom aid is provided ... And I am determined that, from now on, Britain will not shy away from celebrating and taking credit for them." In other words, it is all about the British receiving the gratitude of the people they are helping. 

So, the right action for the wrong reasons. Such explanations do fuel suspicion about British arrogance and ambition. Public diplomacy is not about taking credit; it is about building relationships. If the Secretary had noted that branding British aid helps to make connections between the source and the recipient, then the decision may have been received with more warmth.

  

China's war against Harry Potter

Thanks to my colleague Robin Brown for drawing this excellent article to my attention.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/01/04/chinas_war_against_harry_potter

I agree with Robin's comments on this piece (http://pdnetworks.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/hu-jintao-and-cultural-construction-in-china/#comment-491). Creativity has always been a problem for China, and there is a wonderful collection of essays addressing this issue - Culture in the Contemporary PRC, edited by Julia Strauss and Michel Hockx (CUP 2005). The contributors address the problems facing China's burgeoning creative industries and offer some interesting perspectives on why the Chinese tend to imitate rather than innovate. Hunan TV's Super Girl (or to give it its full title, Mongolian Cow Yoghurt Super Girl Competition) was a milestone; not only did it bring X-Factor-style reality TV to China, but it also depended on the audience participating and voting to save their favoured singer. It has since been pulled from the airwaves ...

I had some experience of this Chinese penchant for imitation when I lived in Ningbo. At a time when only four or five Harry Potter books had been published, hawkers were selling Harry Potter 7,8,9 and even 10. (The Harry Potter I saw at the cinema was censored - Harry's first kiss was deleted.) Moreover, I saw a Chinese version of Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire, but with contestants playing for prizes instead of cash. Instead of buying formats like other countries (so we have Indonesian Idol, Indian Idol, American Idol etc - all looking exactly the same), China takes the original concept and Sinifies it, something that we should not criticise (after all, this is what Mao did with Marxism-Leninism).

Robin and the author of the article, Stephen Walt, are correct; you can't legislate to make a population more creative. As Walt says: 'Government leaders don't create new and innovative art; it springs up from unfettered human beings, and often from fringe elements in society. And as Hu surely knows, some of the most creative artists are dissidents.' Certainly the most creativity in China is found on the internet and is subversive, satirising the party, its fiats and its way of working - see http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/06/chinese-bloggers-riff-off-worst-ever-doctored-propaganda-photo/241295/. Such creativity is inspired and inspiring, and is a serious challenge to all those inside and outside China who see only staid, controlled and censored media and communications platforms.

The problem is with a new directive that Chinese television should broadcast fewer 'vulgar' programmes and more news and programmes with virtuous moral content. But who decides which is which? And authoritarian regimes pull popular entertainment programmes from the schedules at their peril. One of the reasons the Romanian people turned against Nicolae Ceausescu at the end of the 1980s was because he pulled from the airwaves a popular British serial from the 1970s, The Onedin Line, and replaced it with North Korean-inspired propaganda. The Romanians turned to Hungarian TV via illegal satellite dishes for entertainment (Hungarian TV was far more liberal and even satirised the Hungarian regime and its Soviet masters). When Romanians saw on Hungarian TV the revolutions sweeping through Eastern Europe, well ....

The Chinese Communist Party needs to be careful. By removing popular entertainment programmes, the regime may actually be driving the people to seek out the kind of foreign programmes that Hu Jintao's new rant against 'cultural imperialism' opposes. Be careful what you wish for ...

What price Tesco?

There was an interesting report in The Guardian newspaper (25 November 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/24/india-allow-foreign-supermarkets-stores) which described the recent flood of global supermarket chains into India. The report presents local reaction and suggests the possible positive and negative effects (lower prices for consumers, investment, infrastructure versus lower prices for farmers, job losses and 'the end of traditional shopping'). Opening up to such foreign chains as Tesco and Carrefour will be problematic because of local politics, and it is possible that investors will face tough conditions.

I have never been a fan of the cultural imperialism thesis. I find it far too simplistic, and my own observations throughout East Asia convince me that global forces will operate alongside local, and that consumers will always prefer local produce provided prices are reasonable and quality/diversity are maintained. This is as true for television and movies as it is for food. I also disapprove of cultural imperialism's pessimistic view of local identity which basically sugggests that local identities are fragile, vulnerable and easily dominated or even supplanted by foreign cultures. Again, I see little evidence for this and I have confidence in coexistence and the tenacity of local cultures to survive. The best book I have read on this topic is James Watson's Global Arches East: McDonalds in East Asia (Stanford University Press, 1998; 2006). This is an engaging and convincing anthropological study of consumer behaviour in East Asia which challenges the idea of McDonalds operating as a foot soldier of cultural imperialism. In fact, McDonalds has been forced to adapt to local markets to reflect consumption habits, and not just in terms of the food offered. The experience of eating is as different in Taipei and Hong Kong as it is in Beijing and New York. Watson and his team of contributors also place McDonalds in specific cultural contexts and connect the experience of eating their with local approaches to work, family, education and ideas of 'fast food'.

Will Tesco or Carrefour change shopping behaviour in India? Of course they will, but probably only for the affluent middle classes. I suspect though that local markets and local approaches to consumption will still dominate the market place (literally and metaphorically). Moreover, partnerships such as that between Tesco and India's Tata, and Debenhams and Planet Retail suggest a more nuanced understanding of business strategies. After all, as McDonalds success is East Asia demonstrates, adaptation is the key to survival. I expect that yet again shrieks of horror about 'cultural imperialism' will sound hollow, as well as over thirty years out of date.

Xinhua calls for 'Media UN'

Below is a story from the Wall Street Journal (1 June 2011). It is by Li Congjun, the President of China's Xinhua news agency, and is thirty years out of date. We all know what happened to MacBride, published in 1980; moreover, attempts to regulate international media and communications have never been very successful. Remember the struggle between the right to freedom of speech and the right to protect one's own internal affairs and sovereignty, both enshrined in international regimes at the end of WWII and both used at regular intervals by all powers during the Cold War to justify or rail against international propaganda. 

Li suggests in this article four principles which could provide the foundation for a new regime, but he fails to tell us how these might be practiced or enforced. Moreover, if the principles did contribute to the structure of a new international regime about information, Xinhua would be the first to feel its heavy hand (read the four principles and then remember this is the President of Xinhua - a news agency in an authoritarian political system - suggesting them). 

Finally is the idea of cultural imperialism relevant anymore in an international system where culture and information do not flow north-south, or west-east, but are multi-directional and allow for a number of greater regional voices that challenge a supposed 'western hegemony' (Al-jazeera is the most stunning example)?

One must ask: why Xinhua and why now? Could it be that China's international media (and Xinhua's own television service) have finally realised that they are unable to compete with other broadcasting systems? Do they believe that it is far easier to blame outsiders (after all, the western media ARE biased against China, right?) than to address shortcomings in their own organisations, content and formats?

  

 

We need a mechanism to coordinate the global communications industry, something like a 'media U.N.'

By LI CONGJUN

The world established a new international order after World War II with the founding of the United Nations. For over six decades, the international community has endeavored to create a more balanced, just and rational political and economic order.
Unfortunately the rules governing the international media order lag behind the times, especially compared to changes in politics and economics. The gap is seen, first and foremost, in the extremely uneven pattern of international communication. The flow of information is basically one-way: from West to East, North to South, and from developed to developing countries.
In 1980, the 21st General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) addressed the imbalance and inequality in international news reporting and called for a new order in international mass communication. Over the years, a growing number of insightful people, including many from the West, have proposed changes with the conviction that the existing order is far from just, rational and balanced.
In our interdependent world, the human community needs a set of more civilized rules to govern international mass communication. This reminds me of bridge, a game I truly enjoy. Modern bridge is known as contract bridge, indicating that players are bound by a contract and the game is a bidding process, in which wise and effective exchanges of information rely on collaboration and communication carried out in a fair and just manner.
Earlier variations of bridge, known as bridge-whist or straight bridge, were different. In bridge-whist, there was no bidding and the game was all about gambling, making communication difficult. The modern game has been shaped by gradual rule changes over the years.
The "bridge" linking modern information flow and the international media is crumbling, in a sense, due to a lack of fair "contracting" and "gaming." This situation is incompatible with the contemporary world. An unjust and irrational order hinders the global media industry's sustainable development and contributes to the problems in today's world. We need to start a constructive reform through rule changes to rebuild the bridge of communication and let the media industry play a more active role in promoting the advancement of human civilization.
Four principles should guide changes in the value system:
• Fairness: This requires that media organizations from all countries should have the right to participate in international communication on equal terms. Those media organizations in turn should provide comprehensive, objective, fair, balanced and accurate coverage to minimize discrimination and prejudice.
• All-win: It is advisable to create conditions allowing media organizations from different countries to share the fruits of development in information and communication industries, to play an active role in international mass communication, and to reverse the unbalanced situation where the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker.
• Inclusion: To maintain the world's diversity, media must respect the unique cultures, customs, beliefs and values of different nations; strive to dispel suspicions and remove barriers between different cultures and civilizations; enhance dialogue and communication; and seek common ground while putting aside differences.
• Responsibility: Media organizations should not only ensure openness and transparency to promote the building of an open society, but also keep to rational and constructive rules so as to turn mass communication into an active force for promoting social progress.
We must also keep improving rules and explore new mechanisms governing international communication. Unesco should actively negotiate and settle issues within the U.N. framework. However, it is necessary to keep improving rules and, when the conditions are ripe, to explore a long-term, nongovernmental mechanism to coordinate the global media industry, something like a "media U.N." This can be a mechanism for global media exchanges and consultation, and it may evolve into an organization for coordination and maybe even arbitration.
A sports analogy may help explain what I mean. Ping-pong, or table tennis, played a unique role in restoring China-U.S. relations in the 1970s and is known as China's "national sport." For many years, Chinese ping-pong players have taken the top prize in almost all major international events. This presents a paradox: The stronger a team becomes, the more it desires to maintain its position and keep improving. However, when a team is invincible for too long, few others are inclined to compete.
In the long run, the sport in which China enjoys so much advantage will be less appealing, less viable, and may eventually be excluded from future Olympic Games. In fact, ping-pong has undergone a series of major rule changes over the past two decades. After the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, the older 38mm balls were replaced by 40mm balls and the former 21-point scoring system was changed to an 11-point system. These changes, aimed at limiting the advantage of "super players," have made the sport more enticing to players from different countries.
The theories of "checking superpower" and "maintaining equilibrium" also apply to the media. It is time to reverse the marginalization of developing nations in the media, change their underdeveloped status, and enhance their rights of expression in the international media market. To that end, a mechanism for international cooperation, exchange and coordination is needed, as well as an increase in funds and technical support for media from developing countries.
Almost five decades after the discovery of the double helix, James Watson said in his book, "DNA: The Secret of Life," that the Human Genome Project found that human beings are similar in genetic makeup. Our common ground is far wider than any potential gulf that threatens to separate us.
Information flow, like gene transcription and expression, plays a vital role in the evolution of civilization. Resetting rules and order in the international media industry is an adaptation to the trend of democratization of international relations. With diversified expression and information flow, we can mend the broken bridge of cross-cultural communication and build an information link to the future.
Mr. Li is president of China's Xinhua News Agency.