Happy new year,
A comment on “Time to ramp up China’s soft power” by Harvey Dzodin:
It seems it is also time for research on today’s breed of Fellow Travellers.
There are many precedents for such studies, beginning with the research on Soviet fellow travellers in Europe and elsewhere who sang Stalin’s praises and eagerly helped to bolster Soviet “soft power,” even after they learned about what Stalin was doing.
The archival access may not be there for this on today’s generation of China travellers, but we need something insightful like Michael David-Fox’s book Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941, on the interaction between gullible Westerners and the Soviet soft power institute VOKS — which can seem quite similar to the role of the Confucius Institutes today.
But that era’s fellow travellers, as for Mao’s China, were more ideological, which was the main reason they would hear no evil, see no evil.
For today’s fellow travelers it seems ideology can’t possibly be the motivation? At least not the main one.
Today it may well be that this type of research will have to follow the money, more than any ideology. In this case, Harvey Dzodin in China Daily, the songs of praise are sung by an American TV company executive, of the ABC network (http://www.uq.edu.au/confucius/mr-harvey-dzodin-presents-at-uq-207259).
Maybe there are lucrative TV or “social media” deals in the making, and that’s the hidden motivation for this strange article? That would certainly align with the public efforts of “tell-China’s-story” Twitter, “read-the-Chairman’s-book” Facebook, and Hollywood with all the suddenly-ubiquitous Chinese plots — they all give the public impression of being eager to get in at any price, for the sake of market shares and profit margins.
As for the “social media” and Tencent’s WeChat, which Dzodin is promoting, their censorship is of course well-known in China, but it sure must be illegal in America (First Amendment, etc.) and other places? I think there have been motions to sue them for this in Australia, to force them to defer to local laws. Have they been sued yet in the US? That could be a very interesting move.
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>