Lessons from Beijing on how to stand up to critics

KP Nayar
Strategic Analyst 

The most remarkable fallout of the novel coronavirus outbreak has been China’s new willingness to acknowledge mistakes in public. Whether this will be a glasnost of the kind that Mikhail Gorbachev initiated in the Soviet Union is too early to tell.

But unlike in the case of the Soviet Union, when Gorbachev pushed his perestroika as well, the West is not helping matters even a bit: It finds it inconceivable that China may be on the cusp of change from the experience of having to tackle the massive challenge of a new coronavirus.

It was unbelievable to hear an anchor on state-run Chinese television agree the other day with an American commentator that the performance of the Communist Party of China ‘so far’ in tackling the new disease has called into question the credibility of the party and shaken confidence in the government.

China’s print media has been slower than their audio-visual counterparts in embracing new openness, but signs of change are visible and deserve to be encouraged instead of being dismissed as inconsequential.

Similarly, the Supreme People’s Court pulled up the local police for the way a doctor in Wuhan, who was the first to suspect a re-emergence of SARS in the new coronavirus, was severely dealt with as a ‘rumour-monger’. Chinese media has published the full text of the court’s criticism, which is tantamount to accepting in public the mistakes made by the omnipotent State.

Simultaneously, China is not taking criticism abroad, especially attacks in the European and North American media built on prejudice, bigotry and racism to go unchallenged. There is an important lesson in this for India because both countries are now at the receiving end of Western media onslaughts.

To say this is not to make a value judgment on the issues for which India is being criticised, but merely to emphasise how China is effectively using the tools available to its government to stand up to its critics, while India is routinely dismissing such criticism as inconsequential or irrelevant and not using the same tools that are available to New Delhi as well. The case studies in contrast should be of interest to diplomats as well as media professionals.

China makes a distinction between universally respected media outlets and what one Chinese journalist called ‘gutter tabloids’. When an influential publication or TV channel puts out something related to the novel coronavirus outbreak which the Chinese consider false or objectionable for reasons of prejudice or anything similar, their Foreign Ministry spokesman immediately takes it up with that media outlet, writing to explain Beijing’s view or to lodge a protest.

When was the last time, the spokesman of India’s Ministry of External Affairs did the same with foreign media houses with a global reach? Most major international publications have correspondents or stringers in India, but the spokesman’s way is to churlishly ignore these representatives, not to explain the government’s point of view or to engage and debate with them.

A European correspondent based in Singapore, who also covers India, said that because his publication wrote critical articles about Indian issues — not authored by him — he does not get media visas to India any more. Since he has to write on India any way, he now goes to people who are uncompromisingly opposed to the government, who are happy to give him enough fodder for his features and stories.

The scandalous episode of how Jeff Bezos, whose investment in The Washington Post is but a tiny fraction of his vast wealth, could not get a single appointment with anyone in the government during his recent visit to New Delhi because of what his newspaper has been writing about India is instructive.

On the other hand, when The Wall Street Journal allowed itself to be used for displaying racism of the worst kind against China in the context of the novel coronavirus outbreak, Chinese-Americans approached the White House: not for punitive executive action against the newspaper, but to build a community for change through democratic means in which the people have a say.

We the People is a White House website which can be used by anyone to petition the President on issues that matter to them. If a petition gathers one lakh signatures within 30 days from which it was created, the petition will get the attention of the President. White House aides will then review the petition and a response from the President’s Executive Office will come in 60 days.

Citing The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of China’s current health crisis, a petition says: ‘Such reckless comments against innocent Chinese citizens will only encourage racism and incur repercussions against Chinese or other Asian ethnicities.’ When ‘Asian ethnicities’ are mentioned, Indian-Americans are also gratuitously included.

The objectionable WSJ article carried the headline: ‘China is the real sick man of Asia.’ Historically, in a New World context, the term ‘sick man of Asia’ invokes deep racial prejudices against Chinese immigrants over which many a battle has been fought in courts, political platforms and streets in the early years on the United States.

If Indian-Americans were to start a similar petition on any issue, given the activism of the community and their past support for the Indo-US nuclear deal or the 1998 nuclear tests, it will only take a few days for such a petition to be on top of the queue for Donald Trump’s attention. The Chinese, as these episodes prove, are masters in the game of using any route, any loophole to advance their interests abroad. They don’t stand on false pride or flaunt arrogance.

It is interesting that in their public pronouncements now, China’s media and government often mention three countries as having helped their country the most in its present crisis: Japan, Pakistan and Iran. For Indians, this is food for thought about why China and Pakistan call each other ‘all-weather friends’.

As for Japan, every member of its parliament, the Diet, is to donate 5,000 yen to China in addition to other massive help that is already being sent. Given the long history of Sino-Japanese hostilities, the most touching recent image was when Toshihiro Nikai, 80 year-old Secretary-General of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, told China’s Ambassador in Tokyo that Japan will ‘mobilise the entire country to provide support and assistance to help fight the epidemic’.