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March 10, 2005

Want to know where the US is headed?

You can look into the crystal ball at CCTV (Chinese Central Television). Even the sports anchor is a former(?) government official, for crying out loud.

I have been watching this for a couple of nights after discovering it while insomniac-channel-surfing, and I have to tell you, I can't see any difference between China's state-run media and our own supposedly "free" press. The same propaganda stories, using the same language, shilled by different talking heads. Did you know that China is adopting a more prudent fiscal policy (or, as one charming young lady correspondent kept pronouncing it, "physical" policy) after the more proactive policies of the past seven years? Well, after hearing the exact same story on three programs in a row, twice by Chinese talking heads and once by a BBC-contaminated westerner, without even a single deviation from the script, I sure as hell do (as an aside, a breakdown of China's fiscal year budget was offered: in a country with four times the population of the US, the budget was about $37 billion--compare that with the US). Oh, and there has been a great outcry from the Chinese people to draft anti-secession laws regarding Formosa. At least, that's the first reason the politicians at the National People's Congress cite when they are interviewed in support of the inevitable cross-strait invasion, which, if the Taiwanese show any gumption and don't cave, will be kicking off sometime this summer. Now, I ask you, if, say, Puerto Rico wanted to secede (which it does), just how high would your rat's-ass factor be (the rat's ass factor is measured in inverse proportion to how much one cares about a given phenomena--the higher the rat's-ass factor, the less one cares)? I'd wager pretty high. So would mine be. And I'll wager further that most Chinese outside the NPC feel the same about Taiwan.

So what's the point? Watch CCTV or read its website and tell me how different this is from our "fourth estate." I doubt you'll see much, if any.

Posted by Patrick Yancey at March 10, 2005 04:17 PM

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Posted by: Ali_Massoud at March 12, 2005 10:08 AM

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