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Going over recent headlines about China, I came up with an idea: to suggest to South Park’s creators a slightly different version of the “Blame Canada” song. The thing is, China is getting a lot of bad press. Industrial espionage, currency manipulation, Internet censorship, unsafe products, the list goes on and on. We could almost conclude that without China, there would be no problem, and we would all live happily.
PR with Chinese Characteristics
To be fair, China deserves -to a certain extent- it’s bad reputation. Unfavourable articles about product safety or Internet censorship were not mere speculations. They related real and unfortunately sad stories. But Chinese leaders could clearly mitigate the negative impacts such stories have on China’s reputation. That’s what the Western world does all the time!
Anybody who lived in China for a while got tired, one day or another, of the official line that appeared in the newspapers. Repeating a message over and over again can be effective, but the message has to make some sense. And using Soviet-style slogans doesn’t help either.
The media coverage of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake showed that there were some improvement. Authorities displayed a willingness to be more transparent than the usual. Many Western PR firms are now working with China to improve its image. But there is still a lot of work to do.
The Other China
With any stories attracting negative media coverage, the reader frequently ends up thinking that the ‘allegedly’ bad guy is in fact.. a… bad guy. With China, I found it a bit unfortunate. Because there are so many cool stories about this country and its people. I’ll try to feature some in the next few posts.
In the meantime, people will probably continue blaming China… Until they pick on someone else. (Watch out India, you’re next!)
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Hi Michel, your blog is very interesting. Regarding China, it’s a huge country with a billion people. Like every other country, it does things that some other country may not agree with. We want to give them lessons on how to manage their growth while we have a lot of trouble managing ourselves, even though our population is smaller than their two largest cities combined. I don’t think that the image we receive from China over here is fair and accurate. I am looking forward to reading your next blog entries. Zai jian !
Hi Jean-François,
Thanks for the good words on the blog. I’ll try to come up with other interesting topics. I agree with you. We tend to be quick on judging China. In a sense, a one-party state is an easy target, isn’t? There’s obviously some room for improving our mutual understanding. That means more efforts on our parts, but also on theirs.
Xièxiè ni.
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