WILL CHINA WIN THE MEDIA WARS?

The U.S. Tried to Teach China a Lesson About the Media.

It Backfired.

A month after President Trump banned travel from China, and the day the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States passed 100. The State Department announced a long-planned expulsion of about 60 employees of five. Chinese state media outlets working in the United States.

The U.S. move gave the Communist Party the perfect excuse to get rid of pesky American journalists who had. Over the previous two months, offered the world a window into China’s deadly mistakes in responding to the outbreak of the virus.

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On March 17, China slammed that window shut, announcing the expulsion of reporters for The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and forcing the firing of Chinese nationals. Who worked for those outlets as well as for Voice of America and CNN. New York Times

It’s difficult to see how China can lose from this exchange. I’ve explained in these pages, American reporting of China has been atrocious for generations and China is the big winner from this move. But, the US journalists have been lying about China for generations and. By so doing have damaged both China’s reputation in the world. And Americans’ capacity to respond to the challenge that China represented.

Now it is too late. An uninformed US public can neither understand nor respond to China’s social, political, economic, educational and scientific leadership of the world. So, the Chinese, by contrast, have always had accurate and realistic information. About the US and now that their country is in the lead, will lose nothing by knowing less about their former rival.

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