China again cues up its propaganda machine

International Herald Tribune

Mao Zedong announced the tune himself, in 1927, when he wrote: "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."


For the next half-century, China was one of the most violent places on earth, and not just because of the vicious foreign invasion and civil war that swept the country, or the ceaseless purges of supposed traitors and class enemies. There was also the matter of language, which in China has been both an underrated means of violence and a vehicle for it.


Mao's state created a propaganda system built on a crude triage: a world of heroes who were unalterably and impossibly good, and an even larger one of villains who were irredeemably, cartoonishly bad. Over-the-top became the routine in official rhetoric. Enemies were called "monsters" and "cow ghosts," "snake spirits" and "running dogs." And in one campaign after another the public was called upon to "resolutely crush" or "relentlessly denounce" them.


This was a universe of variable geometry, where people were not to reason things out on their own, but to fall in line. Today's hero could be tomorrow's villain, with no clear evidence or explanation. The sole moral compass point was the immoral leader himself, Mao, who to this day remains a sacred cow whose likeness peers out from every bank note.


In recent years, it had seemed as if this movie had been retired, but last month the production was cued up once again. The bad guy this time has been the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and the fact that outside China this villain is one of the world's most admired people has only caused the propagandists to ramp up the volume.


[..]The official slogan of the Games may be "one world, one dream," but that's not the feeling one gets listening to the state's organs. It is an ugly, wound-nursing nationalism one hears. "So strong," said the filmmaker Tang, "that there's almost no introspection, not even among Han intellectuals."