Cinema Journal

In March 2009, Li Changchun, China's Chief of Propaganda and a senior member of the standing committee of China's Political Bureau, told the ABC (Australia's national broadcaster) that China was "concerned" about the Western media's reporting of Tibetan issues, and he firmly requested that the ABC discuss China in a "comprehensive, well-balanced, fair, and objective manner."¹ Li's behavior is indicative of China's increasingly proactive—rather than reactive—approach to propaganda. Instead of waiting for Western media to become "objective" or more sympathetic to China in their coverage of sensitive issues, China is now moving its propaganda offshore. For instance, the photo exhibition, "Tibet of China: Past and Present," recently traveled around the world repudiating the West's popular representations of the Dalai Lama.² What emerges from offshore propaganda is a high level of synergy—sometimes planned but at other times arising organically—between the Chinese government and diasporic Chinese communities with respect to international public opinion of China. While Li Changchun was espousing the official government line on Tibet, similar sentiments were being expressed by students from the People's Republic of China (PRC), in a series of clashes with pro-Tibet demonstrators in a number of Western cities. Many Chinese students and migrants found it surprising and emotionally unacceptable that the Western media, supposedly balanced and free of propaganda, could be just as one-sided as the Chinese state's propaganda machine. As part of its "soft power" ploy, the Chinese state wants to improve the effectiveness of its propaganda—dubbed more neutrally its "communication capacity"³—overseas, and in aiming for this, it has found a ready-made channel among former Chinese nationals now living outside China. [End Page 126]

The growing assertiveness of diasporic Chinese toward the West can best be understood against the backdrop of China's ascent on the global stage. Until recently the world has witnessed steady double-digit economic growth in China, which only became a member of the World Trade Organization in December of 2001—the same year that Beijing finally won its bid to host the Olympic Games. A post-Games China is believed to have "graduated to world power status,"⁴ and its supposed ascent as the most powerful nation of the twenty-first century has started to take on the appearance of established truth rather than prediction.

Patterns of outbound migration from China have also changed since the 1980s, and this has affected communication flows as well. The massive exodus of post-1989 political dissidents, humanitarian refugees, and economic opportunists has given way to a steady stream of full-fee-paying tertiary and secondary students. A sure sign of the PRC's self-confidence is its changed attitude toward Chinese students and migrants now living overseas. Once regarding these "wandering children" (haiwai youzi ) with suspicion, Chinese embassies and consulates now make systematic efforts to reach out to them, including providing free Chinese textbooks to Chinese-language schools overseas, organizing "roots-seeking" summer camps for children of former PRC nationals, and participating in various diasporic Chinese gatherings. Diasporic communities live out the reality of China's ascent in their everyday cultural production and consumption practices, at both the individual and the collective level. Many overseas Chinese households now have a satellite dish on their roof or in their backyard, enabling them to re-create a Chinese mediasphere wherever they are.

After more than a decade of practice, the Chinese state media have achieved a high level of sophistication—both rhetorically and technologically—in speaking to these diasporic audiences. China's official television network, CCTV (China Central Television), now delivers two popular services, with CCTV-4 reaching around 10 million viewers globally, and CCTV-9 finding some 40 million viewers overseas.⁵ The network also controls about 75 percent of Chinese-language television stations in North America.⁶ CCTV's Great Wall TV platform, launched in 2004, carries an enormous amount of content from China's national and provincial channels, and has now expanded into the Asian region with services to Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan...