Image: Camilo Jimenez
Not too long ago, infotainment was the answer to survival for news organizations on the cusp of the digitalization wave. Be what hard-core journalists might have said about the “soft news” with its entertainment nature, short of substantive and informative value, it thrived on the digital and social media.
There is nothing wrong with a demand for entertainment and even fiction. In fact, most infotainment content is built on facts, even though there will be some that stray from this underlying element. But what is disturbing has been its evolvement and usage to disinform; the proliferation of disinformation, misinformation and mal-information—fake news—made easy by technology, and manifested to desensitize readers to discern between truth and half-truths or lies. Perversely, the insatiable appetite for infotainment can very well be exploited to entrap the unwitting audience.
Last week, a report of North Korea blaming the South for its Covid-19 outbreak made headlines around the world. Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, reprimanded South Korea for sending leaflets contaminated with Covid across the border without evidential support. Any reasonable reader would dismiss the North’s argument to be nonsensical but disinformation campaigns have become so sophisticated and deeply penetrated that the consumption of information doesn’t always come with a critical eye. Authoritarian regimes in particular have the resources and motivation to go the distance in stretching the truths, or rationalizing how information is managed. There is clearly a difference between entertainment from fiction and deriving it from fake news, but that line can be blurring as consumers don’t necessarily differentiate.
China’s state media had a field day with the Taiwan visit by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US’s House of Representatives. State mouthpiece China Global Television Network claimed success of garnering “attention and the reposts” of its online and video reports, as well as social feeds on China’s countermeasures against the US over Pelosi’s visit by more than 2,000 foreign media titles including the BBC and American broadcasters ABC and NBC. What CGTN conveniently omitted was the coverage of China’s angry responses and countermeasures merely constituted to one part of the cross-strait crisis story, as any balanced news report would aim to do.
The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the US that Pelosi’s visit, ahead of her arrival in Taiwan, was “playing with fire”. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” it threatened. Barely a day after the speaker’s plane had left Taiwan, the People’s Liberation Army began shooting missiles towards the waters off Taiwan in multi-day, large-scale military drills in six areas around the island that cover the approaches to three most important ports and the airspace that planes use to descend to Taiwanese airports.
They signal China’s strength as much as its anger, but they are far from making good of perishing “those who play with fire”. Beijing has nonetheless ceased cooperation with the United States on areas including military relations and climate change, as well as imposed sanctions against Pelosi and her immediate family. Pelosi has shrugged off the sanctions—“Who cares?”. Instead she stressed that the US would not allow China to normalize the new level of pressure on Taiwan it asserted with days of military drills .
Beijing’s trade curbs of Taiwanese fruit and fish imports, and exports of natural sand, a key component for the production of semiconductors were hardly an existential threat. Natural sand from China account for a tenth of the island’s sand imports. Notable was the bans did not include the chips themselves, which are crucial to Chinese manufacturers.
On the other hand, China’s ultimatums spoke more effectively to Chinese nationalists, sending many into a frenzy and fired them into a war of words online. The current regime has nurtured a paranoid nationalism that fosters Beijing’s new global order narrative, which supports the “wolf warrior” approach to foreign policy and the superiority of the Chinese governance system against the decline of the West, especially since the global financial crisis of 2007. The Covid-19 pandemic has also worked in the regime’s favour, enabling the Chinese propagandists to contrast the West’s chaos against China’s order and control of the viral outbreak, keeping death toll low and allowing normal activities to resume ahead of many countries. But that was until the Omicron variant hit, and lockdowns with draconian measures have become more frequent and increased. So have the grievances of the people, many of whom have taken to social media to protest.
Chinese nationalism has been carefully shaped by the regime. Teaching of patriotism was ramped up after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, which effectively blurred the line between loving the party and the country. Humiliation suffered at the hands of foreigners all the way back to the opium wars launched by the British where the Chinese were victimized was emphasized. But the party would make China strong again. As such, China as a rising superpower resonated with its people, and unification with Taiwan is at the core of the national rejuvenation.
After all the threats and strongman speak, the challenge for Chinese President Xi Jinping is he cannot appear weak, especially with a few months to the 20th party congress in the autumn where is expected to be crowned the “people’s leader”, elevating him to the venerated stature of Mao Zedong. An attempt to conquer Taiwan would place Xi in a position that no other leader has ever done, but a full-blown military confrontation with the US will destabilize the Chinese economy which is already under the weight of the frequent pandemic lockdowns.
At the end of the day though, Xi does preside over one of the world’s most extensive propaganda and censorship mechanism. The apparatus is already at work to address the perception that Chinese responses are not strong enough.
