It is becoming harder to distinguish between the Washington Post’s straight news reporting and the literal Chinese agitprop it publishes for a fee.
The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” newspaper has published yet another report portraying China as the noble hero and the United States, particularly President Trump, as the ignorant antagonist.
“Trump views China’s Communist Party as a threat. Young Chinese see it as a ticket to a better future,” reads the headline to an Aug. 4 Washington Post news report.
That is a heck of a thing to allege, considering the people of China are allowed access only to Chinese Communist Party-approved information. Democracy dies in darkness indeed.
“After seven decades in power, the ruling party has faced potentially existential challenges over the past year,” writes Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield. “But far from diminishing its stature at home, as some in the Trump administration appear to believe, the party’s response to some of these crises has helped solidify the support of existing and aspiring members — or at least neutralized grumbling.”
She adds in total earnest, “Chinese who were complaining in February about the party’s coronavirus coverup reflect more positively on their experience now that they can see, through the American example, how much worse it could have been.”
Ah, there it is. Yet another uncritical recitation of the Chinese Communist Party’s official line that it dealt swiftly and competently with the viral outbreak that originated within its borders. Never mind that the Chinese government has been silencing anyone who publishes damning accounts of the state’s clearly disastrous handling of the pandemic. Never mind that Chinese authorities reportedly have been deleting articles detailing the party’s pandemic failures. And never mind that the infections and fatality figures reported by Beijing are totally unbelievable. We will just repeat the narrative that China has this thing beat because that is apparently what a free press does.
The Washington Post article continues, quoting a 20-year-old member of the Chinese Communist Party who says, “It’s strange to think of the Communist Party as weaker, because all of us feel that our country and our party have grown stronger in the face of this epidemic.” The report then quotes a professor at the Hunan provincial branch of the Communist Party School, who says of the Trump administration’s anti-China stance, “This just shows that they fear a stronger Communist Party and a stronger China after we showed our might in the battle against the coronavirus epidemic.”
Chinese communist apparatchiks are not the only ones in the Washington Post report with kind words for the party.
“It’s easy for people outside China to view the Communist Party as a throwback to Soviet times,” writes the story’s author. “But in China, the reality is more complicated. The party may remain bound by many of the strictures first envisaged by Mao and his comrades in the 1920s, and these pronouncements may hint at underlying alarm about the challenges China faces, but the organization is relevant to many people’s lives.”
And by “relevant,” she means that fealty to the Chinese Communist Party can come with certain goodies, including “better education prospects and better jobs, more politically advantageous marriages and nicer apartments.”
“For many,” she writes approvingly of the dystopian nightmare where obedience to the state means you may get a nicer apartment, “it is a ticket to a brighter future.”
Now is as good a time as any to remind you that the Chinese government paid the Washington Post handsomely for about a decade to publish literal communist propaganda designed to look like news articles. The trick now is to see if you can spot the difference between the paid Chinese-made agitprop and the stuff that the Washington Post produces itself.
