PoliticalWarfare.org

VOA to kill broadcasts into rural China, Tibet

As the Chinese regime steps up the sophistication and tempo of its international propaganda operations, the United States government is curtailing a mainstay of providing unfiltered news and information to the most restive large areas under one-party control.

The Voice of America (VOA) has announced plans to terminate its shortwave broadcasts into rural China and Tibet, citing cost-cutting measures and its move toward more digital programming. 

Rural China and Tibet have been major sore points for the communist regime.

Farmers have led grassroots revolts against official corruption and taxation without representation. Because they do not have access to digital media, they depend on VOA shortwave broadcasts to stay informed.

“China has appropriated $7 billion on international propaganda in the past two years,” an Obama administration official close to VOA tells Bill Gertz at the Washington Times. “In 2011, CCTV [PRC state television] North America in Washington, D.C., plans to increase its reporters from 12 to 20 people. Meanwhile, VOA Chinese staff will be cut over 50 percent.”

Meanwhile, promised reforms at VOA's scandal-plagued Persian broadcasting unit are slow in coming, as this blogger has heard firsthand from dozens of Iranian democracy activists.

How dictators censor us

Dictatorial regimes and movements continue to censor the American media through implicit or explicit threats of retaliation. Anne Applebaum notes the problem in her Washington Post column that:

• Yale University Press censored a book about the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and didn't include important cartoons that the author had included in the manuscript.
• GQ buried a story (first broken in the US by David Satter) in its September 2009 issue that pointed to the former KGB as being behind a series of bombings of Russian apartment buildings that Vladimir Putin used as a pretext to invade Chechnya; the story was purged or never posted on GQ's website and censored out of its Russian-language edition.
• Google has merrily censored its Chinese-language search engine to come up with few if any significant results on the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan or democracy.

"These three incidents are not identical," says Applebaum. "Yale Press refused to print the cartoons because the university fears retaliatory violence on its campus. Conde Nast [publisher of GQ] refused to promote an article on the Russian secret service because it fears a loss of Russian advertisers. Google refuses to let its Chinese users search for 'Tiananmen' and other taboo subjects because Google wants to compete against Chinese search engines for a share of the huge Chinese market. All three companies exhibit greatly varying degrees of remorse, too, from Conde Nast (none) to the Yale Press (a lot) to Google (ambivalent: Google founder Sergey Brin initially argued that the company would at least bring more information to China, if not complete information).

"Nevertheless, the three stories lead to one conclusion: In different ways, the Russian government, the Chinese government and unnamed Islamic terrorists are now capable of placing de facto controls on American companies -- something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In a world that seems more dangerous and less profitable than it did in the pas t, either greed or fear proved stronger than these companies' commitment to free speech."

Incidents like these are nothing new. One almost forgets that CNN ran deliberately biased coverage of Saddam Hussein's regime as the price its executives paid for the dictator's permission to operate a "news" bureau in Baghdad (a la Peter Arnett). Harvard University is notorious for its apparent faustian bargain with Chinese benefactors to water down its academic skepticism of the Beijing regime - and to invite People's Liberation Army intelligence officers to Cambridge as part of an "exchange" program. And so much more.

Great piece of Chinese satire

China’s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions About How Great The Chinese Government Is Here's a fine piece of sophisticated Chinese satire about the communist regime in Beijing, and the flawlessness of its legal system. I don't know if it's from a real Chinese TV show, or something cooked up by those devious tricksters at The Onion. Either way, it's brilliant satire and deserves more attention.

A rare take on political warfare from a Free Chinese general

In putting together my spring course on public diplomacy and political warfare, I re-discovered a rare English translation of an important political warfare book by a prominent Chinese nationalist general.

General Wang Sheng wrote Theory and Practice of Political Warfare, first published in Taipei in 1959. He ran the General Political Warfare College as a close confidant of Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.

Attached is a PDF of the English translation of Theory and Practice of Political Warfare, translated by Hsin Kwang-hsu in 1973. I've had a paper copy in my filing cabinet for 25 years or so, and a student kindly made a PDF so the document could receive wide study and review. If an online version of this document exists, I haven't seen it, so I'm attaching it to this page. I'd like to see some substantive reader comment.  Download Wang Shang - Theory & Practice of Political Warfare