Another guest editorial:


A SAMPLE OF A CHINESE OPPOSITION PRESS

Was at YIH today when I picked up another copy of THE EPOCH TIMES WEEKLY (SINGAPORE EDITION), which I always find fun to read. Especially when it says that it is the uncensored, unbiased source of news for the Chinese speaking world. In short, this newspaper, with a circulation in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Europe, Singapore and SE Asia, claims itself as the opposition press to the state-run PRC media.

I always find it a fun read, particularly because a quick flip through it reveals itself to be the least fact-based, sentimental agitprop imaginable. Clearly positioning itself against the CCP, every issue would contain some veiled attack or another. In one issue, it featured an article on Russia describing the wonders that it had gone through ever since Communism fell and it adopted capitalism. Among one of the data cited included “80 percent of Moscow residents have villas out in the countryside, and that every weekend they would head out to the villas to enjoy life.” While it sounds like Moscow had apparently found an amazing level of home ownership, anyone at least familiar with Russian culture would know that these villas are called “Dachas”, and the fact that many Russians have obtained these Dachas was in part due to the Soviet era where the trade unions had the task of obtaining land for the Dachas and distributing them among their members. Such pieces depicting journeys to former Eastern Bloc countries are just one of the inept examples of the Epoch Times’ “journalism”. This week we have another piece on Budapest, predictably ending a paragraph on the Hungarian flag, and how it “reflected the sacrifices and hope for the future the Hungarian people possessed.” This agitprop-disguised-as-travel op-ed piece comes after two pages after an urban legend page talking about the misfortunes that arose from Communists smashing Buddha statues, and a psychic that predicted Edward Kennedy’s near-death escape in the Chappaquiddick incident.

But this week’s issue takes the cake on the final page, with a movie review of KUNG FU HUSTLE. The reviewer describes it as a film “filled with justice and humanity and compassion, displaying the fundamental truth that good never triumphed over evil, displaying justice, conscience, heroism and truth, chivalry and morality”.

Spread that definition wide enough, and it can apply to “The Lord of the Rings”, “The Mummy”, “Star Wars”, “Rambo I—III”, “Rocky I—V”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Spiderman 1—2”, “Hellboy”, “The Incredibles”, “Die Hard” and “Battlefield Earth”. In short, it is a conventional happy-ending blockbuster.

And that is not all, according to the article, “The portrayal of the gangsters in the movie is similar to the CCP, and the final fight between the users of the Buddha Palm and the Toad Skill is very thought-provoking…only by uniting, like the heroes in the film, against the system, can we come to enjoy the glorious sunshine of democracy.”

Indeed, the mind boggles at how a man can using the toad skill, bloat himself up like a balloon and bounce around like a pinball, or how a man can send giant invisible forcefields down from the sky to crush his opponents. Notice how it does not say that the portrayal of the gangsters is similar to that of the CCP, because obviously if you dig deep enough any political system has its fair share of closet skeletons. Power corrupts. The only advantage to a system such as democracy is that the rights of the ruler hang not on his own conscience, but the will of the people. The Epoch Times, therefore, displays a fundamental lack of the workings of democracy, assuming it is the “glorious sunshine” that will come after any form of autocracy is defeated. History has more often than not, proven that this is not the case, all democracy was achieved via a phase consisting of the disenfranchisement of political and ethnic minorities, and the crushing of dissent. It took the French two empires and three republics to get their experiment right, and the Americans 200 years.

Best of all, the review puts words into Stephen Chow’s mouth, I swear, the author mentions that one of his friends told him about an interview with Stephen Chow, and that in the interview Chow said indirectly that “I am a very humble, normal person, and that movies are the way that I help to realize my fantasies.” Notice he never quotes Chow directly, but he manipulates a quote from a friend about Chow, my my, what journalistic integrity. If we are going to take this quote from Chow as a fact that secretly he desires the overthrowing of the CCP and not that he wanted to fulfill the fantasies of watching numerous martial arts movies as a child, then we must consider that Peter Jackson also directed the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to fulfill a fantasy of his a possible sign that New Zealand has an oppressive, tyrannical political system despite being the first country in the world to have women’s suffrage and recognize the Maori culture as part of its makeup, and not that he wanted to go and relive the fantasy trilogy that he loved reading. Then quick, we must go and pull the cover on the parliamentary system of New Zealand and denounce it for its evil!

With such fine journalistic quality, the fact that the CCP in all its magnanimity allowed this paper to have its little corner in the SAR may in fact be a sign it tolerates its opponents more than given credit for.

With such an opposition press, I would hunger for state-owned media anyday.

--- Ivan Patrarch-Mayne