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@Wangxi @manqiangrexue The media landscape is heavily titled in favor of the west. However, that doesn't mean the West is guaranteed a victory. They are winning a lot in the psychological war against China in large part
because Chinese media is very incompetent.
Let me make this one point super clear. China does NOT need to lie and should NOT lie. The biggest asset China has is its credibility. The biggest liability the Western media has is its credibility. People often think, propaganda = lying. It’s not. Propaganda is about influence and ultimately to get people to behave in the way that you want. The best propaganda is all truth. The Western media lies so much because the facts are against its imperial agenda. It’s impossible for them to call China a colonizer of Africans unless they lie, cherry pick, exaggerate, etc. China needs NOT and should NOT copy that aspect of Western media.
Manqiangrexue, you asked, what can be done. Here are a few easy ideas off my head:
1. Be undetected. China's state media is instantly ignored because the audience has been conditioned by western propaganda to view anything from Chinese state media as propaganda. Fund alternative media that doesn't scream "I am Chinese state media". This is the west's playbook. They control all kinds of media in the background. The audience mis-perceives these biased sources as "free and independent" when they are anything but. Look up Operation Mockingbird and the book, Presstitutes, as examples.
As a corollary, always expose Western propaganda sources such as anything funded by the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Whenever the West reports “secret anonymous credible sources tell us”, just bring up wmd in Iraq and Mike Pompeo’s “we lied, we cheated, we stole”.
The west lies so much that it relies on the audience to be ignorant. Your job is to prevent that from happening.
2. Destroy your adversary’s perceived credibility. The Western media lies all the time.
This is one of their biggest weaknesses to attack. How to attack credibility? Make use of classic examples like wmd in Iraq. For example, when the west started accusing China of creating or releasing this virus, the Chinese should have instantly painted it as a propaganda campaign reminiscent of wmd in Iraq. This is extremely powerful and impossible to fight because everyone knows about wmd in Iraq by now. Everything the West says would be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Another example is to bring up the false flag anthrax attack. The Americans alleged an rogue state attacked them and it turned out Fort Fort Detrick the origin of the attack.
3. Cherry pick. Learn to focus and unfocus. Focus on what you want the audience to think about. Unfocus about the things you want them to not think about. Let's see how the west does this.
They focus on Wuhan lab. They unfocus on the usa, which has orders of magnitude more BSl4 labs.
They focus on Chinese researchers possibly doing biological weapon research. They unfocus on the usa's NIH funding Wuhan labs to participate in bat coronavirus research.
They focus on the "possibility" of a bioweapons leak from China. They unfocus on the over 1000 biological weapons leaks in the usa and most recently in 2019 by Fort Detrick, where mysterious coronavirus/covid-19 like illnesses appeared. They unfocus on American's extensive history of biological warfare against its own citizens, Cuba, North Korea, China, etc.
4. Get to the point. Don't aimlessly ramble for 25 minutes. Take a topic and reduce your arguments to a few talking points and repeat them everywhere with minor changes. This employs the sleeper effect and social proof to get people to accept the idea.
5. Control the frame. Frame the debate the way you want. This is a key Western propaganda technique. The Western media is framing this as a "Chinese cover up". State media showed some facts like the timeline. That's ok. It would have been better to show how the us knew and warned Israel and NATO allies that China was going to suffer from a coronavirus related cataclysmic event before the Chinese knew. Chinese media should hyper focus on this point because of all the grave implications this has - Westerners had pre-knowledge, did NOT warn China, did NOT warn the world, did NOTHING to prepare, and most importantly, how can they possibly know this if they were innocent...
A second opportunity is for China to frame the debate with "the West is hiding its nefarious activities from the world" by using the facts: CDC hides data, prevents testing, gag order/firing whistleblowers, holding secret meetings in biological warfare planning rooms, had pre-knowledge in November about a potential cataclysmic event in China before the Chinese even knew.
A third opportunity is to bring up the 2001 American anthrax false flag. Insinuate that this could be another American anthrax false flag. Again, this is next to impossible for the West to counter.
6. Maximize your aesthetics. Many Chinese male reporters and some of their Chinese male anchors and almost all Chinese male guests are repulsive to look at it and listen to. They sound like racist nerdy effeminate caricatures (eg
) when they speak English with their thick accents. No one wants to listen to them. Wang Guan is one of few reporters who actually looks and sounds aesthetic enough to be a reporter. Almost every other Chinese man, including one of their faceless translators (who sounds like a girl), creates negative soft power every time they open their mouth or appear on screen.
7. Projection and hypocrisy. The West is currently waging a global propaganda campaign against China and calls it "news". China debunks their lies and the West calls that "disinformation". This inverting of reality is a staple of Western discourse.
China doesn’t need to use this since the facts are on its side, but it’s important to expose these Western tactics when they show up.
8. Imagine what your adversary is scared to death of the world discovering. Hyper focus on that. Once again, from point 5 - "CDC hides data, prevents testing, gag order/firing whistleblowers, holding secret meetings in biological warfare planning rooms, had pre-knowledge in November about a potential cataclysmic event in China before the Chinese even knew."
Focus on that. Frame the debate around these points. Keep accusing them of a cover up. Use their hypocritical cries for "transparency" against them. Say things like "The world demands transparency from America. Why are they so fearful if they have nothing to hide. What are they hiding? "
9. State opinions as facts. China doesn’t really need to do this because this is more of a liar’s tactic. Notice how the West states lies as fact…
“Everyone knows coronavirus originated in Wuhan”
“How do we make China pay for this crime against humanity?”
“The Chinese regime covered this up”
10. Push negative associations. I would start Chinese news about coronavirus/covid-19 with things like
“In the ongoing usa propaganda/disinformation campaign to deflect blame onto China, the trump administration….”
“America’s Fort Detrick, an infamous biological weapons lab was involved in the 2001 anthrax false flag…”
“In 2009, the American CDC was responsible for the American H1N1 virus, killed at least 300 000 globally. They did nothing for 180 days and killed hundreds of thousands around the world. “ make sure to show victims crying over deceased loves ones combined with images of unfeeling CDC directors to amp up the emotional punch.
11. Make them look bad. America loves to brag about its human rights. So the world how little they care about human rights when the rubber meets the road.
Show America stealing supplies from their “allies”
Show the bold faced lie of “Chinese crap” being desperately stolen by America.
Then you can cap it off by contrasting it all with the absurd talking points from their propaganda memo eg “America is the greatest humanitarian the world has ever seen”
12. Be on the offense and attack first. The attacker ALWAYS has the advantage of speed and controlling first impressions. From the beginning, the West waged a global coordinated propaganda campaign to blame everything on China.
