China's new faces
For years, China has been trying to improve its global image, to be seen as a cultured and dignified nation, not the sweatshop of Asia or known for a regime that suppresses human rights. It has used big events like the Olympics and the World Expo to show the new face of China. It has spent billions to expand its media empire. It has also made films and published books to celebrate its achievements. But these efforts have had mixed results, as ideology and the heavy hand of censors often made the final product unattractive to outsiders.
This summer, however, China finally has a big success, winning hearts and minds in a well-made film, The Founding of a Party (titled Beginning of the Great Revival in Hong Kong and elsewhere), made to mark the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.
Last Sunday, I went to see the film, expecting the style of lectures and dogma typical of official films of communist history. I was wrong. It was excellent entertainment, with good acting, a fast-moving plot and majestic scenes that captured the scale and poignancy of the events between the 1911 revolution and the founding of the party in 1921. There was not an empty seat in the house; the film gripped the attention of the audience - with not a giggle or sneer for all the two hours. The film has already earned tens of millions of dollars on the mainland; it is likely to break box-office records.
This is propaganda - but high-class propaganda, an example of how China is getting better at packaging its message that the republic is founded on ideals and patriotism. The heroes were not rough peasants and workers turned soldiers but scholars and intellectuals. Their weapons were not rifles and artillery but ideals and patriotism. Even Mao Zedong had to play a secondary role behind the principal founders of the party. He was repackaged into speaking flawless Putonghua, a far remove from his thick Hunan accent in real life.
This is the new soft power, which aims to show China not as a communist dictatorship that plans to take over the South China Sea and attack Taiwan but as a country people associate with success, elegance and neighbourliness. Li Na's victory in the French Open and Yao Ming's success in the NBA are good examples of this power: their ready smile, humour and healthy family life are worth a thousand speeches by their political leaders.
In other areas, too, China has stepped up efforts to win over the world, often cynical of its economic success. In the past four years, Beijing has spent billions on media to reach the foreign audience - adding TV channels in Russian, French, Spanish and Arabic to the English one launched in 2000, and the Mandarin channel for overseas Chinese. The programmes are presented by well-groomed and highly trained foreigners as well as Chinese, many of them educated abroad with a good sense of how to appeal to their audience.
China Daily has just expanded its Asian edition, with new content on Asian issues and for distribution in Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Singapore and India, giving it a pan-Asian reach.
While budget cuts are forcing the Western media to close foreign bureaus around the world, Xinhua and other Chinese media are opening new offices everywhere. Voice of America and BBC World Service are cutting services, while China's international radio is increasing them. As Chinese diplomatic and economic power expands, so the journalists who work in these offices have better access to the business and political leaders of foreign countries, giving their programmes more appeal.
They are restricted in covering Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and other sensitive issues. But they provide better coverage than the Western media do on issues that are not sensitive - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, Africa and South America - because they are more objective.
Another arm of this soft power is the Confucius Institute, China's equivalent of the Alliance Francaise, the Goethe Institute and the British Council: funded by the government, it teaches the language, culture and current affairs of China. The first one opened in Seoul in 2004. By last October, there were 691 Confucius institutes and Confucius study centres in 96 countries and regions, teaching many of the millions of people around the world who study Chinese.
In films, China is quickly improving its style, learning especially from Hong Kong which has produced Hollywood stars like Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat. In The Founding of a Party, Chow plays Yuan Shikai , the warlord who was emperor for 21/2 months in 1916.
Chinese producers can count on an astonishing war chest at home - box office sales last year soared 64 per cent to 10.2 billion yuan (HK$12.3 billion). At the end of 2010, the country had 6,200 screens and is expected to add 2,800 this year. This money enables Chinese studios to buy the stars, expertise and technology in evidence in The Founding of a Party.
So watch out for more attractive products, in films studded with big stars, good plots, dramatic battle scenes and romance - with the message that the founding of the party was a seminal event that led to the wealth, power and prosperity of today.
Mark O'Neill worked as a Post correspondent in Beijing and Shanghai from 1997 to 2006 and is now an author, lecturer and journalist based in Hong Kong
