Pro-Beijing scholar wants to set up platform to counter West's 'bad-mouthing' of China

A Shanghai-based scholar, claiming China is being "bad-mouthed" by western nations, has vowed to form a special "rhetoric front" to advance the government's perspectives on China's rise.

Zhang Weiwei, director of the Centre for China Development Model Research at Fudan University, organised a forum this week to discuss the West's response to China's growing influence, news portal guancha.cn reported. 

“The People’s Republic of China [PRC] has solved problems of ‘being bullied’ and ‘being starved’ in the first and the second 30 years [after it was founded],” Zhang said in the opening remarks, apparently referring to periods prior and after the economic “opening-up” in the 1970s.

“Now, it should tackle the problem of being bad-mouthed," he said.

The claim echoes the Communist Party's view of blaming foreign media and governments for portraying China in a "biased" way. In the past few years, for instance, China denied the visa applications of a number of US journalists following investigative reports on Communist Party elites and their wealthy relatives - reports which the Chinese government has bluntly refuted.

Without citing specific examples of bad press for the nation, Zhang pledged he would try to forge a China-orientated "rhetoric front" within the next decade to contribute a fair depiction of the nation’s rise.

A scholar and supporter of China's mode of development, Zhang urged Chinese academics to innovate and redefine Western concepts like the Gini coefficient (a variable which measures relative inequality) and separation of powers.

In questioning the regime's methods, critics of the party have frequently pointed to China's yawning wealth gap and the one-party rule.

Zhang, whose studies focus on international relations, did not immediately respond to inquires on Thursday.

Zhang said the forum would gather once a month, and invite a number of distinguished scholars who are supportive of China's development mode and responsive to his proposals.

Eric X. Li, a Shanghai-born American venture capitalist and political scientist, will speak at the forum next month.

Li had given a speech titled, “A tale of two political systems”, at a TEDx conference in 2013, in which he suggested today’s China demonstrated that there was more than one way to run a successful modern nation.