Question 1: Western Media Bias?
Is the western media even-handed in its coverage of China? And how has this impacted public perception of China in America?
Ron Unz—I think the Western media has been overwhelmingly biased against China, a bias that stretches back for decades but has steadily grown worse during the 2010s and especially the last few years.
Coverage has recently become so extremely dishonest and distorted that it reminds me of how the old Soviet media portrayed the West even as the USSR went into severe decline and eventually collapsed, and I think that unfortunate analogy is a very relevant one. Furthermore, much of our academic world has followed this same pattern of totally distorting the reality of China and its relationship with the U.S.
Some of the worst examples of these media falsehoods only came to my attention during the last decade.
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For more than 35 years the American media has annually denounced the Chinese government for its supposed 1989 massacre of protesting students at Tiananmen Square, but there seems overwhelming evidence that incident never happened, and was just a Western propaganda-hoax, endlessly repeated by our media.
For example, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post personally covered those events at the time, and he later published a long article setting the record straight, but his account has always been ignored. Articles published in the New York Times by its own Beijing bureau chief said much the same thing, but these also had no impact. Numerous other sources, including secret American diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks have confirmed these facts, but our biased, lazy, or ignorant journalists have never paid any attention and for decades continued to promote the myth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Last year I published a long article summarizing all of this evidence.
Another egregious example was the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, an illegal attack that killed or wounded nearly two dozen Chinese. Our government and media have always described this as a tragic accident, while denouncing and ridiculing China for claiming that the bombing was deliberate.
But once again, there is overwhelming evidence that the Chinese government was entirely correct and our own government was lying, with our dishonest media endorsing and amplifying those lies. Indeed, a NATO officer was even quoted in a leading British newspaper as bragging that the guided bomb had struck exactly the intended room in the embassy. I discussed this in another section of that same article.
- American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Uncovering the False Media Narrative of Tiananmen Square
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 13, 2024 • 8,800 Words
A few years after America’s 2008 mortgage meltdown nearly brought down the world financial system, I published a long article contrasting China’s growing success with America’s recent record of failure. My piece emphasized that the Western media and much of the Western academic world often portrayed and contrasted the two countries in ways that were the exact opposite of the reality.
- China’s Rise, America’s Fall
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words
As a short sidebar to that long article, I compared the very different Western coverage of a pair of major public health scandals.
In China, dishonest businessmen had adulterated baby food and other products with a plastic compound called melamine, protecting themselves by paying bribes to government officials. As a result, hundreds of infants were hospitalized with kidney stone problems and six died, resulting in a huge wave of public outrage and a massive government investigation and severe crackdown. Many of those involved received long prison sentences and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were executed. Western media outlets naturally had a field day describing how widespread Chinese corruption had resulted in dangerous food products. Nearly 17 years later, I sometimes still find Americans mentioning China’s food scandal and the dangers of Chinese imports.
However, around the same time, America was hit with the Vioxx scandal, in which Merck heavily marketed a lucrative pain relief medicine to the elderly as a replacement for simple aspirin. But Vioxx sales were suddenly halted when a government study showed that the medication had apparently been responsible for tens of thousands of American deaths. Internal documents soon revealed that Merck executives had known of those dangers for years but suppressed the evidence in order to reap billions of dollars of profit from their drug. American media companies had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in Vioxx advertising, so they quickly dropped the story and almost no Americans still remember it today. Although no one was ever punished, when I later examined the underlying mortality data, I discovered that the true Vioxx death toll may have actually reached into the hundreds of thousands.
Thus, the American media devoted huge attention to a Chinese health scandal resulting in six deaths while quickly flushing down the memory-hole an American health scandal whose body-count may have been as much as fifty thousand times larger. Therefore, today probably many times more Americans are aware of the former than of the latter.
- Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 1,800 Words
During the last few years, the media’s anti-China propaganda has gone into complete overdrive, portraying that country as suffering under a horrible, oppressive dictatorship.
As an example, in January 2020, top officials of the outgoing Trump and the incoming Biden Administrations both declared that China was committing “genocide” against the Muslim Uighur population of Xinjiang province, and our media has regularly repeated and amplified those outrageous accusations.
Xinjiang province is freely open to both Western and Chinese tourists, with huge numbers flocking to that colorful region, and as I pointed out in a December article, none of those many visitors have ever noticed any such horrifying events. Instead, many Westerners have who recently visited China or now live there have begun documenting their experiences in numerous YouTube videos, often very favorably comparing conditions in that country with those in America.
- American Pravda: Propaganda-Hoaxes vs. Chinese Reality
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 16, 2024 • 6,700 Words
A common refrain of those YouTubers has often been “The Western media has been lying about China.”
Question 2: The Han Chinese People
The Han Chinese are by far the largest ethnic group in China, comprising an estimated 92% of China’s population. In your opinion, is race or ethnicity a factor in China’s success?
Ron Unz— I do think that China’s overwhelmingly Han Chinese majority population has been an important element in the country’s national success in several different ways, but some of the key factors are not fully appreciated in the West.
First, because China’s total population is over 90% Han, the country is far more ethnically homogenous and culturally unified than nearly any of today’s Western countries. Contrary to the West’s dishonest anti-China propaganda, China’s numerous ethnic national minorities are not harshly mistreated let alone the victims of cultural or physical “genocide.” But they are still only a very minor element in Chinese society, especially because they are mainly concentrated in outlying, often thinly populated provinces.
I think a reasonable analogy might have been the overwhelmingly white America of the 1950s but without blacks. Americans of that era certainly knew that various non-white minorities existed in their country, including Eskimos in Alaska, Hispanics in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, Asians in Hawaii, and some Hispanics and Asians in California. But these were all very small groups, each amounting to only 1% or 2% of the total national population, so that most Americans never encountered them and considered their country’s population as essentially white European.
Moreover, just as the overwhelmingly white America of the 1950s was divided into white regional groups, with New England whites different from Southern whites or Midwestern whites, the Han populations of the different Chinese provinces have traditionally spoken different regional dialects that actually amounted to different languages, while always using the same written form. However, since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, younger Chinese have all learned the Mandarin dialect in the schools, an important step in strengthening national unity by ensuring that everyone could speak the same language.
Although Han Chinese think of themselves as a single people, to some extent they actually represent a fusion of different original groups who had existed prior to China’s unification, with the example of the Roman Empire providing a reasonable analogy.
Around 2000 years ago, the Han Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire were roughly contemporaneous, but although Rome fell and its territories fragmented into numerous different states, the Chinese Empire survived and generally remained united during all the centuries that followed.
However, if Rome had never fallen, it’s likely that all its different component peoples would have eventually come to regard themselves as “Romans,” though with regional differences. Thus, northern Romans might have generally been taller, with fairer skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, while the Romans of North African or the Levant would have been darker and shorter, with black hair and brown eyes. But all would have considered themselves Romans.
Similarly, northern Han tend to be taller than southern Han, and the different provinces—many of them as large as European countries—are often culturally different, traditionally spoke different dialects, and ate different foods, but they all regarded themselves as Han Chinese, though having differing regional characteristics.
But completely aside from China’s Han ethnic unity, another very important reason for China’s success has been its long and almost unbroken history as an organized, centralized state, which for thousands of years has been one of the most economically and technologically advanced parts of the world. The resulting cultural and economic pressures have greatly shaped the Chinese people over those centuries, ultimately producing many of their current characteristics.
By contrast, much of today’s Europe had never been a civilized part of the Roman Empire, and even those parts that were Roman later spent up to a thousand years living in the much more backward societies of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages prior to the Renaissance.
The impact of this long legacy of civilized life in China was always noted by Western scholars. In my articles, I have pointed out that although most Westerners of the mid-twentieth century were very skeptical of future Chinese success, our leading public intellectuals of a century ago had held entirely different views, and would hardly have been surprised by China’s rapid economic advance in recent decades:
Although these developments might have shocked Westerners of the mid-20th Century—when China was best known for its terrible poverty and Maoist revolutionary fanaticism—they would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross’s views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China’s probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.
A tale of two countries.
The USA, who takes money from it’s people and sends it to other corrupt leaders in other countries and spends countless amounts on needless wars.
And China, who takes money and reinvested it back into their own country and people.
Can you tell which… pic.twitter.com/dLpGtMCdHO
— Noctis Draven (@DravenNoctis) January 16, 2025
The widespread devastation produced by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two, but except for such unforeseen events, their analysis of Chinese potential seems remarkably prescient. For example, Stoddard approvingly quotes the late Victorian predictions of Professor Charles E. Pearson:
Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.[5]
Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures. Racialism—the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories—was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.
With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia’s own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.
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On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people. For example, Stoddard wrote:
Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.[6]
Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese. Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading “The Struggle for Existence in China.”[7]
During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people.
Thus, today’s Han Chinese are the heirs to the shaping pressures of thousands of years of life in an organized, stable, but very economically challenging civilization.
- American Pravda: The Racial Roots of China’s Rise
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 4, 2024 • 13,300 Words
