A recent cover story in the Hong Kong media “Asia Weekly” put Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in a dragon robe and quoted the criticism of current affairs by DPP party insiders such as founding party veteran Chang Chun-hong and former Vice President Lu Hsiu-lien to satirize Tsai as a “dictatorship by popular vote”. The report instantly triggered a war of words between the blue and green camps in Taiwan.
Critics within the DPP called Tsai’s government “more and more like the Kuomintang during the martial law era,” saying that the shutdown of China Sky TV, the decision process to open Taiwan to U.S. pork containing lean meat extract (ractopamine), and the police interview of doctors who opposed the opening of the Ley Pigs because some of their claims were found to be untrue by the health agency, all made The government’s decision to open up the country to the public has been criticized by critics as “executive dictatorship, legislative cronyism and judicial responsiveness”.
In the face of the weekly’s harsh criticism, Green campers, including DPP spokesperson Yan Ruofang, countered that the report ran completely counter to other international mainstream media reports, and called Asia Weekly a controversial media, “not only pro-communist in stance, exclusively for the Beijing government mouthpiece …… It has no value for commentary.”
Unwilling to be “discredited,” Asia Weekly has issued several statements refuting this, and has added an interview with Zhang Junhong, who criticized Tsai for “resurrecting authoritarian power, and for being more blue than blue.
Asia Weekly is the first media outlet in the world to feature Tsai Ing-wen, who is known as a “beacon of democracy” in Taiwan, and some scholars say they will leave it to readers to make a public judgment on whether the report is a true insight or a deliberate attack.
However, the P-picture on the weekly’s cover is not original, and once again reminds readers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait that in the international mainstream media, the Asian leader most often mocked by the dragon robe is in fact Chinese President Xi Jinping. Many international media outlets, including CNN, have questioned whether this “Emperor Xi” is the one who is most often mocked in the international mainstream media, including when Xi Jinping pushed for a constitutional amendment to remove term limits on his presidency in 2018: Is this “Emperor Xi” trying to push China from one-party dominance to one-man rule?
More recently, the French newspaper L’Observer also published a special edition of “China, the Eternal Dynasty: 2000 Years of Power” just before China’s National Day last November, featuring Xi Jinping on the cover in a dragon robe and sitting on the throne.
Thus, Asia Weekly’s report accidentally made Xi Jinping a control group.
Is Xi Jinping the real emperor?
Li Zhenghao, a former KMT spokesman and current founder of the “Grassroots League”, recently posted a Facebook post in which he took a swipe at Asia Weekly, writing, “The media has to prove that it is an independent and critical media …… It is by reporting. If Asia Weekly dares to put out a cover of Xi Jinping in a dragon robe, with the text criticizing Xi Jinping’s many acts of undermining democracy and the rule of law in Hong Kong, abusing and killing the Uighurs in Xinjiang, militarily occupying Tibet, and trying to assimilate Inner Mongolia, I will immediately subscribe and read it every day. I will wait and see, and laugh at you for not daring.”
A search of Asia Weekly’s Facebook account for recent stories about Xi Jinping reveals mostly only touted text. For example, in November 2020, the weekly described the new U.S. President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping as having a “unique bond,” and in October 2020 it reported that “Xi Jinping’s visit to Guangdong…gives Shenzhen more room for governance than a municipality directly under the central government and empowers it to The magazine reported in October 2020 that “Xi Jinping’s visit to Guangdong … gave Shenzhen more room for governance than a municipality directly under the central government, and empowered the city to reform and open up again” and that “Xi Jinping’s popularity rose to new heights after his success in fighting the epidemic.
In addition, the weekly said in May 2018 that “Xi Jinping is regarded as the ‘chief designer of great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’, and the layout of ‘Xi-style diplomacy’ has deepened, with a brilliant combination of head of state diplomacy and inter-party diplomacy. “
Only between September 2014 and March 2016, several cartoons drawn by Wang Jinsong, entitled “Chinese media under Xi Jinping’s command,” “Xi Jinping’s disarmament” and “Xi Jinping takes Deng Xiaoping as his teacher,” seem to implicitly satirize Xi Jinping’s leadership style and situation, which is characterized by a clampdown on freedom of the press and expression, authoritarianism, and a lack of popularity with foreign heads of state.
Asia Weekly’s courage to stand against Tsai Ing-wen’s regime proves that the publication is by no means “green media,” but is it brave enough to stand against the power of China and the Hong Kong government by commenting on Xi Jinping and even following the style of the Chinese official media in anointing the Hong Kong police as the man of the hour in 2019? Has it proved that it is not a “red media”? This is the question that many people in Taiwan have raised.
Denigrating Taiwan’s democratic system
In a written interview with the Voice of America, Yan Chun hook, a veteran Hong Kong publisher, said, “Asia Weekly is already a mouthpiece outside the Chinese Communist Party, and they have been doing what the left media cannot do. Because the leftist media is too explicit, Asia Weekly still has what little deception is left.”
Yan Chun hook said that among the Chinese media in Hong Kong, the left media refers to the official media like Wen Wei Po, Ta Kung Pao or Shang Pao which are subordinate to the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government. The rest, like Sing Tao Daily, Economic Times, Hong Kong Economic Journal, Hong Kong Economic Journal, and even Ming Pao, also lean on the CCP to varying degrees. Only Sing Pao is an outlier, while Apple Daily, founded by businessman Lai Chi-ying, is the only remaining independent newspaper, and a few online media still retain their journalistic integrity.
Yen Chun-hook was the head of the Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution. In recent years, he has published a full-length novel, “Blood and Rain in China,” which looks back on the past 50 years ago and draws on his own experiences to portray the civil and military attacks between the opposing factions of the Red Guards.
In response to Asia Weekly’s negative review of Tsai, Yen Chun-ho said that its purpose “is only to discredit Taiwan’s democratic system.”
He said, like Taiwan or the United States, “there are internal conflicts in a democratic society, what is strange? But in Hong Kong, the police beat people who demonstrated peacefully, and arrested and sentenced them indiscriminately. Have you ever seen the Tsai Ing-wen government arrest and sue Taiwanese people indiscriminately? In Taiwan, the general public can scold Tsai Ing-wen, in the mainland, the general public dare to scold Xi Jinping? It is clear who is more like the emperor, isn’t it?”
Asia Weekly picks soft targets
In an interview with Voice of America, Zola, a citizen journalist from China who now lives in Hualien, Eastern Taiwan, also said that Asia Weekly was “pressured by political pressure to scandalize Taiwan’s political ecology. He argued that the weekly’s independence and truth-telling ethos had been lost with the fall of Hong Kong.
Zola, whose real name is Shuguang Zhou, has been a naturalized Taiwanese citizen for nearly three years. He says the description of Tsai as a dictatorial emperor is untrue. And in Hong Kong’s extremely deteriorating media environment, Asia Weekly has neither the guts nor the space to comment on Xi’s dictatorial rule.
Zola said, “Tsai Ing-wen was elected by the people and received more than 8 million votes to elect a democratically elected president, so there is no doubt about her legitimacy. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, was elected as China’s leader under a one-party dictatorship without a democratic election, so the legitimacy and status of the two are incomparable. Asia Weekly it can only pick on soft targets, on leaders with freedom of speech to bash, but it has no way to challenge the real dictator of a totalitarian state.”
Zola said the number of dissidents, rights lawyers and journalists who have been systematically imprisoned for opposing the Communist regime since Xi Jinping took power in 2013, such as Zhang Zhan, who was recently sentenced to four years in prison for entering Wuhan alone to report on the epidemic, is the type of political persecution that is almost rarely heard of in Taiwan.
Huang Zhaonian, an assistant professor at the Institute of National Development at National Chengchi University in Taipei, analyzed that Asia Weekly exploited the openness of Taiwan’s news market and used internal conflicts as fodder for political propaganda for the Beijing regime.
Beijing regime’s big foreign propaganda flank
He said, “This material actually takes advantage of the differences and divisions within Taiwan, that is to say, there is a plurality of opinions within Taiwan, even if there are different political parties in the same society, there are blue and green, and there are unification and independence. Even if it is the same political party, there are factions within it. It (Asia Weekly) is basically using the pluralism and differences of Taiwan as a free and democratic society, and then using such material as its political propaganda. Then its goal, of course, as you can see, is actually speaking, and its own title is authoritarian.”
Huang Zhaonian said Taiwan is by no means an authoritarian society with one-party rule, and its competitive election system gives all political parties the opportunity to gain access to the central government, the Legislative Yuan, local governments, etc. Although the Democratic Progressive Party is currently “in full power” in the central government and the legislature, the blue camp heads 14 of Taiwan’s 22 counties and cities, making Taiwan a democratic society by any political science definition. By contrast, he says, China and Hong Kong are truly authoritarian societies.
Huang believes that all kinds of speech and news positions have their own survival strategies and markets in Taiwan, but as a social public instrument, all media should do their social responsibility. He believes that Asia Weekly has not fulfilled its social responsibility as a media outlet, because its coverage of Tsai’s story does not meet the two most basic journalistic standards of truthfulness and fair reporting.
Asia Weekly’s coverage of Tsai received nearly 3,000 comments on Facebook, both positive and negative, with a clear majority of supporters calling the weekly “courageous”, “brave to speak out about the current political situation in Taiwan” and “as brave as Zhongtian (TV) to speak the truth and reveal the truth to monitor the government”; while opponents called its “definition of dictatorship amusing”, said its cover imitating foreign media “can be described as drawing a tiger but not a dog”, or said (the yellow robe on the cover) “if it is changed to Xi Jinping’s head, the whole publishing house may disappear”.
Although the news and speech market in Taiwan is becoming more and more polarized, whether it is the “green media” with a position favoring the DPP, the “blue media” with a position favoring the KMT, or the pro-China “red media However, whether it is the “green media” with a bias toward the DPP, the “blue media” with a bias toward the KMT, the pro-China “red media”, or even the Chinese official media, which can only be called “party”, their reports or opinions are rarely blocked or censored, even if they are challenged. Even for Zhongtian TV, which was shut down after a failed license change, its parent company, Wang Zhong Group, still maintains other TV channels and several print newspapers as channels of communication for its speech.
Huang said that the content of all media reports must be left to readers to make public comments, but in order to promote readers’ media literacy, the political and economic structures embedded behind each media should be fully revealed.
Borrowing a boat to go to sea
Huang Zhaonian said that although Asia Weekly is not an official media of the Communist Party, it is still a part of China’s foreign propaganda.
According to his analysis, in addition to the expansion of China’s foreign propaganda efforts through Chinese capital and official media, another model is to buy overseas media through pro-China businessmen, which is often more effective. The latter is often more effective. This so-called “borrowing the boat to go to sea” model is through the infiltration of ownership, such as the Want China Group bought by Taiwanese businessman Tsai Yen-ming, and Malaysian timber tycoon Zhang Xiaoqing’s World Chinese Media, to control some media in Taiwan and Malaysia, as well as Hong Kong media such as Asia Weekly.
Yen Chun-hook also criticized: “The Chinese Communist Party uses the greed of businessmen and has a bottomless personality. It has become the norm in Hong Kong to buy off the media in exchange for financial benefits. Most journalists with a conscience have left the pro-communist media, and those who remain are originally their own people, and those who do not ask questions about right and wrong, but only seek personal gain.”
After Zhang Xiaoqing’s media group acquired Asiaweek from the Warner Times Group in 1994, the publication’s stance gradually shifted from anti-communist to pro-communist, and its earlier stance of criticizing the dictatorship and supporting the Chinese pro-democracy movement, reform and opening up, and universal values has also It has changed.
Huang Zhaonian pointed out that the Wangzhong Group was the “local collaborator” of the Beijing regime in Taiwan, while Asia Weekly was the “foreign collaborator” of the Beijing regime in Taiwan. When the media credibility of the Wangzhong Group, the “local collaborator” in Taiwan, “Asia Weekly”, the “foreign collaborator”, has apparently come into play.
Demeaning the China story
He said that the purpose of all China’s big foreign propaganda is to tell a good story about China: to belittle democracy and to tout China.
Huang Zhaonian said, “To the whole world, it (China) wants to tell the so-called good story of China: that China is good, that authoritarianism is good, that the Chinese model is good. That the Western liberal democratic system is, in fact, not so good, that the elected government is not trustworthy, that the elected government, the democratic government is not efficient, and so on.”
This political propaganda goal is reflected in Asia Weekly’s criticism of elected Tsai Ing-wen’s “authoritarianism” and its attack on Taiwan’s democratic system, but Huang says the logic of the so-called China story is “full of contradictions,” because if Asia Weekly were to judge Hong Kong and Chinese societies by the same standards, it would realize that Hong Kong and China are truly authoritarian societies.
Most societies that have experienced democracy know that while democracy has its flaws, the way to improve it is not to go back to the one-man, authoritarian model of governance that Xi Jinping is seeking.
Voice of America emailed and called Asia Weekly’s Hong Kong editorial office for a response, but did not receive one.
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