Writer Lois Wheeler Snow’s husband Edgar Snow’s network
Beijing is desperately looking for “useful idiots,” reports the World’s Beijing correspondent Federico Lemaitre. Lemaitre reported on the 3rd. Lemaitre noted that the Chinese Communist Party, which now has a low profile even among Asian countries in the Eastern Association, is hoping to find a “new-age Edgar Snow,” a Western journalist who touted Mao and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s.
Le Monde reported that Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s annual press conference was coming to an end, and it came to the last question. This time it came to a young reporter for China Daily, the English-language daily of the Chinese Communist Party, who described himself as a spokesman for “global Internet users. He said, “We have noticed that foreign media, especially Western media, tend to be selective in their coverage of China. One remembers the time in Yan’an when American journalist Edgar Snow and his book “China’s Red Star” put the Chinese Communist Party on the map. Do you think it is possible to have another Edgar Noe today?” .
Now the question came at just the right time, Foreign Minister Wang Yi was trying to raise the subject and said, “Snow is not a Communist. But when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party, he has no ideological bias and speaks the truth and is objective. (…) He has worked with admirable professionalism and ethics to improve mutual understanding between the United States and China. (…) Even as the world changes, the media should maintain its professional ethics. (…) China wants to see and welcome this new era of Edgar Snow among foreign journalists.”
This question and answer was obviously not by chance. A few weeks later, on April 18, in an interview with the Associated Press, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng put the screws even tighter: “Friends of the media, I hope all of you can be the Edgar Snow of a new era.”
Le Maitre went on to point out that Edgar Snow, the American journalist who was welcomed at head of state level that year, was born in Missouri in 1905 and arrived in China in 1928. There he lived the bourgeois life of the gentry, interacting warmly with the intellectuals and artists of Shanghai and Beijing, where Mao Zedong established the Communist Party headquarters in Yan’an, Shaanxi Province, in China’s interior, after its Long March in 1935. He stayed there for more than a decade. Under siege by the Nationalist army, the Communists came up with a brilliant idea to break out: invite Western journalists to prove that they were far from being under siege. They chose Edgar Snow, the man known in Chinese Communist circles at the time for his leftist ideas. This man would receive a head of state level welcome in Yan’an. He would talk with Mao Zedong for dozens of hours overnight. According to historian Julia Lowell, the book, which was compiled and published after the Mao-Snow talks and reviewed over and over again by those around Mao before publication, describes the Communists as “ideal patriots and equality-loving democrats. Even today, the book can be found in bookstores throughout China: “The Red Star Shines in China”.
The Communist Party now wants to find some foreign journalists for Edgar Snow in the New Century, but it has attracted a lot of ridicule; is it not because, in contrast to his former chairman Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping has never met a foreign journalist, not even for a one-hour meeting? For deeper reasons, this speaks volumes about the concept of journalism held by the communist rulers. Whether Chinese or foreign, journalists are here to tell the “truth,” and the Communist Party is the only one qualified to define it.
Failing to achieve its goals, the report said, the Chinese Communist Party was reduced to exploiting “useful idiots” who could not see the goal clearly and propagandized, reverting to Lenin’s formula of exploiting Western intellectuals who were mesmerized by the hospitality of a well-planned visit to Moscow. At the press conference, Wang Yi had previously praised the book “Ouïghours” by a “French writer” Maxime Vivas, saying it “describes a real Xinjiang, a prosperous and stable Xinjiang “. The book turned out to be nothing but fake news (published by La Route de la Soie Silk Road in France).
If using foreigners in official discourse to establish credibility is a traditional Chinese propaganda tactic, China now knows how to turn to it and now uses social networks, Le Monde said. China’s international television station CGTN aired a report on April 5 in which a very active “influencer” said he visited Xinjiang and was struck by the “normalcy” of the situation there and the prosperity of cotton farmers. Raz Galor, as he is known, is an Israeli living in China, where he has made many videos promoting China, and we met him on April 20 at the Boao Economic Forum, where he ran a tea and beverage stall at what could be called “China’s Davos,” and he was He was the only stall allowed to sell drinks on site during the forum event.
The young blogger, who is also reported to have multiple talents – he has a badge that is in principle issued to journalists – admitted that the Chinese government told him which farmers to meet in Xinjiang. But then he tells us, apparently without telling the truth, that he does not support Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang.
Do these people do journalism? No. It’s pure propaganda. On YouTube, we can also see Daniel Dumbrill, a Canadian, explaining why there is no genocide in this part of China. His profession is a beer business in Shenzhen, thousands of kilometers from Xinjiang.
Is it true that the Chinese Communist Party turns to these “useful idiots”? The journalist from Le Monde points out that we think it’s possible because China’s image in the world is now getting worse. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, China’s image is now at rock bottom, even among the Asian countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), with a lower level of trust than even India. But its desperate search for and recourse to these “useful idiots” in fact shows that the Communist Party’s “soft power” is currently at a very low ebb.
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