Video: Exporting Propaganda - China's New Charm Offensive

Spin, manufactured in China

A friendly, gentle depiction of the People's Republic may soon be coming to Americans and Europeans via their television screen and newspapers (see today's International Herald Tribune and its cleverly disguised paid-for-but-looks-like-news insert) .

Yes, this bought and paid-for China is the same country which has banned its citizens from using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and most recently Skype. As noted by the NY Times, China's rulers are "obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet".

From the article:

Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him."

A Chinese person with family connections to the elite (said) that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on Google’s servers in the United States 

In the wake of the overthrow of Tunisia's government, other dictatorships (e.g., Mubarak's monarchy in Egypt) are now following China's lead.

I can only imagine how the Politburo Standing Committee's discussion over China's international image problem went down: "China is the world's greatest exporter, and propaganda works pretty well here, so why not package the two together?"