MCLC: me-media (2)

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me-media (2)
From: ALVARO Joseph James 
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Outside of the immigration office in Wanchai, Hong Kong, there is an elevated pedestrian walkway. Because of the many foreigners going in and out of the buildings, there are lots of people passing out flyers and whatnot in English. One young lady happened to be passing out the China Daily for free. I stopped to watch for a few minutes to see who took it – but no one did. Merely an anecdote, but it illustrates an interesting point that I have backed up by research as well.
In the discussion of China’s mass media, I would like to make the case for its English-language media lest we forget that it is mostly through English that China is attempting its soft-power initiative. If China’s outreach is to be attempted at all on a global scale, it must be carried out in the language of the ‘colonizer’ (Kachru 2006). If China hopes to challenge and eventually supplant Western dominance in the realms of ideology and culture, the medium of English is the way to go. And therein lies the caveat for China. English speakers are cagey readers, well trained in the arts of critical reading, especially when it is related to politics and ideology.
China’s troubles in getting out the message, as David Shambaugh (2007) suggests, persist because the values of the Chinese government are ‘amorphous’, and its political system is undesirable for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it is largely non-transferable to situations outside of China and therefore is perceived as having little to offer politically. In other words, even though it might be in English, as long as there is a lack of common ground, a starting point of interest, Chinese news media will remain as it is now, essentially marginalized from those it wishes to influence – in spite of the large amounts of money and energy invested in promoting it. Joshua Cooper Ramo (2007: 17) said no amount of ‘image surgery’ will help China out of what he calls the ‘disconnect between reality and the image’ it tries to project. But the issue of ineffectual media, which linguistic engineering alone cannot remedy, transcends the mere use of the English language. It is nested at the deeper level of ideology.
China’s soft power does indeed speak English – but it will continue to fall short unless the ideological divide has been bridged. Until this happens, China’s English media, will always speak a foreign tongue – ‘Zhonglish’ or ‘Xinhua English’ (Mair 2009) – a language ideologically unintelligible to the non-Chinese global community.
Joe Alvaro, Hong Kong
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 3, 2014
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