Understanding Chinese Propaganda

I shamelessly clipped this from SSG.  China has been on a ascend since the late 1989 after Tianaman square.   In the 1990's they were caught funneling money to Bill Clinton's campaign in exchange for American Missile Technology. 

Are you curious why China is suddenly spreading obvious lies suggesting that the United States was behind the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan? It is a departure for them:  not in that they are suddenly using propaganda, but in that they are suddenly being obvious about it.  Propaganda is everywhere in Chinese media, and in fact in Chinese life.
Normally the propaganda is carefully concealed. On the 10th of February, Chinese state media company The People’s Daily put out a tweet showing quarantined coronavirus patients dancing. The tweet read, “Virus can’t put out the passion for life!”  Similar videos have emerged from Italy, too, where people are dancing on their balconies or playing music for neighbors. You could easily believe that the video of the dancing Chinese quarantines is just as spontaneous. Yet the ‘dancing to show how happy they are in their prisons’ videos have a history in China that they do not have in Italy. When the BBC went to the prison camps in which China’s Uighur minority is being re-educated, they too were shown dancing:  Uighurs forced to perform for them, forced to smile and say that everything is all right.
Having lived in China myself for a time, I can attest that propaganda suffuses Chinese life.  This has been the case since the Communist revolution following World War II. Mao took his propaganda very seriously, commissioning endless posters, and crafting endless mottoes for the people to learn and repeat. He put together both government and non-governmental organizations of people to push the government message into public life, and to identify and publish anyone who refused to speak the words as if they believed them. Chinese state police were part of the enforcement, but so were the Red Guards, a student paramilitary movement that enforced speech codes against their own professors (and everyone else, though the rare foreigners had some leeway).
Chinese propaganda generally has two faces, one facing the Chinese people, and one facing the outside world. The inward-facing Chinese propaganda is universal and all-encompassing. Its fullest expression is in the “Social Credit” system that China has developed, which checks every aspect of your life that can be checked and digitizes it all into a single score for how good a ‘citizen’ an individual ruled by the People’s Republic is. This controls everything about your life, from how free you are to travel to whether you can get a loan, or what jobs are open to you.
The Chinese people know they are being constantly propagandized, and constantly monitored for compliance. They mostly go along with it (with rare heroic exceptions) both because challenging the propaganda is costly, but also because Chinese culture underwrites this approach. In China it has long been considered very rude to say anything that creates a public upset, and polite to float an untruth if it would calm a situation or allow a beautiful mask to be maintained. Propaganda flows organically atop this social etiquette: what the government says is true becomes the polite fiction to be maintained. It is not just the threat of punishment, then, that makes Chinese-facing propaganda so ubiquitous and pervasive. It is also based on a deep cultural desire to maintain public social harmony.
When Chinese propaganda faces outwards, it tends to try to be completely unnoticed. As the Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano points out, this sudden obvious lie is really a departure for a program that normally attempts to operate stealthily. That matches my experience. Chinese propaganda attempting to persuade Americans tends to operate on the principle that a carefully edited truth is much more powerful than an obvious lie. The whole time I lived there I never saw English-language Chinese state media make a false statement, yet I was constantly aware that their presentation of the facts was deeply misleading. If you checked their facts, you’d find that all the facts were true. It was always the interpretation that was false and misguiding.
Truth is a force multiplier in propaganda operations. The more often you can tell the truth, the more credibility you build with readers. The more often they check your story and find that it lines up with reality, the more they will trust you. The more that they trust you, the more you can guide them to believe what you’d like with carefully crafted framing. You can omit, you can distract, and you can interpret the facts that you do present in the light you would prefer. Because your audience has found you reliable in the past, they won’t question your interpretations all that much.
It is even more effective when you can mask your involvement. Chinese state media is always going to be a little suspect to the average American, no matter how often they avoid telling obvious lies, because of state media’s direct connection to a totalitarian state. If you can encourage American media to carry friendly stories, however, you will get a lot farther. China has invested vast sums in US media and technology purchases, allowing them to apply pressure behind the scenes to ensure that American media covers stories (or does not cover them) in ways that advance China’s interests. Their technology purchases also gives them a way to influence Chinese-language speakers in America, and to monitor them — and the rest of us who use apps with Chinese ties. That monitoring provides invaluable feedback to them on how messages are being received and interpreted here.
It’s not just news media that Chinese propaganda has come to touch here. Hollywood has also seen very large Chinese purchases and investments.  So have video game producers. This means that China can influence how its government and culture are portrayed in American movies and to a lesser degree our video games. When was the last time you saw a movie that portrayed Communism as evil? How about Chinese government or military leaders in the ‘bad guy’ role?
By contrast, when was the last time you saw a movie or television show that raised doubts about America or portrayed an American government official as corrupt or wicked? All the time, right? Of course, most Americans do think that our government and its leaders are corrupt — at least that ‘the other side’ is. Indeed, many of them are. It’s a strength of our culture that we are able to engage in robust criticism of bad practices by our leaders. As Carafano points out, however, the Chinese are very good at leveraging our own divisions against us. They never have to say anything bad about any American: they can just re-broadcast what we say about our own.
The shift to an obvious lie, combined with the expulsion of American reporters, thus marks a surprising shift in China’s propaganda war. Carafano thinks it may be aimed at Africa, where similar tales of alleged CIA malign activities are already widely believed. That may be right. It also may be that the coronavirus efforts are not going as well as they hoped, and they are trying to get the American free press away before that story gets out. In that case, the obvious lie was a provocation designed to give China ’cause’ to expel the journalists.
In any case, it is a departure. We shall keep an eye on the People’s Republic of China.

Chinese Sub surfaces by American Aircraft Carrier.

I remembered reading something about this and I finally figured that I would do some research on it.  

On 11th November 2006, the Commander of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet at the time, Gary Roughead, made a historic visit to China in a hope of improving the relations between the two countries. His visit was intended to organize a joint military exercise that emphasized the search and rescue role of the Navy and was to take place on 19th of November that year.
However, the visit was overshadowed by the incident that occurred during an American naval exercise near the island of Okinawa. On 26th of October, a Chinese Song-Class submarine surfaced within five miles of the USS Kitty Hawk airplane carrier in the Pacific Ocean. Several weeks before the US delegation met with their Chinese counterparts, ships from the Pacific fleet were stationed in international waters between Taiwan and South Japan.

The carrier was surrounded by a dozen of ships in a protective formation, but nevertheless, the Chinese sub managed to slip through unnoticed. It came as a surprise that the Americans were unable to detect the lone submarine earlier, for their extensive defense screen included a submarine and anti-submarine helicopters, all responsible for protecting the battle group from an underwater attack.
There were a number of theories why the Chinese Navy staged such a provocation. It remained unclear for how long the sub was shadowing the carrier, but this sort of error showed how much the American Navy let its guard down after the Soviet submarines stopped being a threat.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Navy conducted a plan to de-emphasize their anti-submarine warfare capabilities, since they were convinced that the preeminent submarine threat had been neutralized and that it would take decades for such a threat to re-emerge.
The Chinese military officials dismissed the Washington report that the submarine was following the aircraft carrier, but it seems unlikely that the whole incident was accidental. The sub-detection capabilities of the US Navy showed that they didn’t consider the level of advancement of the Chinese submarine fleet. China has alway been reclusive about its arsenal, so this came as no surprise. Nevertheless, the US underestimated the level of sophistication achieved by the Chinese subs.
The incident reminded the two governments of the reason why their relations were so cold in previous years ― in 2001, an American spy plane collided in mid-air with a Chinese jet fighter. The incident occurred 70 miles away from Hainan Island province off the coast of China. The jet pilot died during the collision, and the spy plane crew of 24 men was forced to land at Hainan. There, they were detained by the Chinese until the two countries agreed on terms for their release. Since 2001, relations were strained, until the visit in 2006.

Admiral Gary Roughead.

Let’s take a look at the hardware that sparked the 2006 incident. The Song-Class submarine is diesel-electric powered. It is the first submarine class developed entirely by China and also the first Chinese submarine to use the modern teardrop hull shape. It uses a German state-of-the-art 396 SE84 diesel engine.

USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63)

Its armament includes Russian-made wake-homing torpedoes and anti-ship cruise missiles. Although China still lags behind with the technology, especially because of the fact that they still haven’t fully developed nuclear-powered submarines, the Song-class submarines, together with the Yuan-class submarines equipped with air-independent propulsion (AIP), could represent a real threat.

Song-class Submarine. SteKrueBe – CC BY-SA 3.0

On the other side, USS Kitty Hawk was first put into service in 1961, and it was officially decommissioned in 2009, two years after the incident took place. Nevertheless, the ship represented the pride of the American Navy ― a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board. The sub certainly made an impression, and the American commanding officers were obviously embarrassed by their lack of caution.
One NATO official called this event “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik,” making a reference to the Sputnik orbiting satellite, which was launched in 1957, marking the beginning of the space age.
During his official visit to China, Admiral Gary Roughead stated, after discussing the incident with the Chinese, that the submarine “was operating in a manner that did not hazard any vessel or cause any problems for any vessel.” Roughead added that he believes ” … that the openness and transparency and the ability to communicate when our forces are operating in proximity with one another is very important. That’s why we are doing this series of exercises.”
Admiral William Fallon, the former commander of the US Forces in the Pacific, on the other hand, pointed out that the battle group wasn’t engaged in anti-submarine activity. If it had “and if this Chinese sub came in the middle of this, then it could have escalated into something that could have been very unforeseen.”

Chinese sailors at the Qingdao, North Sea Fleet headquarters parading within 2000 for a visiting U.S. Navy delegation. 

Despite the tensions, the naval exercise went on as planned and it was deemed successful by both parties.
The South Chinese Sea area remains a subject of dispute to this day. The question of naval superiority in the Pacific is often mentioned, as China had been building up its fleet in the past years.  Since 2011, they have started their own aircraft carrier development program, and the first vessel was commissioned in 2012. In 2015, several sources confirmed that China was building a second indigenously designed aircraft carrier.
Also, an incident very similar to the one that happened in 2006 was reported on 24th of October, 2015, when a Chinese submarine tailed the nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Ronald Reagan off the coast of Japan. On this occasion, Pacific Fleet and Pacific Command refused to comment the event but didn’t deny that it happened.

When Red China Snagged a Soviet Tank

I was surfing around and ran across something about the Chinese snagging a Soviet tank during an abortive border incursion during the Sino-Soviet split.  The Chinese uses the captured tank

For a template to improve their domestic tank industry.  The resulting Type 69 which I saw a lot of in the Persian Gulf War because the Chinese sold a boatload of them to Saddam Hussain so he could replace what has been destroyed in the resulting fight with the Iranians during the the Iran–Iraq War which also contributed to Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf War. Iraq's military was accustomed to fighting the slow moving Iranian infantry formations with artillery and static defenses, while using mostly unsophisticated tanks to gun down and shell the infantry and overwhelm the smaller Iranian tank force; in addition to being dependent on weapons of mass destruction to help secure victories. Therefore, they were rapidly overwhelmed by the high-tech, quick-maneuvering US forces using modern doctrines such as AirLand Battle, that we had developed to counter and disrupt the Soviet armored formations.

In 1900, Russia signed the Convention of Peking which gave them Outer Manchuria and other Chinese lands. When both countries became communist, their nagging border dispute was swept under the rug, especially since China needed Russian technological expertise.
At least till Nikita Kruschev ruined it. In February 1956, he hosted the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party and denounced Joseph Stalin as a monster, demanding reforms.
Mao Zedong, China’s head honcho, was shocked. He thought of Stalin as a comrade-in-arms. Worse, he believed that Kruschev was also attacking him, for Mao felt that purges and summary executions were necessary for China’s transition from its feudalist past.

Then in 1958, Kruschev wanted to install long wave radio stations along China’s coast to help guide Soviet submarines.
Mao was suspicious but agreed on the condition that China be given nuclear weapons. Kruschev balked, even though Chinese scientists had already received blueprints for an atomic bomb from their Russian counterparts.

When Kruschev visited the US in 1959, Mao accused him of sucking up to capitalists. Things came to a head in 1962 when China used the Cuban Missile Crisis as an opportunity to occupy India’s Aksai-Chin region, and the USSR sided with India. But when Kruschev pulled Soviet missiles out of Cuba, Mao had had enough, and the official friendship between the two nations ended.

Soviets and Chinese using sticks against each other during the Sino-Soviet Split

In 1964, Mao claimed that the Treaty of Beijing had been unfair. He demanded a return of territories under Soviet control, including Zhenbao (Treasure) Island, which the Russians called Damanski.

Mao (left) and Kruschev (right) together in 1958

To mitigate increasing tensions, Kruschev agreed to hand over Zhenbao and other lands, but Mao screwed it up a few months later. During a speech, he jokingly said that he’d present Russia with a bill for their occupation of Siberia, the Far East, and Kamchatka. Kruschev was furious, so he nullified his agreement with Mao.
Chinese and Soviet troops began massing on the disputed border. Though technologically inferior to Russia, Mao was convinced that China’s superior numbers would far outweigh Russian technology. He was right.
When Arkady Nikolayevich Shevchenko (former Under Secretary General of the UN) defected to the US in 1978, he admitted that the USSR was terrified of China’s numbers. Shevchenko claimed that if Mao attacked, the Kremlin was going to launch nuclear missiles.
But Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, cautioned against it. He knew they couldn’t nuke China without consequences to themselves. But while the Soviets thought of self-preservation, Mao did not.
Mao just couldn’t grasp how dangerous nuclear weapons really were, calling them “America’s Paper Tigers.” He was convinced that China’s vast size and numbers protected it from any possibility of nuclear annihilation. Still, he took no chances, so on October 16, 1964, China detonated its first atomic bomb in their test area.

The Chinese proposal to redefine the Sino-Soviet border with Zhenbao (Damanskii) Island on the Chinese side. “中国” on the left is China, while “苏联” on the right is the Soviet Union. Zhuwq – CC BY-SA 3.0

Things only got worse from there. According to the official Chinese version, some of their civilians were attacked by Soviet troops in border regions. Others who peacefully protested illegal Soviet occupation were allegedly run over by Soviet tanks.
The Soviets claim that Chinese soldiers began haranguing Soviet border posts, some by waving Mao’s “Red Book” at their faces. To de-escalate tensions, Soviet border guards were ordered to use sticks to push Chinese nationals back across the border.
The Chinese retaliated by using longer sticks, resulting in ridiculous jousts. Later, they sent martial artists and wrestlers to the border, since neither side wanted outright war nor to lose face.

Soviets armed with sticks to minimize damage against the Chinese

It all came to a head on March 2nd, 1969. In supposed revenge of murdered Chinese civilians, members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attacked Soviet border guards on Zhenbao Island – killing 59 and injuring 94. The Soviets counter-attacked on March 15th by shelling the PLA on the Chinese side of the Ussuri River.
To take Zhenbao back, they sent in four of their newest weapons – the still-secret T-62. As they crossed the narrow frozen river, one ran over a landmine. The other three didn’t bother turning. They simply reversed back to the Soviet side.
A PLA soldier approached the damaged tank, opened the hatch, and found himself staring at the barrel of a pistol held by an injured Russian. The man fired, but his gun jammed, allowing the Chinese soldier to throw a grenade in. The Chinese wanted to tow the tank away, but sniper fire from the Soviet side prevented that.

Chinese border guard (on the right) waving Mao’s “Red Book” in front of a Soviet border guard

The following day, the Soviets returned to claim their dead, which the Chinese allowed. But when they tried to retrieve their tank, the Chinese fired, forcing them to retreat. On March 21st, the Soviets sent over a demolition team but were again beaten back by the Chinese.
With the Soviets gone, the Chinese navy was called in to help pull the tank onto the Chinese side. They arrived on March 28th, but were shelled, so the Chinese tried another tactic.
Using the tank and sniper fire as cover, engineers began dismantling the T-62. They were still at it on April 2nd when the ice began to melt. The Soviets took advantage of this by firing at the ice around the tank till it sank. Satisfied, they retreated.

A T-62 tank at the Museum of The History of Ukraine in WWII in Kiev, Ukraine. Gutsul – CC BY-SA 3.0

They ignored the Chinese navy who continued their efforts to salvage the tank but whose suits were ill-equipped for the freezing temperatures, causing many to die of hypothermia. By April 29th, the Chinese pulled the rest out and sent it to a tank factory in Lyshuen.
But the Soviets hadn’t given up on their tank. In mid-May, a Chinese saboteur was caught near the factory with a bag full of explosives. Under questioning, he admitted to working for the Soviets who wanted him to destroy the factory and the T-62. He was executed, of course.

The PLA capturing the T-62 tank

The tank didn’t turn the balance of power in China’s favor, but it accomplished something far more important. Mao realized that he couldn’t fight the Capitalist West and the Soviets at the same time, which led to a thaw in Chinese-US relations.
Only in 1991 was Zhenbao Island returned to China, but it was only in 2003 that the two nations finally delineated their borders

China Rejects blame for Indian Aircraft Carrier mishaps

the article is compliments of international news sources and the pictures are compliments of various internet sources, the insertions are compliments of me and Wiki;)


RIA Novosti
13:49 28/09/2012
BEIJING, September 28 (RIA Novosti) - China has denied Russian claims that Chinese firebricks were to blame for boiler failures in the Russian-refitted Indian Navy aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya, which suffered propulsion problems during sea trials in the Barents Sea last month, local daily Beitsin Chenbao reported, quoting Defense Minister Yan Yujun.
"We checked this, and found that Chinese enterprises which make such firebricks for naval propulsion systems have never exported such products to Russia," Yan said.
Earlier this month, Russian media reports, quoting Andrei Dyachkov, President of United Russian Shipbuilding corporation which refitted the carrier, claimed the ship's boilers had been damaged due to failures in the brick insulation separating them from the ship's structure. The shipyard used "sub-standard Chinese firebricks," Dyachkov said.
Another official involved in preparing the Vikramaditya for sea trials, claimed the reason for the boilers’ failure was India refused to use asbestos to protect the structure around the boilers from heat, fearing that the material was dangerous for the crew. He said the boilers’ designer had to use firebrick, which proved not sufficiently heatproof.
The Vikramaditya was to have been handed over to India on December 4 after the sea trials following a much-delayed refit that has gone massively over-budget. The deadline has now been postponed again until October 2013, and the cost of the new repairs to the boilers has not been revealed.
The boiler problem is the latest in a string of hold-ups in the refit of the ship, in a defense deal that has turned into a shipwreck of its own, going way over budget and being repeatedly delayed.
India and Russia signed a $947 million dollar deal in 2005 for the purchase of the carrier, formerly the Russian Navy's Admiral Gorshkov, but delivery has already been delayed twice, pushing up the cost of refurbishing the carrier to $2.3 billion.
Sevmash shipyard director Vladimir Pastukhov was fired in 2007 over his poor management of the project.
The Vikramaditya was originally built as the Soviet Project 1143.4 class aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov. The Project 1143.4 carriers and a class of destroyers with the same engines suffered a history of boiler failures during their lives.
The ship was laid down in 1978 at the Nikolayev South shipyard in Ukraine, launched in 1982, and commissioned with the Soviet Navy in 1987.
It was renamed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1994, the Gorshkov sat in dock for a year for repairs after a boiler room explosion. In 1995, it briefly returned to service but was finally withdrawn and put up for sale in 1996.
The ship has a displacement of 45,000 tons, a maximum speed of 32 knots and an endurance of 13,500 nautical miles (25,000 km) at a cruising speed of 18 knots