One common strategy in the overall repertoire of techniques to influence international public opinion used by China and others today is launching complaints about the representation of one’s own country in the foreign media. This strategy was used as early as in the 1920s, primarily by people who had networks abroad and saw China as a junior member of the world community.
After the turn of the century, especially starting in the 1920s, despite the fact that the GMD had turned towards the Soviet Union, the United States became more influential in shaping China’s reforms in a number of realms including education and journalism because of the Boxer Indemnity Scholarships, the first round of which was distributed in 1909.153 In the 1920s, U.S.-educated Chinese journalists maintained ties to U.S. journalists and institutions.154 As opposed to most European scholars, Americans at the time still viewed “public opinion” as a benign, positive force that had developed legitimately and that needed to be respected by governments that wanted to claim any form of legitimacy/representation.155
As demonstrated above, early efforts on the part of Chinese political factions were presented in the United States as an attempt on China’s part to publicize its stance and the opinion of the Chinese public because the world had
153
There had been Chinese studying in the U.S. before, but the overwhelming majority of them came through ties to missionary schools and were not connected to the Chinese government. The Boxer Indemnity Scholarships were created responding to demands mostly by American missionaries to return the money that China had given freely to the U.S. in excess of American claims in the Boxer Protocol. Cf. Stacey Bieler, “Patriots” Or “Traitors”?: A History of
American Educated Chinese Students (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 99.
154 The most important destination for Chinese journalists was the University of Missouri. For its
influence on the formation of Chinese journalism, see Yong Z. Volz and Chin-Chuan Lee, “American Pragmatism and Chinese Modernization: Importing the Missouri Model of Journalism Education to Modern China,” Media Culture Society 31, no. 5 (2009): 711-730.
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an interest and a right to know about it. The idea of international public opinion as a moral force had been implied in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were wildly popular in China at the time of the May Fourth Movement,156 and was fully spelled out in Wilson’s speech at the League of Nations in February 1919.157
This was a time when the idea of “public diplomacy” became popular in China, not in the sense that the term is used today but as a synonym of “open diplomacy” and the opposite of examples such as the Versailles conference, which was seen by Chinese American-educated journalists as the classic example of “secret diplomacy,” i.e. diplomacy behind closed doors, which led to unjust outcomes.158 While in the early 20th century, journals such as the National Review were only presented in the terminology of the “rational public opinion” discourse in the U.S. press (but not necessarily in China), by the early 1920s, Chinese journalists, at least when speaking in English, had adapted the same vocabulary and line of argument in addition to new arguments about the need for open diplomacy and journalism standards that had become popular in the United States by that time.
One common strategy that Chinese organizations pursued during the early 1920s, not called xuanchuan, but taking place at a time when the term xuanchuan was already in use in China, was cautioning foreign governments and foreign organizations that their image in the eyes of the Chinese public deteriorated because of their negative portrayal of China and the Chinese people in the country’s mass media. Thus, as early as in the 1920s, Chinese used appeals to shared values in order to try to change how China was portrayed in foreign media, including the press and film.
Such activities were not labelled propaganda. In fact, at the first Pan- Pacific journalism conference organized by the Press Congress of the World in
156 For translations of Wilson’s talks, see for example Jiang Menglin 蔣夢麟, “Meiguo zongtong
Wei’erxun canzhan yanshuo” 美国总统威尔逊参战演说 [Parallel English title: President
Wilson’s speeches on the World War] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1918) and Ch’ien
Chih-hsiu 钱智修, “Meiguo zongyong Wei’erxun heyi yanjiang” 美国总统威尔逊和议演说 [Parallel English title: President Wilson’s Speeches on Peace] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1919). Also see Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1911,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1327-1351. Wilson obviously lost in popularity after the decision at Versailles to hand Shandong to Japan, and this was one factor that led Chinese to turn towards Bolshevism (cf. ibid., 1349), but networks of U.S.-educated Chinese of course continued to exist.
157 Cf. Akami, “The Emergence of International Public Opinion,” 108-109. 158
In this case the fact that German colonies in China were handed to Japan rather than returned to China.
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Hawaii in October 1921,159 at which China was represented by four delegates,160 one of the Chinese delegates, Xu Jianping 许建屏 (Jabin Hsu),161 called for a Western “press devoid of propaganda and colored news.”162
Propaganda in his eyes, as in the eyes of the other participants, was a bad word, the opposite of ‘white publicity,’163
which was intended to counter the problem of secret diplomacy behind closed doors and create transparency for the public. The crucial function of the press was to hold politicians auntable to their promises of open diplomacy. The argument that ‘public diplomacy’ was needed in order to serve the public interest certainly appealed to Chinese journalists, particularly when made in connection with the Treaty of Versailles. It also resonated with the traditional Chinese distinction between private interest (si), as displayed by the Western press at the time, and public interest (gong), which could only be achieved through open diplomacy.
The press congress was used by Chinese delegates to criticize the Western press’s China coverage and to appeal to the (perceived) wish of the Western press to be well-respected in China. Delegate Xu Jianping emphasized that Chinese journalists had already lost their respect for the Western press, as they felt that news organs were controlled and steered by their national governments.164 The speech Xu gave was very much in line with the rhetoric of the American members of the World Press Congress at the time, but also expressed the disappointment of
159 Although the Congress had theoretically been in existence since 1915, the meeting in Honolulu
was the first in the history of the institution. Program and proceedings of the conference are available at http://archive.org/details/programproceedin00panp, accessed July 29, 2012. See for instance “Greetings from China” (12), Hollington K. Tong, “Open Diplomacy, the Hope of the Pacific Press” (57-59). Tong referred to Americans as “leaders of public opinion” (58), Jabin Hsu, “A message from the Chinese Press” (65-66), K.P. Wang (Associate editor of the Shenbao), “Getting News In and Out of China” [88-93], Also see Walter Williams, The Press
Congress of the World in Hawaii (Columbia, Missouri: Stephens Publishing. 1922).
http://ia600500.us.archive.org/9/items/presscongressofw00presrich/presscongressofw00presric h.pdf, accessed July 29, 2012.
160 Cf. Bryna Goodman, “Semi-Colonialism, Transnational Networks and News Flows in Early
Republican Shanghai,” The China Review 4, no. 1 (2004). Document retrieved through ProQuest on August 14, 2012. The President of the Press Congress was Walter Williams, who was also the president of the University of Missouri, where the majority of Chinese journalists were trained (and where Williams himself had founded the Journalism School).
161 Xu had graduated from the University of Michigan and worked for the China Press (Dalu bao
大陆报) at the time. Volz, “China’s Image Management Abroad,” 160.
162 Jabin Hsu, “A message from the Chinese Press” (65-66). “Program and Proceedings,”
http://ia600409.us.archive.org/1/items/programproceedin00panp/programproceedin00panp.pdf, accessed July 29, 2012.
163
Hsu, “A message from the Chinese Press,” 66.
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the Chinese people in the American press which had been accepted as “big brothers” in teaching China the code of journalism and as a force “helping to guide the public opinion of China’s vast populace.”165
The belief underpinning this line of argumentation was that public opinion was a moral force and that foreigners cared about how Chinese public opinion viewed them.
In addition, China also tried to engage in “film diplomacy,” which refers the efforts of a nation-state (both through popular and government initiatives) to exert influence on how one’s country is portrayed in film productions abroad. This was a very common practice for governments all over the world in the first part of the 20th century.166 Films that portrayed China and the Chinese people negatively prompted both protest letters to influential people in the film industry and foreign governments, as well as caused heated discussions at home. In protesting movies to foreign governments, Chinese often appealed to the interests of the other parties to maintain their own image in China. Protesting the 1921 movie Dinty167 to the
U.S. Secretary of State, for instance, Chinese students implied that films portraying a negative view of the Chinese could hurt America’s image in China if the government allowed these movies to be distributed unchecked.168
The central idea behind such appeals was, again, that China was an equal or a potential equal in the international system, once it had caught up with the Western countries by learning from them. Those who believed that China was already accepted as a junior member of the international community and would be increasingly integrated over the coming years as the country continued to modernize itself tried to engage and reason with their foreign peers by appealing to shared ideals.
This shows that the notion of the rationality and importance of public opinion was also used to try to improve China’s image abroad (by appealing to foreign journalists, film studios, etc). Such activities later became part of the
165 Hsu, “A message from the Chinese Press,” 65-66.
166 By the 1930s, Hollywood had begun paying attention to foreign markets by avoiding movies
that could be censored in one country due to unfavorable portrayal of its citizens. The requests of third nations were also taken into consideration by national censorship regulations, either preemptively or upon request by a foreign government. Michael C. Walls, “Chinese Reactions to the Portrayal of China and Chinese in American Motion Pictures Prior to 1949” (PhD diss. Georgetown University, 2000) 139-141.
167
Dinty is a film about a newsboy who runs into trouble with drug smugglers in Chinatown.
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overall package of activities subsumed under the term xuanchuan.169 The discourse universe centred on the notion of imperialists who would never treat China as an equal was soon to emerge, among others, as a polemic against this ideal.