“They’ve turned into our politicians!”
The lament of an anguished European businessman who’s been watching Chinese politics for many years. “Once Chinese leaders were engagingly earnest technocrats who made worthy speeches. But now it is all about getting the media message right.”
As he grins for the camera, Li Keqiang may share the nostalgia. But he’s also a realist. Some imagine that in the absence of an electoral cycle, the one party state can afford to shelve political narratives.
But in China, they couldn’t be more wrong. Thirty years of high speed growth has bred an impatient urban generation who have no experience of the hardships which went before. The Chinese Communist Party can’t take their loyalty for granted. It has to show that it’s working hard to clean the air and provide corruption-free education and healthcare.
And while control is in their Leninist DNA, the smart ones know that in an era of 600 million internet users they can’t control the political story by edict alone. That doesn’t stop the rest from trying.
The Ministry of Propaganda and the official media pump out a daily stream of orders on what should be reported and how but the only result is to drive the Chinese public ever further onto social media and the anger platforms they provide.
So the relationship between British politicians and their media is worth studying. From a Chinese government perspective, the British press is frankly frightening and outrageous, but they are beginning to discern that successful politicians can still get their messages across and that sometimes the government is believed.
In his time as a provincial party secretary, Li Keqiang faced public scandals over HIV-AIDS from tainted blood, factory fires and mine disasters. Now he does crisis management at a national level with about 100,000 “mass incidents” of protest and rioting a year. No one knows better than he that the most dangerous thing for a government in a crisis is when no one believes you. There may be something to learn in London.
Lesson 3: Soft power – Britain is magic