ChinaGeeks

The Beijing Olympics sure succeeded in attracting Western attentions; one wonders if sometimes Beijing wishes they hadn’t. The Games, and by extension China, drew harsh criticism from many corners of Western society, and while some of the criticisms are certainly fair, the tone of the discourse in some corners heralds the rise of a new form of orientalism.

Take, for example, a recent piece run by Alternet.org titled “Is Someone in China Reading Your Emails?” Ostensibly, this is a piece condemning the American government and American corporations for dealing with the Chinese military, but its tone is decidedly alarmist and its depiction of Chinese people as mindless automatons blindly serving an Orwellian dictatorship is deeply concerning, especially from a publication with a reach of more than three million viewers per month and the stated goal of “[confronting] the vitriol and disinformation of right wing media, especially “hate talk” media.”

Author Maura Moynihan begins her assault by comparing Zhang Yimou, the director of the Olympic Opening Ceremony, to Leni Riefenstahl, the director of Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. In fact, there aren’t many similarities between the two despite their abilities vis-a-vis groundbreaking cinematic aesthetics, but the comparison makes the Chinese government into Nazis. It also confirms the continued and deep truth of Godwin’s Law.

After employing the tried-and-true reductio ad Hitlerum rhetorical tactic, Moynihan shifts gears to fear-mongering: “If you use Windows, the Chinese Communist Party to knows how to hack into your laptop. If you have friends and associates in China, they’re reading your emails.” Never mind the fact that if you use Windows the ten year old down the block knows how to hack into your laptop, the assertion that the CCP is reading all emails sent to and from China is completely absurd. Aside from the fact that the sheer volume of emails would make reading all of them completely impossible, it is extremely unlikely they’re bothering to waste the manpower of hiring hundreds of thousands of English specialists to peruse your mail. Moynihan doesn’t attempt to substantiate her claim at all, though. (It should be noted that her article is posted as news, not as an opinion piece).

The fear mongering continues with her description of “a vast human intelligence gathering operation of Chinese citizens recruited to spy for the Motherland known as “a thousand grains of sand.” This network involves tourists, businessmen and some of the over 100,000 Chinese students who study overseas each year. Every one is questioned by intelligence officers before and after their foreign tour and offered lucrative rewards for valued intelligence.” This claim, too, is completely unsubstantiated, and will serve only to arouse unfounded suspicion of Chinese nationals who only wish to study, travel, or work in peace.

“Chinese cyber hackers,” (cyber hackers!) Moynihan writes, “have made numerous incursions into classified US networks.” So, of course, have American hackers, Russian hackers, Pakistani hackers, and hackers from just about anyplace with a computer and an ethernet cord. Why Chinese attempts to hack into secure US networks is at all surprising is unclear, as is what, exactly, that has to do with her point.

Eventually, she notes that critical US defense microchips are being manufactured abroad (she doesn’t specify that they’re being made in China, though), and ends on her hopes for the new year: “Let’s hope that the only thing “Made in China” next Christmas is a plastic Santa — not spyware in our computers, where Big Brother, wearing, [sic] a Mao cap, is shifting through our cyber profiles.”

And there we have the 1984 reference, paired up with a mention of Mao caps as a reminder of socialist conformity, and the threat that someone, somewhere in the giant, faceless nation that is China might be sifting through your online data.

Of course, there’s some sense to be found in the general idea that the US faces security risks when buying secret military electronics from China (as they would when buying them from any other country). Why China would rig computers manufactured there to spy on American consumers is less clear (it’s also hard to believe that they could do such a subtle job of this that no one in America would notice), but whether her argument is supportable or not is nearly irrelevant, couched as it is in fear mongering and orientalism.

In just over a thousand words she managed to work in all of these “rhetorical devices”:

• A comparison of modern China to Nazi Germany.
• An implication that all Chinese citizens abroad should be suspected of spying.
• An assertion that the Communist Party is actively engaged in reading the emails of American citizens.
• A comparison of modern China to Oceania (the fictional nation from George Orwell’s 1984.
• A reference to Mao, and Mao caps (how is this at all relevant to a story about hacking and computer technology?

“Journalism” like this adds nothing to the international political discourse. It detracts from American’s understanding of China and plays off of their fears both unknown (the faceless Big Brother reading their emails) and known (Nazi Germany) to make a point that is, at best, deeply obvious.

The phrase “new orientalism” is now most popularly used to refer to the misguided impressions Westerners have about the arab world and Muslim culture, but it seems equally applicable to this increasingly prevalent method of depicting China and Chinese people, too.