Zhao Yanjing, a Professor in the Economics Department at Fudan University, published an article on China’s Ai Sixiang website on 10th April 2020 in which he called for China to quickly establish its own narrative on how it has fought the Covid-19 virus.  Otherwise, western countries will succeed in establishing their counter narrative that China’s early delays and errors resulted in the virus escaping from Wuhan and causing havoc in the rest of the world.  They will pin the responsibility for the virus on China and its ‘totalitarian’ system, in order to offload responsibility for their own failure to take timely measures to prepare and defend their own populations.  He believes this could lead to China being treated like a defeated power after the end of a war, which is isolated and even forced to pay compensation to the victors.

Zhao says it will not be enough for China to rely on a passive response by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.  Western countries will aggressively pursue their own well developed core narrative and China must develop its own narrative in response.  He says the Chinese narrative should include the following main points:

1. The battle with Covid-19 is a battle between humankind and and a previously unknown virus.  It is a war in which the whole of humanity is battling against a common enemy.  China must not allow the west to characterise it as China’s responsibility.  If it becomes a question of ‘Who is responsible?’,  China will fall into the trap laid by the west of seeking to characterise it as a ‘man made disaster’ instead of a ‘natural disaster’.  China must stress the fact that Wuhan was the first city to face this previously unknown enemy.  He likens it to taking a “closed book examination” as compared with an “open book examination”.  Zhao says that this is the only way to explain what he describes as the initial “cover up and delay” on the part of the Hubei and Wuhan local governments, the only way to “frankly admit and correct the errors that occurred” and counter the charge by western countries that China’s “totalitarian government deliberately hid the facts”.
2. Wuhan is like the English town of Eyam that isolated itself to prevent the spread of the plague in 1665.  Zhao says Wuhan should be compared with the townspeople of Eyam who sacrificed themselves to save others from the plague, instead of being compared with Chernobyl in the Soviet Union where people suffered from the errors of their government.
3. Wuhan’s sacrifice was a sacrifice for the whole of mankind.  At a time when the rest of the world still believed Covid-19 was just another type of seasonal flu, Wuhan was the first place to face up to the virus and fight against it.  Zhao says that Wuhan’s “losses were grievous and there were repeated errors”, but Wuhan never surrendered like Paris, or “collapsed at Dunkirk” like the UK, in 1940.  He also compares Wuhan to Stalingrad, the city that “gave hope to mankind at the darkest moment” of World War II.
4. Use ‘self media’.  Zhao says that China lacks influential international media organisations like RT (the Russian international English language television channel) and Al Jazeera that can put its message across.  He says this is a “shame” – he in fact uses quite a strong Chinese word, ‘耻辱/chiru’, to express his feelings about this.  He says that China nonetheless has a very strong ‘self-media’ sector, with many people expressing their views online through blogs and posts of all kinds.  These include Chinese students abroad, Chinese companies operating in western countries and people of Chinese background living in the west, many of whom use Twitter, Tik Tok and other types of social media.  Once a core narrative has been established, it can be filtered through all of these channels to reach a wide group of people with social media accounts in the west.
5. Establish trust in the information that is provided.  Zhao says that the first requirement when providing information is that it must be true.  As the first country to face the challenge of Covid-19, China naturally has a huge amount of true information about it.  Zhao says there is a lack of trust in this information, however, because China lacks its own narrative to counter the west’s narrative.  Once China has a proper narrative of its own, it will be able to win its own ‘discourse rights’ and the true facts will then become an instrument of the exercise of those rights.  He says the true facts will only be believed if they are ‘tailored’ through the core narrative, not if they are ‘tailored’ through the exercise of state power alone.  Once there is a powerful narrative, there is no need to fear the true facts.

Zhao goes on to say that whether the virus is with us for a few months or a few years, like wars and the Great Depression it will sooner or later be behind us.  However, the core narratives are likely to have a very long lasting influence on every aspect of the post virus world.  He compares it to school examinations.  In themselves they no not create any substantial change for the students who take them.  The results of the examinations, however, can change the hierarchical relationship between students; that new relationship will then persist until the next set of exams.  He also says the battle against the virus could be viewed as a type of war.  The relative interests of countries after a war may not be determined by the size of the sacrifices they have made in fighting the war, but rather by the perception of the country’s performance as reflected in the core narratives of the combatant countries.

Zhao says that western countries long ago learned the importance of winning the ‘war of narratives’.  He quotes from an article published on 16th March 2020 in the UK’s Financial Times’ newspaper by the paper’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, Gideon Rachman, who said: “If [the Chinese version of events] gains traction, the geopolitical effects of the coronavirus will linger – even after a vaccine has been found for the disease.  The belief that China is on the rise and the west is in inexorable decline with gain new adherents.  And arguments for authoritarianism and against democracy will be made with increased boldness – in both China and the west.”

Zhao concludes his article by saying that the reason why countries are considered to have lost wars is that they are defined as such in the winning countries’ narratives.  The Chinese must not innocently believe that history belongs to the side that possesses the true facts.  In the face of a winning narrative, the truth is not important.  History is always written by the victors’.  From this viewpoint, the main battleground is that on which the battle for the power of the winning narrative is fought.

Comment:

Zhao is absolutely right in believing it is essential for China to have its own core narrative on Covid-19.  I do not, however, agree with all of his views on what the contents of that narrative should be.  It is right to stress that Wuhan and the rest of Hubei Province were the first in the world to face the onslaught of the virus.  The early mistakes in dealing with it are more understandable in that context, particularly in the light of the errors subsequently made by European countries and the United States.  It is also right to stress the sacrifices made by health workers from all over China who came to help out in Wuhan.  

I do not agree though with Zhao’s suggestion that China should compare the residents of Wuhan with those of the English town of Eyam who closed off their town to prevent the plague from spreading elsewhere.  The story of Eyam is not very well known even in the United Kingdom, let alone in the rest of the world.  There is also a negative aspect to this comparison.  The townspeople of Eyam successfully prevented the plague from spreading, whereas the virus had already spread from Wuhan to the rest of China and (as we now know) many other countries in the world, before Wuhan and Hubei Province were closed off.  It would be hard for the Chinese to make much headway by featuring the town of Eyam in their defence of how they handled the virus. 

Also, while it is certainly important for China to have a core narrative, I do not believe the lack of such a narrative is the core problem they face.  The main reason China is having difficulty putting its version of events across is not the lack of a good narrative, but rather the extent to which negative views of China have become entrenched in the west.  For years the Chinese have failed to adequately explain their policies on crucial matters such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and the treatment of the Uighurs.  Meanwhile, ‘China experts’ in the west have run rings around them, characterising almost every policy of the Chinese government as an ‘evil design’ of an authoritarian government that enslaves its own people.  It is hardly surprising that some politicians in western countries are now leaping at the chance to divert blame from their own failings on to China.  In a sense, Zhao shows he understands this when he bemoans the lack of a decent Chinese media channel broadcasting to the rest of the world like RT or Al Jazeera.  His suggestion that China’s narrative can be effectively delivered through social media channels is far from convincing, however. The fact remains that China should have been doing far more for many years than it has done to get its message across.  It may now be too late.

My own view is that the Chinese narrative should stress both that Wuhan and Hubei Province were the first areas in the world to face the virus, and also that China effectively prevented the virus from spreading to the rest of the country in a serious way through their use of strict lockdowns.  They can also say that they are succeeding, so far, in preventing further substantial outbreaks in the rest of the country through ongoing monitoring and testing.  They also need to bolster their case by explaining convincingly how the virus originated – this will take much time and research, but it will be very important for them to get the facts on record in a convincing way as soon as they can.

评论

赵燕菁所提到的中国亟需构建自己新冠疫情的核心叙事的意见是非常正确的。然而我不同意他关于这个叙事的所有内容。他强调武汉和湖北省是在全球中最初面对这场疫情冲击的地区，这是正确的。正因如此，武汉和湖北省地方政府的早期误判是可理解的，尤其是鉴于西方国家包括美国和几个欧洲国家在内的后来的误差。而赵教授赞扬了从全中国各地赴武汉的数以万计医护人员的无私贡献，这是恰当的。

赵建议中国的疫情叙事应该把武汉人和住在英国的埃姆村人相比较。埃姆村人于1665年为了抗击鼠疫自发地封锁了他们的村落，因而导致大部分村民的死亡。可是埃姆村人的牺牲行为在英国都不是一个众所周知的故事，何况在别的地方。而这个故事也带有一个消极的方面。埃姆村的村民成功地防止了鼠疫的蔓延，相反武汉和湖北省封闭以前新冠病毒已经从那里传播到整个中国大陆甚至于全球了。因此我认为对比武汉和埃姆村抗击疫情的表现对中国的叙事不太有利。

还有，尽管中国亟需一个有效的抗击疫情的核心叙事，缺少一个有效的叙事并不是中国面临的关键问题。中国试图有说服力地传播自己的叙事的原因不是它缺乏一个有效的叙事，而是西方国家和人口对中国的固有的消极看法。 很多年以来中国一直没有足够地解释自己对台湾，香港和维吾尔族人这类关键问题的政策，同时在西方国家‘中国通’不休地谴责中国，把中国政府的全部政策看作专制政府对它国民的奴隶。难怪西方很多政客乘机把自己在抗击疫情的缺陷转嫁给中国。从某种意义上，赵教授领会到了这个事实，因而他很遗憾中国缺少有全球影响力的国际广播公司像俄罗斯的RT和半岛电视台。可是他认为中国能够有效地用社交媒体传播自己的叙事，这不让人信服。其实中国早就应该尽力对全球传播自己关于很多国际问题的叙事，如今可能太迟了。

对我来说，中国的叙事应该强调武汉和湖北省两者在全球第一次面对了这场疫情，此外中国也用封城方式有效地阻止了疫情蔓延到中国大陆的其他地区。中国政府也可以表示迄今为止由于周密的监测和测试仍然没有在武汉和湖北省之外的大规模的爆发。他们另外需要有说服力地说明疫情的来源。尽管疫情来源的解释需要很多时间调查，但实事求是地交待疫情的来源和抗击过程对中国来说是一项很重要的任务。

Link to the original article: http://www.aisixiang.com/data/120808.html

Michael Ingle – michaelingle01@gmail.com

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Tags: 赵燕菁, Gideon Rachman, 尽快建立中国抗疫的核心叙事