THE AMERICAN NEWS MEDIA'S VOLATILE PERSPECTIVES ON CHINA.

• Author: Carpenter, Ted Galen

In the decades since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, wild swings have occurred in the way that American media outlets view that country. At most times, a herd mentality is evident, as a large percentage of news stories portray China in one particular fashion, although there always are some dissenters from the dominant narrative. The nature of that narrative sometimes shifts rapidly and dramatically, however. During some periods, the prevailing perspective has been extremely hostile, with nearly all accounts seeing the PRC as a monstrous oppressor domestically and an existential security threat to the United States. That was the case for more than two decades following the communist revolution, until Richard Nixon's administration suddenly altered U.S. policy in 1971-1972, and Washington no longer treated the PRC as a rogue state.

For the next three decades, the media tended to view China in a more benign fashion. During the 1970s and 1980s, China's image in the American press was that of a useful, de facto diplomatic and even military ally of the United States against the Soviet Union. A considerable number of news stories, editorials, and op-eds also noted that China was emerging as a significant U.S. trading partner. When the Cold War ended, the rationale for a strategic partnership no longer applied, but journalistic accounts emphasized the PRC's rising economic importance to America. Not even the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 derailed either Washington's cooperative relationship with Beijing or the media's reasonably positive view of China, although there appeared to be a bump in wariness and skepticism within the journalistic community.

During George W. Bush's administration, the roster of dissenters favoring a more hawkish policy toward Beijing began to grow. One catalyst for the media's shift was the sense that the PRC was becoming more a serious economic competitor to the United States than an essential trading partner. Even though both countries were prospering greatly from the relationship, a greater number of stories appeared featuring allegations of "unfair" PRC trade practices, including cases of intellectual property theft and currency manipulation to make Chinese goods more competitive.

Negative media accounts were not confined to the economic arena. More journalists began to see the PRC not just as a worrisome trade competitor, but as an emerging U.S. military rival, if not an outright adversary. Beijing's surging defense budgets and increasingly assertive behavior in such arenas as the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea fed those concerns in the media. Press uneasiness about the PRC's behavior continued to rise throughout President Barack Obama's administration, although a majority of news stories and opinion pieces still presented the U.S.-China relationship as positive and mutually beneficial.

A more noticeable split in press coverage has developed over the past three years, with a hawkish perspective gaining strength and challenging the once-dominant pro-engagement view in the media. The Trump administration's hardline trade policies led primarily to a sharp (sometimes partisan) debate, with journalistic advocates of the status quo condemning the president's apparent willingness to wage a trade war, while economic nationalists saw the firmer stance as long overdue. However, it is Beijing's behavior outside of the economic arena that has sparked a surge in both public and media hostility.

Two events were especially important catalysts. One was the successful move by President Xi Jinping's regime in May 2020 to impose a new national security law that menaced Hong Kong's guaranteed political autonomy. That move reinforced already strong condemnation in the American press about Xi's growing repression within the PRC, including squelching even the mildest forms of political and economic dissent. The other crucial catalyst for the increasingly negative portrayals of the PRC was Beijing's handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020. Complaints erupted throughout the American news media about the PRC's secrecy and duplicity regarding the spread of the virus, as well as attempts by Chinese officials to shift blame onto the United States for the pandemic. Public hostility toward Beijing has risen sharply--as confirmed in opinion polls-and media accounts reflect that shift.

Security hawks and economic nationalists have gone on the offensive in the media. Proponents of the overall U.S.-China relationship are still active and influential, but there is now a cautious, defensive, and at times almost apologetic tone to many of their news stories and editorials. They seek to prevent fatal damage to the relationship, even as they feel compelled to criticize PRC leaders for their conduct regarding both Hong Kong and the coronavirus.

Negative press views of China seem to be reaching their highest levels since the period immediately following the Tiananmen Square crackdown. In some ways, the extent of negativity may be higher than at any time since Nixon's outreach to the PRC. There certainly is less evidence of group think and a herd mentality throughout the media. For perhaps the first time since the communist revolution, there appears to be a vigorous debate between factions of roughly equal strength about how the United States should deal with China.

The Early Years: Pervasive Anger and Hostility

China's communist revolution in 1949 came as an alanning shock to the American people in general and news outlets in particular. Americans could scarcely believe that a leader they regarded as an admirable figure and an important member of the free world, Chiang Kai-shek, had lost a civil war and been overthrown. Dean Rusk, who served as deputy undersecretary of state for far eastern affairs in the Truman administration, ruefully recalled that the press and public reaction to the fall of China, was akin to "that of a jilted lover" (Rusk 1990: 158).

Even before World War II, American news publications lionized Chiang. Historian Barbara Tuehman (1971: 187-88) noted that "Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek as 'Man and Wife of the Year' for 1937 gazed at Americans in sad nobility from the cover of Time, sober, steady, brave and true." Time's publisher, Henry Luce, had been born in China of missionary parents, and not only did he take a great interest in China's affairs, he was a staunch anti-communist and admirer of Chiang. Time and the rest of Luce's vast magazine empire were important components of the powerful "China Lobby," which influenced public opinion and U.S. government policy to continue supporting Chiang and persist in an utterly uncompromising policy toward the new regime in Beijing (Koen 1960).

Media leaders were not pleased when a communist regime displaced their hero. Even moderate members of the mainstream media, such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe, criticized the Truman administration for failing to prevent the communist takeover. Conservative publications were decidedly more strident than the New York Times or other liberal establishment types in condemning administration policies. Three right-of-center media platforms during that time, the Washington Times-Herald, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal advocated an extremely hawkish stance regarding the overall threat that international communism posed to the "free world" (Chamberlin 1948). Those newspapers joined with the Luce magazines to excoriate the Truman administration for its handling of developments in China. Two of those newspapers, the Times-Herald and the Tribune, were owned by Col. Robert McCormick, a long-time conservative Republican stalwart, and members of his extended family (Smith 1997). Criticisms of the Truman administration's handling of China developments became ever more pointed and vitriolic in those publications.

Once Chiang's regime fell, it became utterly perilous for anyone in the media or government service to dispute the dominant conservative narrative that Washington's incompetence had "lost" China. The corollary was that a policy to isolate the PRC was essential along with vigorous U.S. diplomatic and military support for Chiang's exile regime on Taiwan (Carpenter and Innocent 2015: 48-61). Indeed, the prevailing narrative by the 1960s portrayed the PRC as an even more dangerous and repulsive threat than the Soviet Union to America's security and way of life. That view even penetrated popular culture. A best-selling novel and subsequent movie, The Manchurian Candidate, was based on a paranoid premise that Communist China was able to infiltrate and manipulate America's political system by utilizing a brainwashed prisoner of war. In Ian Fleming's book Goldfinger, the conspirators behind that arch-nemesis of hero James Bond were Russians. But in the 1964 movie based on the book, the villains were changed to Chinese.

The assumption that China was an existential threat was especially strong among right-wing media outlets once it became apparent in the mid-1960s that Beijing was intent on building a nuclear arsenal. National Review, the flagship publication of the conservative movement, published two editorials in 1965 warning that China's communist leaders could not be deterred the way the United States deterred the Soviet Union. The second editorial appeared with the pro-war headline "Bomb the Bang." National Review's editors admonished U.S. officials not to sit passively "like a man who watches and waits while the guillotine is constructed to chop his head off" (Carpenter 2015).

Moderate and liberal publications did not go as far as recommending preemptive war against the PRC, but they saw no opportunity for a policy of peaceful coexistence with Mao Zedong's regime either. The onset of China's bizarre, fanatical Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s made the notion of a dialogue with that government seem even more farfetched...