This Is China ( China Today)

As a Chinese American who’s an obsessive reader of anything about China and a reader of New York Times for over 50 years I find it surprising that there are more Chinese on the pages of opinion writers and editorial pages recently, the only unsurprising thing is it’s still anti-China to a large extent. Obviously it represents the liberal view points of democracy, human rights, and rule of law that represent the antithesis of Chinese narrative. It certainly is not difficult to find those Chinese who left China and embrace Western values to take on anti-China positions as marketplace will attract those with affinity to Voice of America propaganda views. I suspect CIA financed think tanks spent millions trying to understand China would have done better by reading columns like mine or Shanghai based program by Professor Zhang Weiwei “China Today” which is on the 9th weekly installments available free on YouTube.
The TV program is about 40 minutes long each, and Professor Zhang of Fudan University and his associates discuss topics about recent political developments and then a TED like talk to young university audiences and take questions from audiences. There is no taboo questions and they touch on various topics from analysis of Chinese society, minority areas, history, and even term limit. Professor Zhang asked the young people to be self confident and confront West with his answers direct and up to the point. For example he answered the question westerns asked him about why China didn’t have a color revolution by quoting a Chinese student showing 2 pictures of Bond from Shanghai, 1 from 1990, and another from 2010s. The pictures are self explanatory.
The program is shown on Monday night Shanghai time, and usually posted on YouTube by Monday evening or Tuesday morning Eastern time in U.S.. These shows are a powerful tools and shows China’s soft power. The main criticism I have is it is a Chinese show and is on Mandarin. I wish they are translated to English and other languages so it can be disseminated all around the world. Since the program is still ongoing, I will not be critical but suggestion on the other taboo questions. It is more than 50 years since Cultural Revolution and 30 years since TAM incident. When I visited museum of Chinese Communist Party founding in Shanghai, there were many pictures of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party, including those who defected, exiled, or even surrendered to Japanese. It gave a biographical sketch of their accomplishments, whether martyred or betrayed the cause, even a Russian who was executed wrongly by Stalin. These are the histories and China is not afraid to face them. China did say Mao made errors from the Cultural Revolution and gave him a grade of 70% versus 30 % errors. It is past time to examine the cause and lessons from Cultural Revolution, both positive and negative.