China Obsessed With Occupy Wall Street

By Joel Brinkley

Right now, China is obsessed with the Occupy Wall Street movement, deathly afraid that it will spread there. How can I tell?

The China Daily recently ran a column headlined: "U.S. Media Blackout of Protest is Shameful." The Lexis-Nexis news service shows that on the very day that column ran, the American news media carried 282 stories about the movement, and in the weeks before, the total was 631.

So I called the author, Chen Weihua, deputy editor of China Daily USA. He's based in New York.

"Well, I wrote that on Sept 27," he explained, "and there had been just one or two sporadic articles." That prompted him to write: "One of the best kept secrets in the United States over the past two weeks seems to be on and near Wall Street in New York." There, he said he witnessed police brutality including seven arrests and a man "suffering a serious leg injury." All and all, he concluded, "the gap in real reporting is really serious to me. It's really absurd."

By Sept 27, the day Chen says he wrote his column, the four New York-area daily newspapers had already run 16 stories since the protests began 10 days earlier, including a front-page New York Times article on Sept 25.

State-controlled Chinese media have made a festival of Occupy Wall Street coverage, part of the government's effort to convince its people that they are much better off living in China rather than decadent America, riven with income inequality. "The U.S. crisis is a result of the unrestrained freedom for the rich," Global Times, a government newspaper, reported.

That overlooks a few inconvenient facts. Using the "Gini coefficient," which measures a nation's income inequality, China ranks as the world's 36th-most-unequal state, while the U.S. is a few steps back at 44th. Forbes magazine reports that the U.S. has more billionaires than any other nation. But just behind, in the second spot, is China. Meanwhile, the United Nations says almost half of China's population does not have access to a toilet. (In the U.S. it's less than 1 percent.) What does that tell you about income inequality?

The People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece, ties itself in knots over Occupy Wall Street. One recent story's headline asked if "the Wall Street protests are the U.S. version of the Arab Spring?"

The paper added: "The U.S. media is worried that riots similar to the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa may occur in the United States." (In 35 years as a journalist, I have never noticed that we the media have had a collective political concern about anything.)

But a few paragraphs later, the paper tripped over itself, saying: "the so-called Arab Spring is objectively nonexistent. It's just a beautiful name given by the United States based on its own wishful thinking." I guess the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria weren't told of this.

Global Times writer Wang Yizhou, a professor at Peking University, remarked: "Things would be very different if the protests took place in China. The government would take powerful measures, and the financial giants would dare not to refuse change."

Actually, China has already taken powerful measures. The China Digital Times reports that "a long list of banned keywords has been uncovered" that are blocked from display on search engines. Chief among them: the word "occupy" followed by every city in the country, like "Occupy Guangzhou."

And a Shanghai news site reports: "Multiple sources have told the Shanghaiist that police have been going around bars asking foreigners if they've got anything to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement," afraid that those people "might start an Occupy Shanghai."

Some American journalists are guilty of their own overexuberant, even gleeful, reporting on China's problems. Late last month, a reporter for MarketWatch wrote: "Forget Greece. Forget Italy. Forget Occupy Wall Street. The really ominous news right now: China's housing bubble is finally bursting," which will bring "unmitigated disaster." His primary evidence: "Prices have started falling."

Looking over all of this, Chen, the China Daily columnist, said protestors told him: "It's natural that corporate-controlled media outlets are not going to cover a protest that is fighting excessive corporate influence in society." (Sounds like a typical young American protestor's concern, doesn't it?)

But Chen also expressed personal disappointment with America.

"I am really frustrated that the model here isn't improving," he told me, "so China will have something to look at."

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