Learning From Liars: This Week in Chinese Headlines

Fact: all news is printed with agenda.

That agenda may or may not be what conspiracy theorists think it is, and it's very rarely what the writers of the news claim it is, but all news, be it Eastern, Western or radicalist, is printed with an agenda. In the West, that agenda is simple: to sell more news. News is printed by private enterprises that are solely profit-driven, and their goal is to print what you will buy, and what will make you likely to buy the next issue. In years past, when people were a bit more savvy than they are today, the way to sell newspapers was to print the truth, or at least something reasonably resembling it. In this polarized day and age, when someone whose worldview is based off of social media posts written by Joe Schmo and Jane Doe (in an echo chamber of their fellows who already share their views) can call themselves "informed and educated" with a straight face, people are a bit dumber. Ergo, Western media has adopted a new tactic: tell people whatever they want to hear, and call it news. If what you print forces people to question what they believe, they won't pay money to read it because they don't want to be challenged to think. So media organizations pick their target market (Left-Wing, Right-Wing, underground, etc.), take a guess what that target market already thinks of a given issue from their knee-jerk reactions on social media, and then print whatever spin confirms what the target market already believes.
In Party-driven States (such as China), the agenda is a little more old-fashioned: print what the government wants people to believe. "News" in China is unabashedly, unreservedly, a mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party, they openly declare that media should be "infused with the Spirit of the Party (Communist Party Central Committee, Communique[1])."

This is why I like getting my news from Chinese sources: it's easier to separate fact from fiction than it is in Western media.

It's not that Chinese media is more honest (if anything it's far, far LESS honest than Western Media). It's that they're not as good at hiding their slant as Western Media outlets. Chinese media is accustomed to peddling Communist Party propaganda to Chinese audiences (who, frankly speaking, have never been a very discerning lot), so they tend to be rather ham-fisted when injecting government bullshit into the news. Subtlety has never been the Chinese Communist Party's strong suit. So reading Chinese news tells me TWO things. By sifting out the BS I can readily see what the real news is, and then by taking stock of the BS afterward I can see what the Communist Party's thoughts are. Making this even easier is the fact that China's government only has a handful of major English-language media outlets: China Daily and its tabloid cousin, Global Times are the big ones, and the Hong-Kong-based South China Morning Post is (a little bit) less directly controlled by Beijing. The thing that one must remember when reading China Daily is that the target audience is not the Chinese population. Let's be plain: the vast majority of them cannot speak or read English (despite 12 years of government-enforced English classes in schools, but I'll save the damning indictment of their education system for a teaching journal). Ergo, these outlets can be clearly marked as mouthpieces for what the Communist Party wants foreign audiences to think.

With all that having been said, it has been a very, very interesting week here in Beijing.

To begin with, Kim Jong-Un was here for the past few days, briefing Xi Jinping on the Singapore summit. The fact that Xi Jinping felt such an urgent need to bring him here shows that -much like I stated in my previous article, he is nervous and wanted reassurances that his puppet did not break away during the closed-door summit (to which China was not invited). Beijing's additional security measures during this meeting have been very telling. First, there have been police and even PLA members on guard duty at key subway stations, a step Beijing takes whenever basically ANYthing happens (visit by a foreign dignitary, a major festival, Xi Jinping has a migraine, etc.). They also took the rather unusual step of tightening internet controls so most VPN's are less effective at getting around their "Great Firewall," something they typically only do during extremely sensitive times when they are afraid something detrimental to the Party might go viral on Social Media (such as during the 19th Party Congress, or earlier this month around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre). That's not really much of a reveal, honestly. What is more revealing is the last two issues of China Daily.
Both issues featured a front page story about Kim and Xi's meeting. "Xi: Implement Summit Consensus" for Wednesday's front page, and "Xi: Kim's Visits Usher in New Journey." The fact that both headlines are "Xi says..." is an interesting examination of the dictator's status within the minds of the Chinese populace, but I digress. The Wednesday article (Implement Consensus) was essentially a series of declarations of friendship between the PRC and the DPRK, repeatedly echoing statements like "the two leaders agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations," and "whatever the situation, the CPC and the Chinese government's firm commitment to consolidating and developing bilateral ties will not change, the Chinese people's friendly affection with the people of the DPRK will not change, and China's support for Socialist DPRK will not change." It rounds out this series of affirmations with this interesting statement: "Xi said he stands ready to work with Kim to continue to implement the important consensus reached between the two sides, and push forward the long-term, sound and stable development of the China-DPRK relationship (Mo, China Daily, "XI: Implement" [2])."
...Now then, do you notice that this briefing about the Singapore summit had very little mention of the Singapore summit? Do you also notice how desperately China wants to remind the world "we're north Korea's friends." Given that the world already took that fact for granted, why the sudden urge to prove it? I sense insecurity. The underlying emotion here, to continue the analogy from my previous article [3], is that the husband is now begging "please don't leave, we've been through so much," and the battered wife is saying "oh don't worry," but being rather reserved in her emotions about it. Nonetheless, the husband is desperate to show the whole world "see? She's staying with me! See? ...You see this, don't you? Don't you?"
The Thursday issue of the same paper tells more still. In Thursday's issue's cover story, it became clear that Xi Jinping was desperate to try and gain back the spotlight he lost last week. The article has four separate mentions of the fact that Kim has been to Beijing 3 times in the past 100 days, and Xi Jinping refers to this as "making history (Mo, China Daily, "Xi: Kim's Visit" [4])," the same phrase that was tossed around quite a lot during last week's first-ever summit between a sitting US president and North Korea's chairman. Frankly, it's difficult to take such a claim seriously. Also, like the day before it, this article spoke very little of the summit last week between Trump and Kim (which was the nominal reason for the meeting), but consisted mostly of constant, almost hypnotic reaffirmations of "North Korea is our friend... North Korea is our friend... North Korea is our friend..." At the risk of beating a proverbial dead horse, I feel I must reiterate the sense of desperation here. China wants the world very badly to believe "North Korea is closer than ever to China."
What I found the most surprising of all though, and the most revealing, is this: aside from the cover story, neither issue had a single other mention of Kim's meeting with Xi.
A bit odd, don't you think? Given the rhetoric of "making history" and "China's deep affection" for NoKo, and given that the alleged reason for the meeting was to brief Xi on what happened at a world-altering meeting, doesn't it seem a bit odd that there was nothing else said about it? Instead, both issues were a hodge-podge of editorials by Chinese "experts" saying a trade war with the Us will crush the US and not damage China, drippingly sycophantic praise of Xi's "Belt and Road" project, and of course the Communist Party's emotionally charged spin on the US refugee crisis (since China, whose own Human Rights record reads like a Quentin Tarantino remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, has to get all the mileage they can out of anything that can be spun to look like Human Rights abuses in the US), and the usual peppering of articles highlighting any third-world leader who stops to pay homage to the "Great" Xi Jinping. Nothing, except of course the eye-catching cover story, even discussed Kim's seemingly inconsequential two-day meeting in Beijing.
Now that tells me one of two things: Either...
[A] There is nothing to tell, or...
[B] Beijing doesn't like what they heard.
Given the bitterness of China's renewed vitriol toward the US (viz-a-viz, the trade war), I'm leaning toward option B. Add to this the fact that Beijing's one and only Foreign Language bookstore (at Wangfujing) was hurriedly stuffing its shelves with previously unimportant volumes hailing the relationship between China and North Korea (and of course dozens of "remember the 'evil American imperialists' actions in the Korean War" books), and it begins to look like China is suddenly terrified that they're losing their grip over North Korea.
I don't know yet if America gained an ally last week in Singapore, but I can say this: China lost one, and they're in the denial stage right now.

Works Cited

[1] People's Republic of China. Communist Party of China's Central Office. Central Committee. Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere. 22 Apr. 2013. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.
http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation

[2] Mo Jingxi. "Xi: Implement Summit Consensus." China Daily. [Beijing]. Wednesday, 19 Jun, 2018: page 1

[3] Patriam Reminisci. "The Trump - Kim Summit: Takeaways." Steemit.com. 19 Jun, 2018
https://steemit.com/china/@patriamreminisci/the-trump-kim-summit-takeaways

[4] Mo Jingxi. "Xi: Kim's Visits Usher in New Journey." China Daily. [Beijing]. Thursday, 20 Jun, 2018: page 1