Confucius, DeepSeek, and Why China Would Win a War With the United States
Question 1: Western Media Bias?
Is the western media even-handed in its coverage of China? And how has this impacted public perception of China in America?
Ron Unz—I think the Western media has been overwhelmingly biased against China, a bias that stretches back for decades but has steadily grown worse during the 2010s and especially the last few years.
Coverage has recently become so extremely dishonest and distorted that it reminds me of how the old Soviet media portrayed the West even as the USSR went into severe decline and eventually collapsed, and I think that unfortunate analogy is a very relevant one. Furthermore, much of our academic world has followed this same pattern of totally distorting the reality of China and its relationship with the U.S.
Some of the worst examples of these media falsehoods only came to my attention during the last decade.
For more than 35 years the American media has annually denounced the Chinese government for its supposed 1989 massacre of protesting students at Tiananmen Square, but there seems overwhelming evidence that incident never happened, and was just a Western propaganda-hoax, endlessly repeated by our media.
For example, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post personally covered those events at the time, and he later published a long article setting the record straight, but his account has always been ignored. Articles published in the New York Times by its own Beijing bureau chief said much the same thing, but these also had no impact. Numerous other sources, including secret American diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks have confirmed these facts, but our biased, lazy, or ignorant journalists have never paid any attention and for decades continued to promote the myth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Last year I published a long article summarizing all of this evidence.
Another egregious example was the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, an illegal attack that killed or wounded nearly two dozen Chinese. Our government and media have always described this as a tragic accident, while denouncing and ridiculing China for claiming that the bombing was deliberate.
But once again, there is overwhelming evidence that the Chinese government was entirely correct and our own government was lying, with our dishonest media endorsing and amplifying those lies. Indeed, a NATO officer was even quoted in a leading British newspaper as bragging that the guided bomb had struck exactly the intended room in the embassy. I discussed this in another section of that same article.
- American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Uncovering the False Media Narrative of Tiananmen Square
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 13, 2024 • 8,800 Words
A few years after America’s 2008 mortgage meltdown nearly brought down the world financial system, I published a long article contrasting China’s growing success with America’s recent record of failure. My piece emphasized that the Western media and much of the Western academic world often portrayed and contrasted the two countries in ways that were the exact opposite of the reality.
- China’s Rise, America’s Fall
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words
As a short sidebar to that long article, I compared the very different Western coverage of a pair of major public health scandals.
In China, dishonest businessmen had adulterated baby food and other products with a plastic compound called melamine, protecting themselves by paying bribes to government officials. As a result, hundreds of infants were hospitalized with kidney stone problems and six died, resulting in a huge wave of public outrage and a massive government investigation and severe crackdown. Many of those involved received long prison sentences and a couple of the guiltiest culprits were executed. Western media outlets naturally had a field day describing how widespread Chinese corruption had resulted in dangerous food products. Nearly 17 years later, I sometimes still find Americans mentioning China’s food scandal and the dangers of Chinese imports.
However, around the same time, America was hit with the Vioxx scandal, in which Merck heavily marketed a lucrative pain relief medicine to the elderly as a replacement for simple aspirin. But Vioxx sales were suddenly halted when a government study showed that the medication had apparently been responsible for tens of thousands of American deaths. Internal documents soon revealed that Merck executives had known of those dangers for years but suppressed the evidence in order to reap billions of dollars of profit from their drug. American media companies had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in Vioxx advertising, so they quickly dropped the story and almost no Americans still remember it today. Although no one was ever punished, when I later examined the underlying mortality data, I discovered that the true Vioxx death toll may have actually reached into the hundreds of thousands.
Thus, the American media devoted huge attention to a Chinese health scandal resulting in six deaths while quickly flushing down the memory-hole an American health scandal whose body-count may have been as much as fifty thousand times larger. Therefore, today probably many times more Americans are aware of the former than of the latter.
- Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison
Ron Unz • The American Conserva
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
