Reason Number 6 - Drycleaning the News

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 11.

“In early summer 2007 a man walked into the offices of the Chengdu Evening News, a newspaper located in the central Chinese city of Chendgu. He gave the text of an advertisement he wished to place to the young female clerk on duty. The words of that advertisement were ‘Paying tribute to the strong mothers of the June 4th victims.’

The advertisement referred to June 4th 1989, the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The Chinese government’s denial of this event had been so successful, sanitizing the educational system so well, that the young clerk had never heard of it. After the Chengdu Evening Post ran the advertisement, the deputy editor in chief of the paper was sacked, as were two other members of the editorial office

The Communist Party is extremely sensitive about any mention of the Tiananmen Massacre in public life. Open discussion of the event is dangerous, so much so that many young people the same age as the clerk often express disbelief if you tell them what really happened on that evening. The news is so effectively dry-cleaned that young people who do have some knowledge of the event support what the government did to end it. Hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens not only do not know the truth of their own country’s past, but also have a warped view of the world that lies beyond China.

As well as showing the almost pathological fear the Communist Party has of discussing the truth of modern Chinese history, this incident is just one part of a much wider web of lies, half-truths and misinformation that lie at the heart of today’s Chinese media.”

ChinaBounder comments:

Some months ago I wrote an entry called ‘How to Get Fucked in China.’

That drew a lot of hits, primarily from people who were looking how to ‘really’ get laid in China – people searching for sex via Google, Yahoo and so on. I guess most of those searchers were people who were coming on a holiday to China and hoping to get laid while they were in the country. If that is indeed what brought them to the blog, they must certainly have been disappointed.

So this time I will give a tip for all those readers who really want to know how to get laid in China. Because it’s very easy.

All you need to do – when you get to Shanghai, at least – is buy the city’s ‘flagship’ daily newspaper, Shanghai Daily.

Turn toward the back pages. There you will find a page or two of ‘massage’ adverts.

Look at the names – ‘Happy Ending’ and ‘Angel Delight’ and ‘Thailand Experience’ and ‘Honey Angels’ – stuff like that. These are, of course, call-girl ads.

Each advert has a mobile phone number on it. Call one up. You’ll get through to a Madame. She’ll speak pretty good English, as this is a service aimed mainly at providing Chinese prostitutes for Western visitors. The Madame will get your hotel room details and tell you the girl will be there soon.

And she will – it’s an efficient service and since, as a foreigner, you will likely be staying in a downtown hotel, it won’t be long before she’s knocking on the door. Don’t worry about the staff not letting her into the hotel – they’re in on the game too.

So you’ll let the girl in, and she’ll tell you she’s come to give you a massage. The massage will begin. She’ll take off your shirt, your trousers. She’ll get to work on you. And after a few moments she will offer you sex.

Then you negotiate. She’ll start with a high price, two or three thousand yuan, or maybe more if you’re in a swanky hotel. You can haggle this down a long way. Twelve hundred to fifteen hundred yuan is fair, but if you’re a real hard ass you can get it down to a thousand or even a little less. She won’t speak much English, because most of these girls are from poor countryside families, selling the only asset they have, their bodies, though occasionally you’ll get a more highly-educated university girl, ‘working’ her way through college to pay the bills. It’s the same old story – the rich and powerful preying on the poor and weak. So the girl will be able to haggle. She’ll also know words such as ‘Condom’ and ‘No’ and ‘Don’t,’ and of course the language of faked sexual pleasure is pretty much global.

So you settle on the price – and, please, do not haggle it down too much, for consider how much you have and how little she has, and consider what it is you are paying her to do. Then she will undress.

You know what to do from there on, right?

Now, here you can read about Chen Hui, a Chinese citizen. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006 after being busted for running a porn site, with 600,000 subscribers.

That’s life in prison for running a porn site. That sentence was reported in Shanghai Daily, too.

The very same Shanghai Daily that openly advertises prostitution.

Chinese women sold to well-heeled Western visitors, and the Chinese media is the pimp. That’s okay. Yeah, it’s okay to sell Chinese girls to Westerners if you’re the Chinese state.

But not okay for a Chinese guy to sell pictures and videos of sex to other Chinese people.

Work that one out.

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 12.

“It takes great energy for the government to maintain its paper curtain, which, with today’s electronic media becomes thinner and thinner, sometimes almost the point of translucence, allowing the citizens of China to ‘see through’ the face of their own state press into the open windows of the international media.

Unfortunately for the Chinese people, the decades of receiving only manufactured news will for some time prevent them from understanding that the ‘negative’ world media will not harm China, but will enhance its opportunities to find international solutions and solve universal problems.”

And remember – ‘T’ for Tibet and ‘X’ for Xinjiang at the Olympics next month.