Branding China: How about 'Warning, this country could be dangerous to your health'?
Monday, May 5, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
“ ‘When I use a word,'Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
“ ‘The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
“ ‘The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'”
But on their way to the tea party, the XXIX Olympiad, the Chinese Communist leaders have run into worldwide protests including their handling of words.
The rest of the world knows the difference between freedom and cultural genocide, as the Dalai Lama rightfully says the Communists are waging in Tibet.
What may have begun as peaceful protests against the Chinese on the anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight to India turned into bitter rioting against the nearest representatives of the conquerors, including, unhappily, Chinese shopkeepers. [Ironically a large number of the victims appear to have been members of the Hui Hui minority, China’s 10 million or more Moslems of Han ethnicity, mostly concentrated in the northwest abutting Tibet – who in the past have themselves also been in revolt against tyrannical imperial dynasties.] After the first rioting in the Communist Occupation’s Tibetan Administrative Region it spread to the parts of historic Tibet sheared off into other Chinese provinces.
Always willing to employ foreign technology when it suits their purposes, Beijing is apparently lining up sophisticated international public relations to attempt to repair the damage to its image.
“Several British and US agencies were invited to interviews with Chinese officials to discuss a contract, which includes “pre-games PR strategies, media training and market research on western perceptions of China”, according to The Financial Times.
According to the Paris Herald-Tribune, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games current uses the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to promote the Games themselves. But James B. Heimowitz, Hill & Knowlton North Asia's chief executive, says their role is limited because the Beijing Organizing Committee is not empowered to comment on Chinese government policy. Hello! What would one expect them to say precisely since the Chinese Olympic Committee is largely made up of government officials?
Still, Heimowitz said, his firm's advice has been welcome.
"I think increasingly we are seeing Chinese — both private companies and the government sector — increasingly trying to understand how to be more effective in an international environment, and that includes things like understanding and working with international-level communications and PR agencies," Heimowitz said. "They're trying."
Hmmm! Turning a sow’s ear [especially when China is experimenting an epidemic of Blue Ear swine disease which has necessitated culling enormous numbers of pigs and has caused food prices to skyrocket] into a silk purse is, as they say, a conundrum.
But if the multinationals can assemble all the world’s gadgets in their sweatshops in China and control of domestic communications can be arranged through the help of Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, why not get some fancypants from Madison Avenue and Fleet Street to do the same for the image “a rising China” wants to present the world? If nothing else, maybe there is a painting that can be hidden in the attic with all the corruption on it instead of it being out in full view.
The Chinese want advice on how to “brand” China around the world. I have a suggestion: XXX for poison, given the latest episode in which prescription drugs sold in the U.S. have been shown to have been contaminated by Chinese ingredients. Now a series of rows has broken out between various Olympic national committees and the Chinese authorities over feeding the athletes. Beijing has been insisting that all the participants be fed by domestic Chinese suppliers. And some of the athletes, given the recent highly publicized cases of Chinese adulteration of food exports, have been insisting on their own food with their country’s delegations already, as in the case, of the Australians, having shipped supplies toward China. The U.S., too, had undertaken to feed its own. It isn’t clear whether this is a matter of “face” for the Chinese, or sheer crass profit, or both.
Industry sources said that handing their propaganda-making to outside, non-Chinese “ professionals”, would be a departure for the Chinese who have always done all this sort of thing “in-house”. That “house” has often been covering up for torture chambers and prisons where hundred of political prisoners languish in conditions commensurate with the history of repression the extent of which matches the worst horrors of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany and Occupied Europe.
Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee [IOC] has added to its reputation for corruption and malfeasance with an attempted whitewash of the whole Chinese Olympic setting.
“Chinese government bureaucracy is threatening to hamper the smooth running of the Beijing Olympics”, an IOC spokesman complained. But everything is going to be all right because the IOC is now getting more help from “the Chinese bureaucracy”.
Leaving off Humpty Dumpty for George Orwell’s 1984 “newspeak”, someone named Hein Verbruggen at the IOC said Beijing’s Olympic Committee [Bocog] “needed to fine-tune its operations”
“The ability to act as an integrated team, with straightforward processes to enable timely decision-making, will be extremely important.”
Ah yes! That is the Communist China of “straightforward processes” and “timely decision-making” – and perhaps Verbruggen would suggest transparency as well. He did suggest, however, that there might be a cog in the wheel or a wheel in the cog or whatever: “…additional bureaucracy might be a hindrance”.
There is an old saying in the PR industry about “pariah accounts”. Those are the ones which have to be “sold” to media consumers in spite of themselves, where the wordsmiths and the media maven present a false but acceptable picture of what is going on for the gullible and those interested in deceiving themselves. The pay is commensurate.
Get your bid in, PR consultant; you have nothing to lose but your soul.
“ 'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'
“'Oh!' said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
“'Ah, you should see 'em come round me of a Saturday night,' Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side, 'for to get their wages, you know.'
“[Alice didn't venture to ask what he paid them with; so you see I can't tell you.]”