The Communist Manifesto’s plan includes a demand for the “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.” Only a few years earlier Marx had published a long and moving plea in favor of a free press, yet here he is, demanding that the entire press apparatus be controlled by the state. What Marx means of course is the proletarian dictatorship, not the existing state. Regardless of who controls the state, his demand will always contradict his plea for a free press.
Marx envisioned communism as a society in which there would be no differences in class-interest between the state and its citizens. State decisions would always reflect those of the people, as the entire people would rule the state. Therefore, the state media would effectively be the people’s media. But how can a centralized state media represent the views of everyone, unless everyone had the same worldview? Communism has always assumed uniformity of thought, but this is quite unrealistic.
When standing trial in 1849 for insulting the public prosecutor in one of his articles, Marx stated in his appeal to the jurors that “now is the first duty of the press to undermine all the foundations of the existing political state of affairs.” As a journalistic objective, to undermine “all the foundations” of an existing political system is a goal that is entirely disparate from a sincere devotion to honest reporting with the aim of informing the public in a truthful, objective, non-partisan manner – the traditional journalistic standard. As impossible as it is to fully meet this standard, it remains nevertheless a noble and benevolent aim to strive for. It is the only form of journalism that can be considered respectful towards the public. This kind of journalism has only one purpose: to provide information that attempts to paints a rather complete picture of the reality of things from an attempted neutral perspective. In this way the readers can truly have a good understanding of the matter and form their own opinions – as opposed to being spoon-fed opinions formulated by others. Agenda-driven journalism may be fact-based, but the facts are selectively deployed so as to lead to only to one desired opinion – not to represent the reality of events in a fair and correct way. For Marx, journalism need not have such noble aspirations; it must foremost be a tool of the revolution. Its function is thereby reduced to installing revolutionary opinions into the readers’ minds. By declaring not objectivity the main goal of journalism, Marx is actually calling to undermine the profession. Perhaps you may argue that Marx’ statement should be taken with a grain of salt; that this was just some rhetoric to get himself out of a pickle. It is, however, undeniable that his own journalistic activities 100 percent served a clear and pre-determined revolutionary agenda.
It is easy to subvert journalism from its function as a source of information into a political weapon, but it is very hard to revert course once this kind of degeneration has been allowed to manifest. Truthful journalism will expose prior subversion and the people will understand they have been deceived. It will be the end of those who undermined journalism in the first place: they will be tried, convicted, maybe even lynched in a most exemplary way. Thus, intentional subversion of journalism is near irreversible.
The only way in which journalism can be beneficial to the well-being of society is for journalists to attempt to inform the population as objectively and honestly as they can. Everything else amounts to some form of deception or manipulation.
Information equals power. This should be very clear in our day and age. When a State exerts influence over press and news-agencies, either by censorship from above or control from within, the news becomes a tool to shape public opinion in accordance with the ambitions of those pulling the strings. As news programs devolve into subtle or overt propaganda pieces, cobbled together by omitting relevant information, misrepresenting facts, or in some cases using outright lies, informed and sensible people will turn off the news, while others, their emotions riled up, will eagerly gobble it up.
An outstanding case to illustrate the extent to which journalism can be abused when the “means of communication” are centralized “in the hands of the State” is Xinhua News’ reporting of the Tiananmen self-immolation incident in Beijing in 2001. Xinhua, China's official news agency, serves as a global mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
On January 23, 2001, Xinhua reported that five practitioners of Falun Gong had set themselves on fire in Tiananmen square. The meditative qigong practice had been outlawed six months prior, on July 20th of 1999. The year before, Chinese state TV had estimated the number of Falun Gong practitioners at 70 million and rising.
Falun Gong's exponential growth was a cause of worry to certain officials within the Chinese leadership, notably head of state Jiang Zemin and security czar Luo Gan. Both considered Falun Gong an ideological competitor to the Communist Party line. Qigong had always been tolerated in communist China – it was considered a recreational activity not much different from any other form of physical exercises. Falun Gong distinguished itself from other forms of qigong because of its emphasis on a Buddhism/Taoism-inspired conduct code of “truthfulness, benevolence, forbearance”. The self-discipline caught on in all layers of society – including among Communist Party cadres. Essentially, Falun Gong constituted a revival of the spiritual ideas that had historically defined the Orient. With this, it was partly undoing the impact that the Cultural Revolution had effected a few decades prior, when the CCP sought to eradicate all traditional culture and thought, including all forms of spirituality.
The philosophical argument can be made that Falun Gong’s moral guidelines of “truthfulness, benevolence, forbearance” stand perhaps too radically in opposition to the means typically adopted by dictatorial regimes – deception, cruelty, repression – to ever be tolerated by them. Given the nature and history of the CCP, perhaps persecution was only a matter of time, once the popularity of Falun Gong became significant.
Falun Gong was made public in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, an office clerk from Changchun, in Northeast China. Li stated that the practice was a simplified version of an ancient cultivation way that had been passed on privately through the generations. Li travelled around China to teach his practice for two years, after which he semi-retreated from public view. He asked the practitioners to not seek him out but to use his books as a moral guide for the practice. After Li’s retreat, the practice kept spreading through word-of-mouth (Li insisted that the practice should be taught free of charge). In just six short years Falun Gong had gathered a following greater than the Chinese Communist Party with its membership of 60 million, with the number of its practitioners increasing fast.
This was the first time since the formation of the People’s Republic of China that such an immense group had formed with a worldview different from the CCP ideology (with the exception of the brutally suppressed student democracy movement a decade earlier, which was significantly smaller in scale). Where previously local Chinese state television occasionally broadcast programs that portrayed Falun Gong in a positive light, the tide was now beginning to turn. Early 1997, the Public Security Bureau ordered local police stations to investigate whether Falun Gong was an “evil cult.” The investigation came up with nothing. In May 1998, a study by the National Sports Committee drew favorable conclusions about Falun Gong’s impact on the health of its practitioners. Later that month, Beijing Television aired an interview with He Zuoxiu, a nuclear physicist who sought to debunk Falun Gong as a “feudalistic superstition.” When it emerged that He had fabricated his story using false witnesses, the station was quick to broadcast a positive program about the contested Qigong practice. A few months later, the Public Security Bureau launched another investigation, leading to house searches and confiscations of property. Here and there, practitioners were violently dispersed at the parks while they were practicing their Qigong exercises. The turbulence drew the attention of a group of retired National People’s Congress cadres who later that year concluded that “Falun Gong only benefits and does no harm to the nation and the people.” Their report was delivered to the CCP Politbureau. When He Zuoxiu repeated his debunked story in a publication of the Tianjin University of Education in April 1999, several practitioners went to the local appeals bureau to demand a correction. They were greeted with batons; 45 were arrested. When practitioners inquired why they were given this treatment when they’d done nothing illegal, police told them to take the matter to Beijing, because that’s where the orders had originated from.
On April 25, 1999, ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners gathered in Beijing to file a petition with the Complaints Bureau near Zhongnanhai, the Chinese White House. It was a remarkably peaceful and orderly turnout that concluded without an incident; Premier Zhu Rongji met with the crowd – highly unusual in a country like China – and invited a handful to discuss the matter inside the government compound. Zhu seemed unaware of what had transpired in Tianjin. The crowd left after they’d been heard and by the next day, the 45 arrested were released.
However, the magnitude of the protest antagonized Jiang Zemin, then head of state, military leader, and chairman of the CCP. He claimed that a foreign conspiracy was behind the protest, that the Party's survival was at stake, and he turned the state apparatus against Falun Gong. Ten years earlier, Jiang had convinced China's Politburo to respond with violence to the student protests for democratic change after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The result became known as the "Tiananmen Massacre”. An estimated 3,000 demonstrators were shot or crushed by tanks, many more were injured.
On July 20, 1999, Falun Gong was officially outlawed. A persecution campaign to “eradicate”[i] the group was unleased, on a scale not seen in China since the Cultural Revolution. Mass arrests were accompanied by round-the-clock hate propaganda in the press, on radio and TV. An estimated 100 million Chinese practiced Falun Gong when the persecution started – most everyone in China knew of someone who practiced it. Consequently, many felt that the repression went too far; that Falun Gong posed no real threat; that it was all excessive.
These favorable sentiments more or less endured among the general public, in spite of the increasing media madness. That is, until five alleged Falun Gong adherents, including a mother and her 12-year-old girl, set themselves on fire in Tiananmen square on January 23, 2001. Xinhua reported on the incident extensively, with 24-hour news-marathons, and reporting in every Chinese newspaper and magazine, on every radio and TV station. The impact on the public opinion was profound: the incident shattered Falun Gong’s image as a harmless practice. Many who had been skeptical about the CCP’s aggressive persecution, now took sides with it, against the persecuted group. How could it not be an evil cult when it made people burn themselves and their children alive?
Days later, reports from Western media blew gaping holes in the self-immolation story. A CNN reporter who was present on the scene claimed he never saw a 12-year-old girl there. Philip P. Pan, a Washington Post reporter, interviewed the girl’s neighbors. They said that her mother had mental problems. Moreover, “no one ever saw her practice Falun Gong.”[ii]
Xinhua reported that the close-up footage was obtained from three Western media outlets who just happened to be on the scene. But CNN, Associated Press (AP), and Agence France-Presse (AFP) denied being there. According to The Washington Post:
“CNN, the AP and AFP denied having advance knowledge of the incident. The AP and AFP said their reporters were not in the square at the time.”[iii]
A CNN executive confirmed that a producer and cameraman were indeed present, scouting for Falun Gong protests on the square, which happened multiple times the year before around the time of the Chinese New Year. However, the cameraman was arrested as soon as the incident began, before he had a chance to come near and film anything.
So who was it that filmed the close up shots? One clip shows a person in a police uniform filming the event from nearby. Then who operated the long-distance camera that zoomed in and followed the events from the moment they occurred? Why were two police vans immediately present and why were the policemen carrying large fire-extinguishers that are not standard police equipment? Why does a slow-motion analysis of the news-footage reveal that Liu Chunglin, one of the self-immolators, was hit on the head with a metal rod by a man in a military coat, so hard that it bounced off her head as she collapsed amidst the smoke and mist of the fire extinguishers? Why was the event broadcast almost immediately, when normally every bit of news reporting has to await approval from communist party censors before it can be released – a process that usually takes two hours at least? Another close-up shows the twelve-year-old girl lying on the floor, crying for her mommy, but the laughable make up – cracked black lines painted on her face – looks anything but burnt skin.[iv]
More close-up footage features one Wang Jindong, sitting in meditation position, his face ostensibly burned (or is that a mask?). A policeman hesitates to put a blanket over him, giving Wang just enough time to take a deep breath and shout: “This Dafa is something everyone has to go through.” Between Wang's legs is a green plastic bottle with gasoline that, according to Xinhua News, he poured over himself. This then begs a few questions: if he had set himself on fire, how come the bottle was still intact? Why did the plastic not melt? If he had been ablaze before, how could he take such a deep breath and articulate so clearly? Why weren’t his vocal chords damaged from breathing in the flames?
Falun Gong practitioners pointed to more specific discrepancies: reportedly Wang Jindong had been practicing Falun Gong for five years, yet he assumes the basic meditation position incorrectly. It also makes no sense for him to shout “Everyone has to go through this Dafa” when the Falun Gong teachings (the “Dafa”) emphasize that the practice should always be voluntary. And why would these people set themselves on fire when the discipline explicitly disapproves of murder and suicide?
A week after the incident, State-run TV ran an interview with Liu Bairong, a sixth Falun Gong practitioner who was at the scene. She went there to self-immolate but changed her mind at the last minute when she saw the others burning. During the interview, she holds up a similar green 2-liter plastic bottle: “I drunk about half a bottle, and wanted to pour the rest on my body,” she confessed. Ingesting gasoline causes chemical burns in the throat and severe poisoning – half a liter can be lethal. Yet here she is, an out of shape woman in her late fifties, if not her sixties, apparently unscathed from drinking 1 liter [almost a quart] of gasoline just one week prior.
Footage from the Jishuitan hospital where the survivors were treated featured an interview with Liu Siying, the twelve-year-old self-immolator, who was “rapidly recovering.” The girl is wrapped in thick gauge bandages from head to toe – she resembles a mummy. Normally, heavy burns are left uncovered to avoid infections and facilitate the cleaning of the wounds, which needs to be done daily. Patients are kept in sterile rooms. Medical staff is required to wear face-masks and sterile clothing to approach them. Yet here, a reporter and her camera crew, all dressed in plain clothes, are allowed to conduct an interview in a normal, shared hospital room, with other beds nearby. Even the nurse looming over the child doesn’t wear a face-mask. Li Chi, head of the hospital’s burn ward, tells the reporters he had to perform a tracheotomy on the victims to prevent them from choking. However, the girl has no problem speaking – she even sings a song for the camera. No other interviews were granted; no foreign press was allowed. Two months later, out of the blue, the hospital announced the death of the “rapidly recovering” girl. No one knows what happened to her, or who she really was.
The International Education Development, a United Nations sub-commission on the promotion and protection of human rights, dryly concluded that the self-immolation incident was “staged by the government.”
The self-immolation video was not the only fabricated news story sent out into the world to have the population participate in the persecution. Many Chinese began to fear that the Falun Gongers they knew would harm themselves or others, and they reported their own colleagues, friends, and family to the authorities. These people were then imprisoned and subjected to re-education, forced labor, and torture, sometimes to the point of death. Many never returned, be it dead or alive, and no foreign journalist stationed in China was allowed to report on the many “disappearing” – and still disappearing to this day – lest their press license was revoked.
Without a free press to do honest reporting, to point out inaccuracies and abnormalities in official narratives, even a grotesque and obvious piece of theatre like this can be consumed by the unwitting masses as fact and truth. This incident is an ultimate illustration of the dangers of the “centralization of the means of communication in the hands of the State.”
Excerpt from: Deconstructing Karl Marx & Communism
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[i] Mickey Spiegel, Dangerous Meditation: China's Campaign Against Falungong, Human Rights Watch 2002
[ii] Philip P. Pan, Human Fire Ignites Chinese Mystery, Washington Post, February 4, 2001
[iii] Philip P. Pan, China May Charge Foreign Reporters Over Tiananmen Burning, Washington Post, February 9, 2001
[iv] See the documentary False Fire: www.falsefire.com
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