Posted 10:39 PM by Floyd

I was propagandized yesterday!

During our tour we stayed at hotels designed for Westerners, and the TV usually included CNN. Yesterday we checked into a Chinese hotel (the Tian Ping) in Shanghai, and I surfed the channels for English content. There was no CNN but there was an English channel which reported on the Communist Party Congress being held in Beijing. The voiceover claimed that everyone was discussing the congress, and there was a shot of a circle of smiling happy people, all intently reading newspaper reports of the congress. Actually it was so obviously faked that it was funny. (My wife says that these are government workers on break from their usual duties.)

There is very little propaganda here. If you had to guess the spiritual leader of China based on public portraits, it would be not Zemin or Mao but Colonel Sanders. Mao appears on currency, but other than that the only place to see him is on cheap knickknacks sold in tourist bazaars. The last time I visited China the only political poster I came across had a picture of Deng Xiaopeng and the phrase, "Development is the Truth." The mall in which I am blogging does have a floral sculpture of a hammer and sickle, but also features a bronze statue of a man with a briefcase and cell phone -- hardly Communist dialectic.