{"id":193000,"date":"2016-04-08T16:28:09","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T23:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=193000"},"modified":"2021-09-14T20:35:57","modified_gmt":"2021-09-15T03:35:57","slug":"tabloid-editor-and-ex-diplomat-square-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2016\/04\/tabloid-editor-and-ex-diplomat-square-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Times Editor and Ex-Diplomat Square Off"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Party’s official mouthpiece People’s Daily, has become a prominent voice in China news in recent years. Its often inflammatory and flamboyant editorials<\/a> are sometimes presented as expressions of official positions, but some both inside China<\/a> and elsewhere argue that it is best ignored<\/a>. In a speech at Beijing’s\u00a0China Foreign Affairs University on Wednesday, former Chinese diplomat Wu Jianmin openly criticized chief editor Hu Xijin for the publication’s “extreme” articles and hawkish foreign policy stances<\/a><\/strong> which, he claimed, fail to give an accurate portrayal of global events. From People’s Daily Online:<\/p>\n \u201cGlobal Times always publish articles that are very extreme and narrow-minded,\u201d said Wu, member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Group in China\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; former Chinese ambassador to France, as well as former dean of China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.<\/p>\n \u201cLast year, I was invited by Hu Xijin to attend a Global Times conference. At the beginning of the conference, Hu\u2019s description of what\u2019s currently happening in this world was all confusing. And this was what I said to them, \u2018Your eyes have not seen the world in a full scope. You failed to see the major developments in this world and you failed to get hold of the main global trends,\u2019\u201d Wu said.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought, this is today\u2019s China. Hu is the chief editor of one of China\u2019s mainstream media and he should be very knowledgeable, yet he fails to understand the current global circumstances,\u201d Wu added in his speech.\u00a0[Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hu Xijin responded in a Weibo post on Thursday dismissing Mr. Wu’s comments<\/a><\/strong> and defending Global Times\u00a0as a “positive asset of China\u2019s foreign policy.” Laura Zhou at South China Morning Post reports:<\/p>\n In a lengthy post on his Weibo, he said the comments were typical of the thinking of \u201cold-fashioned Chinese diplomats\u201d, who believed the media\u2019s role was \u201conly to increase the chaos and a source of nationalism\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThey hope the media should highlight \u2018diplomatic achievements\u2019 and focus only on the development of friendly cooperation between China and other countries,\u201d Hu said.<\/p>\n They should never touch sensitive issues and speak \u201cstrictly in line with the tone of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, like a parrot repeating the words of a human\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n Hu said that Wu\u2019s criticism came as the Times<\/em> published reports that sounded more hawkish than usual and struck a different tone from the official line.<\/p>\n Hu argued his newspaper was providing a platform for diverse voices, which was a \u201cpositive asset of China\u2019s foreign policy\u201d. [Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At The New York Times, Owen Guo looks at the immense interest that the incident has generated online<\/a><\/strong>:<\/p>\n The dispute has drawn thousands of comments online. A person writing under the name Yanshanjian was among many taking Mr. Hu\u2019s side, saying that the ambassador\u2019s mind-set would subject China to bullying by foreign countries. \u201cThe Chinese people\u2019s rejuvenation dream is a noble goal and has a bright future,\u201d the commenter wrote on Weibo. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to hide anything, and we must dare to show our sword in the face of containing and encircling by the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n Others were critical of Global Times. \u201cThe newspaper always has an ultranationalistic approach to many issues and lacks a holistic view of world politics,\u201d wrote Qin Xiao, a Weibo commenter in the southeastern city of Nanchang. \u201cCooperation and peace development are a prevailing trend, yet the newspaper is so hard-edged and aggressive and must declare itself an enemy of the world. It shows it\u2019s extremely unconfident, unsure and dark-minded.\u201d<\/p>\n The dispute appears not to have affected one of Mr. Wu\u2019s public roles: as a Global Times contributor. On Friday, the newspaper ran a column by him that said that China and the United States would not go to war over the South China Sea and that China needed to \u201ckeep calm\u201d in the dispute. [Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Global Times, a tabloid owned by the Party’s official mouthpiece People’s Daily, has become a prominent voice in China news in recent years. Its often inflammatory and flamboyant editorials are sometimes presented as expressions of official positions, but some both inside China and elsewhere argue that it is best ignored. In a speech at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1088,"featured_media":193006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14744,14745,14746,100,5],"tags":[2898,6821,14620,6230],"class_list":["post-193000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-level-2-article","category-level-3-article","category-level-4-article","category-politics","category-society","tag-foreign-policy","tag-global-times","tag-hu-xijin","tag-wu-jianmin","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n\n