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Chapter 5 Banging the Democracy Drum: From the Superpower There is a sadness in seeing this jewel of Asia transfer to the hands of a dictatorial regime, only 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. —Chicago Tribune, editorial, July 1, 1997 In the American view of the past, the United States was not a classical imperial power, but a righter of wrongs around the world, in pursuit of tyranny, in defense of freedom no matter the place or cost. —Edward W. Said (1993: 5) They can walk freely now, how long will that last? —CNN shows pairs of walking shoes in Hong Kong. They played it up. I had friends in the States who called up and thought there was martial law in Hong Kong. —Mike Chinoy, CNN Hong Kong bureau chief, referring to CBS’s treatment of the menacing sight of the People’s Liberation Army crossing the border (Knight and Nakano, 1999: 68) In the era of “high modernism,” Hallin (1994) argues, American journalism domestically followed the New Deal liberal policies and defined foreign policy in terms of bipartisan consensus on Cold War containment. Has the era of “high modernism” indeed passed as he claims? As far as the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997—at a time when the West had supposedly won the Cold War—is concerned, the U.S. media’s political reason, agendas, and narratives remain defined primarily by the mighty icon of Americanism. The end of the Cold War, according to Fukuyama’s (1992) controversial thesis, represents the total exclusion of viable systemic alternatives to western liberalism. The collapse of the Soviet Union has made 85 the United States the only superpower and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) a major hurdle to reconstructing a U.S.-dominated liberal international order (Burchill, 1996), not to mention that China’s growing nationalism is a source of regional, if not world concern. Against this backdrop, the handover of Hong Kong becomes a theater, a site and a moment for various national media communities to engage in a discursive struggle. The transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty reportedly attracts a contingent of 1,047 U.S. journalists from 108 news organizations. They cover Hong Kong but aim at China. American exceptionalism is the motif for this ideological confrontation. Where a Communist power is concerned, the United States— along with its media—always sees itself as “a righter of wrongs around the world, in pursuit of tyranny, in defense of freedom no matter the place or cost” (Said, 1993: 5). Chang (1993) documents that the elite U.S. press has closely followed the foreign policy toward China throughout various administrations. The handover of Hong Kong is but a new chapter in the oscillating history of U.S. media coverage of China between cycles of romanticism and those of cynicism (Lee, 1990), this time perceived through vivid lenses and lingering memories of the brutal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. During that uprising, the U.S. media strongly and perhaps justifiably endorsed the students’ ideological causes, in contrast to the Japanese media, whose primary concern was the impact on Japan’s economic interests in China (Lee andYang, 1995). Dramatized by the televised bloodshed, the U.S. media made what Herman and Chomsky (1988) call “worthy victims” out of Communist China’s wanton killings because they “proved” the superiority of capitalist democracy.1 Since 1989 the U.S. media have continued to portray the PRC as an invariant dictatorship, in fact the last Communist giant to be struggled against, whose promises regarding Hong Kong are not to be trusted. For its part, having issued an unrestrained torrent of threats, China is suspicious of the West’s motive to make Hong Kong a base of subversion against the motherland. Notwithstanding its historical significance, the handover is a “set-piece journalism,” a staged spectacle, and a rather bland “media event” with its script written in 1984. Journalists had concocted likely scenarios of riots and disturbances that did not come to pass. Short of surprises and unexpected ruptures, they could only do “theater criticism,” a review of some sort of performance not keeping pace with a moving story (Knight and Nakano, 1999: 129). However , even the presumably detached theater criticism flaunts strong ideological underpinnings. The fact that the U.S. media drum up the democracy theme in Hong Kong “recall(s) and celebrate(s) events and persons that are part of their jointly acknowledged generational and cultural...

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