New soft-power media spring up everywhere

Big Lychee, Various SectorsToday, 10:57

The New York Times reports a Chinese state-run English-language on-line media start-up aimed at pushing a warm, cuddly, positive-energy, soft-power, not-propaganda-at-all message to the world. I immediately (vaguely, blearily) suppose the story is about the South China Morning Post, which became part of the Beijing-friendly Alibaba group as of 6.00pm yesterday. But no, it’s about Sixth Tone (Mandarin, five tones, geddit?), an offshoot of The Paper. (Note that it’s .com not .cn – subtle, persuasive and seductive or what?)

Once you get past the usual over-designed format, it’s relaxed, approachable and eager to be liked. It fearlessly tackles safe stuff likedomestic violence. But it inevitably tiptoes around sensitive matters – for example,discussing the Central Leading Group on Comprehensive Deepening Reform without mentioning Xi Jinping, for whom it is a tool to grab yet greater personal power, this time at the expense of (also unmentioned) Li Keqiang.

Sixth Tone is a big step away from the Han-supremacist, Sino-skinhead, semi-psychoticGlobal Times to something more ‘Late 1980s Singapore Edgy’. One article asks why South Korea can produce glamorous hunk-filled military TV soaps, while Chinese army-themed dramas are such unbelievable crap – the question, and answer, being a metaphor for Sixth Tone’s own predicament ultimately under the control of censors and a Leninist one-party state.

So, the new no-paywall Jack Ma-ownedSCMP…

I was wrong yesterday in saying the paper did not mention the Panama Papers in its print edition. My eyes are authorized to skim over celebrity stories without informing the brain, and so I missed the Jackie Chan-angled report at the bottom of page 3 of the City section, classified as ‘investigation’. It concluded with a paragraph dismissing the Chinese leadership’s part in the saga as stale, reported in its pages long ago, and thus not worth further burdening readers with. Sniff.

Today, the paper carries standard wire services’ copy on the story. We can put the confusion down to SCMP staffers’ understandable excitement as the new bosses were taking over, and joining with the old regime in announcing a bonus for everyone. For no very obvious reason, the print edition has shuffled things around, with the sports now appearing in the business section. Otherwise, everything seems eerily similar – reminiscent, perhaps, of the atmosphere throughout Hong Kong on July 2, 1997.

One thing that hasn’t changed: godawful puke-inducing real-estate ads…

…featuring such gems as endorsements from the boss of Sa Sa and a ‘descendent of the Hysan Development family’…

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