When Encountering Made-in-China

News is ideology. it is designed to mystify audiences and to impose a false consciousness on its audiences about the world through proving constructed information and images. Especially when encountering the other, the news plays a watchdog role regarding politics and economy, barking at news media to alarm its audience to be alert. The barking seems to be a natural ability or response to “make things public” as a way of practicing democratic rights. However, how the dog barks depends on how it will be heard, what its owner instructs, and how much attention it receives.

News is also a “Thing” or “Ding” discussed by Bruno Latour and Peter Weilel to “assemble” race, ideology, place and culture into an essential rectangle to frame the Asian as a whole so that the western audience can stand in front of those framed pictures to gaze at the other’s activities. I, as a Chinese Canadian, find out that I feel constant pain and anger when locating myself outside of this rectangle as one of the observers because Chinese images in the western media are highly constructed to focus on a single point out of which mistaken generalization are made. This dog-bark-formed-frame not only “disassembles” or destabilizes my faith toward this so called “race-free” country and democracy, but also, enable me to be highly aware of who I am and what I should fight for.

SARS is a symbolic example to examine how news frames the Asians with race, ideology, place and culture. I was in an ESL school when SARS occurred in 2002. I recall whenever I turned on the TV or the radio, or when opened a newspaper or clicked on the Internet, SARS was there. The news barked loudly, seriously and more viciously than ever, acting as a watchdog to alarm the westerners to protect themselves. However, in the case of SARS, the news built a solidly rectangular wall rather than a frame to not only segregate Asian, especially Chinese people as a whole, but also to discriminate against Chinese and Chinese- Canadian in general. Indeed, the news at that time functioned as a vehicle to spread yellow peril. For instance, I remember there were many SARS related articles on news media criticizing Chinese food culture, and even there was someone on the Internet called SARS rice-eating disease. In fact, fear that the news aroused seemed to be more severe than SARS itself. Even without a single infection, Chinatown and other Chinese community was quickly identified as a site of contagion and risk. A restaurant I worked at had no white customers at all. A teacher in my ESL school refused my friendly hug after I came back to school after Christmas. Many of my Chinese-Canadian friends had the same feeling that we had become victims and visible targets in the country we live.

If SARS is a symbolic well-known product of Made-in-China, then toys containing lead is another typical Chinese product that western news focused on in 2007. In the West, “Made in China” brand is a synonymous of lesser quality and cheap goods. With same rectangular formula, the news frames the other, in this case, China, as a contrasting image, idea, and experience to help the West to define itself as if “the Western culture [can] gain in strength and identity by setting itself off against [the Other]” as Edward W. Said argues in his book, Orientalism. According to my own observation, the Western news strategy toward China seems to focus on more negative reports rather than on positive events. By revealing how chaotic China is, the news repeatedly plays its watchdog role and mimics its owners’ tone to play opposite and against Made-in-China. Here I am not saying that lead toys are good things; what I am trying to indicate is that the Western news tends to use its microlens to magnify one point and blur other truths, generalizing to a fault. For instance, while the Western news was barking how much devastating influences those toys brought, there was another truth which was not heard or blurred. That is, most toy factories in China are the Western/Chinese co-operative companies. As a result, the news, functioning as a “Ding” to “make things public,” is constructed and reinterpreted. If appropriating Daniel C. Hallin’s doughnut diagram theory to describe the relationship among news media, the West, and the other, I would conclude that the news assembles or brings the western audiences to “the sphere of consensus” with constructed information and images of the other, but disassembles and segregates the other as whole to “the sphere of Deviance”.