CCTV FOLLIES 6.13 Come join Xi's culture club!
5,000 years of history and culture have produced a most exemplary man -Xi oversees Chinese culture for overseas Chinese -Russia gets free pass on its ongoing war of invasion -It's the fault of the US!
Let’s say you’re running the newsroom of the most influential TV program in China and your main man—the person who you are tasked to adulate, and must continue to adulate and whose story you must tell well in order to do your job well and keep your job—doesn’t do anything newsworthy or pop in for any notable photo-ops?
What’s a good communist editor to do?
CCTV provides a case study in creative propaganda here, taking the absent paramount leader and associating him with all sorts of glorious, wonderful, ancient and inspiring things. Ostensibly the opening segment is about the wonders of Chinese culture, and the need to be proud of it, but in reality it’s a kind of branding exercise for one extraordinary personage who is the end-product and high point of 5,000 years of cultural evolution. Stunning sunsets, ancient palaces, the Great Wall, the Yellow River, the planet earth itself are not too small or trivial by way of comparison.
Yes, there’s always file footage on hand to show the great man in action, too, here seen pointing at things. Even critics must admit the man’s a world-class pointer-outer of things.
“As Xi Jinping has emphasized, it is important to honor the study of the origin of world civilization with original contributions.”
In the New Era, culture is cherished and very well cared for. In fact much of it is locked up in these wonderful, inspiring citadels which epitomize Chinese culture.
And the great meandering rivers of China continue their inexorable flow to the sea…
In unrelated news, but related in the sense that Xi has a finger in everything, if not a heavy thumb, CCP cadre study Xi Jinping’s ideas on education, taking copious notes.
Speaking of culture, that long red carpet represents a reaching out to ethnic Chinese of the world to get in tune with the motherland and join Xi Jinping’s culture club.
Come seek your roots in China! Xi will show you the way! It’s the only way!