Opinion | The 'Where is' Story- A hook of western media deception
By Tom Fowdy
"Where is Li Shangfu? China's missing defense minister highlights Xi's total grip on power"- reads the headline of an article in the Guardian. The piece speculates that China's Defence Minister, Li Shangfu, has been subject to a political purge because he has not been seen in public for three weeks, and therefore "he is missing" and "Xi Jinping" is bad. This type of story should seem familiar to you, that's because it is. Last time it was "Where was Qin Gang?", or going further back "Where is Peng Shuai?" The articles love to peddle a narrative that people, particularly on the premises of political dissent, "disappear" and therefore create an open-ended speculation that they have met a horrible fate of some kinds, and therefore it is a testimony against the system itself.
Of course, we know where Li Shangfu is, he is under investigation for corruption, as to speak. It is only natural that someone facing such probably wouldn't appear in public, but that doesn't quell the narrative in any way, but in fact only amplifies it. Rather, such is always portrayed as being absolutely and affirmatively politically motivated and concerned with a "centralization of power" rather than holding people to account. According to a certain editor in Foreign Policy magazine, this apparently shows why the system is "unstable", rather than "stable." God forbid that any political system might hold senior figures to account when all evidence shows the exact opposite happening in the so-called open and transparent West.
The obsession with "disappearances" and "purges" is a discourse created around public memories of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. It is of course empirically true that Joseph Stalin brutally purged his political opponents in pursuit of "one man" centralization of power. This even went as far as editing people's existence out of photographs. Public imagination of this was only further enhanced through George Orwell's published critiques of Communism, including novels such as Animal Farm or 1984. The problem with it of course is not that it's strictly untrue, but it has created an all-embracing caricature and stereotype of Communist, or "hostile" states that tends to overthink, over analyze and spread more nonsense and speculation, than fact.
The Western media can relentlessly create rumors about someone's perceived disappearance, or in North Korea, even execution, which rarely age well. The use of these stories is designed to play on the public imagination of the above and subsequently demonize countries by weaponizing fear, paranoia and suspicion about their political operations. This has been done most notoriously with North Korea more so than any other country in the world. This is because the secretive state's closed nature and lack of contact with the outside world, coupled with relentless propaganda from South Korean and US "sources" allows the mainstream media to essentially report anything they want with no fact-checking whatsoever.
How so? If Kim Jong Un even refrains from making a few public appearances, a mainstream media firestorm ensures which in 2020 even had him down as dead. Yet to other people in the country, it is worse because of the absurd narrative pushed about endless executions, which is often extended at some point to every public figure, often for trivial reasons. Such as for example, the mainstream media falsely reported the Moranbong Band were executed, when this wasn't true. This has been extended numerous times to other officials or important figures. As hostility to China has grown, thus the "where is?" narrative has been more aggressively pushed in the bid to depict Xi Jinping's rule as uncompromising and tyrannical.
With this reporting, there is no scenario of people "willingly" keeping a low profile or being prosecuted for wrongdoing, it always is and must be the system. Whether it be Li Shangfu, Peng Shuai or even Jack Ma. As the Guardian article cited in the first paragraph narrates, with its cherrypicked experts, every disappearance, every outcome must be about "the party", "factions" or "Xi", ignoring the fact that in Western politics, people move in and out of the public eye all of the time, and that political reshuffles in elite positions are commonplace. Nobody, after all, would call the weaponization of a scandal to bring down a senior Conservative government minister, such as for example, Dominic Raab, as a "factional purge", would they? Or the pursuit of criminal charges against Donald Trump? Of course, while that does not mean such "purges" do not happen in China, as that is a reality of political life, nonetheless, the tendency to frame every person in "missing" terms, as if to mislead they have been taken away to some gulag or met a secretive grim fate, is deliberate gaslighting and deceptive reporting from bad faith journalists.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
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Opinion | How the US crushed the 'China Dream' in the West
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