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Posted on 11/04/2001 9:21:57 AM PST by tallhappy

I saw the recent article posted here about the Chinese videos of 911. Here is a much more detailed and longer article about these videos and related subjects.

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New Yorker

October 15, 2001

SECTION: LETTER FROM CHINA; Pg. 83

HEADLINE: STRAIGHT TO VIDEO;
How the attacks are playing in the provinces.

BYLINE: PETER HESSLER

BODY:
In the video shops in Wenzhou, I found three versions of the attacks on America. One was a DVD entitled "The Century's Great Catastrophe"; the other two were videodisks-"Surprise Attack on America" and "America's Disaster: The Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-first Century." The videodisks appeared three days after the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were hit. The DVD didn't come out until almost two weeks later, and I was able to find it at only one shop, where it was displayed between "Jurassic Park" and "Planet of the Apes." According to the shopkeeper, "The Century's Great Catastrophe" was selling particularly well. People in Wenzhou know how to do business. Wenzhou is a medium-sized city on the southeastern coast of China, just across the straits from Taiwan, and its proximity to the ocean has encouraged residents to look outward. You find Wenzhou emigres in Chinatowns all over the world-opening restaurants, running stores. At home, they make things for export. One nearby satellite city, Baishi, is famous for producing plastic shoe soles; another city, Baixiang, makes men's suits. Liushi is known for low-voltage electronics. In 1988, as China's economic reforms accelerated, Wenzhou began manufacturing cigarette lighters; it is now responsible for more than sixty per cent of the world market. The people of Wenzhou are proud of their cigarette lighters. A friend who lives here gave me a luxury windproof model that came with a Swiss Army-style knife, scissors, and nail file.

In many ways, Wenzhou is as far away from Communist China as one can get without leaving the mainland. The local economy is more than ninety per cent private, and unemployment is low (one per cent, according to official figures). The people take pride in having built the economy without substantial investment from the state, and they have a reputation for being natural-born entrepreneurs-uncultured but crafty and hardworking. I wondered how the pragmatic, international outlook of the people in this vibrant city, which has so many traces of American culture, would shape their reaction to the events of September 11th.

Like all cities in China, Wenzhou has been flooded with cheap bootlegs of American films, most of which are produced in copy shops in the southern province of Guangdong. Wenzhou's video stores sell not only the recent Hollywood blockbusters but also dozens of American films that I'd never heard of, with unfamiliar names in the cast and credits, and with lurid cover blurbs promising sex and horror. Browsing through the racks in one store, I pulled out "At First Sight." Its come-on read, "He finds a way to make huge profits with attractive women." Nearby was "Heroes for Hire," with the line "She: a soft-hearted, attractive, lovable pet. He: a threatening, abnormal killer." The teaser for "Reptilian" was "Tiny insects cause a coming atrocity for human beings." One of the World Trade Center videos featured a series of blurbs in the center of a big orange star:

Iwatched all three of the World Trade Center videos. The DVD had been hastily produced by the governmentrun Xinhua publishing house, in Beijing; its front cover displayed photographs of Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, and the burning of the Twin Towers. Like many Chinese bootlegs, the back cover had tried for an air of authenticity with a false credit line composed of random Hollywood names and studios: Tom Hanks, Columbia Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer, Ving Rhames, Touchstone Pictures. A small box noted that the film was rated R, for violence and language. The video combined footage taken from ABC News with Chinese commentary and American movie soundtracks that had been dubbed in at key moments. Gunfire and explosions rang out when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. The theme from "Jaws" accompanied the collapse of the north tower, which was shown in slow motion.

The makers of "Surprise Attack on America" had taken what at first seemed to be a more documentary approach. The video opened with scenes of daily life in New York-people crossing streets, workers in their offices-while a narrator gave background information about Manhattan and the World Trade Center. Something caught my eye during one of the office scenes, and I replayed it-a five-second shot of a banker hurrying from one desk to another, carrying a sheaf of papers. He looked familiar, and for a moment I wondered if he was someone I'd known in college. When I replayed the scene a second time, I realized that it was a splice from "Wall Street."

Hollywood movies kept cropping up in "Surprise Attack." Often, the inserts were so short that I couldn't tell where they had come from. The effect was unsettling: a flicker of ambiguity between fact and fiction. The collapse of the towers was followed by a scene from "Godzilla" in which the monster lays waste the rest of Manhattan; this abruptly segued to a sombre President Bush giving a press briefing, which merged into a bombing sequence from "Pearl Harbor." Later, the narrator cited historical acts of terrorism, ranging from the Serbian assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand to the activities of the P.L.O. "Terrorists are not happy with superpowers like America," the narrator said. "There are many reasons for their dissatisfaction, and the most important one is that the powerful nations push their principles on other countries." The film went on to describe the aftermath of the 1998 attacks on United States embassies in Africa. America's retaliation-the unsuccessful bombing raid in Afghanistan-was illustrated by a glimpse of missiles whizzing over San Francisco Bay: a scene from "The Rock."

When I asked people in the streets for their reactions to the events of September 11th, several of them equated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with NATO's 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which claimed three lives. America, they said, had got what it deserved for trying to be the "policeman of the world." Expressions of compassion for the victims in New York and Washington sounded curiously callous. "Why did the terrorists have to kill all those innocent people?" one man said. "If they had a problem with the American government, they should have flown directly into the White House."

I talked about these reactions with a friend in Wenzhou, a Chinese teacher of English at a private school. He said that many of his fellow-teachers had laughed while watching television coverage of the attacks. "One of them told me that he couldn't sleep that night, because he was so excited and happy," my friend said.

We discussed the role of the state-controlled media in these responses. For decades, the Chinese government has aired criticisms of American culture and American imperialism, but such commentary was notably absent after September 11th. Chinese officials expressed solidarity with Washington, partly because they viewed the incident as an opportunity to improve ties with the United States, but also because they feared domestic terrorism. The western province of Xinjiang, which shares a border with Afghanistan, is home to the Uighurs, an Islamic minority group that has chafed under Communist rule since China solidified control of the region, in 1949. Uighur separatists have turned to violence in recent years, and there are reports that some of them have been trained by the Taliban.

But these incidents have not been covered by the state media, and the average Chinese remains unaware of the degree of discontent in Xinjiang. I met few people in Wenzhou who viewed the attacks in America as any kind of warning. To the Chinese, who have endured war and political upheaval throughout much of the past century, the notion of modern-day terrorism is purely abstract. When I asked my friend about the voyeuristic pleasure that people were taking in the devastation in America, he said, "It's the same thing that Lu Xun described." This was a reference to the great twentieth-century writer who had often criticized his countrymen for a failure to show compassion. In his novella "Ah Q" and in other books, Lu Xun identified the Chinese habits of rubbernecking and bullying as serious national shortcomings.

But I sensed another force at work. In the past decade, the government's anti-American propaganda has taken on a new dimension, thanks to the proliferation of Hollywood films on video. The Chinese press had always depicted America in broad strokes-as a land of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, of sexual license and rampant violence-but the portrait was now far more vivid. To the average Chinese, the September 11th attacks were only the most dramatically violent American movie to date. In "America's Disaster," one of the narrators, Chen Xiaonan, said, "We are astonished, but at the same time we are not astonished." Chen is a newscaster for Phoenix Television, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Based in Hong Kong, the station aspires to become the CNN of China, and it is aimed at satellite owners on the mainland. The terrorist attacks were a boon for Phoenix, which provided Chinese viewers with far more extensive-and more sensational-coverage than the state-owned networks. Chen and other Phoenix announcers repeatedly compared the events of September 11th to scenes in "Pearl Harbor" and "Air Force One," apparently under the impression that, in the absence of such references, viewers would not realize that the attacks were real.

And, just as President Bush had borrowed from movie-poster lingo in his reports to the American public-the vow to capture bin Laden "dead or alive," and the adoption of Hollywood-style titles such as "Infinite Justice"-so the Chinese video-makers had been quick to spot the star potential of the world's most-wanted terrorist. A photograph of bin Laden appears on the spine of the DVD case, which is normally reserved for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tom Cruise. "I've heard people say that now bin Laden is even more famous than Mao Zedong," the English teacher told me.

In Wenzhou, I visited a friend who works as a clerk in the foreign-sales department of the Tiger Brand cigarette-lighter factory. She goes by the name Shirley, and by Wenzhou standards she is a successful young professional. At twenty-eight, she earns two hundred and fifty dollars a month, using her English skills to line up foreign buyers.

Together, we toured the Tiger Brand plant. Male workers were using die-cut machines to punch igniter buttons out of zinc alloy; female workers were molding tiny cannisters in plastic welding contraptions. It was a well-run factory, and the main office had display cases featuring its high-end products. There were gold-colored lighters studded with fake diamonds, and special barbecue lighters that telescoped out to reach inaccessible places. On one wall was a world map that showed the company's export patterns fanning out from Wenzhou to the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, India, and dozens of other countries. A big sign, in English, read "Let Tiger Brand Create World Famous Brand. Let the World Further Understand Tiger Brand."

Later that evening, I had dinner with Shirley and her husband, who develops software for a Wenzhou computer company. Both of them said that, among their friends and fellow-workers, there seemed to be little identification with the victims of the terrorist attacks. Shirley herself admitted that she hadn't been especially moved while watching the first televised reports. "I didn't really feel sad," she said. "I admit that I've always had a prejudice against America, because it's so powerful and it always uses its power in other parts of the world. But the more I thought about what happened, the more sympathy I felt for all those innocent people."

An underlying premise of America's globalism has been that the spread of American culture and products, combined with increasing trade links among countries, will lead to greater international understanding. With Shirley's command of English, her rising income, and her work in a business whose products travel the world, she seemed to bear this out. Still, none of this, apparently, had caused her to worry that what was happening in America might affect her life in Wenzhou, even though evidence of repercussions was everywhere. The Chinese stock market plummeted after the attacks, and on the day I left Wenzhou the municipal government was testing air-raid sirens-something that usually occurred only in times of tension with Taiwan. "I don't think the terrorist attacks will have any impact on our factory, because we don't export much to America right now," Shirley said. "Actually, some people have been saying that if the dollar drops it will help our exports to other parts of the world."

Her husband added that even the possibility of an economic downturn didn't frighten them or their neighbors. "It's all relative," he said. "The Chinese often say that you only feel poor if you're next to somebody who isn't poor. If the whole world drops and we drop with it, then things haven't really changed."

It struck me that this way of thinking was precisely the opposite of what America hoped to encourage with its trading partners. But then, I thought, why should the world become a smaller, more understandable place if all you do is send off cigarette lighters in return for Hollywood films? (c)

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