Monday, December 23, 2013

China Will Require Journalists to Pass a 'Marxism Test'

Post-Mao China is really a mixed bag. There are pockets of free market activity, but there are massive government projects that are a complete waste. China's central bank, The People's Bank of China, has at times printed more money than Bernanke, which has created a very unstable economy that could crash at any time. And now this: Reports Global Post.
Journalists across China are now boning up on Marxist terminology like the “labor theory of value” and “commodity fetishism[...] Their jobs depend on it.

Thanks to a new regulation promulgated last fall, all 250,000 of China’s journalists and editors will have to pass an exam on the “Marxist view of journalism” in January or February of 2014. In the several months leading up to the exam, the government has mandated that reporters take weekly classes to ensure “political consistency” with the Communist Party line.

“Some reporter[s] who lack ethics still have not surfaced,” one Marxist educator told the state-run Global Times. “We urgently need to educate media circles with the Marxist view of journalism. Such education can't be loosened and should be conducted in a long term.”

6 comments:

  1. Believe it or not, the Chinese media might be taught that the ultimate goal of Marxism is the destruction of the state.
    The USG's media is a tool of the state.
    .
    Strange but true.

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  2. So the Chinese are just now adopting what's been the case for U.S. journalists for decades?

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  3. You can bank on the fact that the journalists will not be taught the orthodox Marxism end-state goal of destroying the State. Mao, along with Stalin, were nationalist-Marxists rather than the internationalist--and typically much more anarchic--Marxists like Lenin and the Frankfurt School. Like the ideas of democracy, rule of law and liberty in the West, China utilises a geopolitically specific bastardisation of Marxism to maintain the status quo of their dominance over Chinese society.

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    1. You can bank on someone, perhaps a foreigner in Hong Kong or Shanghai, asking a few of those journalists whether or not they were told about the Marxist goal of eliminating the state. Of course, if the state went away, what would be the role of a monopolistic political party like the CCP?

      Maybe there is more cleverness in the reform wing of the Chinese Common Property Party than at first appears to be the case.

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  4. It would appear the "dingbat" line forms in the east...

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  5. So China believes in the labor theory of value and yet in the infancy of its quest into Capitalism did all it could to attract foreign capital. I guess the LTV only applies after the capital is created and deployed. LOL

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