Indeed, it does appear that all of those untrustworthy Western presenters have been banished from CCTV-9 news and current affairs programmes in the run up to the PRC's 60th anniversary celebrations. Today, there was one poor Chinese lady who seemed to be fronting everything. She's an attractive woman, but her English pronunciation is especially tortured. Listening in to the business programme while I made myself a sandwich for lunch, I kept on hearing her banging on about "T-bones being very popular in Hong Kong". Eh?? Well, it seems that the Chinese government has just issued its first Renminbi-denominated treasury bonds, and they are proving a hot item especially with investors in the Special Administrative Region. T-bonds, T-bones - close enough. |
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
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"Indeed, it does appear that all of those untrustworthy Western presenters have been banished from CCTV-9 news and current affairs programmes in the run up to the PRC's 60th anniversary celebrations."
I'd like to think that this was a touch of Froog irony aimed at the paranoia that seems to be enveloping Beijing these days. But I suspect not.
Fortunately I haven't had to endure any CCTV9 nonsense for some time now. Yang Rui must be having a field day on Dialogue. Am I allowed to use the word 'wanker' on this site?
Oh yes, Dialogue's been doing a special series on how absolutely spiffing everything is in China these days. Even Yang Rui has almost exhausted his stocks of unction.
Of course, it doesn't always go quite according to plan. A few days ago they had Evan Osnos and Kaiser Kuo on to talk about China's use of 'soft power'. They both suggested that the Olympic opening ceremony had been perhaps a bit overdone. Kaiser tactfully observed that the whole idea of building up the importance of the Beijing Olympics as somehow symbolic of China's emergence as a major world power was "a huge strategic error", and commented that the Chinese leadership had "a tin ear" for PR (I'd be prepared to bet that that one whistled right over Yang's head).
I can't help feeling a bit sorry for Yang Rui sometimes; he just gets hopelessly out of his depth on that programme. His blink rate is an indicator of his anxiety level, and he was blinking ninety to the dozen through that show. You could see the 'off message' warning klaxon going off in the back of his head, but there was nothing he could offer in response other than to change the subject (ah, that old tactic!). I don't know if it was planned and scripted this way from the outset, but he was having to change the subject every couple of minutes in this show: almost every question was completely unrelated to the one that had preceded it.
Foreigners are still allowed to read the weather.
And Ed Maher appeared on the 'token foreigners' carnival float.
But I don't think there have been any on the news programmes for a week now.
Wish I'd seen the Kaiser slice and dice His Oiliness.
Yeah; 'a tin ear' probably had the backroom boys reaching anxiously for their idiomatic dictionaries.
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