Defusing tension -- not a habit normally associated with the Global Times. It’s an international news and opinion arm of the Communist Party’s principal newspaper, the People’s Daily. But unlike the demure old Party paper of record, the Global Times is a sassy newsstand tabloid. As such it has emerged a staunch guardian of China’s global interests and image, there to knock down unfavorable portrayals by us mischievous overseas press.

     Global Times coverage tends to be uneven - sometimes oblique, sometimes didactic, sometimes schizo. But it's distinguished by bombastic headlines, slippery splice-jobs of translated articles, and often standoffish op-ed, which have earned the paper notoriety as a reactionary font of jingoism amongst China watchers - not to mention many Chinese peers and intellectuals. By Western journalistic standards, its critics tend to judge the publication as a natural outgrowth of the system it defends. But the way the paper sees things, it’s certain foreign media who are the hacks – the ones who are “demonizing China”. The typical cover story presents world opinion either gushing over China or conspiring against it.

      The paper’s divisive craft has only compounded its success (and vice-versa). It’s gone from a twice-weekly to a daily the past few years, and circulation has swelled to about two million, by the paper’s own count. That figure may be a stretch, but it would place it third among the nation’s dailies. Its impact on Chinese nationalism cannot be ignored. I find it helpful to view the Global Times as a daily soap opera, bringing to life the psyche of the Chinese foreign policymaking community, playing out a rising China’s ongoing identity crisis vis a vis a Westernized global order.

     This year has been an especially divisive one. The Tibetan upheaval turned the Olympic torch rally into a whistle-stop publicity war over China’s human rights record. The Global Times duly stepped to the fore in Beijing’s defense. When protesters assailed the torch in Paris, its reporting from the scene was the Web link that inflamed anti-French furor. Then for months it pilloried Reporters sans frontieres founder Robert Menard, a long-time nemesis (recommend you read David Bandurski’s analysis).

     In late July, as Beijing girded for August, the Global Times took American newspaper accounts of its heavy-handed security measures as a direct affront. “Do Not Taunt the Chinese People,” fumed a front-page headline. A day or two later, when Beijing organizers revealed authorities' plan to designate three parks as protest zones during the Games, the front page of the Global Times played up favorable foreign press about the move (So far, not one protest has been approved) From there the cover piece veered sharply into a recent Pew public opinion poll, which showed 86 percent of Chinese surveyed were content with the direction of the country’s development.

     The free talk session came a couple days after that. What, the editors embarked, was so wrong with the Beijing Olympics? How had the coming-out bash devolved into such controversy? I’m a sucker for these sorts of behind-the-scenes affairs. At the rap session, as I’d experienced before, the editors were affable and diplomatic. In private they come off as significantly more flexible than their paper. Besides five or six of them, there was one young Japanese research fellow, one author, one U.S. affairs expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one foreign reporter (me). We spent the afternoon around a long carved wooden table at a glassed-in teahouse. We chomped on sunflower seeds and talked over one another’s voices. Talking points included traffic, visas restrictions, security, and medal supremacy. Why did Beijing have to be so uptight? Political pressure had filtered down throughout the system, said a ranking editor. It could not be helped.

     What about the Global Times? That was another area of particular sensitivity. “People say we’re a just a patriotic tool,” explained the ranking man. “But we aren’t. We have a duty to reflect the ordinary Chinese people’s views. That’s what we’re doing.”

     More questions came up. Why were the foreign media “politicizing” the Games? In response it was pointed out that they were politicizing our “politicizing”, along with just about everything else. What could be done to improve the coverage? Lots of advice there: more original reporting, less cherry-picking; more full translations, fewer slanted excerpts; fewer one-sided polemics, more balanced array of commentary. The editors were open to most of those suggestions. But original reporting of foreign affairs (at the whim of the Party propaganda department and Foreign Ministry) would be hard, they suggested. What storylines would we be following? For one, the U.S.-China medal race. They liked that idea.

     How did our feedback affect their Olympic coverage, if at all? No idea yet. It’s hard to tell. But our Chinese colleagues in the Newsweek bureau have been helping us keep up with Global Times. Here we've translated a smattering of excerpts printed in its pages over the past two weeks. We’ve tried to choose representative selections:

Aug 4

“In the Culture of Protocol, Don’t Always Adapt to the West”, by media professional Xun Xunlei:

Since ancient times China has been renowned as a country of protocol, but once the moment the Olympics comes along, people say we should adapt to Western protocol…Need Olympic protocol look to take after the West? In the past, Chinese have been educated, trained, and directed that when meeting foreigners, they shouldn’t ask casually about such private matters as marital status, job or faith. However, there is a big difference between Chinese sightseeing abroad and entertaining guests in the capital. One issue we’ve neglected is that the Olympics at their root are a chance to display Chinese culture and civilization. Those little clashes in the details of protocol won't change people’s views of China. On the contrary, if we cater singularly to foreigners, they will not see the characteristics of Chinese culture.

Aug 6

“Respect Ordinary People’s Passion for Gold Medals”, by Ding Gang (People’s Daily senior editor):

Ordinary people might not be able to spell out what the Olympic spirit is, but they do know who has a chance at gold; ordinary people might not care much about the grand significance of the Olympic Games, but they do care to the utmost about who wins a gold medal. In a certain sense, the “commoner’s Olympics” is precisely the “gold medal Olympics”. Think about it. If there were no furious scramble for gold medals, would there be thousands upon thousands of ordinary people scrambling to buy tickets, or glued to their television sets? Gold medals are not the sum total of the Olympics, but the contest for gold can bring ordinary people the greatest joy and stimulation.

“Focusing Solely on Gold Medals Tantamount to Blasphemy”, by Zhang Jingwei (Jiangsu-based scholar):

In 2004, a Canadian Web page designer set up an “Olympic failures” Web site and pledged to render eternal in cyberspace those heroes who had failed, especially those athletes from small countries. For us, these “failures” happen to be our most dependable friends. On the one hand, we too were once the “failures” who carried the humiliated marking of “sick man of Asia”. On the other hand, the majority of those failures happen to be the ones who gave us the most steadfast support when the Beijing Olympics met with politicized rejection by the West. Keeping in mind the need not to forget who we are and to repay the kindness of others, we should make those same friends feel at ease, not left out in the cold.

“Take First in Gold and We Can Stand Up Straight”, by Yang Yanfu

Is it developed countries alone who can represent the spirit of the Olympic Games, who can manifest it? They don’t want to be first in gold medals? You take first in gold medals, and they say “you’ve risen up and want to be a hegemon”; you miss out on one gold medal, and they ridicule you as the “sick man of Asia”. Why, when we’re going for first in gold medals, do we still have to worry that they won’t be happy, that they’ll all sorts of things about us? There are some developed countries who’ll complain about you being such a large country. You practice “family planning”, for instance, and they say your human rights situation is the worst. Then world grain prices soar, and they say it’s because you are eating too much meat and too much rice. Therefore, we must drive when we should drive the car, do [tubal] ligations when we should do ligations, eat meat when we should eat meat, and take first in gold medals when we should take first in gold medals. The only thing to fear is that for the moment we can’t do it. But if indeed we do, then it would be the good fortune of our people, an auspicious sign of prosperity, an exultant moment in our history.

Aug 7

“A Harmonious Olympic Games Needn’t Fear Isolated incidents” (cover piece)

On August 6, more than 10,000 reporters from all over the world focus on the torch relay in Beijing. From the red walls of the Forbidden City to the Olympic hairstyle of kids in the streets of Beijing, from the onlookers along the route waving flags to the many people not lucky enough to enter the sites but who stood in front of a big screen shouting “Jia You” for the homeland. These scenes were seen and heard by the entire world. “I can’t understand why anyone would want people brought trouble to such a country,” a foreign reporter who asked not to be identified told the Global Times. Indeed, on the morning of Aug 6, four foreigners climbed a telephone pole near the Bird’s Nest and hung a “Tibet Independence” slogan. Shortly thereafter they were “taken away” by police who rushed to the scene. On Aug. 6, the United States Olympic Committee criticized four cyclists who were wore hygienic mask on arriving in Beijing. The four athletes apologized to [Beijing organizers] BOCOG and the Chinese people. In every corner of Beijing, understanding between Chinese and foreigners is growing. Over the past couple days in Houhai, Wangfujing and other areas with a lot of tourists, the eyes of foreigners and Chinese are meeting in great numbers, and they’re smiling at one another. Our reporter even witnessed a Chinese and foreign men baring their bellies and shoulders for a group photo. The Olympics have brought Beijing residents some restrictions and inconvenience, but more so it has brought excitement and expectation…

Aug 12

“In U.S.-China Basketball, Strategic Positioning Makes For a Vast Disparity” 

The Aug 10 U.S-China basketball showdown was a matchup of two teams with a wide disparity in ability. The aim of America’s “Dream [Team] Eight” is to be champion, while the aim of the Chinese basketball team is also “dream eight” – that is, to advance to the final eight [at the Games]. It’s just the same in the world today, where the U.S. is the global hegemon while China is only a regional power. China cannot possibly pose a threat to Dream Team Eight’s dream of being champion. Nor is the United States China’s true adversary.

This state of affairs is comparable to the current China-U.S. strategic situation internationally. The core of U.S. foreign policy strategy is the maintenance of its position as global leader, while the highest aim of Chinese foreign diplomacy is to create a positive international environment for peaceful development. Under the present system of economic globalization, China does not wish to challenge U.S. hegemony, and the prime strategic threat facing the United States does not come from China. Strategic asymmetry means that the two sides’ strategic interests will not come to a clash of life and death. So those people who had forecasted that this game would see a “rising country” challenge the “hegemonic country” were doomed to be disappointed.

…This China-US showdown in basketball was full of elements of globalization. All the players on the U.S. squad are from NBA, while in our lineup, Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian are from NBA and Sun Yue just signed on…They were rivals in the Olympic matchup, but on other courts they are teammates or friends with respect for one another. Thus we saw their friendly gestures and smiles after the showdown. Similar scenes will come in another “China-U.S. showdown”, because the head coach of the U.S. volleyball squad is China’s Lang Ping.

Aug 13

“World Integration Inevitably Breaks Sporting Monopolies”

When Chinese athletes break the monopoly of Western sporting powers in certain events, many people view it as a wonderful symbol of it casting off 100 years of humiliation. But at the same time we should note that it’s not only Western countries whose monopoly in certain events is being broken. In several of China’s stronger events, for example ping-pong, diving, and badminton, it is facing a challenge from other countries… When we face a challenge in an event in which we’ve traditionally held the advantage, shouldn’t we approach it with balanced mindset? In sport it is necessary to have a generous spirit, a global perspective, and a balanced mindset. In a global village, patriotism is important, but love for the world and human race is equally important.

Aug 15
"The Real China Better Seen Once Than Heard 100 Times”, by Liu Guochang (People’s Daily Senior Journalist)

Just before setting out for Beijing, a German mother and daughter were told that Beijing may not be safe. But once they got to Beijing they found that was not the case…

…The reason these overturned impressions exist lies with distorted reports in the Western media. These media do not depart from the point of objective reality, but rather write recklessly through colored lenses. They’ve produced no shortage of trash and misled vast audiences. Nevertheless, rumor in the end is but rumor. More than 400,000 overseas visitors have come to China this time for the Olympics. While taking in the sporting competition, they have done sightseeing and shopping, and come in touch with the common citizens. They have perceived China’s real situation, and got a realistic impression.

“The Olympics Should Set Free a Spirit of Tolerance”, by Zhou Qing’an (Tsinghua University media scholar)

Historically we see that prior to any Olympics, most any host country has had to face a massive risk of negative coverage, to take the last five as examples…

…A country’s people must have the ability to cope with negative appraisal. China is a rising power. Even though China’s reform and opening is marking 30 years of history, China is still a newcomer to the post-war system of relative stability. In the process of integration with the world, it is hard to avoid clashes of values, lifestyle, and understanding of the rules of the game, as well as of national interests and political systems. These clashes have made an outside impact on that portion of Western nation with whom the central power to speak has long resided, and that in turn has produced an overreaction. This overreaction is often manifested in the form of negative coverage. To cope with negative coverage is to cope with our adjustment to the process of internationalization. In fact, one needn’t overly care about this overreaction from the West. Psychological growth is part of the maturation process of any people.

Aug 18
Olympics Produce a Different Style of Patriotic Expression”

…Some Chinese coaches have been abroad, and there are also foreign coaches who are working in China. They led Chinese team to victory over their own countries. “Peaceful war” aptly represents a sport game. No matter who wins, the nation’s glory will not be harmed. The Chinese Go player Nie Weiping criticized Lang Ping for leading US team to victory over China. His thinking lies 30 years in the past.

…We are able see patriotism from athletes, but in a different mode. Tong Wen, who got the gold medal after defeating Japanese athlete in judo, said she was fighting for national glory. Cao Lei, who won gold medal in weightlifting, said that her medal would be a present to her homeland and her mother (who died recently). Cao’s love for her country and for her mother run parallel. For Lang Ping, her love to China and volleyball are not contradictory at all.

We have moved to an era of multiple modes of patriotism.