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(a department of the China International Publishing Group) saw its cooperative
agreements dwindle.
It was then that Chinese officials revived an old tactic that the Communist Party had employed before the revolution—using friendly foreigners and pro-PRC Chinese immigrants to publicize China’s story. Chinese officials called this tactic of localizing
the work of foreign propaganda, the “borrowed boat” strategy.”
One such friendly American was a China scholar*® who was for years associated
with Random House. According to Huang Youyi, the chief editor of the Foreign Languages Press posted to the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this American argued that for China to improve its image in the United States, it needed to work through American organizations, and so he collaborated with Huang on a book series, “The Culture and Civilization of China,” which the Yale University Press began publishing in 1997, The American’s “understanding of the US publishing industry and his friendly attitude towards China became an indispensable condition for the success of the cooperation,” Huang wrote.*! Books from the series are still given to foreign
guests of the Beijing government.
In a period of deep crisis for China’s reputation, Huang’s success in using foreigners
to publish material beneficial to China’s image became a model for other Chinese operations. From the early 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party began to seek opportunities to cooperate with Westerners, Western media and publishing companies,
and overseas Chinese to tell its story.
Lack of Reciprocity
It is important to compare Beijing’s efforts to “grab the right to speak” and obtain “discourse power” overseas with the efforts, and ability, of Western media organizations to access China’s market to a similar degree. For decades, those efforts have faced roadblocks placed in their path by the Chinese government. A key roadblock has been China’s ban on Western investment in media except when it involves such things as
fashion, cars, and lifestyle.
Private media
Unlike the United States, where Chinese reporters are only restricted from entering
high-security military installations, Western reporters in China are subject to a panoply
Media
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