China Picks Up The Half A Percentage Point Of GDP Growth Its Finance Minister Dropped

Xinhua has added half a percentage point to the 7% GDP growth for the year finance minister Lou Jiwei talked of at a Washington press conference on Friday after the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue. “There is no doubt that China can achieve this year’s growth target of 7.5%,” the state news agency now reports the minister as having said.

This Bystander can forgive anyone a slip of the tongue. Nor is Lou the first politician to need the services of a clean-up crew. As we noted yesterday 7% is the annual GDP growth target in the current five-year plan, even if 7.5% is the official target for this year. Half a percentage point either way on the GDP growth number does nothing to alter the trickiness of the balancing act the leadership has to pull off in lowering long-term growth expectations for China while making the necessary structural fixes to the economy to prevent years of hyper-rapid credit expansion and of the shadow banking system from bringing growth to a halt with a hard crash.

Seek And Ye Shall Not Find

This Bystander was amused to see the most searched-for terms on Xinhua’s English-language service today (screen-grab above). Clicking on the names of the three individuals listed yields no information more recent than a week old. We can only assume that nothing of interest has happened to them since.

Two Tips Of Our Titfer

Every writer, we assume, reads a piece now and then that makes them say, that was exactly what I was trying to say but this piece says it so much more concisely and elegantly. This Bystander came across just such a piece today, by the FT’s Philip Stephens on why China’s assertiveness is driving its neighbors towards the U.S. It is not just that he agrees with our long-standing analysis, it is the way he says it.

Damn you, Philip Stephens, as the American satirist John Stewart might say. Which leads to our second tip of the titfer, to ChinaDailyShow.com, a Sino-centric hybrid spoof of Stewart’s mock news program and the unrelated American satirical newspaper, The Onion. It might seem that Xinhua and the China Daily are beyond spoofing, but ChinaDailyShow.com manages it. Japan halts porn exports to China over Diaoyu controversy. China’s top political advisory body holds seminar on improving its function. Only one of those is fake. And, admit it, you had to think twice before cheating by mousing over the links.

China’s World Service, An Al-Jazeera Of Its Own

Modeling a proposed 24-hour cable news channel on Al-Jazeera is bound to be taken the wrong way in the U.S. and set false expectations elsewhere. But that is the model that Beijing reportedly has at the heart of a 45 billion yuan ($6.6 billion) investment in its three main state media, Xinhua, CCTV and the People’s Daily, expanding their services to give China a global media voice commensurate with its emerging superpower status.

Beyond the 24-hour cable channel, CCTV will add Arabic and Russian language services to the Mandarin, English, French and Spanish ones it already has, and from May the People’s Daily will publish an English-language version of its tabloid Global Times.

The expansion comes when Western commercial media are scaling down their own international coverage so there is a vacuum to fill. Beijing’s plan calls for more reporters, more bureaux and more outlets, but not necessarily more freedom to report. China’s press has increasingly been feeling if only occasionally pressing the edges of the envelope within which it operates, but three organziations getting the money are still state-run media in a country where propaganda is a term, as Variety puts it, “used without negative connotations”.

The primary task, though, is to present China to the world, not the other way round. The melamine tainted milk and other recent food and product safety scandals have shown Beijing that it needs to do more in that regard, and is a further sign of the country’s confidence in stepping out into the world on its own terms.

And those terms must be true, because we’ll have seen them on TV.

The Fictitious Economy

Not to poke fun at a touch of underpolishing by Xinhua‘s editors, but this Bystander is wryly amused by the state news agency’s English language report of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s press conference following the Asia-Europe summit:

“Lessons should be learned from the financial crisis, and the responsibilities should be clarified for governments, companies and supervision, respectively,” said Wen. He emphasized that the development of the fictitious economy should be balanced with the real economy, so as to prevent the problem of the fictitious economy from affecting the real economy.

Many a true word….

Xinhua Spaces Out

Xinhua’s web site ran a detailed report Thursday on the successful launch of the Shenzhou 7 space mission,  including snatches of dialogue between the astronauts. Only problem was the story was posted hours before lift off. An Associated Press report on the snafu. And another on the actual successful launch is here.

Fact Checking Two Views Of Tibet

Xinhua annotates screen shots from Western TV and websites to show up reporting errors in their coverage of Tibet.

This follows Sunday’s apology by German TV station RTL for using a picture of Tibetan protestors in Katmandu in a report on the recent disturbances in Lhasa.

More Xinhua excoriation of the CNN, BBC and the Berliner Morgenpost here.

Pick at the little errors to unravel the greater truth.