July 27, 2007
“Communist” China Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST It’s not easy for me to admit it, but I enjoy watching Lou Dobbs’s show. I might be alone on this blog in this respect. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sympathetic to the man’s politics. If I don’t watch too often, or for too long a period of time, I find him hilarious. He always sounds like he’s auditioning for a TV movie about Father Coughlin. The language he uses is so over-the-top and inflammatory, I often wonder if he realizes that he sounds like the propaganda chief of a Third World dictator. When immigration reform failed last month, Dobbs called it “a glorious victory for the American people.” Replace “American” with “Iraqi” and you’re in the idiom of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Of course, what’s not funny about Dobbs’s show is that he has plenty of viewers who take him seriously. The last time I watched Lou Dobbs Tonight, a few weeks ago, I was startled by a term the host used. Going back to look at transcripts of his broadcast, I see that he uses it rather frequently; for some reason, I’d never noticed it before. In a segment about regulation of imported commodities, Dobbs made reference to “Communist China.” That’s strange, I thought, for him to be using such anachronistic vocabulary. It wasn’t really surprising, as Dobbs presents himself as the table-thumping defender of middle-class capitalism. On Lou Dobbs’s list of favorite things, I’d guess Communism ranks somewhere between Mexicans and Michael Moore. All the same, it was weird to hear a twenty-first-century TV personality using a term that went out of fashion some time ago. Just when did calling China “Communist” go out of fashion? I didn’t know, so I did a little research. The product is the graph below. Searching The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for the terms “Communist China” and “Red China,” I made up a little chart that attempts to illustrate the popularity of those terms over time. The results illustrate an obvious trend.
Over the 60-year period between 1946 and 2006, these four major newspapers were most likely to include the terms “Communist China” or “Red China” during periods of tension between the United States and the People’s Republic. Looking at the graph, you see a spike in use of these terms after Mao’s seizure of power and during the Korean War. There’s another spike in the mid- to late 1950s, around when you would’ve had the various crises in the Taiwan Straits. Unsurprisingly, the terms climbed to the heights of their popularity in the late 1960s, during the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution.There’s a steep drop-off with the beginning of the 1970s. It starts a little before 1970, but it really takes off come 1972. I hesitate to read too much into this graph, but it does look like the practice of calling China “Communist” or “Red” fell into obscurity around the time of Nixon’s visit to Beijing. If the dwindling use of this vocabulary is any indication of Americans’ feelings toward the Chinese, it should further confirm that ’72 was a turning point for Sino-American relations. Even during the 1980s, when anti-Communism was at the front and center of U.S. foreign affairs, China managed to escape these unfriendly labels. The terms still crop up a few dozen times each year (with “Communist China” far more common), but a good number of these appearances come in book reviews, where authors employ them only in historical contexts. Lou Dobbs is making an effort at bringing “Communist China” back into style, but it isn’t catching on outside his six o’clock broadcast. His job ought to get even harder as China’s status as a Communist state grows more ambiguous.
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