On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television A NEW CHINA LOBBY BY MARVIN KITMAN I GREW UP at a time when China was a dangerous subject. One week a scholar specializing in the Middle Kingdom would be denounced as a Communist...
...producers swarmed into Beijing, followed by our distinguished correspondents, notably Big Bird...
...But his special—a kind of "Great Wall Street Week in Review"—did clarify economic theories, so you could really understand the dynamics of the inscrutable marketplace...
...The visitor who has so far left the strongest impression on the Chinese must be Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and the star of PBS' The Yin& The Yankee...
...That's how these patrons of the arts operate—a captain of industry obviously can't trek across Nepal by yak, like any normal person...
...or worse, that they might have more on their minds than the sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong...
...Just recently I got a press release in the mail announcing illusionist David Cop-perfield's impending visit to the People's Republic to do a special...
...In 1979 Forbes, the sort of fellow we used to call an "ugly American"—he described his publication as a "capitalist tool"—was the first foreign motorcyclist allowed into the Soviet Union...
...Someoutraged patriot may feel called upon to make citizen's arrests of everyone involved for God knows what—maybe violating the trading with the enemy act...
...Television is like Chinese food: You see one program, you want another in an hour or less...
...These developments will of course not bear fruit immediately...
...Like two yuan...
...By spring, trips on the mainland had become less exotic than the Today show's Amtrak excursion from New York to South Dakota...
...After all, my words might eventually come back to haunt me...
...Harboring a taste for Cantonese—let alone Szechwan or Hunan—cuisine was not necessarily considered treasonous, but you could find yourself under surveillance...
...A new ideology has taken over China, proclaiming that "To be rich is glorious.' Incidentally, the slogan should remind us of the remarkable Chinese way with words: Al one time, not very long ago, Ihe ideologues insisted that "To be rich is bad...
...Mainland officials had long turned him down, but Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum, whose production company made the Forbes documentary, worked out the visit in a 1982 codicil to a coal deal...
...Actually he said "Ming Dynasty...
...And all for suggesting that the mainland's millions could not be ignored...
...You know those used TVs we have in this country—the j unk you can't give away to your kids or to the Salvation Army...
...Should I go on record saying how glorious and breathtaking the production is, how fascinating it makes the people and their way of life seem...
...Mao said, "Let a thousand flowers bloom,' and this is currently interpreted as a paean to commercial clutter...
...Unfortunately, the Chinese have a phobia about unteth-ered flight: They thought that if this strange foreigner got up too high he would be able to see their military secrets...
...I'm worried for Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, two of America's leading opinion-makers, who fronted the PBS series...
...The Western the family was watching had been sent to China free of charge by CBS in 1983...
...As an encore Copperfield will make our trade deficit disappear...
...Especially the shots of peasants in the rice paddies staring bug-eyed at the leader of the motorcycle gang...
...Jerry) Goodman, the wittiest writer on economics and money since John Stuart Mill, commented: "This is what it looks like when you release 35 years of pent-up consumer demand...
...I believe it was Confucius who warned, "Give them Dallas and Knots Landing and next they'll want Dynasty...
...One shot showed a Young Responsible bringing home a new refrigerator on the back of his bicycle...
...Ka-reem Abdul-Jabbar and the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers would make them absolutely paranoid...
...For example, a special one-hour PBS economic travelogue, Adam Smith in the New China: From Marx to Master Charge, included a scene of thousands of people fighting to get into the equivalent of a state-operated Fortunoff's...
...OnlyifyouareMalcolm Forbes can you pull such strings...
...While we're at it, we should throw in all the broken-down washers, dryers and refrigerators nobody wants to fix, throw out or use...
...On the other hand, only if you are Malcolm Forbes can you afford to take five motorcycles and a large balloon on your vacation...
...he wanted to free-fly across China in his balloon...
...He wasn't content merely to tear through the countryside at ground level, however...
...China lobby...
...Dominoes will be falling all over...
...How do you think men and women in collectivized rice paddies feel when they see a pitch for Uncle Ben's Minute Rice...
...In the meantime, as we await Communism's demise, I have been thinking about ways of assuring American prosperity and making the world safe for democracy in the bargain...
...The Chinese, Smith informed us, already have commercials for Szechwan Cola, convertible sofas and fast food ("Ducks pressed while you wait...
...He didn't advise us to "buy thousand-year-old eggs...
...With the approval of the Communist government, apparently, Copperfield—the only man who ever turned Marie Osmond into a duck named Webster—will attempt to penetrate the Great Wall at a location two hours from the capital...
...Inthebad old days you even thought twice before eating Chinese food...
...The Heart of the Dragon is the kind of propaganda vehicle that would have kept Roy Cohn and G. David Schine going night and day for as long as the Ming dynasty...
...Once Party boss Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Cultural Revolution and gave a green light to Westerners, U.S...
...These shows are the Chinese theater, balcony and popcorn stand combined...
...In addition, he pointed out, they have taken up the ancient theory of " winging it...
...By comparison our own Yuppies appear to be bourgeois Spartans subsisting on bowls of rice...
...the chopsticks were literally poised in mid-air until the commercial break...
...The Forbidden City wasn't built in a day...
...It's also a bit startling to see numerous prominent journalists and institutions associate themselves with a program that is pro-China and pro-mainland...
...We could sell—or, better yet, donate—them to the Chinese...
...These commercials are a brilliant stroke of psychological warfare...
...The tube was on, and as the people ate they watched a Western...
...But Americans in China continued to come up with incredible images...
...Thirty people watch an average set—roughly the traffic in theaverage Brooklyn living room in the Uncle Miltie era...
...For his invasion of China, Forbes brought along one of his famous hot air balloons and five bikes...
...Besides, CBS—and here is the diabolical part of the scheme—has managed to pro vide its goodies with the commercials included...
...It was probably the first time these folks had seen an American, much less one wearing black leather pants and a red vest while riding his Harley-Davidson smoking cigars...
...They could be airlifted in on our Air Force C-51 transport planes under Red Cross auspices...
...In place of trade-ins, though, we ought to insist that the Chinese ship the antiquated appliances, with the Uncle Sam brand name painted prominently oil Ihe sides, to some truly underdeveloped country—Cambodia, say, or Laos...
...The TV account of this modern-day Malcolm Polo's adventures was a lot of fun, though...
...Of course, you do wonder if the Chinese authorities have heard of satellite photography...
...short" in the course of his visit to China...
...He is devising a technique based on a physical phenomenon called "diffusion," which the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Science says is "the actual transport of mass in the form of discrete atoms through a solid...
...The same sort of thing has been happening elsewhere on TV, too...
...Adam Smith," really George J.W...
...Everybody has been there or is planning to go, it appears, except Gary Coleman...
...This was certainly the most ingenious plot to destroy a Communist nation since the CIA's reported plan to bring Fidel Castro to his knees by flooding the world with surplus saccharin...
...One week a scholar specializing in the Middle Kingdom would be denounced as a Communist spy, the next a diplomat who had served there would be labeled a Fellow Traveler...
...You could see the Chinese are going to be very good at this new game of buying things...
...Forbes resembled a god from a distant planet, trailed by his followers, the little white people...
...Smith gave us a glimpse of the new materialism that may lie ahead: A Chinese family living in a hovel nevertheless had a TV set, a tape recorder and every other necessity of civilized life except a Cuisinart...
...Smith observed that by introducing incentives and bonus payments the rulers have discovered a new economic principle called the "profit motive...
...In fact, back in the 1950s respected academics and bureaucrats were persecuted for believing and saying the same things President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed and said in the 1970s...
...Then there are those poor dupes, South Carolina Educational Television and the Gannett newspaper chain, listed as coproducers...
...We can be right there to sell them, as advertised on our TV shows...
...In 1983 China had an estimated 16 million TVs for a population of 1 billion...
...Remember what happened after the Communists rediscovered the old Chinese game of table tennis—they rammed Ping-Pong balls right down our throats...
...The McCarthy Era was the golden age of suspicion...
...Indeed, their relentlessness can be scary...
...Havi ng exposed t he Chi nese to t he old stuff, we'll soon find that they want the newer models...
...So previewing The Heart of the Dragon,Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary on China that began airing the night of May 6, still troubled me a little...
...These men and women, products of a generation of "socialism," had money to spend and were buying anything that was not nailed down...
...Can TV dinners be far away...
...Unlike so many of the financial wizards who have taken to TV, Smith did not offer hot l ips on how lo make our fortune cookies come true...
...They were not touching the great Chinese food in their bowls...
...The Chinese took him very seriously when he accompanied the rest of t he Sesame Street cast in 1983, apparently thinking he might make a nice lunch for the entire 5,302nd Infantry Division...
...And Chinese laundry collectives must surely be demoralized by the ads for washing machines and miracle detergents that let any fool get clothes whiter than white...
...The whole thing was funded by General Electric gold and is running on each PBS station...
...Millions of Maoists are probably brooding over ring around the collar...
...The leaders themselves explained that they were introducing the "Responsible System,'' not the free enterprise system...
Vol. 68 • May 1985 • No. 7
