Wandering China

Is Lifetime Achievement Emmy awardee Mike Wallace the reason why Chinese leaders do not give interviews? Indeed 4th-generation leader Hu, since taking over as President in 2003 again and again provides only written interview answers to the foreign press and has never granted a free ranging interview. Is this the cause?

Check out the Youtube video below for the interview in question.

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Is Mike Wallace the reason Chinese leaders don’t give interviews?
by Isaac Stone Fish
Source – Foreign Policy Blogs, published April 9, 2012

Hu Jintao, China’s president for the last decade, is the first leader of China since the Empress Dowager Cixi (who died in 1908) to refuse to speak with foreign press. Chiang Kai-Shek gave interviews, Mao Zedong pontificated to Edgar Snow; Deng Xiaoping joked with foreign reporters while expounding on his pragmatic philosophy.  Even Hua Guofeng, Mao’s short-lived successor, chatted with a British journalist. China’s current premier Wen Jiabao has sat down with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria twice for a relatively gentle round of questioning but the top leader, and the other members of China’s ruling council the Politburo Standing Committee, have stayed silent.

More than any other reporter, Mike Wallace, the charmingly aggressive 60 Minutes correspondent who passed away this Saturday at the age of 93, may be the reason for Hu’s reticence. A sit-down with Wallace was rarely a pleasant experience for world leaders — particularly autocrats: he lectured Yassir Arafat on violence, challenged Vladmir Putin on democracy, and suggested to Ayatollah Khomeini that he might be a lunatic and a ‘disgrace to Islam.’ But his 2000 interview with former Chinese President Jiang Zemin may have played a role in convincing Jiang’s successor of the value of keeping his mouth shut.

In contrast to Hu, Jiang was a flashy (for a Chinese leader) former Shanghai Party secretary, who sang karaoke on state visits and recited the Gettysburg address to foreigners. He told Barbara Walters in 1990 that the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre was “much ado about nothing,” and Lally Weymouth in 1998 that “I really don’t know what kind of threat China poses” to India. Read the rest of this entry »

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