Wang Jisi, a professor of international studies at Peking University and a top expert in U.S.-China relations, complained at a peace forum in July that CCTV’s main news program ran at least two stories about the United States every night, and that both were negative.
“They’re either about the U.S. having another mass shooting, another example of racial tensions or its messy handling of the pandemic,” he said. “Why can’t we talk about what’s happening in Africa or Latin America and not talk about bad stuff in the U.S.?”
In an interview with an academic journal this year, Mr. Wang tried to correct the idea that the United States is in decline. He argued that after America’s international standing experienced relative decline between 1995 and 2011, its share of global output rose in the decade after 2011. There is not enough evidence to conclude that America’s economy is in irreversible decline, he said, though he acknowledged that U.S. soft power had diminished.
For China, the danger of drinking its own propaganda Kool-Aid is that it stops looking at its own problems while exaggerating America’s weaknesses.
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