Week 6 - Chloe Shiau

Kevin Latham's "Media, the Olympics and the Search for the 'Real China'" uses the Olympics in China to show how social media has perceived China to be. There was the view of the Chinese people, which praised China's new technology, economics, innovations and such by judging how the Olympic stadium and reearangement of a lot of Beijing turned out. The other was the view of the foreign media, which was not very ecstatic and said that "real China" is not what it looks like during the Olympics and that they were putting on what might be a fake show for the world to see. In this article, Latham wrote that one of the fireworks that was portrayed on television that was supposedly for the Olympics was actually an animation and enhancement of fireworks that was previously filmed, which prompted people to realize that the Olympics did not show the "real China."

However, according to Sheng Ding's "Branding a Rising China: An Analysis of Beijing's National Image Management in the Age of China's Rise," China was coined one of the world's highest growth rates as a tourist destination. Even though China has a good national image in the global south, the Western countries do not believe that China is governing their country the right way. This could be why there was so many controversies to the "real China" mentioned in the previous article. It is two different views on the political, economic, and social aspect of China. China has definetly branded themselves as becoming more powerful politically and economically, but the problem is that their growth isn't favorable to some countries.

Question: Will the Western and the global South ever combine their views and will China ever have a globally good image?

Works Cited:

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