Changing Public Perceptions of China: Nixon to Obama Introduction by Ambassador Richard H. Solomon Moderated by Mike Chinoy, Senior Fellow, USC U.S.-China Institute Marcus Brauchli, Executive Editor, The Washington Post Jim Laurie, President, Focus Asia Productions HK Ltd. Melinda Liu, Beijing Bureau Chief, Newsweek James Mann, Foreign Policy Institute Author-in-Residence, Johns Hopkins SAIS Jerrold Schecter, Chairman, Schecter Communications [VIDEO] There are 700 million Chinese today and they are targeted to hate. Their growing power is the world's greatest threat to peace and light. CHINA The Roots of Madness Conceived and Written by THEODORE H. WHITE It all began in mystery and goes on today in mystery, but they must be brought to recognize that they are the biggest factor in the world's disorder, and we must untangle the madness of their mind. 1972 PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: The government of the People's Republic of China and the government of the United States have had great differences and we will have differences in the future. But what we must do is to find a way to say that we can have differences without being enemies in war. BARBARA WALTERS: I knew nothing about China. I remember when we got off the plane, it was like landing on the moon. CBS SPECIAL REPORT This is a CBS News Special Report The President in China Banquet in the Great Hall 1979 China's Vice-Premier, Deng Xiaoping, who spent most of the day in Houston, arrived in Seattle tonight where he'll spend the final two days of his American tour before returning to Peking Monday. Jen [INDISCERNIBLE] has been traveling with the Vice-Premier and reports on Deng's activities in Texas. So the Chinese leave today with their memories and perhaps a new image for Communist China's leading man, for Deng Xiaoping not only went West, but went Western. 1980 Dancing girls in the Chinese production of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; bare breasts in the Impressionist art at Peking Airport -- this merely symbolic of the liberalization in all areas of life. The Chinese is, well, functional -- lots of blue cotton and an occasional People's Liberation Army grey coat. Enter fashion magnet Pierre Cardin, out to start a revolution of his own, evidently. He celebrated the idea in Peking with his idea of what the well-dressed Peking man and woman might wear in the future. In the market, the reappearance of free enterprise, a relaxation of state control which extends to industry and agriculture as well. MELINDA LIU: The early '80s theme of China was Deng Xiaoping on a roll, opening up, isn't it great, signing this love affair. An important part of the Chinese economy is the two-way trade with the United States, nearly 6 billion dollar's worth this year. 1987 China's first international cosmetics exhibition -- thousands of would-be consumers, most of them young women, call at the Beijing Exhibition Center, marveling at the displays by foreign cosmetics companies whose representatives were themselves marveling at the potentially huge market here. It's an unbelievable market and actually it could be the greatest market in the world. 1989 Rick Moore CNN Newswatch It is being called a massacre. Chinese troops have taken over Tiananmen Square by shooting and beating their way through thousands of demonstrators. Mike Chinoy 2 CNN Reporting The soldiers have now taken over Tiananmen Square. The protest there is finished, squelched. DAN RATHER: The images of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square were so searing that in so many people's minds, certainly outside of China, it became the overpowering image. 1992 PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: An America that will not coddle tyrants, from Baghdad to Beijing. Chairman Mao once wrote, "A revolution is not a tea party. It is an act of violence." Today, even thought the symbols of Mao's Communist Revolution still dominate China's political landscape, the country whose successors defiantly hail as the last true bastion of socialism is undergoing a non-violent revolution, perhaps more profound than that which Mao himself inspired. 1994 TOM BROKAW: Just take the NBC guests and my NBC colleagues and grab'm by the arm and say, "You're not going to believe what this was like just twenty years ago." You cannot believe this! [00:05:00] That they've done this in this short amount of time is destroyed of my ability to describe it. 2008 What happens tonight is merely a small step, but a great leap. China is welcoming the world! The first-ever Olympics for the world's most populous nation. BILL REILLY: They're expanding their army. They're obvious brutal people over there. They don't want any human rights. I think they have designs on some more territory. The People's Republic of Capitalism, a four-night event starting Wednesday July 9th at 10 on the Discovery Channel. The city has already attracted significant American investment like this Briggs and Stratton plant where Chinese workers are now on the assembly line building American engines. Those engines used to be built here at this shuttered Briggs and Stratton in Rolla, Missouri. MITT ROMNEY: These guys are after us and looking for ways to harm us. 2012 3 PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Tonight I'm announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade and practices in countries like China. 1967 There are 700 million Chinese today and they are targeted to hate. Their growing power is the world's greatest threat to peace and light. MIKE CHINOY: You can see in that film that the sort of perceptions of China or trail of China is just worse from one extreme to another in form of course in part by things that did happen in China. But this difficulty in trying to get a more balanced take on China is, I think one of the big challenges for the media and it’s reflected in public attitudes. I was looking over the weekend literally 40 years to the day after Nixon arrived in Beijing there was a Gallup poll which asked Americans: What country do you see as United States greatest enemy? And Iran was number one but number two was China; ahead even of my favorite place, North Korea. With a quarter of the respondents saying that the Chinese were the greatest enemy. Now, that same poll showed that four out of 10 Americans had an unfavorable view of China. But that more than half of them had a positive view of China as a friendly country. So you have this sort of paradoxes within paradoxes in the way in which people look at China. And what I hope you'll do in our discussion here is to try to talk a little bit about the origins of these different images and where the various flip flops have come from and what they tell us both about China and about the way the media operates. And what we might need to think about in terms of trying to get a more balanced understanding of China in our journalism and in our broader public understanding. And to do this we've got a terrific panel of veteran journalists and China Hands just going down the row here. Marcus Brauchli is now the executive editor of The Washington Post and previously was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal but I knew him back when he was a China Hand in the '90s. He actually told me he first arrived in Hong Kong in the mid '80s and spent 15 years covering greater China and the rest of the region based in Hong Kong and Shanghai for the Wall Street Journal as well as since in Tokyo and in Europe. Jim Laurie, who [INDISCERNIBLE] when he was wearing his cowboy hat as a veteran foreign correspondent who's spent many years at ABC and NBC news. He stayed in Saigon after the communist victory in 1975 and was the first ABC correspondent to be based in Beijing after normalization and has covered China for many years and was there in 1989. And now runs his own video and consulting company and is currently working closely with China Central Television as it just opened a big North American production center here in Washington. Melinda Liu is the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Newsweek Daily Beast Company and also a veteran China correspondent. She opened the Newsweek Bureau Beijing around the time that Jim opened the ABC bureau. Was also in Beijing as I was in 1989 and after covering many other stores in other parts of the world including the Soviet War in Afghanistan, both Gulf Wars, I think and other things has been based [00:10:00] in Beijing for the past several years. So she's seen it very early on all the way up to the present day. Jim Mann is currently author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced 4 International Studies. He's previously served for many years as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times both as correspondent here as a foreign affairs columnist and in the 1980s he was the LA Times Beijing correspondent. He's the author of a number of books on China and on other topics including especially for purposes of this discussion a book called the China Fantasy. And lastly Jerry Schecter is a journalist and historian with extensive experience in China and Russia and in Southeast Asia. He worked for the Wall Street Journal and spent 18 years with Time magazine and covered the Nixon trip in '72 and again went to China with Nixon in 1976.