(Published in Global Times, 5th Nov.,07)

Is China really so strange and unusual?

Recently, the American television station CBS broadcast a program called "China is not so strange and unusual", analyzing the way in which American media companies portray China. It argues that the American media now tend to attempt to portay China as nothing other than an ordinary country. However, the American public's perspective is that the media is kowtowing before China! The television show suggests that many Americans, due to issues such as food quality, or piracy of copyrighted material, now consider China to be an unusual country. However, as author Jeffery Wasserstorm points out: "Washington and Beijing have now for approximately thirty years enjoyed normalized political relations. Isn't it time we also had a normalization in our general thinking towards China?"