User Generated Propaganda for China

I was speaking with media expert and Asia specialist Thomas Crampton this morning about the Beijing Olympics panel we would like to hold at the Carnegie Council as part of our Workshops for Ethics in Business series supported by Booz Allen. We would hope to hold a balanced discussion on what companies have learned from doing business in China over the years.

Tom mentioned an interesting new book to check out: China Price by Alexandra Harney. According to the Penguin website, the book “uncovers the truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal, Hobbesian world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen and unconscionable toll in human misery and environmental damage.”

To counter these types of critiques, however, a new genre of web content has emerged. Tom blogs about what he calls “user generated propaganda” here. You can watch several examples, including one PowerPoint style video and a hip-hop video.