Point of Contention (with the Deer-Leader)

Daily Yomiuri front page for Monday, March 7.
Top Headline:

CHINA MILITARY BUDGET TO LEAP 18% IN 2007
Compiled from news services

BEIJING -- China's military spending, a point of contention with the United States, will jump 17.8% this year, a spokesman for the National People's Congress said Sunday.

China's military spending is an obsession for Japan and the US, especially the Cheneys, even though as the world's most populous country, China has a relatively small military budget and has not projected power beyond its neighbors Korea and Vietnam since the 1948 revolution. Consider that it has a population about double that of the US and Europe combined, and that it borders over a dozen countries which include nuclear-armed Russia, nuclear-armed India, nuclear-armed Pakistan, and possibly-nuclear-armed DPRK. Meanwhile, the US has the sacred right to arm itself to the teeth in order to defend itself against the ever-present risk of invasion from Canada and Mexico.

Aside from that, notice that the first sentence reports it from the US point of view, not as an objective fact. They literally cannot write one sentence with putting the US ruling elite's perspective in. This is very odd since it is a Japanese newspaper reporting on China, which should have nothing to do with the US.

Is the US news ever reported that way? Of course not. Have you read "Donald Rumsfeld, in a move applauded by the Chinese leadership, was replaced today."? That would be very odd reporting. But that is what we have every day.

This is compiled from AP and AFP-Jiji(!) wire services, so either they phrased it that way, or the writers at the Yomiuri are such good imperialist subjects that they spontaneously embedded their submissive fascist thinking into the story unconsciously or consciously.

The story has nothing whatsoever to do with the United States. They might as well interject about how the pope, Al Capone, or the Dear Leader feels about it. You would recognize it as propaganda if the newspaper said Stalin, the Central Committee, or Chairman Mao will be sure to disapprove of this news. Most people are so brainwashed that they will read that and not even consciously notice how they are being told what to think. People in the Soviet Union and China had to learn how to read between the lines of the official media, and we need to learn that the official media (the organs of state power) can be those which are privately operated for profit, too.

If the writers were to add how American neocons such as Mr Cheney or Rumsfeld had spoken out to warn of a danger of rising Chinese militarism --which we have no evidence of-- that should be several paragraphs further down in the article.