Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America by Douglas E. Schoen, Melik Kaylan

CHAPTER 8
    Propaganda Wars: Losing Ground in the Battle for Hearts and Minds
    “The core, the binding fabric of this unique civilization—is the Russian people, Russian culture.”
    — VLADIMIR PUTIN 1
    “To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and strong military.”
    — XI JINPING 2
    “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
    — BARACK OBAMA 3
    “Y ou’re bandits. Democratic bandits. You’ve destroyed thousands, maybe millions of people [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. I’m living through being democratised with a truncheon on the head by the West every day. Who needs that kind of democracy?” Thus spoke Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, in a rare interview. 4 Lukashenko is widely known as the “last dictator in Europe” owing to his obviously fixed elections and repression of dissent.
    In the same interview, given to a London Independent reporter in 2012, he cited the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union and argued that he had brought safety and security to his country. “These were terrible years of anarchy, and not only in Russia. I don’t need your democracy! Belarusians don’t need this democracy if there’s no economy. If a man can’t work in his own country and earn his living, if he can’t take a piece of land, if he can’t build a house, plant a tree, raise his children because he’s scared to let them go outside.” 5
    No one who lived through the Russia of the 1990s—with its endemic corruption, violence, massive unemployment, and spiraling social problems—wants to go back there. What the Belarus dictator offers instead is stability: “So Lukashenko is a bad guy! Go out on the street, look around—everything is clean, neat, normal people walking around. There’s no way that the dictator can’t take at least some credit for that.” 6 More recently, Belarus’s economy has faltered, but the dictator’s argument has been persuasive to many—and he is one of Vladimir Putin’s staunchest allies. During a May 2012 visit, Putin referred to “brotherly Belarus” and praised “the special nature of our relations.” 7
    A few months later, in Beijing, more than 500 rural Chinese farmers paraded through the streets holding portraits of Mao. “Down with the Japanese imperialists!” they chanted. They had come to the capital from Heibei Province, a distance requiring a bus trip—the kind of transportation and logistics that suggested a government role. “How else could 500 farmers come from the provinces?” asked a Chinese blogger. 8
    The farmers were just one part of a broader national protest in September 2012. Huge crowds trashed Japanese-owned businesses—a Panasonic plant, a Toyota dealership, and 7-Eleven stores, among others. They torched Japanese model cars. Chinese police helped direct the protests, steering the demonstrators to proper areas. “I need tolead the crowd and guide them to march in an orderly fashion,” a policeman wrote. 9
    September 18 is a traditional day of protest in China, commemorating the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. But at the same time, with the two nations mired in an intense dispute over a set of islands in the East China Sea, the protests had a contemporary feel. And their massive size and seamless coordination seemed to make clear that the Communist Party was directing the dissent toward a desired target—the Japanese—both to whip up nationalist sentiment and tamp down internal criticism of the regime’s domestic policies. Nationalism has long served that function for governments.
    Lukashenko’s devotion to order and Beijing’s appeal to nationalism are just two instances that illustrate the broader phenomenon of Axis and Axis-friendly countries rallying public support by appealing to fundamental, visceral impulses: the need for stability, the fear of chaos,