Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

He Who Controls Images, Controls People

With all the recent buzz on the Inter­net and else­where about Google’s impend­ing pull-out from China, much men­tion has been made of the cen­sored con­tent that Google.cn presents to users in China.  Con­trol of infor­ma­tion is fun­da­men­tal to total­i­tar­ian con­trol of peo­ple.  For that rea­son, Google.cn could not present, for exam­ple, images of the 1989 Tianan­men Square crack­down.  If you Googled Tianan­men Square on Google.cn, appar­ently all you’d see are nice, postcard-like images of the Square.  For a pub­lic space whose name means the Square of Heav­enly Peace, surely such tran­quil, benign images of this his­toric space are mes­sages unto themselves.

I came upon an inter­est­ing quote today, from a book about the Roman Empire.

Power is a far more com­plex and mys­te­ri­ous qual­ity than any appar­ently sim­ple man­i­fes­ta­tion of it would appear.  It is as much a mat­ter of impres­sion, of the­atre, of per­suad­ing those over whom author­ity is wielded to col­lude in their sub­ju­ga­tion.  Inso­far as power is a mat­ter of pre­sen­ta­tion, its cul­tural cur­rency in antiq­uity (and still today) was the cre­ation, manip­u­la­tion, and dis­play of images.

When I read this, I thought imme­di­ately of the CCP-enforced cen­sor­ship of Tianan­men Square images on Google.cn, and China’s cel­e­bra­tions of the 60th Anniver­sary of the CCP’s claim to the impe­r­ial throne.

On the one hand, the cen­tral pub­lic space of the cap­i­tal of the mas­sive coun­try of China is pre­sented online as tran­quil, calm, and majes­tic — with no indi­ca­tions that at any time it was oth­er­wise.  On the other hand, a parade of mil­i­tary for­ma­tions and hard­ware to show phys­i­cal strength, resolve, and mas­tery.  The mes­sage is that the Party, and by impli­ca­tion the coun­try, is strong and that this strength is used to fur­ther peace and to ben­e­fit the people.

Is that truly the case?  Many peo­ple out­side the domin­ion of the CCP, and some within it, would say it is not.  Yet, as the mar­ket­ing say­ing goes, per­cep­tion is real­ity — and by con­trol­ling imagery, the CCP con­trols per­cep­tion within its realm.

His­tory is replete with pat­terns that repeat them­selves.  The rea­son is sim­ple.  The one con­stant ele­ment through­out his­tory is human nature, and all of its strengths and weak­nesses.  One ele­ment that plays on both sides of the coin is this: He who con­trols images, con­trols people.