I have very much appreciated the posts to assignment A. One of the issues that emerged fromt these posts is the current influence of Mao and Confucius in China. Here is an article from tomorrow’s NY Times Magizine on the so-called “reddist” village in China. Here again from the NY Times is an article describing the politics around a statue of Confucius that was installed/uninstalled in Tiananmen Square. Given that both of these accounts appear in a western newspaper I suspect that they are incomplete and biased. Consider reading these articles (and in the case of the article on the village there is also a video) and critically comment on the approach taken by the writers of each. I am particularly interested in any comments you would care to make on the video and the way in which the editing and choice of images do or do not reinforce a particular point of view. Critiquing this video will assist your interpretive process later this summer.
Watching this video without sound I was stuck by the image at 01:01 of the harvest wheat field with a nuclear cooling tower behind it. The choice of images in this video seemed to echo what the Western viewer might think of as negative aspects of development. The focus of the article gears itself towards the Western readers expectations of China’s development policy.
The article also contrasts the “drab apartments” of the residents of the village with house Wang owns. The reader of this article will have a value judgment of the worth and benefit of living in or owning a home. How do the residents of this village view their own housing situation and would they characterize it as drab?