National Library supplies copies of this article under licence from the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). Further reproductions of thIs article can only be made under licence. An official Chinese perspective on Australia Errol Hodge and Zhang Weihong China pushesfavourable press coverage of Australia The writers conducted an analysis of the content of the domestic edition of the Renmim Ribao (Beijing People's Daily) concerning Australia and Australians over the years 1988-1993 to find whether the paper's coverage had changed significantly in a period of great change in China, economically, politically, socially and culturally. The People 's Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, is read by China's decision makers and opinion leaders. It is still by far the most influential paper in China even though its circulation has dropped to 2.3 milliou since the Cultural Revolution of the sixties and seventies, when it peaked at seven million.' At that stage its reporting was extremely subjective, and its style polemic. Today, it is far more objective, more so than many Western papers, though there are certainly editorial policies about what news not to cover, and these heavily influence its content One hypothesis of the research was that the analysis would show a progressive liberalisation in the selection of news about Australia during the period under stody (periodically denounced as a time of "bourgeois liberalisation"), but that the trend was temporarily reversed during the period that followed June 4, 1989. A second hypothesis, in the light ofthe television series He Shang and the article by Chen Xiaomei on occidentalism 2 , was thatthe analysis would showthatAustralia has been portrayedin a favourable light as a modem and technologically advanced country from which China could learn. The phenomenon of occidentalism is of growing interest to Chinese intellectuals. There is a long history of the definition of modem China againsttraditional China, in that the former is affected by developments in the outside world. In the He Shang television series, the history of China wasconstrueted to show how 'backward' China is and how much it needs to modernise or develop. Thirdly, the investigators wanted to see ifthe research could detect any consciousness ofthe growth oftrading blocs and the likely pla=ent of Australia in any such bloc. Australian Journalism Review, Vol. 17 (No.2) 1995 68 \\\t m l\t 980100571