Pro-Beijing scholar wants to set up platform to counter West's 'bad-mouthing' of China

A Shanghai-based scholar, claiming China is being "bad-mouthed" by western nations, has vowed to form a special "rhetoric front" to advance the government's perspectives on China's rise.

Zhang Weiwei, director of the Centre for China Development Model Research at Fudan University, organised a forum this week to discuss the West's response to China's growing influence, news portal guancha.cn reported. 

“The People’s Republic of China [PRC] has solved problems of ‘being bullied’ and ‘being starved’ in the first and the second 30 years [after it was founded],” Zhang said in the opening remarks, apparently referring to periods prior and after the economic “opening-up” in the 1970s.

“Now, it should tackle the problem of being bad-mouthed," he said.

The claim echoes the Communist Party's view of blaming foreign media and governments for portraying China in a "biased" way. In the past few years, for instance, China denied the visa applications of a number of US journalists following investigative reports on Communist Party elites and their wealthy relatives - reports which the Chinese government has bluntly refuted.

Without citing specific examples of bad press for the nation, Zhang pledged he would try to forge a China-orientated "rhetoric front" within the next decade to contribute a fair depiction of the nation’s rise.