An April 24th piece in the PLA Daily cautioning against the “corrosive effect” of foreign culture has been republished by several Chinese-language newspapers and websites, including People’s Daily, the immensely popular infotainment website sina.com, and china.com.cn, which operates under the jurisdiction of the press office of the State Council--China’s Cabinet.

The piece features interviews by PLA Daily reporter Zhang Xinyang with Xue Xiang of the department of strategy at the Chinese Academy of Military Science and Wang Ding, director of the political department at the Tianjin General Detachment of the People’s Armed Police.

It begins with a statement by Zhang that “like political, economic and military security, cultural security is an integral part of a country’s national security system.”

Wang Ding warns:

Using a variety of tactics, hostile Western forces are engaging in unbridled propaganda to promote the Western, capitalist world view, outlook on life and value system… Taking advantage of relevant agreements of the World Trade Organization, they export vast quantities of movies, television programs, books, and other cultural products. As they reap enormous economic profits, they also export their cultural values and generate an unmistakably negative impact on our social and cultural life…

This thinly veiled attack on the United States follows closely Washington’s decision earlier this month to file formal complaints against China with the WTO over alleged IPR violations and restrictions on market access for U.S. movies, DVDs, books, and music. China has vowed to “fight until the end” against these American complaints.

Xue Xiang of the Chinese Academy of Military Science cautions in the interview that globalization has made it “singularly difficult to defend against the corrosive and destructive effect of foreign culture,” and that “satellites, radio and television broadcasts, and the Internet…have created a series of problems for national cultural security; for example, the Internet has provided a platform for advanced countries to export culture to developing countries…thereby magnifying the negative impact of Western values… We must build a line of defense against foreign cultural corrosion.”

The expression “foreign cultural corrosion” heavily populated Chinese cyberspace this past January, when China Central Television’s English news anchor, Rui Chenggang, led an online campaign to have a Starbucks outlet removed from the Forbidden City because it constituted an “affront to Chinese culture.” A fluent English speaker, Rui Chenggang spent the 2005-2006 school year as a visiting fellow at Yale. His exposure to Western culture appears not to have had an especially “corrosive” effect on him--or perhaps such activism is precisely what the regime most fears.