, Columnist
The Boosterism Behind China's Silk Road Story
Beijing is downplaying certain facts to sell a heroic narrative at home and abroad.
How myths are made.
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Sitting in my Hangzhou hotel room one evening last September, I caught a helpfully subtitled Chinese TV show about Song Dynasty inscriptions carved on a mountainside near Quanzhou -- the city Chinese media invariably call “the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road.” With prayers for good winds and safe returns, the carvings bore witness to China’s far-flung commercial relations during the European Middle Ages. The report was a perfectly legitimate travel feature. By calling attention to the Silk Road, however, it also served the Chinese government’s purposes.