Politics of Recognition in They Chose China

Mike Wallace:  [Do the Red Chinese] believe in our freedoms?

David Hawkins: No.  To them, it’s much different.  And uh, we have an aggressive government who’s always hunting for war…

MW: Do you believe the United States should recognize Red China?

DH: Personally, I think they should.

MW: Why?

DH: It’s a very big thing.  They have a very large land area, a 650 million Chinese population, and it’s like, uh, like saying there’s a… it’s a big elephant in the room and saying he’s not there until he becomes powerful enough to step on you.

MW:  Do you expect that they will become powerful enough to step on us?

DH: I have no doubt.

-They Chose China, 43:00-44:30

When I watched this exchange between Mike Wallace and David Hawkins in They Chose China, I thought about the idea of politics of recognition and how it related to the Cold War attitudes towards China.  Now, it seems ridiculous to “not recognize” China, but Mike Wallace talks about nonrecognition as the norm, and recognition as subversive.  The interview is conducted like an interrogation.  When Wallace asks a question, the camera zooms in very closely to Hawkins’ face, drawing the audience’s attention to his nervousness and the sweat on his forehead and suggesting his guilt.  In this passage, Wallace focuses on Hawkins’ willingness to recognize the existence of an enormous country with different ideologies than the U.S., asking, “Do you believe the United States should recognize Red China?”  However, he doesn’t acknowledge or accept Hawkins’ full explanation of how large China is, but focuses instead on the suggestion that China could become a threat, leading the audience to believe that there are good reasons for not recognizing China.  Wallace’s interrogation-like interview reflects the attitudes of McCarthyism by acknowledging different ideologies only to demonize them.

In the clips of the interview shown in They Chose China, Wallace does not attempt to understand Hawkins’ point of view.  He doesn’t use the common interviewing technique of reflecting back what the interviewee has said and validating or contextualizing their point of view for the audience.  Instead, he continuously asks questions, one after the other, without responding to anything that Hawkins says.  In this way, Wallace’s interview with Hawkins could be seen as a microcosm of U.S.’s failure to recognize China (and the Americans who chose to live in China).  By having Hawkins on his show, Wallace recognizes Hawkins on some level, but in the interview, through his questions, language, and angle, he ends up being dismissive towards his perspective.  After reading Mike Wallace’s biography on Wikipedia, I learned that, during his time with CBS, this acknowledging-and-dismissing tactic came up more than once.  In 1967, Wallace anchored a documentary called, CBS Presents: The Homosexuals, where he said, “The average homosexual… is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.”  Just like the Hawkins interview, Wallace recognizes the existence of gay people by anchoring a documentary called The Homosexuals, but then dismisses them by suggesting that their relationships are substandard compared to heterosexual couples, and that they aren’t as “capable” as heterosexual people.  Wallace’s eagerness to repeatedly define otherized groups to himself and his audience without actually listening to their perspectives reveals the tendency of the majority to legitimize their own power by diminishing the narratives of the Other.