It's all about making a spectacle

Product placement deal transforms into dispute

According to him, like all other governments in the world, the Chinese government also faces its own challenges and readily admits to them. But the reality of China's growth and development is being ignored by a section of the Western media that seeks to present a biased vision to their domestic readers and viewers.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many Europeans found it difficult to accept "how well China coped" with the seeming contradictions of a Communist political system and an open market economy. However, he says, there's awareness about China's history as highlighted by the recent visits of around 80 French and Belgian readers of his newspaper to China.

"They were well aware of the opium wars, the country's past relationship with the West, the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and the country's opening up over the past 30 years," he says of the visitors.

"They were also well informed about more recent happenings, such as changes to the one-child policy, the phenomenal growth of social media and recent issues in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and the Tibet autonomous region."

Despite the knowledge of China that many Europeans have, some journalists still choose to focus on "just negative" stories about China, he says.

There's probably a degree of "jealousy mixed with admiration" for the country among a section of the mainstream Western media, he says. Yet, he concedes that some journalists simply aren't able to grasp the story of a vast and complex country and end up producing reports that don't convey the full picture.

During a recent trip to Hunan province where he was invited to attend a Chinese friend's wedding, Malovic says that he was struck by how openly local people talked about the hard times they faced in the 1960s, and how China is now tackling its social and environmental problems. "They are so positive about China as a nation," he says.

He says back in the 1980s, Hunan was a remote part of China and going there was difficult.