Dear Xinhua News Agency,

It’s becoming clear that you’re not going to respond to my interview request, so I thought I might post a note on my blog. I suspect these words will at some point be reviewed by a person connected to the government, and perhaps that reader will pass along my correspondence.

Last week I saw a feature on your website titled "If hot stars were blackened." It displayed pictures of white American movie stars and entertainers – including Lady Gaga, Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart -- whose faces had been darkened, and their noses and lips enlarged considerably. In addition, Brad Pitt received buck teeth.

I’m not sure whether to call it slideshow minstrel theater or a Photoshop experiment in blackface, but the images would be so patently offensive to many readers that I’m not displaying them. (They can be linked to here.)

Someone apparently tipped you off to the fact that distributing vaguely racist images on the government’s official newswire is not the done thing, so you scrubbed them from the website. (A snapshot of a cached version of the page is here.)

Instead of just throwing together a blog entry wondering aloud what in the world you were thinking, I tried to get in touch and have a conversation. My news assistant called your offices and was informed that the images came from China Radio International, another state news provider. So we called CRI and were told, by a woman who would not give her name, that the pictures had been borrowed from an overseas website. The management at CRI would not be available for comment. And that was all.

But Xinhua, the state news service for one of the most important countries in the world, had carried those photographs on its website. I wondered why – A young staffer doing something rash, perhaps? A simple mistake? Or a lack of understanding about how the pictures might be perceived abroad?

It seemed like a very strange time to do such a thing. Talk of China’s soft power, and of improving its global brand, is everywhere these days. Articles on the subject have become plentiful, accompanied by no end of dinner table chatter and speculation in Beijing. (An excellent podcast on the subject can be found here.)

The Chinese government has announced that it’s launching a global media outreach of TV and radio stations in several languages. You, Xinhua, are starting a new 24-hour English channel and moving your North America headquarters to New York's Times Square.

The Washington Post earlier this year described the broader initiative as "a $6.6 billion global strategy to create media giants that will challenge agenda-setting Western behemoths such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the BBC and CNN."

Given all of that, I thought it would be interesting to talk with you about the “If hot stars were blackened” feature in the context of the soft power campaign, and ask what lessons might be drawn from the incident.

So we called you back and got a fax number for submitting a written interview request. It’s been a few days now, and I suspect I have the only answer from you that I’m going to get – which is content being deleted from the public domain, followed by no comment.

I’ve been thinking this over today and have wondered whether that response might be as revealing as anything else. I have also thought several times of a quote I read late last month in the New York Times. The author, Edward Wong, was reporting about his experience with Chinese government media handlers in Tibet and included this line: “One Xinhua reporter asked me, 'When will foreigners view us like The A.P.?'"

The question is an interesting one. And my interview request remains sincere.

With Best Regards,

Tom