Comments on: What’s Wrong with The Economist’s “Angry China” Article?

By: How Chinese Society Is Changing | The China Vortex

How Chinese Society Is Changing | The China Vortex — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:48:49 +0000

[...] west never seem to tire of telling the Chinese, especially Chinese government, about how China should become a more open society, and the Chinese never tire of telling the west to shut up and stop interfering in China’s [...]

By: ZsaZsa

ZsaZsa — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 07:48:45 +0000

Hi,
Never read the article in the Economist – I will eventually.
So, why am I commenting here. Well, everyone above seems to be putting forward valid arguments but methinks you are all missing the general simplicity of the situation. People all over the world are always angry about something or the other. I guess it is just now that we are noticing China. They are more in the spotlight now than ever before. Imagine this. If you were living in a country of over a billion people in a time of flux, wouldn’t there be a chance that you too would be angry at something? I think so. It is probably a whole load of different ‘angers’.
Of course, then there is all the crap about folk wanting to boycott the olympics. The reaction to that and its ‘anger’ would be heard above all others. Anyone calling for a boycott should probably shut up. Miserable bXXXXXXds!
I say, let the Chinese enjoy their moment of pride and all other nations should enter willingly with an open heart. I’m sure then more folks can be a little happier.
Zsa Zsa

By: Lloyd Lofthouse

Lloyd Lofthouse — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:39:51 +0000

You miss the point. Many in the west, out of ignorance, arrogance and laziness (because they won’t do the homework or are in denial), believe what the Economist lead article says.

However, your response here is one step in the right direction to correct this missconception and educate if the masses in the West will pay attention. I’m not holding out much hope in that area since lack of respect for education by many western children and parents (unlike China where education is important) and not taking the time to read is a major flaw in western civilizations.

I’ve been a guest on numerous radio talk shows attempting in my own limited way to explain why most of the Western media has been twisting the facts and getting it all wrong about this Tibetan issue.

No matter, China is now too powerful to be pushed around like the Western powers (mainly France and Britain) did to China during the 19th century. There will be no more Opium Wars to force China to do what the Chinese do not want. Today, the Chinese will make the decisions in China.

Robert Hart, an Irishman that arrived in China in 1854, wrote in a letter decades later in 1889, after he had been Inspector General of Imperial Chinese Customs for some time, that by 2100 China would be back on its feet again (meaning a super power), and he hoped that when that day comes wisdom and not revenge will shape China’s actions.

I have faith that most Chinese are more sensible and understanding of the West’s ignorance, failures and limitations and will adjust accordingly while not allowing other’s to dictate what China will do.

I’m sure that China is more than willing to let other nations alone if other nations will leave China alone while being an equal partner on the world economic stage.

It is important for the West to wake up and set aside the arrogance that has been displayed in the past regarding China and other countries like India and realize that the world is a big place and we have to work harder to understand each other and get along and accept the differences.

I fear what will happen if this shift does not take place. The world can not afford more wars like WWII or worse.

By: David Ng

David Ng — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:32:23 +0000

To those such as Beijinger, Anna and Lao Wai, who would have it that the response of indignant Chinese is overblown due to their regular consumption of propaganda, I would make the (highly subjective) retort that I found much of the Western reporting on Tibet to be biased, despite pretty much reading Australian newspapers for a living (and never having read Xinhua etc in my life). Oddly enough, the Aussie newspapers were somewhat less biased than say, the BBC. The bias is subtle, often a matter of emphasis and word choice (“crackdown”, “authoritarian” etc), but it is there if you’re looking. More blatant of course was the use of the Burmese (?) footage, which, contrary to Lao Wai’s assertions, was highly unprofessional journalism as opposed to a minor accuracy. While I accept Beijinger’s observation that Western reporting is often polemical these days, I am old enough to remember when it was less so, nor am I convinced that this is a positive development.

I concur with MY’s view that the Chinese people (or several loud mobs of them the world over, for the pedants) are aggrieved by the criticism of the CCP of the Western media, and that this has the potential to undermine East-West relations and global development. Yes, this is partly created by a disconnect between the media’s view of the CCP as a repressive dictatorship and the ‘people’s’ view of the party as a more complex entity (from inception to Cultural Revolution to now) to which they are willing to give some kudos for dragging them out of the shit.

However, I think the point MY has not bothered to explain (though he would be well aware of it) is that most Chinese have a legitimate dislike and distrust of the West and its institutions in general. It is the lack of historical context on the part of the West that I imagine is causing the greater disconnect. From my sparse understanding of modern Chinese history, the country entered a period of turmoil, warlords, and a power vacuum directly after the invasion of the imperalist powers, which the CCP eventually managed to fill. We then entered a remarkably shitty period which ended in the 80s, when the current drive to economic development began.

Given this history, even an overseas Chinese like myself, without the benefit of propaganda, would be inclined to feel outraged at the constant harping of the Western media on China’s problems – bearing in mind it is an edifice, the ‘fourth estate’, of those same governments which had a large hand in creating the conditions that led to the CCP, not to mention the people’s years of poverty. Of course, the CCP itself is also to blame, but at least it’s trying to pull them out.

Of course, this is an emotional response, but I would suggest it’s these same emotions that are fueling the hostility displayed by Chinese all over the world in the wake of the Tibetan protests. Possibly compounded, in the case of the overseas Chinese, by experience or knowledge of white xenophobia, the only type to have a global reach due to extensive imperialism and domination. To the Western media or other commentators, this is all ancient history and irrelevant to the issue at hand, in this case Tibet. But to many Chinese people, it is not, and if you consider their experience, that view is equally valid.

In summary, I think that China, and some other developing nations, need to improve their human rights records, and the Western media are entitled to voice their concerns with perceived abuses of such. However, holding such countries to the ever-increasing standards of developed countries is hypocritical and inflammatory, especially where the actions of past Western governments have restricted progress in those countries (e.g. BBC criticising the Indian caste system which was due in part to British colonial rule).

With power comes responsiblity, and with the global reach that the Western media now enjoys comes the responsibility to take a holistic view, which includes history as seen not only by the conquerers (to whom the Opium War is a historical foonote) but also the conquered (to which it was a major contributor to China’s current state). If a fuller context for Chinese issues is too much to ask (e.g. the portayal of the CCP as a nationalistic guerilla movement that became a cult of personality, rather than the flippant ‘authoritarian government’), then neutral language, standards that account for differing developmental stages, and use of the correct footage should be a bare minimum.

To dismiss these sensibilities on the part of developing peoples as a cultural quirk (e.g. the need for ‘face’) is trite, patronising and offensive, as is the assertion that their anger as being “out of proportion”. In psychoanalysis, trauma is resolved via narrative, and in this sense, misrepresenting the Chinese people’s position and then dismissing their righteous anger as misguided is to deny them any voice at all. In my opinion, it is verging on bigoted. It is a shame that the ignorance and resulting knee-jerk bias of many people in developed countries, not to mention their institutions, should pose one of the largest barriers to true understanding and global progess, when these people are in fact the best placed to widen their understanding and make a difference.

By: Lao Wai

Lao Wai — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:04:24 +0000

I think a lot of this hoo-ha is to do with face. Basically, the Chinese think that they are inviting us to a party, and are offended when we then say how ugly their house is.
They are so used to a media which rarely reports China’s shortcomings such as political repression, forced abortions, laogai ‘re-education’, intellectual property theft and suppression of minorities such as the Tibetans that they react badly when the Western media do. They seize on a few trifling inaccuracies in a few papers and TV reports and then say the Western media are biased and never show the Chinese side. But we have shown the wonderfully baroque insults of Xinhua, calling the Dalai Lama a ‘wolf in monks robes’. We are back to ‘running dogs and lackeys of imperialism’.

After decades of lies, distortion and propaganda put out by the Chinese, it is a bit much for them to complain about a few minor inaccuracies. The problem is this; if you impose very strict limitations on Western reporters, you can’t really complain if their reports are sketchy and sometimes inaccurate.

I live in London and on the BBC it was quite clear that Tibetan rioters had killed Hans, and it was obvious when protests were in India or Nepal.
I can’t speak for CNN or what it said, but that is freedom of speech. Sometimes you won’t like what you hear. We are used to it. Western media criticise Western governments and indeed countries and peoples every day.

Chinese demonstrated here in support of China, a right we would not be granted in Beijing. I will not be convinced that there is any sort of freedom in China until the Chinese can legally demonstrate against their own government as they can in India.

I think the Chinese feel slightly embarrassed about their political system- you can tell that by the sharpness of their reactions. I have spoken Chinese for over 25 years and I wish better for them. But I think that the more powerful they get, the more criticism they will receive and they had better get used to it.

By: Anna

Anna — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:21:18 +0000

Your reading of the Economist article is incorrect. The author is not arguing that “The anger directed at the west is in fact domestic Chinese anger at Chinese government policies,” He is arguing that the Chinese government’s vehement response to protests surrounding the torch relay is out of proportion. It is legal to protest in Western democracies and people use that right regularly to protest many things, in this case the failure of the Chinese government to live up to its promises to have an “open Olympics” and improve its human rights practices when it was awarded the Olympics in 2001. He is also making a second separate argument that not everyone in China walks in lock-step with the government and that they too protest, about unfair taxes and fees, lack of compensation for land that is confiscated, forced abortions, about pollution, and many other things. The difference between China and democratic countries is that in China people are regularly arrested for their protest activities and charged with “inciting subversion”, a crime against the state which then means authorities do not have to follow their own laws regarding due process.

You have also been reading too many Chinese governmental accounts of what happened in Tibet and the response by protesters in the West when you say the “pro-Tibet independence folk”. First of all, you cannot lump all of the protesters together – some want “meaningful autonomy” for Tibet and a smaller percentage would not mind seeing Tibet independent. Second, who said they are lumping Chinese people together with the Chinese government??? Perhaps you say it but that just means you have not been listening to what the various groups of protesters have been saying.

The rest of your “article” is not even worth commenting on it is such crap.

By: MY

MY — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:45:28 +0000

Correction: The other western media I read which has reported objectively the Tibet incidence was Economist – “Trashing the Beijing Road”.

Last words: when western democracy, which has been mostly successful in the last century, is increasingly hijcked by popularlism which often short change long-term vision with electability, is something that we all should worry about.

By: Beijinger

Beijinger — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:42:59 +0000

MY – a lot of western journalism doesn’t try to sell itself as impartial and unbiased. it is overtly polemical. One of the things it likes making polemics against is dictatorship, based on experience of what dictatorships have done in the last century. that’s clearly and understandably tough for people to take who are loyal to their country which happens to be a dictatorship, even if it is less of a dictatorship than it used to be. The fact that polemical journalism is also employed against other governments, including the media’s own, ought to be a consolation but somehow isn’t. Partly, of course, many of those Chinese who are angry haven’t really read much western media – after all, it’s not primarily for their consumption, and it is very easy to be swayed by selective collections drawn from news.google.
Of course, more and more “western media” have been accentuating the positive in China’s great changes in the last few years. For some reason, Chinese readers seem to discount this (though oddly, not Chinese officials, who often now stress that much western reporting on China is accurate. Perhaps they know more…) One problem is attitudes like those of Ann, who says that an article that puts one side of an argument is “balanced” because it puts the side she agrees with as a “balance” against those who criticise. As I say, this seems to distort the basic meaning of words. There seems in general, too, often to be an assumption that the starting point should be good news only.
Perhaps the effect of Xinhua-style reporting, which you say most Chinese discount, is stronger than you imagine. As you will see, Snow is prepared to assert something above you on the basis of what s/he has read on Xinhua (don’t quite know how seriously he takes it). In general terms, it is frightening how many arguments which claim to be sceptical of the Chinese government’s newspapers and history books take positions identical to the government’s and repeat as facts things for which there is little evidence outside what the government says.
There is certainly a clear expectation that “balanced” reporting means giving equal weight to the Chinese view of things as to the Tibetan side, whatever the objective reality. What one needs is critical assessment of what information is available. Ann, my comments earlier about China’s disastrous policy did not rely at all on what Tibet campaigners say, I’m afraid, and I specifically said you only had to watch the PRO-China videos to see the reality of Tibetan anger. As it happens, close reading of official Chinese sources would lead to the same conclusion – the widespread protests, not just March 14, are reflected in the Chinese accounts, in however limited way; the eye witness accounts of Chinese people there; even some government officials are in a subtle way admitting the mistakes that have been made. The repeated calls for reintensified patriotic education campaigns hint both at what has failed and the desperation that more of the same must be done.
Of course, I am also being unfair: in my case it is backed up by my own personal experience of visiting the place and talking to locals – including Chinese migrants, who are often pretty honest about how unpopular they find themselves.
It’s not a black and white situation, but it is one the Chinese government’s current policies are worsening. As it happens, I too disagree with the Economist – I don’t think nationalist protests are about to turn against the government either. What I find baffling and frightening is the willingness of so many people, including people who call themselves “moderate”, to turn on the messenger so viciously – however flawed he is – and not consider the reality of the situation in the least bit relevant.
To find errors in a vast array of very disparate western media reporting (given the huge volume of reports, online, in print and on tv, and the circumstances under which the instant reporting was conducted, the anti-cnn collection is pretty small beer) and conclude, in the face of all the evidence, that criticism of China over Tibet is without foundation, its rule over Tibet is fair and positive (Cultural Revolution anyone?- again what happened in Tibet is available from published Chinese sources),and that the wild contradictions inherent in Chinese positions are less important or simply don’t matter at all, as seems to be the case, is to me extraordinary. And from there, that because of these mistakes, the whole edifice of “western type of freedom and democracy” is untrustworthy – is this not a little disproportionate?
Ann, you talk about bait and switch? I did not give any opinion at all on whether the protests and riots were “stirred up” from abroad. How much does that matter? There is certainly no evidence that they were stirred up by the Dalai Lama himself ; if some radicals are on the mobile phone to friends and relatives in Lhasa, that would hardly be surprising. But you will note that this does not make a major conspiracy – there was clearly no supply of arms, for example. The actions of participants, of whom there were in total tens, if not hundreds of thousands in all parts, was marked often by spontaneity. Again I ask, why would people act this way, given the inevitable consequences for themselves, if they did not feel strongly.
The initial protests were peaceful. They turned violent after a repressive response. The violence, the Chinese eye witness reports suggest, was spontaneous This is, sadly, often the result of a repressive system which gives no voice to peaceful resistance. And not even the Xinhua reports have given much in the way of evidence to contradict these assertions.
As for your suggestion that I am juvenile, I am afraid I do not understand what you are trying to say in that paragraph. My example was not to say you were prejudging the media; it was to point out how difficult it is to conduct a dialogue – which everyone agrees is necessary – when those with whom you are conducting it do not seem to think it is relevant whether what they say is true or not.

By: MY

MY — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:57:57 +0000

Robert, I read your post on teacabroadchina, and it is a good one. However, I disagree your conclusion that “The reason why the Western media has been seemingly so ‘one sided’ is because they are bringing to light the continued failures of the CCP in the areas of human rights and religious freedom. When the Western media criticizes the CCP, it runs crying to its people that the Western media is ‘badmouthing’ them.”

Western media’s “badmouthing” has been going on for 60 years, the day when CCP took power. Having grown up in China and received orthodox “communist” education, and knew that the western powers were not friendly to CCP, I was still shocked by the level of one-sided negative reporting about China in Europe when I went there to study in early 1990s. After returned to China and worked for 10 years and saw the changes China has gone through, I moved to North America in 2000, and again, I was taken back by the same one-sided negative reporting about China. I think that this is perhaps the experience of very Chinese who has been in the west. Typically western media’s reporting about China is generalizing one incidence to an overall and blame CCP for every problem that China has been facing which are really typical to any developing countries.

The reason that Chinese has kept silent for so long to this type of biased reporting, is that they knew that their government is not perfect and China is not perfect, although they also believe that the definitions of human rights and religious freedom in China are not exact the same as in the west given its stage of social and economic development. Overseas Chinese do not feel that need and desire to explain since to a foreigner, especially westerns to understand China, one need to overcome the culture, history and ideology barriers which are indeed a lot layers to go through especially if the westerns haven’t realize these layers.

However, the main western media’s behavior in the recent Tibet reporting is beyond what they’ve done previously. It was outright lying, deliberately created false and misleading information and this type of unverified information were used by some western public and politicians as “truth” to attack China. I think every Chinese discounts what they hear from Xinhua is a norm among Chinese in the last 30 years, but they did not expect that the western media, which is sold by the west to them as balanced and unbiased under the freedom of speech and democracy, can deviate so much from the very principles that it preaches. This is does not mean that they will believe everything that Xinhua tells them from now on, but rather, lost their trust in the western media, and further, in the western type of freedom and democracy which the west has been trying to convince them are better than what they have.

By: Robert Vance

Robert Vance — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:40:40 +0000

Paul,

I agree with what you write here in part. The Chinese people are as loyal as ever to their government. There is of course general disatisfaction with government policies but most people in China believe that the government is moving the country in the right direction. I wrote about this recently in a post about Chinese patriotism (http://www.teachabroadchina.com/why-chinese-patriotism-is-to-be-respected-and-feared/) I do believe that the feelings of resentment towards the Western media were very genuine.

However, I disagree with you on your opinions about the Western media. I think that again and again we have seen the Chinese people take comments personally that were directed at their government. As an American, if I took offense everytime the foreign media took a potshot at my government, I would have killed myself a long time ago. The reason why the Western media has been seemingly so ‘one sided’ is because they are bringing to light the continued failures of the CCP in the areas of human rights and religious freedom. When the Western media criticizes the CCP, it runs crying to its people that the Western media is ‘badmouthing’ them. I think the CCP needs to toughen up and stop redirecting the criticism to its people.