China for dummies – the WTO column

(later also at Chinabiz)
My apologies for getting into a rant against the way how the media describe China yet again, but I just had it with the simplicity about how Western media embark into clichés about this country. Fortunately a few of you like it.

Does this sound familiar to you? Most likely not:

All Anti-China Activists (including those who work for the so called China
Democracy Movement worldwide and Falun'shit organisation)Should DIE in
Pain---Screw You!!!

It is the raw voice from the internet in China, in this case by exception in English and from Chinese students in Canberra, Australia, but a standard operation here in China. The so-called chatroom warriors, cursing whoever they can lay their hands on.
But they fall outside the reasonable simple framework of clichés media use to bring their message about China to the rest of the world. That style is, the government is bad, the people are good. It suggests that the good people will rise and bring down the bad government.
Anything that brings the media away from this rather simple but powerful message is sanitized away or seen as an aberration that can easily be ignored. The government doing good things and bad people do not fit that framework. The message that the majority of the people love their country and their government also does not fit here.
It is not just a problem with the reporting about China. To become more profitable, media have to focus on the largest possible audiences. Their mission is to make money, and complicating the image of the world abroad might confuse their audiences. So, countries like China has to be presented as easy-to-digest diets: the government is bad, the people are good.

It is not only in the tabloids and commercial TV-station this happens, also the so-called quality media seem to be unable to distance themselves from this trap, like on the site of the BBC and the New York Times. I was interviewed for the BBC radio program that went along with the article and I have no clue what came out of that one, but the article paints a reality that is at least one-sided.
And then the New York Times: “According to Amnesty International, arrests for the dissemination of information or beliefs via the Internet have been increasing rapidly in China, snaring students, political dissidents and practitioners of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, but also many writers, lawyers, teachers and ordinary workers,” the article claims. Again a reality I do not see.
The South China Morning Post jumped this week on the same bandwagon by claiming falsely that over 800,000 Chinese had been incarcerated in 2004 because of “endangering state security”. While this fits of course exactly the bad government, good people story, it was most fortunately not true. The figure of 800,000 was the total number of people detained in 2004. There were no figures about the number of people arrested for endangering the state security in 2004.
Maybe it is not surprising that companies like Nike panic, when the bad people at the internet come after them. It was a reality they did not know, just like a large number of larger foreign invested companies in China have already discovered: there is another reality than that they read in the media.

Fons Tuinstra