The discerning reader/browser/FBI Agent (if they are all not all over on Wikipedia. See http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker) may have registered that my blog name is actually taken from the Chinese proverb that figures women as being those who hold up half of the sky. This is because I am a woman in China. Not actually a Chinese women - but nevertheless I support my little piece of the sky with dedication and shaky arms.
With The Games looming in a couple of months it seems that China, these days, is rarely out of the news. I lament daily that such coverage has not been consistently so intense over the past few years. Then perhaps we might not have quite so many scared, conspiracist and just plain ignorant "concerned citizens" filling blog-spaces, Letters to the Editor spaces and Talk Back radio programmes with the current China hysteria. Of course, many of the articles which are appearing at the moment are culled from extant, out-dated sources, from the myopic views of returned expatriates, or from over-paid foreign journalists who fly in on expense-paid junkets and become experts on the scene over their first beer in a Beijing pub.
It is not surprising therefore that no-one outside of China has yet picked up on what seems to me to be the most prominent and radical effect of the Lhasa riots: - the fact that Chinese students and a large proportion of others who have been following the progress of events as reported through Western media have, finally and collectively, lost their cherries.
For the last few weeks I have gone round with the words of an old R.E.M. song running through my head: "There's me in the corner/There's me in the spotlight losing my religion..." because for thousands and thousands of young Chinese this is analogous to what has happened to them: their faith has been totally ripped away from them.
As naive as it sounds to those of us brought up in the sure and certain knowledge that newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations are there not to report on events but to push through various partisan agenda, the average Chinese slavishly believed, until recently, that Freedom of the Press in the West meant freedom to report the truth. Especially in America: home of the brave, land of the free and the guardian of truth and democratic ideals. It is for this very reason America seeks to dominate, isn't it? The genuine and noble wish to bring these freedoms to the rest of the world?
The war in Iraq is just such a point in case, isn't it? It is, isn't it?
And Bush really and honestly wanted to save the world from slaughter by revealing the WMDs he genuinely thought were being concealed. Didn't he?. ....
When the first cropped photograph appeared on the net following the Lhasa riots Chinese netizens became uneasy. This was a genuine mistake of course. It had to be. Any moment now someone would realise this.
As photographs of what were clearly police of another country were presented as representing Chinese cops there was even more unease, followed by the certainty that no-one could possibly mistake the clearly racial characteristics and colouring of an Indian for that of a Chinese person. But, as the photo kept circulating unchallenged the knowledge that, to the rest of the world, all who are neither negroid nor Caucasion have no distinguishing characteristics, began to sink in.
It was a a cruel shock. Because hand in hand with this realisation came the unwelcome thought that all the collective knowledge they had grown up considering as definitive to what characterised a Chinese person could possibly not be generally known either. That which they had always considered contributed to their meaning and identity in the eyes of the world suddenly held no meaning. It was an identity crisis of traumatic and national importance.
Suddenly people began paying more attention not just to the dodgy photographs which proliferated unchecked, but to the texts that accompanied them. These texts completed a process begun only hours before and struck at the very core of each Chinese who read them: through these articles not only were the Western ideals of truth in reporting being betrayed but Chinese themselves were losing Face. The concept upon which all Chinese honour is grounded. A slow indignation which had started to burn began to smoulder into anger. The West - that fabled bastion of justice and freedom of speech - was betraying them.
To those outside China whose ideas of Chinese news sources are still based on the quaint Boys Own caricatures of their youth: - smudgy broadsheets on which amusingly propagandist slogans full of "noble comrades" and "capitalist running dog lackeys", are taken up and pressed fervently to pigeon chests, the above may be hard to believe. However, the sins of the Chinese news sources are largely sins of omission. The average Chinese knows and accepts this: just as the average Western person knows and accepts that the news they choose to believe will vary from publication to publication both in interpretation and veracity. In China they do not receive ALL the news, but the realisation that the news Westerners accept can actually be manufactured as part of a vast propaganda machine has come as a rude awakening.
The fall-out from the way the Lhasa riots have been reported world-wide and accepted unquestionably, have changed Chinese perceptions both of self and of other. Their place in the world and the worlds place in China has been questioned and found to reflect through a glass darkly. They are reeling as if from the shock of finding that benevolent, magical Father Xmas is just a tawdry old wino dressed up in frowsty moth-eaten finery.
The process of loss of innocence, the result of the West's colonisation throughout the rest of the world from Australia to India, has finally begun in the last bastion to withstand it. Should we now rejoice that globalisation is at last being achieved?
With The Games looming in a couple of months it seems that China, these days, is rarely out of the news. I lament daily that such coverage has not been consistently so intense over the past few years. Then perhaps we might not have quite so many scared, conspiracist and just plain ignorant "concerned citizens" filling blog-spaces, Letters to the Editor spaces and Talk Back radio programmes with the current China hysteria. Of course, many of the articles which are appearing at the moment are culled from extant, out-dated sources, from the myopic views of returned expatriates, or from over-paid foreign journalists who fly in on expense-paid junkets and become experts on the scene over their first beer in a Beijing pub.
It is not surprising therefore that no-one outside of China has yet picked up on what seems to me to be the most prominent and radical effect of the Lhasa riots: - the fact that Chinese students and a large proportion of others who have been following the progress of events as reported through Western media have, finally and collectively, lost their cherries.
For the last few weeks I have gone round with the words of an old R.E.M. song running through my head: "There's me in the corner/There's me in the spotlight losing my religion..." because for thousands and thousands of young Chinese this is analogous to what has happened to them: their faith has been totally ripped away from them.
As naive as it sounds to those of us brought up in the sure and certain knowledge that newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations are there not to report on events but to push through various partisan agenda, the average Chinese slavishly believed, until recently, that Freedom of the Press in the West meant freedom to report the truth. Especially in America: home of the brave, land of the free and the guardian of truth and democratic ideals. It is for this very reason America seeks to dominate, isn't it? The genuine and noble wish to bring these freedoms to the rest of the world?
The war in Iraq is just such a point in case, isn't it? It is, isn't it?
And Bush really and honestly wanted to save the world from slaughter by revealing the WMDs he genuinely thought were being concealed. Didn't he?. ....
When the first cropped photograph appeared on the net following the Lhasa riots Chinese netizens became uneasy. This was a genuine mistake of course. It had to be. Any moment now someone would realise this.
As photographs of what were clearly police of another country were presented as representing Chinese cops there was even more unease, followed by the certainty that no-one could possibly mistake the clearly racial characteristics and colouring of an Indian for that of a Chinese person. But, as the photo kept circulating unchallenged the knowledge that, to the rest of the world, all who are neither negroid nor Caucasion have no distinguishing characteristics, began to sink in.
It was a a cruel shock. Because hand in hand with this realisation came the unwelcome thought that all the collective knowledge they had grown up considering as definitive to what characterised a Chinese person could possibly not be generally known either. That which they had always considered contributed to their meaning and identity in the eyes of the world suddenly held no meaning. It was an identity crisis of traumatic and national importance.
Suddenly people began paying more attention not just to the dodgy photographs which proliferated unchecked, but to the texts that accompanied them. These texts completed a process begun only hours before and struck at the very core of each Chinese who read them: through these articles not only were the Western ideals of truth in reporting being betrayed but Chinese themselves were losing Face. The concept upon which all Chinese honour is grounded. A slow indignation which had started to burn began to smoulder into anger. The West - that fabled bastion of justice and freedom of speech - was betraying them.
To those outside China whose ideas of Chinese news sources are still based on the quaint Boys Own caricatures of their youth: - smudgy broadsheets on which amusingly propagandist slogans full of "noble comrades" and "capitalist running dog lackeys", are taken up and pressed fervently to pigeon chests, the above may be hard to believe. However, the sins of the Chinese news sources are largely sins of omission. The average Chinese knows and accepts this: just as the average Western person knows and accepts that the news they choose to believe will vary from publication to publication both in interpretation and veracity. In China they do not receive ALL the news, but the realisation that the news Westerners accept can actually be manufactured as part of a vast propaganda machine has come as a rude awakening.
The fall-out from the way the Lhasa riots have been reported world-wide and accepted unquestionably, have changed Chinese perceptions both of self and of other. Their place in the world and the worlds place in China has been questioned and found to reflect through a glass darkly. They are reeling as if from the shock of finding that benevolent, magical Father Xmas is just a tawdry old wino dressed up in frowsty moth-eaten finery.
The process of loss of innocence, the result of the West's colonisation throughout the rest of the world from Australia to India, has finally begun in the last bastion to withstand it. Should we now rejoice that globalisation is at last being achieved?
1 comment:
This post is terrifically interesting and I need some time to think about it. I was rather confronted. I do know many Aussie journalists are deeply invested in investigating the truth rather than perpetuating the myths, but they all either work for the ABC or Fairfax, and I assume your students are seeing US media sources like CNN and Fox. Still, it's frustrating that they don't also see the best of Western journalism — the Guardian and the BBC and the NY Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Out of interest, I no nothing of the "firewall" and what it hides. Can you access all the major Western newspapers from China?
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