Chang Ping: Freedom of Slander

( The following is translated from an article by Wen Feng.

Note:

This is an article published by Beijing Evening News (北京晚报), which is a response to Chang Ping's "Tibet: The Truth and Nationalism". The fact that it has got translated here does not in any way imply my endorsement for its opinion. In fact, I found it disgusting. I only keep it here for the sake of balance. )

Lambasted in the Cyberspace, Mr. Chang Ping might have to, once again, defend his freedom of speech. Obviously he was scared by the bogey of gag order. I am not big on BBS, but the barrage of words has somehow caught my attention. A close look into his article put his version of free speech far beyond the realm of shocking. Probably the word 'ghastly' describes it better. The point he is trying to make is that "Freedom of speech naturally grants the right to misspeak, and the right to question the authority. What could be worse than rumor is the suppression of free speech. ". And he even labeled it as a universal value. What follows is that "Freedom of Speech" gives the go-ahead on distortion and fabrication of evidence, the chance to misrepresent the history and wag the tongue as well as the green light to "free" slander, "free" smear , "free" libel and "free" name-calling. Is this really the much vaunted "freedom of speech", as best exemplified by western media's recent hysteria on Tibet? This kind of freedom of speech is on a par with verbal violence. I've never seen any single western media be able to enjoy such freedom in its own country since this type of freedom violates others' personal right, depreciate our social values, and encroaches upon the moral bottom line. The universal values that Chang Ping is seeking would only serve to debase our society.

I don't know Mr. Chang Ping personally. So I did a little digging myself. It turns out he is the star pitcher of Nanfang News Group, and this explains everything. Nang Fang Group's flagship newspaper " ??? Weekend" has been boasting itself for being the most westernized, the most audacious, the most insightful and the most incisive newspaper in China. It spares no effort to peddle the western version of "Universal Value" and "Freedom of Speech". Chang Ping's article fits that profile. But this time it backfired due to western media's slander, libel and distortion on Tibet riot. It also makes people to start questioning his real agenda other than free speech under this circumstance.

For the likes of Chang Ping, anything coming from the western world contains universal value, which should be uphold , including the right for rumor. It begs the question: In the modern history, all the colonization and wars are started by westerners, in which is there any universal value that can be found? The likes of Chang Ping and their sentiment aptly illustrates that the calling for "universal value" and "freedom" is just a way to conceal their secret agenda. But lies can not hold forever. In the face of facts and truth, they only serve to unmask hypocrisy and enable people to distance themselves from Chang Ping's universal value propaganda.
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Tibet : The Truth and Nationalism

(The following is translated from an article by Chang Ping)

Grapevine news was all over the streets after the turmoil in Lhasa while reports from domestic media are, as always, conspicuous by their absence. For days the only thing you can hear from the domestic media is news brief from Tibet's governor, which comprises only words like "In recent days, a small group of rampant mobs engaged in looting and vandalizing at Lhasa". The amount of information you get is no more than the news title itself. However, people's curiosity was piqued up by government's stern words against Da Lai Lama. Many of them, based on their prior experience, started to look for answers from foreign media. While in the meantime, a few posts and videos surfaced in cyberspace, which unmasked some foreign media's bias and twist of facts. These contradicting voices gained wide recognition within cyberspace, and ballooned into a campaign against western media by Chinese mass, which gave rise to a handful of new websites like www.anti-cnn.com , 'Anti-BBC', or 'Anti-VOA' .

Based on the evidence collected by cyberzens, blatant misrepresentation of facts can be found among various foreign media reports from German, US, UK and India. From the standpoint of professional journalism, some of the mistakes are callow and bordering on deliberation.

Although apology and correction were offered later by some of these medias, their credibility was gravely smashed. Like any false reports, the lost credit and trustworthiness can not be offset easily by the abundance of mea culpa. Thus it begs the question: How can we find out the truth in the follow up report on Lhasa riot as well as on any other significant matters? Given that Chinese media is all hush-hush while foreign media smells fishy, where is the honest truth?

Among those who contradicted foreign media, some claim that they would like to show the truth of Lhasa riot to the whole world. However, this claim faults on logic ground since their action can only show the fact that western media did not do a good job in revealing the truth. But what was indeed going on at Lhasa? For most of us, the only story we were told was from the statement made by government after several days of news vacuum. I am not saying the government is lying, but for any news monopolized by a single source, I can not confirm its truthfulness either. In fact, many foreign media describe it as "truth meticulously engineered by Chinese government". The government later invited some foreign reporters to visit Tibet, but most of their reports on that trip were skipped by official translation. Even they were translated, given the circumstance that western media were badly bruised in this case, the translation would be largely disregarded by general public.

And the fury is not waning at all. Despite www.anti-cnn.com 's statement on its front page that " We are not against the western media, but against the lies and fabricated stories in the media. We are not against the western people, but against the prejudice from the western society", the fuming reaction speaks louder than these words. Many cyberzens sided with extreme, and some of them even started out from that extreme. They begin to care more about news media's stance rather than its neutrality and fairness. They can accept bias as long as such bias is in their favor. And it is against the ideology of professional journalism to disclose western media's unbalance without pointing fingers to Chinese government's tight grip on both the news source and news media. There is no doubt that the latter does more harm than the former. It only took a few attentive cyberzens to balance out a single media's bias, but it took the whole world forever to undo government's news censorship.

Some people in China have already come to realize that as long as we can have an open environment for discussion and presentation, distortion and bias will not post serious threat to truth and fairness. The successful rebuttal against foreign media aptly confirms that. In fact, it was some students studying overseas who revealed such distortion and acted promptly. The picture juxtaposition they've made mushroomed over various BBS as well as on the YouTube. It is hard to imagine this could be achieved otherwise if network media all underwent tight censorship.

And the biased reports also made a serious dent the trustworthiness of journalism. People start to choose narrow-minded nationalism rather than rely on objectivity and justice. The idea of universal value is questioned and the grapple for solo national interest is cheered. Some were even stretched further to accept lies as norm between nations and forgiveness was thus given to falsehood happened next to them as well as in history. Undoubtedly some people were like this since day one and the ongoing case easily handed them ammunitions to convince others.

But it has also come to my attention that sober reckoning and broad discussion were given under this circumstance. People found that the prejudice westerners had against Chinese comes from their culture condescension. But by the same token, is the same kind of condescension in place when we Han Chinese interacts with other minorities in China? The biased reports western media made against China are deeply rooted in their unwillingness to listen and comprehend, as well as their indulgence in Edward Said's orientalism imagination. But are we doing any better than westerners when we deal with our minority countrymen? If we adopt nationalism, how do we convince our minority countrymen to give up their version of nationalism and join us together on prosperity seeking? Da Lai Lama is asking Chinese government for re-examination and re-assessment. What kind of person is he indeed? In addition to the official conclusion, is there any chance to loosen the media censorship and let free discussion unveil the better truth?

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A Few More Words on Tibet

(The following is translated from a post from Drunkpiano's Blog.)

(I would like to express my deep appreciation to those friends who kindly left remarks on my blog. Now I know why the layout of my blog has to be changed. I wish those in mainland China would be able to see my blog after the alteration of some key words. To quote Master Wang (王小山), my mood for discussion is flattened by those disfigured text. Anyhow, let's not talk about this anymore.)

This morning when I woke up, I found the layout of my blog turned funny. And some of the links were also missing. I have thus restored them. In addition to those follow-up discussions among bulloggers, I want to add a few more points:

(1) I second what MZX(莫之许) says. We should tolerate and protect the freedom of speech for those who seek Tibet-Independence. They have the right to express their opinions, to demonstrate and protest lawfully. It would only make matters worse if we try to put a stop to this kind freedom they are entitled to.

(2) But MZX also suggests that those independence-seekers would not be able to gain any ground if all of us can fully enjoy the benefit of freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, I am not quite following on that. In fact, counterexamples can be easily found in those former Soviet Union countries, in Yugoslavia, in the Republic of Burundi and in Taiwan. The process of democracy only helped fostering nationalism and brought it to its extremes. (And things get worse if religion is also involved.) Thus it is highly possible that violence would prevail if we show weak hands on Free-Tibet-Movement. Although I am a stanch supporter of freedom and democracy, I don't think freedom and democracy alone can offer a universal solution. As YL (羽良) has once quoted from the book by Juan Linz, "A united country is the premise of successful democracy, while the opposite is not true". (Not the verbatim quote, but the idea is kinda like this.) And there is another book I mentioned in my previous posts," From Voting to Violence, by Jack Snyder", which is into the discussion of how democratic process boosted nationalism.

(3) And whether Dalai Lama's proposal for autonomy (No military base in Tibet, no migration into Tibet, diplomatic visibility, area of Great Tibet, including part of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu...) is a reasonable one or not, you be the judge.

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Yesterday I had a new post on Tibet, but I removed it later, because that post runs the risk of me being misidentified by those "patriotic young zealots" as their partner, which would sicken me to the stomach.

(1) Extreme nationalism has never been my favor. To be logically consistent, I don't think Tibet's extremism is any better than its Han Chinese counterpart.

(2) The reason I label those monks and young Tibet zealots as extremists is that the violence they had inflicted is indiscriminately toward innocent civilians. Confirmed death with well-spelled names of Han Chinese has been reported, many of them are just business men. (The official media has put the death toll up to ten, which may or may not be true given official media's low credit score.) I guess this is part of the reason why western media like The Economist would label them as mob, a word they rarely use on similar occasions in the past. By the way, The Economist claims that their reporters are the only foreign journalists that had permission to set foot on Tibet and I don't think they are compromised by Chinese government in this case. Thus their report should be taken as neutral, which can be found here. (This article backs their we-are-the-only-one-there claim. From what The Economist has stated later, it seems that their reporter happens to be in Tibet for other news leads. i.e, they didn't get any special treatment from Chinese government when the whole thing started.) Some pictures they've taken can also be found here.

(3) A footnote from The Christian Science Monitor is like this : " The European traveler said he was hiding out with a Tibet family but eventually got kicked out when he disagreed with their sentiment that all Chinese and Muslims should be removed from Tibet. A monk who was with the family asked him to leave, to avoid confrontation. ", which is another corroboration that extreme nationalism played a part in Tibet violence. In fact it would be extremely rare for hatred to go that far, even between Israel and Palestinian, or between Serbian and Bosnian. It is also extremely rare for this kind of barefaced hatred to be welcomed by wide tolerance and sympathy, or even acclamation from the global media.

(4) It is tempting to blame government for opening file. And it is now moot to argue who started it first. But given that the Olympic game is on its way, I guess the last thing Chinese government wants is disturbance. Maybe I was wrong. As for whether the government should take any harsh response, I feel the answer is no in most cases. After all, the government overpowers any violent resistance it might encounter. But under extreme circumstance this kind of harsh measure might be necessary, such as the case when gasoline was poured onto Han Chinese by Tibet to set up a fire, and there is no other immediate solution other than counter-violence to stop this urgent harm.


(5) The Tibet Independence Movement claims that 100 or so people were killed in the violence. Aside from the validity of this alleged number, it is hard to determine how many of these died are of the cause of government crackdown, or how many of them are the victims killed by Tibet. Under this circumstance, the number crunching is largely pointless. Some international media singled out the death toll and suggested that they are all Tibet killed by police, which is unfair and blowing the truth out of proportion.


(6) The government's flat footed response to ban reporter into Tibet is another proof that government officials are still living in the Stone Age. It is always government's conditioned response to keep any disharmony from public, but this kind attitude toward independent media only serves to taint its own image.

(7) Da Lai's accused Chinese government of conducting culture genocide toward Tibet, citing migrations of Han Chinese into Tibet as evidence. My judgment is that the migration should be taken as ill-conceived if it is goaded by promise on better pay and higher position from the government. (Even on that note, I have some reservations since a lot of the migrants are engineers to build infrastructure, which is good for local economy. And similar migration can also be found in other provinces, such as Yunnan, Sichuan, Jiangxi. I failed to see how culture genocide works under this circumstance.) And for any civilians that moved into Tibet to seek for business opportunities, the genocide card simply does not apply. In fact, the globalization has blurred the boundary between cultures. Culture identity has to be kept through the prevalence of each culture's unique idea, instead of closed borders. Tibet by itself is not preordained to any special treatment culture-wise as opposed to the rest 55 ethnic groups in China. In fact, it is hard to find any precedent in other multi-culture nations around the world that a certain ethnic group would have the privilege to keep a massive land exclusively to itself.

(8) It is also true that Panchen Lama underwent persecution during culture revolution. There is no doubt that Tibet was deeply traumatized during land reform and culture revolution. But I want to point out that the culture revolution is a tragedy happened at every corner of China. It is a tragedy of tyranny, not a one of ethnic disparity.

(9) I guess the contributing factor that traumatized Tibet includes: (A) Communist tyranny during revolution. (B) Da Lai's displeasure of losing his power in Tibet as well as the sense of Paradise Lost. (C) The wedge driven by British colonialist during early 1900, and Tibet's foolhardiness egged on by prejudiced western report in 1980s. (A) is regretful and undeniable, but it would also unfair to turn a blind eye on (B) and (C).

(10) Economic aid to Tibet. Over the years Chinese government has provided tremendous amount of fund to boost Tibet's economy, which is in the eyes of the beholders, including Da Lai himself. Some report puts the financial aid per capita as twice the average income of a Chinese peasant. (The number may have some deviation, but you get the idea. And I guess some of the money was not in cash handed out to individual, but in other forms like the construction of infrastructure and temples. ). To be honest, this kind of affirmation action borders on Reverse Discrimination. I am not here to accuse Tibet of being ungrateful since all these investments are the windfall from Chinese government, not out of the demand of Tibet. But it would be insincere to point fingers to Chinese government with one hand while taking doles with the other.

(11) Admittedly Da Lai is a charismatic leader, who knows his way in diplomatic world. His black art to bewitch the western media is something even President Hu would envy. But I only give him credit on political skills, not on moral integrity. In other words, he is no different than any other cunning politicians. His mater piece includes a proposal to offer autonomy for independence. But if you look into the fine print, its stern demands include what I mentioned early in this article, which is extremely hard for the Communist government to swallow. The way the demand is presented at the negotiation table is tantamount to a girl implicitly saying no to her suitors by demanding astronomical amount of wedding gifts. This is a way of political shrewdness.

(12) It is also tempting to say that Tibet want freedom from an authoritarian government. But please be advised that the legacy of Tibet society is theocracy, a far cry from democracy. Some may argue that no one can speak for Tibet people except Tibet themselves, maybe theocracy is just what they want. Maybe they would rather to be enslaved by Lama instead of Chinese ruling... . My judgment is that it is ok to discuss these topics as long as the discussion is peaceful and fair-minded. And I oppose any form of crackdown on the peaceful demonstration. Tibet independence is not a problem for me. What bothers me is seeking independence by pouring gasoline onto Han Chinese, by banishing all non-Tibet migrants, by misleading the international society with miserable stories made from government financial aid, and by special interest groups' self-serving agenda under independence cover.

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Photocopy of Drunkpiano's original text:

Forward

Long after the confusion of tongues, English, not Chinese or any other language, starts to be the de facto international lingo. The reality is that almost the entire world is now published in English. And I am afraid that we have to live with this fact for long to come, whether we like it or not.

I am not saying English is evil. Quite the opposite, I believe English is not a bad choice for the sake of a unified tongue. But not all the minds of human being are alphabetic. There also exist things, many of them are great, that are not offered in English.

The following is a post regarding what prompted Michael Anti (赵京) into writing his English blog. Although AEB (Anti's English Blog) was already water under the bridge (Ref[1][2]), the same mindset brought the inception of this blog here.

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(The following is from http://blog.hjenglish.com/echo_zkl/archive/2005/11/22/177229.html, photocopy of the original text is attached at the end of this post.)

For me, to accomplish a certain matter is sometimes proven to be even harder than delivering a baby. Although I've already signed up at some BSPs to reserve spaces for my English blog, it took me a long while to get started on the real deal. Chinese is my mother tongue, and I expect the readers of my blog to be largely from mainland China. The news that caught my eyes is also linked to China in large part. To start an English blog seems irrelevant to what I am doing at work and would inevitably erode my time budget. What matters most to me is whether my fellow country man shares the same anticipation as I do on a unified news body(*), as well as the craving for freedom and democracy. To a man with deep aspiration, nothing is more exciting than being able to root for his homeland in his mother tongue.

But what happened recently made me realize how misconceived or detached China is in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is hard to imagine that the rest of the world got the firsthand account on Taishi villiage through a distorted news report from The Guardian (Ref[3]). i.e, in the eyes of the rest of the world, nothing comes into being until it is recorded in English.

However, it does make sense to me now in hindsight. If you ask me what I know about Iran and Iranians, I would have nothing to offer besides the image I got from those English news reports that paint their president as a hard line dictator. No one knows what Iranian intellectuals have in their mind. They speak Persian and I don't. Thus consciously these Iranians minds are opaque to me and the non-Iranian world. The only thing I can think of is what Iranian president has said, in addition to the words from those Iran-bashing western politicians. Sadly, a great country is turned into a black-and-white stereotype in this way. We would be left nonplused to any political move that might come out of Iran next.

The same can be said about China. One of such stereotyped views can be aptly found through what happened to Mr. Edmund Xu (许知远) recently. Mr. Xu, the chief reporter of "The Economic Observer" (经济观察报), jumped ship to "New Life" (新生活), along with some of his coworkers. And his job hopping was portrayed by an English news reporter as such that Mr. Xu was doing this because he was fed up with the lack of Freedom of Speech at "The Economic Observer". Obviously, the English reported was one-track minded into thinking Mr. Xu's move was another smoking gun like the protest happened at the editor's office of "China Youth Daily"(青年报). Thus Mr.Xu's recent move proves once again that the Freedom of Speech is deteriorating in China, blah, blah, blah. And more disheartening was that the dude came to this conclusion simply because his assistant managed to scrape some grumble words off Mr.Xu's blog and translated that single piece for him.

Such kind of "Lost in Translation" has laid ground for severe distortion of truth. For example, Professor Xiguang Li (李希光), an imperial guard for tight media control, was ridiculously extolled by western media as a stalwart fighter against media censorship. He thus got a variety of chances to speak to the world on behalf of Chinese news media. And some ostensible NGOs, which evidently are the works of con artists, were presented by western media as the grass root movement for social reform. There is also a conservative editor who has no interest in opinions against dictatorship, was applauded by renowned US expert on Chinese affair as the most influential figure on anti-dictatorship in China.

But Professor Li was right on one thing. He once conjured up a brazen coup to beat western media in its own game. He proposed to the Chinese government to put more focus on propaganda in English and yank the interruption of certain matters out of the hands of western media. Such no-fair-play strategy, which is kinda like Transfinite Warfare at information age (信息超限战), is a disgrace to Chinese as a whole (**).

As a personal blog, I have no intention to fight against the hegemony of western media. What I feel strongly about is to tell the world what those minds (Intellectuals) in China are vehemently discussing: Let the rest of the world know that we are not wasting our time doing nothing!

Going forward, I would start to translate those sticky points of views among Chinese Intellectuals and post them at http://mranti.blog.com (change to http://mranti.blogneo.com/ ). The original Chinese text may be around 1500 characters each. I have no bias against any group. I would try to choose carefully among: researchers funded by government, Marxist, Maoist, new conservative, democrats, constitutionalist, conservatives on culture, conservatives on politics, moderates, environmentalist, woman's rights group, scientologists (***). I would try to label them as the way they label themselves and make the description as accurate as possible. Also I would try to keep a balanced and unbiased view when I pick articles to translate/edit so that the whole spectrum of Chinese political minds can be presented without much distortion. After all, what they say utters Chinese intellectuals' voice in Hi-Fi.

My blog will be kept interactive. Any comments that you made here on my translation will be addressed as soon as possible. Solecisms will be corrected and different opinions will be taken into serious consideration. If anyone comes up with better translation, I will accept that without reservation. For the time being, I plan to keep the blog update for one piece every other day. I think with my gradual improvement on English, I might make the fresh rate to one piece per day. Despite my best effort, I am afraid there still will be many blunt mistakes left at the beginning. Please be patient and bear with me on that. And your friendly feedback on that will be also high appreciated. I believe I would be able to do much better and more professional on this in the not-so-distant future.

This English blog (Anti's English Blog, AEB) is entirely different from my Chinese blog in terms of topics. Thus my Chinese blog would not overlap with my English blog. If anyone happens to subscribe my Chinese blog's feed, please also add AEB into your subscription. Any promotion and external link on AEB would also have my deepest appreciation. I wish through AEB more western readers could have the chance to observe the most sophisticated cerebrums China has to offer.

On top of that, for those readers who wish to do something for our great nation, you can offer your talent, effort and resource at any time to pursue China's future, the kind of future that comes with freedom. Allergy to the incumbent party should not be an excuse for our inaction. Let's disregard its existence and move forward, along with our conscience. I believe this is the mentality that Chinese bloggers should have at Internet Age.

Footnotes:
(*) I don't quite understand Anti wants to convey here. The translation here is merely a literal rephrase of his original text in Chinese.
(**) Anti calls it unfair. But to be honest, I think Professor Li does have some merits here. And I failed to see how this strategy is unfair to western media.
(***) I didn't realize there are so many think tanks in China with convoluted names. I wish here my translation had faithfully labeled them.

References:
[1] Climbing the Great Wall, We Will Persist in 2006, Washington Post, 02/19/2006

[2] The Freedom of Chinese Internet Users is Not a Slave Girl of the Americans, Washington Post, 02/19/2006

[3] Taishi Village and The Guardian's big error: Western media discredited in China, RConversation, 10/16/2005

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Photocopy of Michael Anti's original text: