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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