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| China-Japan-Koreas | |
| Guardian cries wolf, Chinese rub hands with glee as all foreign media are smeared | |
| 2005-10-24 | |
| I found this article on China Daily, which was unusually longwinded and convoluted. Usually, the articles are a few paragraphs and uninteresting. As I have an interest in the "rural unrest becomes spontaneous direct democracy" theme that seems to be breaking out all over in China, I plowed through the whole thing, and then did some web searches. Seems as if the Guardian's reporter made up a story of a democracy activist being killed when he was not. Some relevant excerpts: In early May, a villager surnamed Liang was elected as the leader of a village group. During the election, Liang promised that if elected, he would distribute each villager 10,000 yuan from land acquisition proceeds and donate a plot of land to the village. After Liang was elected, the villagers demanded that he fulfill his avow, so Liang, together with villager Feng and another villager, went to the Village Administrative Committee which was asked to distribute money. But the three were refused. They then appealed to higher authorities concerning the distribution of land acquisition fees and the finance management of Taishi village several times. The village committee, town and district authorities explained the legal issues attentively to the three, quoting relevant State and provincial policies. It begins. Corrupt local officials stealing money, no surprise there. Around 8:40 pm on September 8, some Taishi villagers found that Lu Banglie came with two stranger foreigners driving into the village in a taxi. They were stopped near the Taishi Secondary School by some villagers, because Lu Bangjie came to the village very often in that period and villagers were not happy with him. This time, he arrived with two stranger foreigners in straw hats. The villagers warned Lu not to stir up trouble there because they won't listen to him anymore. The villagers told them to leave immediately, but they kept hanging around in the village. The two foreign men, claiming to be reporters working for a British newspaper but refusing to show any identification, excused that they came for a report on orphan adoption in Taishi. Villagers' suspicion over the trio climbed, as there was obviously no orphan in their village. Great cover story there, Guardian. Lifted it right out of the inflight magazine, did you? Upon realizing that they could hardly entered the village under whatever pretext, the trio then attempted to force their way in and a heated spat escalated to some pushing and shoving. Uh-huh. Lu Bangjie claimed he was injured. Because he was? At 8:50 pm, the Yuwotou police received an alert and rushed to the scene to restore order. The three were later taken to the town government building. After questioning, the two foreigners were identified as the Guardian (UK)'s Shanghai-based correspondent Benjamin Joffe-Walt and the Singaporean Tang Guoye, an employee of a Shanghai-based translation company. Since they were not able to show any documents of permission filed by relevant foreign affairs department, the Yuwotou police briefed them it was illegal for them to gather information without the permission of the provincial and city-level foreign affairs departments. What, they couldn't afford a carton of smokes for a permit? After that, to Toadying to Communists. Classic Guardian. Anyone bet that they'd apologize for a similar error on a story about the U.S.?
The normality of being ripped off by their local officials, that is. See here for a the original Guardian article (with a correction prepended, but the sensational headline is untouched). And then the Readers' Editor's response when it's discovered that a fraud has been perpetrated, and sympathy is expressed with the reporter's position. After all, the he thought he was "going to die". As if being surrounded by unarmed skinny peasants is the same as having rifle fire whizz next to your head. A weblog post sums up the whole affair. A google search gives a lot more information about the affair. There is a lot of real abuse happening in China, and from now on, every time there is an incident, the government will point to this and say, "see, look people, you can't trust these foreigners, they've admitted lying about us because they're jealous of our claims to the Spratly Islands." | |
| Posted by:gromky |
| #5 why shouldn't the reputation of the western media be badly damaged in the eyes of the Chinese? It's badly damaged here. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-10-24 22:59 |
| #4 And the lefty newspapers wonder why their readership is falling like a lead balloon. |
| Posted by: mmurray821 2005-10-24 11:25 |
| #3 I've heard of this incident, as well as what happened in Taishi before this, and this is just gonna allow for the problem to continue. *sigh* :( Then again, it "sure beats" (for the PRC government) having to openly deal with local semiautonomy against central government "imposed" reforms, i.e. 'transparency' measures that the central government imposes whether for PR or to shore its legitimacy up but that the local officials refuse to adhere to, even though apparently the people have started to see the disconnect between the two levels of government... |
| Posted by: Edward Yee 2005-10-24 10:20 |
| #2 And this is different from their coverage of the WoT, how? Patterns of behavior, underlying traits are consistant. |
| Posted by: Slomble Ulolung9962 2005-10-24 09:49 |
| #1 They always did have a problem with the truth and recognizing their own shortcomings. Why stop now. |
| Posted by: MunkarKat 2005-10-24 08:36 |