Gazette: Western media unfair to China

Montreal Gazette - Thousands of Chinese found they were able to access the BBC News website for the first time last week after years of strict censorship. Emails from these new readers flooded into the BBC. Much to the surprise of its editors, most of the comments were critical of their coverage.

The negative feedback so shocked the BBC that its Asia bureau chief Paul Danahar, who is based in Beijing, felt it necessary to respond to this criticism and explain the BBC's challenges of reporting in China.

Danahar acknowledged that the BBC's reporting on Tibet drew much ire from Chinese readers. He defended the BBC by pointing out that it was the first foreign broadcaster to obtain pictures showing the ethnic violence against Han Chinese by Tibetans in Lhasa. He claimed that as a direct result of the BBC's broadcast of these pictures, the Dalai Lama called for an end to the violence.

Not mentioned in his article is the fact that before the publication of these pictures, the Western media were uniform in their condemnation of Chinese brutality and the crackdown. Even after the pictures' publication, the West is still critical of China's handling of the situation in Tibet.

When casualty figures were reported, Chinese official figures were put in juxtaposition with the figures provided by the Tibetan government in exile, always worded in a fashion that suggested the official figures are less trustworthy. What is not clear is that if the Dalai Lama learned of the Tibetan violence against ethnic Chinese only through BBC broadcasts, how was he able to provide any casualty figures?

Our own media are not immune to this bias when it comes to China. Reports of faulty toys, trade imbalance, labour practices, environmental issues, paint China as a hellish place. Reports of economic boom, military build-up and nationalistic sentiments describe China as a menacing superpower soon to challenge the West for a dominant and dominating position in the world.

The result of all this sensationalist, biased reporting is a very badly understood China.

The cover of a recent issue of Maclean's magazine showed a police officers beating up an escaping Tibetan monk. Splashed across are these words: "Butchers and Monsters," promoting an article written by John Fraser titled: "The brutality in Tibet is no surprise. Communist China will never change."

The article was a standard anti-China diatribe. The author is, however, entitled to his opinion. What was disingenuous about the picture is that the policeman in question was not Chinese. In a small caption at the bottom of the picture, the magazine acknowledged that the photo depicted a Nepali police chasing away a Tibetan demonstrator in Katmandu.

China's population size makes it a formidable economic entity. In reality, China is a poor Third World country just starting out on its road to development. At this beginning stage of development, it encounters much systemic difficulty. Its political system is totalitarian although no longer communist except in name; it lacks a well developed judicial system; there is rampant corruption; labour standards are minimal and recent. These problems need to be acknowledged, criticized and corrected. However, we need to understand that they cannot be corrected overnight.

China's Tibet policy can be seen only in this context. It is not a perfect policy. It might even be a bad policy. It is however a policy derived from a national objective of economic development. As a nation, China and its people have elected to rid themselves of poverty by embracing market reform. Along with success, however, economic development has also brought an increasing income gap, environmental degradation and rampant corruption. In Tibet, these negative consequences might well have been magnified through the lens of ethnic tension.

Here in the West, we need to recognize that the negative consequences of China's development need to be solved gradually but persistently through continued dialogue and engagement. Reporting should be balanced rather than sensational.

Ethnic-based riots and violence should be condemned. Dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Beijing should be championed.

Finally, a word on the Olympics and the call for boycott by some in the West. China's handling of Tibet, though often hamhanded, has basically stayed the same over the last 20 years. It has certainly not worsened since the Olympic committee awarded the Games to Beijing.

Ethnic riots planned by some Tibetans with a certain political objective have been quite effective with the help of sympathetic Western media. However, any boycott of the Games or its opening ceremony will be interpreted by the Chinese people (ordinary people who are understandably proud of their collective achievement) as hypocritical and antagonistic.

A confident, prosperous, and accepted China is more likely to become a liberal democracy than a humiliated, rejected, and paranoid People's Republic.

By John Chen, associate professor of medicine at McGill University.

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