In an interview with Al Jazeera, Rebiya Kadeer presented a photograph of what she claimed to be from the Xinjiang riots, where protestors were circled by several lines of policemen. “If all our boys were surrounded by the police, how could they possibly have hurt anybody?” she argued. The report was cited by several Western media, but was later discovered and reported by the Chinese media that the picture presented by Kadeer was actually of an earlier protest in a small city in Hubei Province.
It was also later found that the video circulating among Uyghurs purporting to show footage of Chinese workers’ beating a Uyghur girl to death in Dongguan (the same city in which the earlier killings of two Uyghur workers at the hands of Han Chinese had triggered the Xinjiang riot) was actually a video of an Iraqi girl being beaten to death by her relatives, and was originally broadcast on CNN. The police later arrested an ethnic Uyghur in Guangdong Province of southern China, believed to have provided the video and other fake pictures under the request of, and funded by, the WUC.
As attacks on Rebiya Kadeer inside of China mounted, the Western media, having featured Kadeer in many of its reports, was also criticized for being seen to have sided with her.
Browne said he has received many emails from what he called “China’s angry nationalist youth.”
“Most of the emails are full of hatred, anger, and insults.” he said.
Mutual Distrust
Some media observers have admitted that there is a credibility issue surrounding the Chinese media that has been at the base of the Western media’s perceived “bias.”
“Western media and the Chinese media follow two fundamentally different approaches,” said Browne. “For the Chinese media, a sensitive issue like this will always have an official version of the truth, which forms the starting point for the Chinese media. On the contrary, we do not believe there is a single version of the truth, and we want to produce a spectrum of the truth, and let the readers decide which to believe.
“But many Chinese readers are not used to the idea that everybody has a say in a news story,” Browne added. “They tend to get shocked, and consider it offensive.”
In late July, the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV conducted an online survey and found among Chinese netizens who think the Western media is biased, 70.68 percent of them attributed it to the Western media’s ideological bias, 19.86 percent believed that it was because the Chinese media could not conduct independent and comprehensive reporting, while 9.46 percent believed that it was because of Western media’s inherent distrust of information released by the Chinese government.
“It is all entangled together,” said Du Ping, commentator with Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao. “When Western journalists come to China, where the political system is totally different, they naturally find it disturbing that they have to deal with the government for almost everything, which will inevitably provide them a perspective that this is a ‘society without freedom.’ On the same token, they tend to distrust the information released by the Chinese government and reports in the Chinese media.”
In fact, when NewsChina approached foreign journalists working in China, the majority of them were reluctant to be interviewed. One journalist declined an invitation to talk due to concerns that her view could not be “accurately and fully represented” because the Chinese media “has no editorial authority over its own content.”
It is worth noting, however, that a local Han protestor in Urumqi also declined to be interviewed by a Western media outlet media due to similar concerns on July 7, according to a report by Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao.
Agree to Disagree
One thing the two sides can agree upon is that, on the whole, both the Western and the Chinese media are improving in their coverage of China.
“We have to admit that in the past 30 years, the Western media’s reporting on China has been much more comprehensive, more profound and more balanced,” said Ding Gang. “Even the reports on Xinjiang riots this time are less biased than before. And at the same time, the Chinese media has also become more competitive, especially the metropolitan media.”
“We’ve never had more access to news in China, especially after the Olympics, we can now go almost anywhere to report,” agreed Browne. “Now, the reports coming out of China are more comprehensive than before.”
However, considering the criticism aimed at the Western media last year following the riots in Tibet and the Olympics torch relay, such fervent condemnation will be unlikely to simply disappear in the future. “It is not a problem to be solved. We just need to agree to disagree,” said Browne.
Others argue that best solution would be to stop focusing so zealously on the Western media. “China should stop looking up to the Western media,” said Du Ping. “The Chinese government criticizes the Western media when they say bad things about China, yet praises them when they say good things, which puts the Chinese media in an unfair position, as if the Western media’s opinion is worth more than the Chinese media’s.
“Ultimately,” Ding added, “the Chinese media should be granted more freedom and space to carry out their work, only then can they gain more credibility and have an equal say in the international mainstream media.”
September 2009
