HOME / five-ring circus: Scenes from the Olympics.

Dispatches From Beijing

five-ring circus:
entries

Are the Media Being too Mean to China?

By Tim Wu
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 7:59 PM ET

Check out Slate's complete coverage of the Beijing Games.

Chinese fans at the Beijing OlympicsTo say Beijing is eager to welcome foreign guests to the Olympics may be the understatement of the century. The new airport terminal features a welcome robot, there are "welcome booths" on just about every downtown street, the names of the Olympic mascots spell "Welcome to Beijing" in Chinese. If you're not careful, you may be walking down a normal street only to find yourself surrounded by eager volunteers clad in blue shirts who point out everything you ever wanted to know about Beijing and plenty more you didn't. In the Olympic Village, where the athletes live, friends say that the enthusiasm and attentiveness of the volunteers borders on harassment.

RSS

The enthusiasm is understandable. Everyone keeps talking about the "100-year dream," and in a sense, Beijing has been waiting to host this—its international coming-out—since 1842 or so. That's the year China lost the Opium War and started a 160-year-long search for respect. Much to the country's chagrin, it still isn't getting any.

The Western media have arrived en masse to China's ball: lots of senior journalists, in sloppy dress, interested either in their own athletes or in writing their own big "China piece." (Foreign guests are here, too, but fewer than Beijing had hoped for, thanks in part to self-defeating visa policies.) Not surprisingly, the stories written about China by foreign journalists are rarely on topics China might have hoped for.

The Western press is fascinated with the two P's: pollution and protests. For dessert, anything to do with Tibetan independence, censorship, or foreign visitors is also welcome. Sometimes all of these issues converge, like last Wednesday, when a gaggle of Americans put up a "Free Tibet" banner in Tiananmen Square on what happened to be a very smoggy day. Now that's a story.

So are the media just being a little mean to China? It does at times feel akin to if coverage of the Atlanta Olympics were focused on the failings of the U.S. health care system and the plight of the American Indian. One foreign correspondent for a major American newspaper agreed, telling me, "In Athens the traffic jams were presented as the outgrowth of a hip Mediterranean lifestyle. Here they become yet another product of state repression."

Chinese friends and strangers I've been chatting up on the street complain that the coverage is unfair or biased. "Maybe it's just a kind of cultural difference between Eastern and Western peoples," said Liu Shudi, a student I talked to in a cafe in downtown Beijing. She concedes that it's hard to get her hands on much Western media, but what she has seen (mainly CNN) seems "biased." "We worked so hard. Maybe we didn't do everything right, but we really did work hard. It's unfair."

The cultural difference she's talking about is reflected in fangwen culture, which translates as "official visit." If you've ever done business in China, you know what fangwen is all about—a kind of formal tour that is meant to show how great the host's facility is, while the guest says admiring things. China was hoping the Olympics would be a nationwide version of fangwen. Instead, it is mostly getting fangs.

Another theme that you hear is how much "hard work," or nuli, went into getting the city ready for the Olympics, which makes all the criticism more painful. Here is a Chinese commenter online reacting to the American cyclists who wore masks in the Beijing airport: "You are guests, you come to someone's home that has, through lots of hard work [nuli], been cleaned up, and who welcomes you very warmly. At this time, shouldn't you show friendliness and kindness?"

But when I ask most of my reporter friends—that is, the Western media who live here—if the foreign press is being too mean, they say no, that China deserves the scrutiny it is getting. As one longtime resident said about the pollution, for instance, "China just blew it." In his view, China is backsliding on all kinds of promises it made, but the IOC "is down on its knees giving China a blowjob."

A second theory put forward by reporters is that criticism of China is simply the kind of news an American audience is interested in—criticism sells. A third is that the whole point of giving China the Olympics was to subject it to foreign scrutiny that, for once, it might have to listen to. Reporter and food writer Jen Lin-Liu, who lives in Beijing, wrote in the New York Times that the whole project is backfiring—that "as China projects a new air of openness and tolerance as it rolls out the welcome mat for Olympics visitors, the government is cracking down on citizens."

Lin-Liu is getting at the real paradox here. China's idea of what makes for a better Olympics for foreign consumption—tightened security and cleaning up marginal elements—is exactly what makes Western reporters crazy. If you're showing off for the fangwen, you want to clean things up, but the West wants to see the dirt, not the rug it was swept under. It's the dishonesty, as much as the substance of what's wrong in China, that seems to get under the skin of Western reporters.

Share this article on Digg

Share this article on Buzz

Yet there may be something at the core of the Chinese complaint. It's a sense that no matter what China does, it won't really be accepted as an equal on the world stage, that it will always be left cleaning the toilet at the OECD country club. It might be that China is perceived as an economic and political rival to Europe and the United States, so that the old Cold War reporting instincts come out. But there's also the fact that China doesn't have the manners and grace of the richer countries, even if it has increasing economic and political clout. The question, then, is whether the negative coverage of China is completely rooted in substance or reflects something like class disdain for its uncouth ways.

Beijing itself is an expression of the problem. With the exception of a few neighborhoods, the city is dynamic, but, frankly, not charming. It suffers from the current obsession with fazhan ("development"), which in urban-planning terms replicates the "giant soulless block" development style of Robert Moses and the American 1950s. Authenticity, which Western culture valorizes, isn't something that Chinese people or planners go for right now. There's a tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures, instead of trying to preserve their decay in the way Westerners like. It's all just a little too nouveau riche to get much respect.

None of this is to trivialize the issues the media raise about human rights abuses, censorship, or the situation in Tibet and Xinjiang. For the most part, I happen to agree with the Western critics. But perhaps the key is the difference, as one longtime foreign correspondent puts it, between stories that are appropriately negative and coverage that's just downright cynical. There's no question that this cynicism is compounded by China's stiffness and eagerness to please. Right now, China is an awkward place that just wants to be loved—and that makes it particularly easy to kick around.

five-ring circus:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Are the Media Being too Mean to China?

By Tim Wu
Posted Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 7:59 PM ET

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Jacob Leibenluft is a writer from Washington, D.C. Tom Scocca is a writer in Beijing. June Shih is a lawyer and former Beijinger. Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

Entry 1: Photograph by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images. Entry 2: Photograph by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. Entry 4: Photograph of Michael Phelps by Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images. Entry 5: Photograph of Vivian Lee by Hot Tang. Entry 6: Photograph of a man selling a ticket by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images. Entry 7: Photograph of the Beijing beach volleyball cheerleaders by Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Damn! Must have taken forever to make that-- it hit every spot in Beijing that I've ever sought out, and then some. You'd think for a 7-minute song they could have aimed for less repetition, but this is, remember, a people who listen to and can sing all the songs of ABBA and The Carpenters without understanding a word, so it's perhaps understandable.

But I disagree about CCTV just a bit-- they've come very, very far in the last 15 years, and NBC has no excuse. Seriously, some of the commentary should be banned for posing health hazards to anyone listening. NBC coverage just stinks, whereas CCTV is trying to put out as much coverage as it can. Sometimes they have boring minutes of people standing and waiting, but is that worse than NBC's Games to Commercials ratio, which seems to be 1:15 or so?

--DuckworkerMike

(To reply, click here.)

The west has to wake up and understand that the world is now moving faster than the west expects or accepts. It is easy to go on spreading woolly idealistic conceptual jargon about the right kind of democracy and freedom. At the end of the day, are all people happy in the west and USA? Barring Scandinavian, Nordic and Dutch Europe the rest of the region is a mixed bag of discontent and discord. In the US the average quality of life is so varying it intrigues sometimes how there can be such a boast about US being a developed nation.

Freedom to talk is not license to only condemn and criticize. Whatever be the form of government the progress China has made is undeniable and visible. An average Chinese like any other average national expresses dismay and concern over policies and this is universal. The poor in US with no participation in the machinery of governing will be as disappointed and annoyed as any Chinese. Only difference is your media makes a business of everything including good and bad news. I will challenge the media to give reports on events of human condition whether local or international without pedaling products and services on the airways. The media should accept the professional responsibility of providing true and accurate reports about events and not use the opportunity to make exposes and start beating the chest.

Yes, Beijing is growing and it has pains. Did not New York suffer this after the great depression? I think people lived more miserable lives then and we only have pictures of their past. So please learn to admire what is good after hard work and effort and don't go on playing the lone man blocking the tank card. It is history and much has changed in sociology since then.

--subrashankar

(To reply, click here.)

A real criticism that could be made, but seems to be ignored, is this paradox between the "dynamic" booming development China and the "tendency to either modernize or tear down old structures". This is strange because part of the whole fangwen presentation of China is to show foreigners their great history -- their temples, and more temples. But along with this big emphasis on a grand history are these re-modeled, modern versions of their old buildings. How about writing about that inconsistency instead of just the "giant soulless block"...

--ArkhamEscapee

(To reply, click here.)

I am old enough to remember how the media treated China in the seventies. There was a simplistic fascination bordering on romanticism towards China, even with Mao, and the Red Guards. But as China developed, and becomes more successful, we have become more critical. To me, the June 4 incident paled in comparison to the tens of millions victimized during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, but where was the western media at that time? Also, isn't it offensive to see Mao's picture still prominently displayed at the Tian AnMen Square? Much more so for the Chinese people. That's akin to seeing Hitler's picture in Berlin and Stalin's in Moscow. Yet we see American network anchors broadcast in front of this symbol of evil. I have not heard the western media discuss the reason why it's still there. perhaps removing the picture will take away part of the unconscious resentment that the western media feels about China.

--jdfjdf

(To reply, click here.)

The whole 'meanness' of the media against China that the author mentions is really not about fairness. It's about competition. If they are going to compete with us for limited resources, we have to start by labeling them as some form of enemy. It's not about sharing resources, it's about making sure some upstart doesn't get a piece that should be rightfully yours.

--mallardsballadd

(To reply, click here.)

We hold China up to the same scrutiny with which we view ourselves. This motivation is sufficiently legitimate and, what's more, can easily be proven to be symmetrical in the way that China's coverage of "the West" is not. Should anyone doubt this fact, he'd only have to peruse China's risible and deluded reports on "Human Rights Abuses" in the United States, wherein press-freedom infractions are cited *from American media sources*. The genocide of Native Americans, the failure of America's heath care system which the author points to---these subjects receive exhaustive analysis in American discourse. The West ought to report on China as intrepidly as the West reports on itself. And the ultimate passive-aggressive implementation of the term "bashing", which deflects legitimate criticism as merely a "hate crime" is preposterous. If our criticisms appear to "Chinese eyes" excessive, much of this is due to the excessive praise they grant themselves in their domestic media. Try to excuse us if we momentarily disrupt your self-worship.

--AristophanicBirdsForGovernment

(To reply, click here.)

(8/16)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES