China’s nasty side seems prominent these days
The WSJ reports that journalists who covered the unrest in Tibet have been getting death threats via visitors to a “military themed Internet bulletin board”:
Some Chinese nationalists have undertaken a campaign of harassment, including violent threats, against foreign reporters who took part in a recent trip to Lhasa, for alleged bias in their coverage of unrest in Tibet. The intimidation efforts have included hundreds of calls and text messages to the cellphones of reporters who took part in the government-arranged Lhasa trip late last month, including correspondents from The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Associated Press.
The flood of threats began this past week after the cellphone numbers, Chinese names, and brief descriptions of several of the correspondents were published on a military-themed Internet bulletin board. Contributors to that site have boasted of making harassing phone calls, and posted their own violent threats. “Beat to death these unjust, conscienceless criminals,” wrote one.
The campaign is the latest escalation in a nationalist backlash against Western news coverage of the March 14 antigovernment riots in Tibet and their aftermath. The precise basis for the complaints isn’t clear, although critics have circulated a few photographs published on news Web sites that they argue were misleadingly cropped or captioned. More broadly, the anger reflects deep-seated resentment among many Chinese — fostered by decades of government propaganda — at perceived interference in China’s internal affairs by foreign governments and groups. The phone calls and text messages in recent days have ranged from relatively mundane denouncements to profane attacks on the reporters and their families to numerous threats of violence and death. (”You damned American devil, God will punish you. Tomorrow you will be hit by a car and killed.”)
Robert Kagan and Bruce Kesler have more about disturbing and somewhat surprising developments in China in this year of the Beijing Olympics, a year in which the Communist government of China might better have opted for a friendlier public relations façade. (Is gunning down monks an Olympic sport?) Better to see the truth, however.
As Kagan notes, China is “a 19th-century power, filled with nationalist pride, ambitions and resentments; consumed with questions of territorial sovereignty; hanging on repressively to old conquered lands in its interior; and threatening war against a small island country off its coast. It is also an authoritarian dictatorship.” No kidding.
April 6th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Some Chinese nationalists have undertaken a campaign of harassment, including violent threats, against foreign reporters who took part in a recent trip to Lhasa, for alleged bias in their coverage of unrest in Tibet.
Islamist intimidation has had great success against Western media. Is it surprising that such tactics produce imitators?
As Kagan notes, China is “a 19th-century power, filled with nationalist pride, ambitions and resentments; consumed with questions of territorial sovereignty; hanging on repressively to old conquered lands in its interior…”
A Chinese apologist might invoke the analogy of breaking eggs to make omelets. Ironically or cynically, he might point out the positives among the consequences of nationalistic Western imperialism.
He might gibe at the “multicultural” toleration–encouragement!–of creeping Sharia in Europe, Mexican irredentism in the US, etc. He might argue that while America locks up record numbers of its people (and iirc the highest fraction in the world), it nurtures those who actively work to bring the society down.
And he might criticize the West, especially the USA, for not developing something more cogent than 19th-century nationalism. (I view multiculturalist weakness, self-hate and corruption as symptoms of decline, not of progress.)