I am currently spending several months in China doing some language studies.   Everywhere you go, the talk is the Olympics.  I was asked to write a short essay for class about the Olympics, I hear about it constantly on the news, friends are talking about it, and it was the topic of discussion at a lecture I attended at a local university yesterday.  It’s everywhere.

At the lecture yesterday, attention was brought to the article written by Fu Ying, China’s ambassador to the UK, that appeared in The Telegraph a few weeks ago.  Fu writes eloquently from the perspective of someone who understands where China is, and where it has been, and also how China is perceived by the West.  She writes, like everyone does, with an agenda.  If the article is a good reflection of her true feelings (and it seems to be), she is driven by a love for her country, and a frustration over the representation of that nation’s efforts at reconnecting with the world after decades of being closed off in order to focus on internal reforms.  Much of the world will not agree with how those reforms were handled, and Fu seems to be aware of that.  This causes her to recognize the gap, and to express her wish for China to seek to understand the international community, and vice versa.

A couple of days later, Melissa Kite and David Eimer issued a reply that also appeared in The Telegraph.  The article interests me because it seems to me that it misrepresents Fu’s original piece.  Her defense of her country is reported under the headline “Chinese ambassador attacks Western media.”  While there is a clear element of criticism aimed at the Western media in Fu’s article, I think the word “attack” is rather too harsh a description of it.  The strongest words Fu uses, as far as I see it, are these: 

        There is especially infuriated criticism of some of the

        misreporting of China in recent weeks, such as crafting

        photos or even using photos from other countries to

        prove a crackdown.

Other than this bit, most of the article seems to me to be rather careful in its indictment of the “Western media.”  That’s not to say that her point is not clear, as she does go on later to say that the Western media has “demonised China,” and that if it wants the respect of the Chinese people, that such respect is to be earned.  But it is, overall, an article that seems to be written with a degree of restraint.

While the response to Fu’s original article does mention the “demonised China” comment, and the call for the media in the West to earn China’s respect, it leaves out the section I have quoted above.  Oddly enough, the representation of Fu’s article comes off looking much more like an “attack” on the Western media in the Kite and Eimer response than it does in its original form, despite leaving out the most damning quote in the whole piece.  Rather than discrediting Fu, it seems to me that Kite and Eimer’s response reinforces her message.  They chop up her original piece and couch it in a manner that quite misrepresents the voice of the original.  In this way, they are guilty of the type of “misreporting of China” that Fu points to (and which I originally might have taken as being a bit extreme).

Yesterday, I was in a classroom full of Chinese students born after 1980, those very young people that Fu is talking about in her article, saying she hopes that they don’t become so disillusioned with the West and the media handling of the Olympics that it undoes the efforts that China has put into its opening up.  Sitting in that room, I was very aware of the effects that the political agendas of those who are in a position to shape the news can have on the minds of each individual who encounters their reports.  Ms. Fu and I certainly agree on one thing — our hope that the optimism and kind feelings the Chinese people have had towards the West over the past couple of decades will not fade as they encounter this sort of thing.

The comment sections on those two articles are a great read in themselves.  (I haven’t left one, choosing to write about it all here instead.)  Robert Boyd raises a question in one of his comments, and it is echoed in another left by Juan, asking whether observations similar to Ms. Fu’s, if made by an ambassador from the West to China that were critical of the Chinese media, would be made known to the Chinese people.  Well, all I can say is that I am in China, and neither this article nor responses to it were at all hard to find, and I have found plenty of material from the other side of the debate too. 

Is there still a problem in China accessing some websites?  Yes.  But, that said, the idea that the government here keeps its citizens completely in the dark about criticism against it is outdated.  I have found that many Chinese have a much more sophisticated understanding of both their own country and international relationships than most people I have met anywhere else.  Though much of my time in China is spent in Shanghai, a very cosmopolitan city where one might expect to find a more aware population, I do travel to other parts of the country, and have been to some very rural, undeveloped locations.  And when I travel, I am usually in a position to have close interaction with people I meet along the way, and have spent a good deal of time conversing with Chinese people in various situations, hearing their views of life and the world in which we live.  They are not ignorant and unaware, not by a long shot.

No one claims China is perfect, least of all the people inside of China. I really can’t see how a response like Kite and Eimer’s is going to do any good at all.  If their agenda is to see further reform in China than that which has already happened in recent decades, it seems to me that they might be going all about it all wrong.  (Same goes for protests surrounding the Olympics.)  A healthy dialogue would go much further, rather than the type of vitriol that does nothing but alienate.

© 2008 Shelly Bryant