On October 25, 2009, this Blog was moved to:
http://learningchina.wordpress.com/
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There are two Chinas, and I’m not talking about Taiwan. I’m talking about the Communist Party, the only legitimate political party in China, and its membership of seventy million compared to the rest of China, the other 1.3 billion Chinese that have little or no say in the daily decisions made by the government.
“Beijing Today”, with a reported circulation of fifty thousand, is the capital of China’s only English weekly newspaper and is published under the auspices of the Information Office of the Beijing Municipal Government and run by Beijing Youth Daily. The Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, with a reported circulation of six hundred thousand, is controlled by the Communist Youth League.
It is no secret that the Communist government of China is notorious for altering historical facts to suit their purposes, and to censor others that disagree with the party-line.In the multi-party democratic west, we call that censorship. In China it is an entirely different thing. It is saving face and maintaining dignity or increasing face by altering the facts a bit or a lot. It’s a case of a government making sure that the history books are all politically correct and paint only a positive, glowing image. Since losing face is embarrassing in China, don’t expect things to change soon. The Chinese have been like this for thousands of years.
The Chinese government is not in the business of telling the ‘real story’ to embarrass themselves. The Chinese doctor that reported the SARS epidemic now lives under house arrest, and it was debated if he should be executed or not.
My wife has said that in China when the government prints or says one thing, the rest of the people believe the opposite.When Sterling Seagrave wrote ‘Dragon Lady’, refuting many of the facts in Chinese history textbooks still studied in Chinese public schools, he was denied entry into China using his American passport. Lucky him, he also had an Australian passport. He went anyway.
In “Around the Block” a memoir by Stephanie Elizondo Griest (she worked for one of the English language Communist Party publications in China at one time while living in Beijing), the Chinese people she worked with were proud of their self-censorship (doing what it takes to save face–my words, not Stephanie’s).
This revised post was originally published at Speak Without Interruption on March 25, 2009. Click on this link to read the longer version.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
There is an old saying: "When in Rome do as the Romans do." The same applies to China or any culture that isn't Western. China is not a Western culture, never has been and never will be.
The way the government in China controls "its" media is part of that culture—not due to Communism.
The Chinese do not talk about the "Elephant in the Room" like people in Western culture do. In the West, people talk about all their "Dirty Laundry". When that "Laundry" is really dirty and garners lots of "Yellow Journalism" attention (our so called free press), those people write books about the embarrassing events they were involved in and get paid big money for poor behavior. Such behavior is unacceptable to most Chinese. Of course, there are always exceptions, but in China to tell all goes against the grain. It is more acceptable to put on a sunny face no matter how gloomy or dark life is. When it gets too dark and gloomy, the people in China will riot and rebel.
What is "scary stuff" to me is the gang culture and drugs that permeate American culture. Every major city has thousands of teenage gangsters. Los Angeles has more than a hundred thousand teens that belong to violent street gangs. I taught for thirty years in a school district where most of the schools were surrounded by neighborhoods controlled by street gangs.
I witnessed a drive by shoot from my classroom doorway as school was letting out. One night while working late, a rival gang shot down a single gangster outside my classroom. He died instantly from that shotgun blast. Every year, a teen gangster threatened me at least once, and thousands of American teachers are physically attacked in their classrooms. Many that are attacked go to hospital emergency rooms. I knew a teacher that tried to break of a fight in her room and got knocked out. I injured my back breaking up a violent fight between two girls.
I read yesterday that six-hundred-thousand police officers are physically attacked (annually) by drivers they pull over for moving violation. Another eighty are killed.
Drive down most city freeways in America, and the freeway signs are protected by razor wire so graffiti can be controlled and not cover the words on the signs. America has more violent crime than any country on the earth. America has more people in prison than any country on the earth—twice the prison population than China has and China has 1.3 billion people to America's three hundred million. Half the military expenditures in the world are spent by the United States. The United States has more nuclear weapons in storage than any other country on the earth.
Regardless of the control the government of China has over "its" media, I feel safer in China than I do in America, the land of my birth. It seems that there is a terrible price to pay for the (so called) freedoms Americans value.
Are we really free and just what is freedom?