While in the Melbourne CBD this morning, I was handed a flyer by a young man. The young man and his two friends were wearing white t-shirts that had something like “We are all family” written on the back. One of his friends had a Chinese flag. The flyer states the following:
MEDIA DISTORTION!
VIOLENCE!
In the Memory of the Victims in the Tibetan Riot (March 14, 2008)
There has been disgraceful truth distortion in large scale by such medias like CNN, BBC, CTV, NTV, RTL, FOX, Washington Post, etc.
Right to live is deprived with violence, no freedom of speech can be secured with truth being trimmed. To stop further violation on the most basic human right to life and freedom of expression, we stand up shouting out:
No Violence!
No Media Distortion!
Discover more uncovered truth, please visit:
The flyer also contains some quotes from various sources and statistics from Xinhua. Here’s a couple of the quotes, followed by a few of the statistics:
“Tibetans gone crazy….” (ABC News)
“Oh my God, someone has a gun” “Oh my God. Oh no. That’s crazy. One hundred people are trying to stone one man.” (The Guardian)
18 civilians and 1 police officer killed; 382 civilians injured…908 shops were looted. Damage has cost a estimated loss of more than 244 million yuan (about US$34.59 million).
There’s nothing on the flyer to indicate who’s responsible for writing it, although perhaps the people who put up those websites are.
Yep, welcome to the SchizOlympics - for the overwhelming majority of Chinese this Olympics is China’s graduation pageant and they have no idea why Westerners are so keen on spoiling it.
See EastWestSouthNorth, Blood and Treasure for more.
I’ve noticed a poster or two along the same lines at uni (in the Merewether building, which is part of the economics and business faculty = lots of Chinese international students). Mostly written in Chinese, but you can tell what they’re about from the small English part saying ‘media bias’ and the map with Tibet highlighted with a Chinese flag design.
Maybe the ‘media bias’ would be less if the Chinese government allowed the media unrestricted access to Tibet. Just a thought.
The Lateline interview on Thursday night with two China experts makes interesting reading in light of this propaganda effort:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2213781.htm
Elements of the global Chinese community have been mobilizing over the last week in ways which echo the late 19th/early 20th centuries in response to the Olympic torch relay and Tibet. The symbolism of the Olympic torch in particular has spiralled out of control into the “sacred flame of the motherland” (as Chinese students in Australia have started referring to it) symbolizing “China” itself, beyond the party-state, as unbounded excess as nation/civilization/history/subjectivity, and becoming a site of mobilization.
“Two China experts”: One of them is Geremie Barmé, one of the world’s leading China experts.
Yeah there a pair of dudes in the Melb CBD. One of them’s in military gard and carrying the PRC flag and the other one’s got the PRC Flag t-shirt. They’re handing out Tibet is a happy joyous land bollocks. Exactly what they think they’re gonna achieve is beyond me. No-one believes ‘em and the agit-prop isn’t anywhere nearly as skillfully produced as our domestic brand of political bullshit.
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All we need now is some Falun Dafa people and the Free Tibet crew. Then we can have a real party.
At first blush it crossed my mind that perhaps those Laughing Liberal Pranksters who brought us the famous Linsday flyer last November were back with another one of their Top Japes, but then I realised they were all no-longer laughing, being expelled or resigned from the Liberal Party and either on or awaiting criminal charges.
No, this one’s got the fingerprints of the Chinese Intelligence Services all-over it.
It’s the Party-Line to a Tee and reeks of a certain Stalinist amateurishness to boot. (You know the sort of thing: China only got the Olympics becasue it’s Paradise on Earth and the rest of you had better damn-well remember that and join-in the chorus, if you know what’s good for you).
At least it shows that China’s intelligence services are every bit as ham-fisted, incompetent and inept as our own.
No surprises there, I suppose. It must take a particular type to go into that line of work.
3 Mark Apr 13th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
The PRC’s flyers might be propaganda - so is much Green party boostering on this site! - but their claims may very well be true, or at least have some merits.
Once upon a time, when I was still in the grip of wishy-washy liberal illusions, I was a keen supporter of Tibetan independence, dutifully tramping along to late night meetings. buying bumper stickers and pin-buttons. Its a “stuff white [liberal] people like” kind of place.
Even now, as a bitter, middle-aged and jaded political observer. I am conflicted. As a conservative I sympathise with the longing to maintain national identity in the face of multicultural irritation. So I hope the Tibetans maintain some local customs and traditions.
But conservatives are also are suspicious of violent political unrest. And as a modernist I am on the side of institutions that promote material progress. The PRC is an exemplar on both counts.
The first order of business for Leviathan state is to maintain security over the external border and internal order. The PRC is doing that and much more.
The post-Mao PRC, and the CCP party that runs it, has done more good for more people in a shorter space of time than any other secular organization in human history. NPR reports on how the PRC bolsters infrastructural and institutional conditions in Tibet:
Crusading liberalism, sponsored by the hegemonial Occidental powers, has wrought havoc in the CIS and Iraq. By contrast the PRC has been a model of rational social progress over the past generation. Not the least of which has been its demographic policy, which has stoppe a global meltdown of the ecology.
A break-up of the PRC would cause economic regress and political chaos in the region. So sensible liberals should urge moderation in the treatment of Buddhist monks, but otherwise cut the PRC a bit of slack.
Darlene, there’s some background to the anti-CNN movement here from an ex-CNN journo http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2008/03/anti-cnn-the-me.html (via. Savage Minds http://savageminds.org/2008/03/29/chinese-reactions-to-western-media-on-tibet/) There are some interesting tidbits eg.:
MH, any chance of writing a guest post?
A couple of dudes hacing out pro-China pamphlets? That’s nothing. There was a full-scale protest and march in Sydney this afternoon by Sydney-based Chinese students, decrying the biased western media, etc. etc.
The best I’ve seen though, was the banner being towed by the small plane in San Francisco (I think) saying “Tibet will always be a part of China”.
Best olympic torch relay ever.
Some of the Chinese arguments are:
1. Tibet has always been part of China
2. The west doesn’t understand China or Tibet
3. The western media have been selectively reporting, distorting and lying about the events in Tibet and the Olympics torch rally.
4. The west is fearful of a rising China and is using issues such as Tibet/human rights to keep China down.
Good luck to anyone who tries to debate otherwise - it’s like trying to persuade a Red Guard that Chairman Mao might have some faults.
To quote Mutant Palm, a month ago:
I was interested to note that the torch relay passed through Buenos Aires pretty much without incident, as it confirmed something I had been suspecting, which is that there is a Western construction of Tibet as a serene, spiritual ‘other’ to Western modernity and materialism, and that this informs the passion of pro-Tibet movements in the West.
I am not saying that there are not serious human rights abuses occurring in Tibet. What I would observe is that an image of an ‘other-worldly’ Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhist spiritualism links up with western ‘New Age’ philosophies in ways that perhaps colour how the question of Tibet is approached.
It is probably no accident that the most prominent Western pro-Tibet activists also tend to be Hollywood actors, who are often in the vanguard of such ‘New Age-ism’.
The search for a spiritual alternative to Western materialism also tends to come at a certain stage of material development. In other words, there is likely to be a lot more of it in California than Buenos Aires at this point in time.
Recent events in Nepal also suggest that the populace can tire of transcendent other-worldliness after a while (interestingly, in the name of communism, if the images from the news media can be believed).
I also suspect we are at the end of the days when Olympic torch relay happened without protest.
It would be hard to believe that there would not be hundreds of people somewhere who have a grievance with Britain that would warrant disrupting the torch relay in 2012. It could start in Athens about the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, for example!
I recall watching the Olympic torch pass through Redcliffe in 2004 before settling down for a pub lunch. Accompanied by two police officers on bicycles and a car promoting the local real estate agency, if I remember correctly.
Leinad, Yes. Anyone with half a brain could see the human rights thing blowing-up full-force in China’s face. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist.
What staggers me is that the Chinese obviously failed to do so and have been playing catch-up ever since.
I suppose the poor fools came to believe their own propaganda. They assumed it was “mission accomplished” when they won the Games.
A pretty stupid thing to do, really.
Just ask George Bush.
Evan: Yes, makes you wonder what the IOC was thinking too…
Past experience suggests that the IOC don’t spend a whole lot of time on unnecessary thought, Leinad.
They’re generally a bunch of retired sporting-jocks or business types with delusions of grandeur. Sammaranch, for example, had been one of Generalissimo Franco’s Ministers, which says it all, really.
I doubt they saw this coming either.
Leinad, quoting Mutant Palm: “old chestnuts like Tiananmen provide a larger context of long term, ongoing problems. ”
Well, you young folk! If the Tienanmen massacre is an old chestnut, may I proffer these too: the trial of the “Gang of Four” including Mrs Mao, the death of Chou En Lai, the “Democracy Wall” and its suppression, the flight of Lin Biao, the many excesses of Mao in power from 1949 to the seventies, famines in the 1950s including State sponsored famines when Mao the amateur engineer thought it’d be a piece of cake for folk to make steel in their back yards [!!] “Great Leap Forward”; “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” fake liberal campaign, executions, collectivisation, the Red Guards and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” [inner Party conflict played out on a huge scale with persecution of the well-educated or culturally accomplished].
Yes, there’s a huge tract of history to deal with - much of it bloody and bitter and couched (officially) in flaming rhetoric; Stalisim gone Baroque; Orwell’s nightmare “1984″ performed on a huge national stage, but much of it performed in secrecy and fear…..
As much as new Cambodia inherited the legacy of Pol Pot, new China has inherited Mao, and it seems has not yet dealt with those years of lies. Let a Hundred Truth Commissions Bloom! Let a Thousand Historians Contend. Hold High The Banner of Fearless Investigation!!! May the Great Dialogue Commence!!!!!
BTW, I’m not claiming the Foreign Devils outside China are or were angels, just wishing to shine a torch on China.
cheerio
I can’t shake the feeling that there isn’t a great deal of passion or sincerity going on with this though, not even sincere jingoism. I’m sure there might be a few, but for many of these students it’s probably a thing to put on the resume for party membership (and the lucrative opportunities that entails), especially when these things are organised by Chinese Students Associations (if you ever have dealings with one of these, they put the Young Liberals to shame as hilarious budding apparatchiks).
I don’t see much chance of them mobilising the majority of the vast number of Chinese students, it’d take far more to break through the ambilvalence, apathy and individualism the party created.
So I would be very careful about extrapolating too much from this, it may well just be the Chinese student equivalent of “Aussies for ANZUS”
“Maybe the ‘media bias’ would be less if the Chinese government allowed the media unrestricted access to Tibet. Just a thought.”
That’s true, Bryn. Sounds like you go to Melbourne uni.
“sacred flame of the motherland”. Wow, that’s extraordinary hyperbole. It’s the flame of the Olympic movement, nothing much more than that really. If they feel that way about the Olympics, no wonder they are so upset about the reaction of many in the West to it.
“All we need now is some Falun Dafa people and the Free Tibet crew. Then we can have a real party.”
Yikes, that’d be interesting Adrien. There was some March for Values happening at the same time. Not sure what that about. Values?
Evan, it’s a bit sad that those young folk are willing to work for those whoever is responsible for it.
Thanks for that, dk. Interesting reading. It’s perplexing to me that in the comments thread some people want to suggest that Western media is as bad as Chinese media. Yep, Western media can be made, but there’s tons of sources to go to, unlike….well, you know the rest.
CNN could have included the photo of the rioters, but it wouldn’t have changed anything.
Two boys and a girl with flyers is all that could be managed down here, jangari. Sydney wins again
Good point, Richard.
I too saw the protest by Chinese students in Sydney yesterday. At 1st I thought it must be a pro Tibet rally but then realised it was the opposite - a One China rally and a protest vs western media bias.
They clearly have a point as there were thousands of protesters making one hell of a racket and yet a major protest on a key news issue of the day and I’ve yet to see a mention of it in either the online or print edition of the Sydney Morning Herald.
Was there any violence at the protest?
That seems to be the main way to get a rally into the media.
No violence at all but an enormous amount of noise. It was incredible, far more vocal than any recent protests I’ve seen in the CBD.
There was a report on ABC television news about it but I can’t find anything related on the ABC website, though I did manage to find this short clip on YouTube.
A very good article on the real Tibetby an American professor.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
Unlike the pro-Tibet or pro-china site, it’s fully referenced, and offered a very neutral view. It is quite obvious to me who has been telling more lies and who has been brain-washed all this time.
It’s also very interesting that the west who had been criticising the chinese students for being voiceless and lack of liberal thinking in the past, now try to silence all these western educated chinese students for standing up for their belief and trying to discover the truth.
We don’t need to be a genius to see that some countries are trying to use the Tibet issue to divert the attention of their own people and the world for their failed action in the middle east.
That’s quite a meaty article. Will have a proper read of it later, but he’s right about the “Shangri-La” tendencies of many in the West.
Westerners romanticise Buddhism like nobody’s business, even people who would be very vocal against other religions. It’s very odd.
Anyway, Amnesty has got some interesting stuff up on its site about human rights in China:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/what-human-rights-legacy-beijing-olympics-20080401
I can’t agree with that at all. There is a direct line from this global China protest movement to the Chinese student mobilization in Japan in the 1890s, through (most significantly) the May Fourth Movement of the 1920s, through numerous others - the 1905 Anti-American boycott, Tiananmen in 1989, and my favourite - the 1971 Diaoyutai Islands protest movement across America and in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Taiwan, 2500 students signed a petition again the US and Japan over the Diaoyutai using their own blood.
There are common themes around the nation - the body of, the blood of, sacrifice in the name of, the sacred - into which the Olympic flame and opposition to the global pro-Tibet movement has been incorporated into an impossibly overloaded symbolism.
You should talk to some of these kids and hear what they have to say.
Who did you think I was talking to?
Jack -
And it’s okay to do this by invading your neighbours and subjecting them to totalitarian rule? See the thing is that there’s a chance that Tibetans don’t actually consider themselves Chinese. If they don’t than, as I see it anyway, they don’t have to regard the PRC as the legitimate government. Hence this law and order rhetoric is a cover-up for legitimizing invasion and supression.
So ‘liberals’ are reseponsible for Iraq ‘ey Jack. Oh I didn’t understand that Dubya was a ‘liberal’ silly me. I reckon if I had a cursory look at your rhetoric since the war started I’d see that you were a stalwart supporter of the war until it went FUBAR, then you admitted it was a mistake whilst implying that you always knew it would be and now it’s all the liberals’ fault. And exactly how is the mix of corruption, KGB intrigue and greed that led to the post-Soviet mess the fault of ‘liberals’?
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How long have you worked for the Ministry of Truth? I must say: doubleplusgood duckspeak Minitrue refs unbelievable bullshit.
Well in certain ways that’s true. However they will sell people’s organs ’cause they’re part of naughty religions and they will claim the right to invade their neighbours and they’ll even tell us what we can and can’t say from time to time. Rational or no, the PRC are a pack of arseholes.
From today’s New York Times (14 April)
Tibet Backers Show China Value of P.R.
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Linked text
So it is no accident that we have protests against the Olympic torch relay now. There as been a plan along these lines for seven years.
I also note that the Nepalese (Tibet’s neighbours) have democratically elected a Maoist government.
I’ll avoid the Life of Brian-ish “what has the PRC ever done for us?” discussion.
I work with several Chinese engineers. They’re smart but big believers in orthodoxy. You don’t hear them speak up at meetings or ever rock the boat, they just keep their heads down and do what they’re told. Management loves that, but it’s symptomatic of never questioning authority figures.
One woman who became an Oz citizen recently still holds all she knows from her mother country sacred. She’ll defend the “communist” leadership even though she’s chosen to leave it for a free and open, capitalist country. As far as she’s concerned Tibet has always been part of China.
That’s not a complete fallacy. China long fostered satellite states as buffers. Korea, Indo-China, and probably Tibet too. The Mongols will do that to you. There’s a difference between even Soviet-style iron curtain countries and straight-up annexation that’s too subtle for Chinese brought up under PRC education. The fact that the Americans are in Korea and Japan is seen as the same thing as the PLA in Tibet - seriously!
History like the Boxer Rebellion and the colonial issues behind it still rankle the Chinese. To once be a (introverted) world power only to be a vassal plaything of gweillo-come-lately barbarians has left a mark. It’s a beaten dog attitude to any criticism, much like white Afrikaans I knew in the 80s had. They see themselves as the 200pd gorilla now, and think world opinion is just a battle of wills that can be won just by crushing it. Issues like Tibet or Tiannamen only make them think it’s the bad western culture trying to tell them how to run their country all over again.
The wagons are circled, minds closed, slogans shouted, pamphlets handed out.
Nothing will change as a result. The Chinese will decide that the Olympics will be a brilliant testament to Chinese culture and civilisation even if the whole world craps on it. They’ll just write it all off as racism by jealous and inferior westerners. Our golden era is here, we’re in charge, and you can all get stuffed.