China: Never A Master At Modern Media “Spin,” Deserves Media's Close Examination

China is now blaming the aged Tibetan holy man, the Dalai Lama, for the majority of the recent unrest, protest and just plain unhappiness surrounding China’s human rights record.

This nation, the largest nation on the planet by many measures, feared by the U.S. military as both awesome militarily and unpredictable, has singled out a man that couldn’t hurt a fly.  He, the Dalai Lama, is the evil one.

Never mind that China’s repression of Tibetan protestors may have killed as many as 200 Tibetans, many of them sworn to non-violence and many of them monks.

China says no protestors were killed or injured and great care was taken by China’s security forces who “restored proper order.”

But China’s record of media spin isn’t good.

After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, widely known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, China’s state controlled communist media said that a student protest had been disbursed.  Unfortunately for China, there were many witnesses to that “disbursal” who lived to tell the tale.  I even talked to some who had horror stories of Chinese repression that were easily verified and “fact checked” person to person.  These folks were not lying.  They were eye witnesses to repression of the harshest kind.

Tiananmen means, literally, "Gate of Heavenly Peace."

The reported toll in dead at Tiananmen that day in 1989 ranged from 400–800 (The New York Times), and to 2,000–3,000 (Chinese student associations and Chinese Red Cross).

Now China has decided to vilify the Dalai Lama as the key to all bad publicity and protests surrounding the Olympics. China is blaming him for the recent unrest among Tibetans that threatens to tarnish this summer’s Beijing Olympics.

Through the media, China has told the Dalai Lama and his followers to stop “sabotaging” the Olympics.

The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, also printed an editorial on Saturday, April 26, 2008, attacking “the Dalai clique” for seeking support from Western countries and ignoring “the efforts and achievements made by China after shaking off serfdom and poverty in Tibet.”  
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Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama leads a prayer session in Dharmsala, India, Monday, April 28, 2008.

The Tibet Daily, another party newspaper, said, “The Lhasa March 14 incident is another ugly performance meticulously plotted by the Dalai clique to seek Tibet independence.”

Well, maybe its just me but the Dalai Lama looks to be no match for 1.3 billion Chinese.  And he hardly looks like Darth Vader to me.  And the monks don’t look very fearsome either.

But I could be wrong.

What China, and most Chinese, fail to realize is this: the world, at least most of the world, has moved beyond the ancient ways of telling lies and expecting them to be accepted because you are boss.  The world, at least much of the world, has developd a social conscience.  Organizations like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and Reporters Sans Frontieres and real, valid and mostly worthy of international respect.  If respect is lacking, at least there is international interest and listening.

That last group, Reporters Sans Frontieres, is swon to défense des libertés -- liberté de la presse.  You don’t have to be French or a brie eater to get it.

The people that don’t get it, it seems, are members of the communist party leadership in China.

So for Hu Jintao and his gang we say: you can’t suppress human right the way you do and then hope to “spin” reality into another universe.  The internet, liberté de la presse, and a host of people watching won’t permit that.  You can’t allow poisoned food to be exported to kill our pets and our fellow men and expect us to believe your spin.  You can’t make tainted blood supplies and then usher the blame on to others or out the door.  You can’t tolerate human working conditions so unsafe that mine disasters kill hundreds and perhaps thousands of Chinese workers every year. You can’t beat people up or force abortions when families have babies and expect us not to notice.  You can't ignore modern safety standard like not standing on moving trains and expect us to say "that's OK for China." What it is is a disregard for the lives and safty of your citizens.

These men, found working in China last year, turned out to be slaves.

 
Grilled rat

China wanted these Olympics.  They have bent over backward in many ways to insure the success of the Olympics.  But they have also hammered together a veneer that won’t hide much from the Western media.  The air pollution in Beijing is intolerable and, one might argue, a criminal abuse of the Chinese people.  Restaurant food safety standards have just been instituted in China (for the first time) during the last year’s run up to the Olympics.  Millions of homeless adults and young orphans are being scooped up in buses and removed from Beijing so the Western media won’t see them during the Olympics.  And sub-standard, non-Western housing, the famous hutongs of Beijing, are being seized from the owners and plowed into oblivion – so Western TV viewers won’t see them.

President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Jacques Rogge told Western countries to stop hectoring China over human rights in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Games, in an interview with a British newspaper published Saturday, April 26, 2008.

Rogge said that while he understood the strength of feeling in the West, expectations of how quickly China can change were overblown.

“It took us 200 years to evolve from the French Revolution. China started in 1949,” the 65-year-old Belgian told the FT business daily.

“We all know that there were abuses under Mao and the Cultural Revolution was not a nice period. But gradually, steadily, over 60 years, they evolved, and they were able to introduce a lot of changes.”

In 1949, Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal came “with all the abuse attached to colonial powers. It was only 40 years ago that we gave liberty to the colonies. Let’s be a little bit more modest,” Mr. Rogge said.

Well, poor, poor China.  My heart aches for the communist leaders of China.

Not.

Mr. Rogge is part of sending the Olympics to China.  Now he has to suffer the consequences.

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Jacques Rogge

No one should let the communist leadership of China off the hook.  The Dalai Lama didn’t give China a bad name on human rights or anything else.  China did.

Visit Peace and Freedom at:
http://johnibiii.wordpress.com/

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The Dalai Lama arrives in Dharamsala on April 26, 2008. Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has been pushing for talks with China on the future of his homeland for years but now is making clear they must be “serious discussions.“