A Change of Direction

I have finally stopped using being in China as an excuse not to blog. It's shameful really, hiding behind the firewall as if it can't be circumnavigated with two extra clicks through a proxy website.

Still, I will now update this blog periodically with thoughts on my time in the 21st Century What's News? Room. I intend to make the focus of this blog a look at the differences in the way China and the West reports the same news events. Hopefully, this will allow for a reasoned assessment of what's really going on.

First up we have the attached gem from the New York Times. That towns' officials are wont to beat the living daylights of people filming them beating the living daylights out of other people is no surprise. Nor does it surprise that the subsequent backlash was whipped up through Internet-based hysteria. A big focus of the Western press on China is the rising power of the Internet as a voice of local democracy and medium through which public pressure can be exerted on officialdom:

"The episode is the latest in which bloggers and others have used the Internet to force Chinese authorities to investigate beatings and other abuses by government officials."

Route this neatly through the Tianmen director of publicity...

"We’ve already solved the problem,” the director of publicity in Tianmen said Thursday by telephone. “You can read Xinhua’s articles. There’s no more news about it.”

And you end up with the China Daily line, which this morning reads: "More than 100 city officials from across the country have condemned city administrators in Hubei province for beating a man to death earlier this month..."

So as NYT would have it, the irresistible force of the Internet forced officials' hands, whereas CD reckons it was the system correcting itself. Ho hum.

NYT does not carry an update noting the officials' response and CD does not acknowledge the role bloggers played in highlighting the case. Somewhere in the middle is the whole truth, which might read something like this, if I were to write it:

More than 100 city officials from across China issued a statement condemning city administrators for beating a man to death for filming a dispute between the administrators and villagers in Hubei province. The statement came in response to mounting pressure from bloggers, who were anxious to ensure the killers of the dead man, Wei Wenhua, did not escape justice.