News reporting on China

Every week I read all the articles about China from the main British newspapers. The thing that strikes me most is the abysmal standard of reporting. I know mainstream journalists are mostly pretty indoctrinated (you have to be to get that high up), but they're obviously pretty lazy as well. I know the Telegraph main China guy gave up learning Chinese because it was too hard. He's meant to be this fountain of knowledge about China, and can't even speak to 99.9% of Chinese people.

And a couple of weeks ago there was a big story in a place 200kms outside of Beijing. The reporter, this time from the Guardian, relied 100% on Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, for all the information. How about getting on a train and going there to find out for yourself? It's very noticeable how they use Xinhua when it suits them, for reasonably non-political stuff. Here, Xinhua is treated as reliable. But when it comes to more overtly politically-orientated stuff, Xinhua is referred to as 'the state controlled Xinhua', or 'government-controlled Xinhua', implying that, now, Xinhua is not useful as a source of accurate information. Personally, I'm sure Xinhua is rubbish, but then the British reporting is not far behind.

This week was the 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong. For 3 days there was nothing else on the news channel. I can't understand a lot of it, but the gist was 'HK is better, stronger, richer than before, also rightfully ours, so we're very happy'. That's fair enough, you wouldn't expect them to talk much about democracy and that sort of thing. It seems Beijing has mostly left it alone anyway, it's too much of a good thing for them to interfere in and mess up.

The reporting on it from this idiot in the Guardian, though, was an example of how indocrtrinated elites are. Here's the article - http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2115315,00.html

The first half is a sort of grudging acceptance that the Chinese didn't cock it up as predicted. The second half is almost Orwellian. And the second half is moaning about the lack of democracy. The last two paragraphs are as follows :

"On both sides of the border, there is more money, inequality and frustration. With neither administration elected by universal suffrage and both focusing on business interests, they increasingly resemble unpopular plutocracies.

"The collusion between rich people and the government is accelerating," said Leung Kwok Hung, the only popularly elected Marxist among the 1.3bn population of China. "We have a more divided society than ever. The gap between the rich and poor is widening.""

If you change the first few words from 'on both sides of the border' to 'In the UK', you would have a pretty accurate picture of affairs in England. England is richer, more unequal, and people feel they have no influence on government (eg, Iraq Adventure). Only 59% of people vote. Government is so obviously here to support leading British companies (eg, BAE-Saudi issue), it hardly needs clarifying. The last two sentences of the second paragraph are a pinpoint description of Britain. In HK, this situation is a disaster, but in the UK, its so widely accepted it's not even noticed.

It seems that this contradiction is just totally missed by this journalist. If he had half a brain that he cared to use, he would realise the proposterous nature of the rubbish he is writing. The idea that the UK government is somehow 'committed to democracy' is just absolute, utter rubbish, in England and especially abroad. Britain had 150 years to introduce democracy to HK, and chose not to. Why expect the Chinese to do so, especially as they're so evil and horrible anyway.

There's a phrase in Chinese - 'shuo san dao si 说三道四' - literally, say 3, do 4, ie., say one thing and do another. The Chinese government does it, but the idea that the British do it is just not acceptable in the higher levels of society, even when it is so glaringly obvious.