Casting the first stone

Tibet and China have been a hot topic in global media for some time now. After the end of the riots, however, western coverage seems to have slowly transitioned from “Support Tibet!” to “Let’s all hate on China!” I have been following German-language media closely and have found that some rather renowned publications have ditched their journalistic objectivity to indulge in uninhibited China bashing, creating facts from opinions, evidence from rumour and turning news coverage into a merry old, anti-Chinese story hour.

The following is the translation of a letter I recently sent to the editor of Spiegel magazine in response to their ongoing, severely biased, incomplete and inaccurate China coverage. (For the German original, please click here.)

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For Germany and other European nations, China and other far-eastern countries are out of reach, which is why those nations have to rely on media depictions of these countries and their cultures.

For some time now, your publication has been abusing its informative function to create a completely distorted image of China which depicts the Chinese people as primitive, brainwashed, randomly spitting animals. Articles such as this one (http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,549666,00.html), unfortunately, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

To quote from your article: “The communist Party has launched campaigns and educational measures to teach citizens how to queue properly, not to spit on the street and not to swear…”

And Germans never swear? (If you’re not from Germany- we do. A lot.) Are expressions like Scheisse (You know what that means!) not more than accepted in colloquial speech? Would you write an article about the frequency of swearwords in the German language?

Like swearing, in Beijing spitting is chiefly done by construction and other migrant workers (including those from Tibet, who’d have thought?) Are those people not known for their rough behaviour in any society? Would you call dog loos and “Please keep _________ clean” signs an “educational campaign” to keep the German working classes from having their darlings poo everywhere? (Again, they do. A lot.)

Regarding the topic of the article in question (The planned Beijing smoking ban)- I only need to read back to you one of your own pieces on that joke of a German smoking ban to show how much you are blowing this Chinese “problem” out of proportion.

Your bias rivals that of the Communist Party’s media- your depictions do not serve any other purpose than to create hatred, which leads to nothing but racism.

What are you trying to achieve with this campaign? Would you like to create an anti-Chinese atmosphere? Are you hoping for the German society to discriminate against Chinese citizens? Or are you trying to hurt the Chinese economy? (In which case you’d probably have to rid the German people of their cheapskate attitude first.)

It may be about time for you to think about who exactly you’re supporting and whose hands you’re playing into- you’re certainly not helping any oppressed Tibetans.
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Of course, this is not an exclusively German phenomenon. This is one of a number of letters and comments my boyfriend and I have sent to numerous publications, including Spiegel, FOCUS, Stern, The Guardian and The Times.

And now guess what- none of these were ever published or responded to. It seems that other opinions, or the whole picture, haven’t been particularly popular with the western media lately. (Ironically, of course, the same media never stop pointing out the one-sided bias of the Chinese press.)

Even if it weren’t for the issue of the idealised and uninformed western image of Tibet and its leaders, the self-righteous smugness with which some western countries are preaching moral to the east is outrageous.

Amongst the most outspoken media and nations are Britain and France, who for centuries have set out to rob, rape and murder across the world, all in the name of glorious colonialism.

Also, anyone who has even taken history class would know about the shocking atrocities that were committed in my own home country of Germany just under 70 years ago.

And I simply don’t have the time to even touch upon all the appalling business that the US has been involved in over the years.

Therefore, one can hardly begin to imagine how hurtful and how much of a slap in the face it must be for any Chinese person to have some of their own colonial tormentors and other “developed” nations spitting contempt at them from a moral high horse that they have absolutely no right to sit on.

In the meantime, of course, the denouncing continues and newspapers produce new haphazardly researched “articles” and columns that barely disguise the authors’ hate by the hour.

And readers, commentators, bloggers and Youtubers alike are blindly parroting them, revelling in their comfortably ignorant superiority. Oh that glorious western freedom.

I sincerely pity anyone whose lack of knowledge prevents them from experiencing, and learning from, this beautiful country and its kind, open-minded and inspiring people.