I spoke earlier about how open the Chinese government has been in allowing full reporting, both inside and outside China, in regard to the Sichuan quake and its aftermath. Old habits die hard, apparently. It has been quietly declared that there will be no more stories (at least inside China, at least for now) about the fact that so many school fells and so many government buildings didn't, or about the immense amount of donated aid that is vanishing into thin air long before reaching the victims. (For example.) But the edicts don't seem to have the force they once did. Too many people are too angry. What happens next isn't clear yet: maybe the hammer will fall hard and things will go back to how they were; maybe the hammer will fall hard and break; maybe a new compromise will be reached before the hammer falls.
In other news, I've never done it myself, but I've often thought that "News Crawl" would be a good fiction workshop exercise. You watch any major television news program, see, but instead of watching the images and listening to the anchors and reporters, you only read the headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen, and you have to write a story linking the first, say, five items into a single narrative.
Last night, though, this would have been a stretch. My mouth just kept dropping further and further open at each successive item:
A 747 carrying U.S. diplomatic baggage breaks in half on take-off...
and a cast member from the Harry Potter series was stabbed to death in a bar fight...
All of which was just a little too cosmically incongruent for me, so I stopped watching. I'm guessing that the fifth item would have been in regard to Virginia Quarterly Review and Zyzzyva beating the hell out of each other as re: slushpile etiquette. And I'm guessing that right now some hack at Fox is pitching his superiors on his great new idea: When Lit Mags Attack.
May 26, 2008, 8:44 a.m.Categories: China, History, Litmags, Politics
"Officially, you can never eat it here. Well, it's not that you can't eat it, but, no, you can't eat it. That's the only answer I can give you." - Masataka Kinashi, head of the Usuki Tourism Association, Japan
Most of what I have to say about all things Tibet these days has been posted over here, and that's where I'll continue to think out loud about it, but here's one post I thought perhaps worth editing and double-posting:
My thoughts on Chinese politics are (obviously) informed by my own big-picture stance, which is not and I hope will never be (kneejerk or otherwise) anti-China, anti-Chinese or anti-Han, but simply (and purely, and always) anti-bully.
The problem of course being that my reactions as determined by that stance often come perilously close to--or, still worse, actually become--more instances of bullying itself.
The other problem being that sometimes the bully has a point, and I find myself caring less than perhaps I should, as my antibullyness is invariably higher energy than my yesyouhaveapointness.
Most of what I have to say from here on out can be synthesized by mixing what you find here with what you find by scrolling further down that same page to CCT’s comment "Where the Western media dropped the ball..."
By which I mean only one of the things Orwell meant: to the extent that They (any manifestation of power--Bush or Hu, take your pick) can control what we know, they can control what we are. And there are two ways to do that: giving no information, and giving misinformation. And we should be no less quick to condemn the latter when CNN or RFI is the mouthpiece than to condemn the former when Xinhua is the (okay, silent, but still) mouthpiece.
That said, the two are not equal crimes, regardless of who commits them. Those giving misinformation can be challenged and corrected and, best case scenario, smacked in the mouth. Those giving no information (or, worse, actively working to prevent anyone from gathering any information whatsoever) cannot be challenged in the same way, and there is nothing to correct. One might well try to fill the gap from other sources, but the non- or anti-informationist has reserved for himself a plateau from which to say, "Ah, but those sources are biased!"
And however irritating it may be, he has a point.
But he should not be too surprised if no one listens. The only voice more grating than that of a bully bullying is that of a bully claiming victimhood.
March 30, 2008, 11:07 a.m.Categories: China, History, Politics
