Cup of Cha
This is China

Something strange happened in the last week: the Chinese media/government propaganda machine began heavily covering “Tebet” (certain places and people will be spelled creatively). For the first few days of the uprising the government tried to keep things as quiet as possible, blocking dozens of sites and forcing Western media out of the area. Yet a little more than a week out they are blanketing the newspapers with slanted coverage.

The heavy coverage is definitely more prevalent in the English language local papers than the Chinese ones, but it’s prominent in both. How prominent? The People’s Daily has a fixed banner at the top with the headline “Riots in Lasa” (spelling intentional). Hell, they even have a special section of the website dedicated to the situation. China Daily has a slightly more subtle banner for a special section called “Lasa Riots.” We all know that the coverage is completely biased, but let me give you the clearest example in my eyes. I’ll give you all the sentences with either the word “police” or “army” in one of the most prominent article in the People’s Daily:

On the temple roof, about a dozen monks stood and threw stones at police.

Damn dirty monks!

As the riot intensified, a group of people tipped over a police wagon, and then flipped a nearby car...

56 cars were damaged or burned. Dozens of public security officers and scores of armed police were injured, 10 in serious condition…

After the riots began, Party and government officials of the Tibet Autonomous Region reacted quickly. They deployed the police to disperse the violence, and firefighters to put out the fire and evacuate those trapped inside burning buildings…

Local authorities say more than 580 people have been rescued by the armed police, including three Japanese tourists, as well as teachers and students in a primary school and a middle school. There were no foreigners among the casualties…

In their handling of the incident, China’s public security and armed police have exerted the highest restraint. They did not use any deadly weapons, not even when their own lives were threatened. Some riot police were cornered and beaten. Others were stoned. Armed police on duty outside the gate of the Romache Temple were surrounded and attacked by rioters. None of them fired on their attackers…

By Wednesday, more than 150 rioters had turned themselves in to police, and handed over what they had looted.

Number of mentions of the army: zero. Number of mentions of soldiers: zero. [Update: This article may explain why there are so few police references. They weren't there.]

A look over the Chinese versions of the sites showed that they were saying basically the same thing, although the articles were much less prominent. The lead story on 人民日报 for example, was about economic and scientific development.

But the most important aspect of this coverage is that China has decided to blanket their media, particularly English-language media, with stories that give the narrative they want to convey. There were simply too many stories coming out of the West that portrayed the incident badly to allow that version to be the only one out there. So the Chinese put out their own account, and attacked the messenger. They said the problem was not the uprising, but rather the media’s bias (sounds like a certain candidate I know).

Will this new strategy work? Perhaps. To a degree anyway. It is important for them to put their version out there because it sews the seeds out doubt in people’s minds. While they are inclined to believe that China is acting irresponsibly and brutally, it is difficult to find reliable proof. Yet in the end the strategy is doomed to failure. Westerners simply have too much access to a wide variety of news sources, and the government’s misguided attempts to restrict access to websites only made people think think they have something to hide.

In the long-run this may be subtle but critical turning point. China seems to understand that it has miscalculated. Suddenly everything from YouTube to the hated BBC has been unblocked. It seems that they have realized winning an argument does not happen when you present the only opinion, but rather when it is the most convincing.

Tags: censorship, media, western china
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