Cup of Cha
This is China

Considering the fact that virtually everyone under 35 that I meet in China is working in PR, you would think the government would be able to run a halfway decent campaign. And yet this T1bet situation has shown the stunning misconceptions that the country has about what will create good press coverage.

As I’ve mentioned before, the absolute dumbest thing that they did was kicking all of the journalists out of the t1bet, something that has set off a chain reaction, resulting in the stunningly embarrassing events of yesterday. For those of you who missed it, a hand-picked group of reporters went to T1bet with lots of handlers, and they still saw T1betan m0nks shouting about how they were not free.

What China did was screw this up at every single level. And if they had even the faintest sense of self legitimacy, they would not have created this mess.

First they gave the impression that something was going horribly wrong and that there was something to hide. They did this by evacuating reporters and foreigners from the area. This led to bad press coverage and bitter reporters who had to write stories from afar. Never a good idea.

Second, they attacked…the press. This is not a brilliant strategy if you are trying to get the press to give you better coverage. The only time this works is when reporters are covering a presidential election and, even though the coverage is pretty even-handed, all of the press members deep down prefer one candidate over the other and are then tricked into believing that they have been biased because of their secret love for a potentially great leader. I’m just saying.

Third, they print tons of propaganda that doesn’t even seem vaguely credible. However after everyone calls them on it, they concede the tiniest of points, as if that will convince anyone:

A top T1bet official Thursday corrected a misconception that the recent riots in Lh@sa targeted only Han residents, saying the notion is meant to undermine ethnic unity.

T1betans also fell victim to the March 14 riots, said Baema Chilain, vice-chairman of the T1bet autonomous region.

And I thought the issue was about police, military, autonomy and nationalism. I guess it was just about rioters.

Fourth, they set a ridiculous propaganda mission, which inherently means that foreign reporters are going to be looking for the slightest sign of problems, and even if they don’t see problems, they’ll assume that they are just being sheltered from the real problems. So basically there is no point of even having the trip because you’re either going to get bad press because the focus will be the restrictions or because some incident occurs and the whole mission blows up in your face. Of course, this second option is really unlikely because why would an authoritarian regime worth its salt allow itself to be shown up on a controlled press outing?

But of course they did fail to control the environment, which is almost impossible to imagine. Plus every story had a bitter line like this:

Several American news organizations were invited to send representatives on the three-day press tour, but The New York Times was not.

The really sad part about the whole thing is that in a normal, rational society, no one would make a big deal about a few m0nks protesting their government. It is the fear of self-illegitimacy that has driven the Chinese Government to take this series of absurd and foolish steps. In the West people protest all the time. Last week Americans protested the five-year anniversary of the Iraq war…and the country continued to exist! Amazing!

The Chinese Government has long struggled to believe in its own legitimacy, and its recent PR blunders have done nothing to convince the world to see it any differently than it sees itself.

[I have changed this post's title back to its working name because I felt that the title I had posted it under, "If They Only Had a Brain," did not have the effect or emphasis I intended.]

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