Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Bloggers vs. The BBC
Sandra writes "The BBC has an article about how chinese bloggers hate BBC interviews, as from their point of view all the Beeb cares about is censorship in China." From the article: "This being the internet, the conversation also involved various members of the community accusing each other of having ulterior business interests, being "trolls", or covertly blogging on behalf of the state. But overall, it looks as though mutual trust will be regained. And as well as the specific dynamics of talking about China, there's a new phenomenon here of what happens when bloggers are quoted. "
How do we know that the people who are 'speaking out against the BBC' aren't themselves being coerced into doing so in an attempt by the chinese govornment to negate the BBC's coverage of Chinese freedom of speech issues.
Damn I'm paranoid
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
What else are the BBC going to be interested in? What flavour rice the bloggers prefer?
Seriously though, the BBC is a major news site. Censorship in China is a major issue. What other issue measures equal in magnitude to prompt the BBC to interview a Chinese blogger?
Argh.
"Please BBC, stop highlighting our plight for freedom on the internet."
Hmmm I wonder who could possibly be behind this...
I don't think Chinese people expect the sort of combative, probing, in-your-face interviewing techniques that the best of the BBC journalists employ.
IMO, most BBC journalists really do the job - i.e. asking questions of the 'high and mighty' as well as the 'man in the street' that the viewers/listners would like to ask themselves, and not taking waffle and bullshit for an answer.
I'd love to see the BBC's Jeremy Paxman interview George Bush, for example - nah! never going to happen.
From one of the bloggers complaining about the BBC's aggressive interviewing:
No shit. Did you ever think that it's because, particularly in the case of politicians, they are unwilling to tell the truth, or at least give a straight answer?
The example given is a politician dodging the question of whether he threatened somebody or not. The (repeatedly asked) question was "Did you threaten him?" and the (repeated) answer was "I warned him.", without any clarification of the distinction being drawn. Why couldn't the politician say "No, it wasn't a threat, because..."?
This is very reminiscent of Paxo's famous BBC interview, in which he repeated the same question twelve times when the politician dodged the question. I think it's a good thing to do. If you defer to the interviewee and don't call them on it when they dodge the questions, you are, in essence, just giving them a mouthpiece to offer their unchallenged claims. That's not an interview, that's an advert. They might as well do away with the interviewer altogether if they can't get answers to their questions.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
If I were a reporter interviewing chinese bloggers, censorship would be high on my list. Some of these bloggers maintain there's not much censorship going on. Have they forgotten the whole MSN Spaces fiasco? In my book, government censorship is never acceptable, and we should never stop criticising it. That includes journalists being annoying and asking tough questions.
- Toxic leak in river
- Bird Flu Death
- A WTO conference
- Torture
- Art on show in London
So maybe not overflowing with positive stories, but this IS typical news coverage. You have to wonder if these Chinese Bloggers are paid/told to put forward that censorship is somehow a non issue.The first sentence was misleading and wrong. BBC said something like this- More than 300 bloggers attended the conference.
Yining corrected the BBC woman."No. you are wrong, the meeting participants are less than 200."
According Chinese law, any assembles by more than 200 people should be approved officially.If not, it's illegal.
Clever clever boy Yining... he caught the BBC in a lie. However, the Chinese "Law" he mentioned, interestingly, says waves more than anything he could've said in any interview. I don't know if he did it on purpose, but that by itself should give the BBC enough to write about. Right of association anyone?http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/constitution/ amendment01/12.html
The beauty of Yining's comment is that he takes such laws as accepted truths, and uses it to disprove the BBC's claim the same way a physicist would disprove a certain claim using Newton's or Einstein's theories.
OK. I take the bait.
Slashdot is a blog. It is on the Internet. I am posting this from China.
Here is my blog entry:
1. Chinese people ought to have the same or more freedom as people in the West.
2. Taiwan IS an independent state, which all Chinese already know.
3. China should abolish the fanghuo changcheng (GFW) immediately, and let people use the Internet as freely as in the West (and it can be discussed how freely it can really be used in the West). I don't how many times I have argued this on Chinese state-owned BBS:s.
4. Mao Zedong was an asshole, a pervert and a mass murderer. He was renowned for his serious cases of VD after trying out guniangs in the villages on every one of hid goddamn trip. I have said this too on state-owned BBS:s.
I am now waiting for the gong'an to storm my apartment, transport me to a football field and give me the neck shot in front of a cheering audience...
Oh, before I die, let me just add that I, too, am fed up with the BBC, because they DON'T report the social and cultural context to the filtering in China, but see it all from a modern Western perspective (just back fifty years, and it would be different); they DON'T realize there is a process, and they CAN'T see that much has already gone in the right direction. Freedom IS gradually increasing in China, but you should NEVER expect China to be EXACTLY like the West.
OK, off to the football field...
In slashdot, we talk about stuff that matters, like whether this electric toilet seat can run Linux, is the recent act of MS/SCO/Sony/RIAA/Google.... violates the privacy of the user... It is fine to about that here. I understand what you mean, concern and worries... But, if one day slashdot becomes so powerful that it runs a cable tech news network and start interviewing some random guy in the local mall about the same issue, you can expect they will answer huh!?! It does not really mean privacy, online security etc are unimportant. It just means a large segment of the society has no interest in this in their daily life.
The Chinese bloggers being interviewed by BBC must be feeling the same as the joe sixpack in the local mall being interviewed by CowboyNeal. First, if that guy is a political activist, he or she probably won't have time hang around blogging for unrelated stuff. The other bloggers probably has an interest of travel, career, music, movie and porn. Asking them topics about politics is kind of out of context.
Second, sometimes, the journalists tend to ask questions which has an information content of close to zero. For example, ask if you can freely express about your opinion freely about some banned groups. Okay there are three scenarios. 1) that person answers along the line of "I don't want to talk about this/ I have no interest about this". The reporter reads that the blogger cannot express his opinion freely. 2) that person says no. The reporter reads that the blogger is controlled by the state. 3) that person says yes. The reporter says "yeah. I know the censorship is everywhere"...
While we all know censorship still prevalent in China, conducting such kind of interview is kind of meaningless. Many western reporters tend to have a mindset that there are only two groups of people in China: democratic activists and evil communists... The fact is the China has changed a lot. Most people just don't care about anything, or have an opinion quite different from the stereotype, just like anywhere in the world.