The screenshot above comes from the Anti-cnn.com website as it appeared on Saturday. The item is titled "Rebiya Fakes It! Using a fake photo to twist the truth in the Urumqi incident"
Click on the image to view an image of the full web page. I happen to have saved the page (a research habit I've developed) before Anti-CNN.com went completely offline, sometime on Sunday. For the time being at least there is a Google's cache of the front page from July 9.
Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer mistakenly made prominent use in interviews of a photo that turned out to be from riots in Shishou, Hubei province, in late June. Al Jazeera has an account here.
Roland Soong at ESWN has a full account of how the photo came to be misconstrued and misused (scroll down to find the relavant material in his long compilation of news about the Xinjiang riots).
Apparently, the source of the error was Reuters, who had sourced the photo from Twitter and put it out on the wire before recalling it. Roland somehow got ahold of Reuters' recall notice (click to enlarge):
The Chinese media and netizens naturally went to town on the whole thing.
The unfortunate - but it appears genuinely honest - mistake by Rebiya Kadeer sparked a fury of comments on anti-cnn, many of which denounced the Western media for emphasizing Uighur casualties while making light of Han Chinese casualties. Some comments on that page and on other threads on the anti-cnn (which unfortunately I did not save) described the July 5th race riot as an act of terrorism, accused the Uighurs of being terrorists, and accused Western governments and the Western media of supporting anti-Chinese terrorism.
Such views were egged on by commentaries in the Chinese state-controlled media, some of which even appeared in English. One, which by Sunday had been removed (but which can still be found in the Google cache) began this way:
By whatever calculations, the blood-thirsty maiming and slaughtering of civilians, as young as six years old, in Urumqi, northwestern China's Xinjiang on July 5, is heinous homicide, barbarity against humanity, and terrorist act on China.
A look into the aftermath of the bloodbath found it bore the hallmark of secret and well choreography aiming at innocent human lives, identical to Al Qaeda's killing of thousands of office workers at the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11, 2001. The terrorists this time did not use flying petrol bombs to detonate tall buildings, they brandished steel rods and wielded knives to end lives.
It continues:
The barbarity has astonished China and the world. Thanks to the authorities' revised policy of free on-spot reportage, in sharp contrast to previous media controls, more people on the globe have got to know the senseless killing. Some said that even during New Stone ages, our ancestors, though barely dressed, did not do this to each other while chasing nuts and edibles in the woods.
..and so on.
This kind of language has raged all over the Chinese Internet between July 5 and Saturday or so.
With Xinjiang we've seen substantial evolution of the Chinese government's media strategy in times of unrest, aimed to make the best of a bad situation. The government has come to recognize that media blackouts don't work in the Internet age. Assuming your goal is to maintain the central government's power and the Communist Party's overall legitimacy (rather than total social control which they gave up on a long time ago) when localized unrest flares up it is more effective a multi-pronged strategy, as follows:
- Cut off the Internet and mobile messaging in the immediate area where the violence took place.
- Censor blogs, chatrooms, search engines and social networking sites heavily to prevent people from spreading unofficial information or using social networks to organize. Increase blocks on overseas sites. Shut some domestic ones down if needed.
- Get Xinhua, the People's Daily, CCTV and other officially sanctioned news outlets on the scene as soon as possible. Fill the airwaves, news pages, and domestic websites with the government-approved version of what happened. (This new approach first emerged as a riot-information-management strategy with last year's Weng'an riots.)
- Grant access to foreign media - the lesson of last year's Tibet unrest is that if you keep them out they're not going to believe a thing you say. This time, foreign reporters have directly reported about Han victims of Uighur violence as well as Uighur victims of Han violence. Which is probably one reason why the foreign media has not directly challenged the government's official death toll reflecting many more Han dead than Uighur dead, though they've quoted the Uighur exile groups who say the Uighur toll is actually much higher. Coverage instead emphasizes how hard it is to figure out what's going on, which is a much better storyline for the Chinese government than "they won't let us in, what are they hiding?"
- Be helpful: facilitate the foreign media coverage with press conferences, a dedicated news center, and a discounted hotel in the area you want them to stay in. Allow the police to kick them out of places you'd rather they didn't go to, act coy when reporters complain.
- Wait for the inevitable mistakes to be made in the Western media - mis-captioned photo here, mistakenly used video there, a grossly oversimplified turn of phrase comparing a race riot to the 1989 democracy movement, plus some downright factual errors here and there. Let the nationalistic blogosphere and Chinese media outlets like Global Times rip into these things as proof of the West's anti-China bias and deliberate obfuscation of the truth.
- Take advantage of the failure by Western commentators, exiled activists, and human rights groups to consider how their statements and actions may sound and look to ordinary Chinese people, even those who are open to critiques of their government. Last year we saw a pro-Tibet protestor accosting a wheelchair-bound Chinese athlete. In the Xinjiang case, many Western commentators and human rights groups have condemned methods used in the crackdown, expressed legitimate concerns about an impending witchunt against Uighurs, and rightly critiqued the Chinese government's bad policies that led to the ethnic tensions, but then in many cases failed to deplore the killing of innocent Han. This has given many Chinese the impression that the West condones Uighur violence as excusable because they're an oppressed minority. For example, this statement by Human Rights Watch is unlikely to play well with Chinese audiences because it expresses no concern for the loss of innocent Han lives and stops short of condemning all killers regardless of ethnic background. The Chinese government can afford to dismiss it without domestic political cost.
The result is that while they've got much unpleasantness to deal with, their legitimacy in the minds of the majority of Chinese is sufficiently maintained. While many people may have a lot of serious issues with their government, enough people end up concluding that the foreigners and the exiles may not have the Chinese peoples' interests at heart either - so might as well stick with the current crop of bums and work things out with them gradually.
This weekend, however, the censors seem to have decided that the patriotism may have gone too far. Hence the deletion of certain articles, the shutting down of Xinjiang-related discussions in nationalist-leaning fora like the Global Times, and the outage of anti-cnn.com.
One reason for dialing things back may be the reactions coming from the Islamic world. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has condemned China's crackdown in Xinjiang as genocide. Global Voices' Iran editor dug up this Persian-language blog comparing the Chinese in Xinjiang to the Israelis in Palestine. I get the impression that there is a lot more of that kind of sentiment out there. China has spent the last few decades cultivating strong relationships with the Islamic world, including Iran. China badly needs their oil, among other things. Chinese companies, engineering crews, and construction workers are all over the Middle East and Africa. Suppress the Tibetans however you like and your external economic relationships won't suffer that much. Treat China's restive Muslim minority in an insensitive, ham-fisted manner, and there could be all kinds of hell to pay. Time to start figuring out how to govern a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country in a sustainable, enlightened way.
What's also interesting, I find, is that this year in the wake of the Xinjiang riots I've been seeing a lot of discussion and critique on Chinese-language websites about the Chinese government's ethnic policies. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong but there seems to be a more detailed and nuanced policy discussion going on this year than in the wake of last year's Tibet unrest. A number of postings by Han Chinese people who've lived in Xinjiang, and who think that the government's minority policies have been a failure, have been translated by China Digital Times, Global Voices, Fools Mountain, and ESWN among others. I've come across several Chinese blog posts and articles analyzing the policies on ethnicity and race practiced in Europe and North America. There seems to be a pretty strong consensus among nationalists as well as liberals that - whatever the solution may be - the status quo policies are not working. Combine this with pressure from the Islamic world to do a better job, will things change?
The problem, however, is this: does the Chinese government have the ability to conduct credible policy reform? If good policy happened to be formulated, does the center have enough control over the localities to actually implement it effectively?
If the answer to those two questions continues to be "no," the Chinese government's new and improved information management strategies may help them keep the country together in the short and maybe even medium term, but in the long run even the cleverest and most thorough strategy of censorship and information management will be hard pressed to prop up failed policy and bad governance.
Lots of good info and insights here, especially regarding the discussion of China's ethnic policies.
Being a Chinese American who do visit relatives regularly in China, I still do believe that the Western media is extremely biased against the Chinese government in terms of headlines, who to cover, and is rarely ever apologetic when caught with mistakes.
Rather than dismissing the Chinese bloggers as simply "nationalists", perhaps the Western media should just admit its faults especially when caught with mistakes. Afterall, we all complain about Chinese government's usual tactics of burying the truth and ignoring criticisms. For the Western media to criticize the Chinese government when it does the same to its critics is a bit hypocritical.
For all of its worth, I noticed that after the creation of the anti-CNN site, CNN and the US media has been ALOT more careful in filtering out the none-facts when it comes to reporting on China. The restoration of Western media's credibility within China is an important step if the Western media actually wishes to change China for the better.
Posted by: AC | July 13, 2009 at 12:49 PM
I think you are vastly underestimating the ability of the Chinese government to change policy. If there is a social consensus within the party and outside that something needs to be done, then the policy will change.
However, the main thing may keep the status quo is that people are divided as to what the new policy should be. Broadly speaking some people think the policy is too soft and some people think it is too hard. If this situation remains, then you are likely to see the current policies remain, even though no one likes them, because it's the closest thing to a compromise between two opposing views.
Change, but change what?
One other thing. Information management was part of the strategy, but there has been some information to manage. One thing that is coming out of the Western news reports is that for the most part the police seem to be behaving well. While there are accusations of police bias, if the police were randomly shooting people then none of the information management techniques would work. So to suggest that the Chinese government is relying *only* on information management is quite flawed.
It also brings up some issues that legitimate people can disagree on. For example, does the state have a legitimate right to censor rumors and information that would incite more rioting?
Posted by: Twofish | July 13, 2009 at 01:27 PM
Also I don't think that the Western press is less biased.
The Uighurs simply do not have the sort of media skills and leadership that the Tibetans have. Also, portraying the Uighurs as innocent victims of foreign oppression opens up the issue of Uighur detainees in Guantanamo and the US designation of the ETIM as a terrorist group. These are big messy complex issues that most media groups in the US don't want to touch.
Also, the situation in Urumiqi looks a lot like the situation in Los Angeles after Rodney King. And talking about solutions like "affirmative action for Uighurs" gets you into the problem that a lot of the people in the United States oppose affirmative action. Criticizing Chinese restrictions on mosques, and pretty soon you wonder about US restrictions on Islamic charity groups.
So what happens is that the frame story of oppressed minority just doesn't work in this situation, and there is far, far more acceptance of the Chinese government's view of things because Chinese biases in this situation much more closely resemble American biases.
The other thing is that I don't think that most Americans are inclined to react with outrage. To most Americans, this looks like "just another intractable ethnic conflict" and there is nothing that grabs peoples addition here more than any other ethnic conflict in the world.
Posted by: Twofish | July 13, 2009 at 01:45 PM
West’s hatred for the Chinese people - not just its government – is clearly projected through its “just” and “unbiased” news medium.
In demonizing an ancient people with a proud and glorious civilization, the West projects its own intimately-known evils of racism, colonialism, hypocrisy, barbarism, and cruelty onto the historically-feared Chinese.
Two birds with one stone: the West gets relief from its own guilt -- after all, it has got a lot of blood on it hands in the last 500 years--and indulges in murderous envy of a people who are returning to her rightful place in the world.
Posted by: David | July 13, 2009 at 03:18 PM
Rebiya Kadeer's photo incident is worth emphasizing not because it exposes her as a liar -- as you've argued, this kind of mistake is too obvious too be intentional -- but because it reveals the WUC's casual relationship to evidence -- one that, not coincidentally, is shared by Free Tibet organizations and most other self-proclaimed human rights groups: Any rumor goes, nothing needs verification.
The reason they can maintain this attitude is because the Western media not only eagerly, but blindly eats up everything fed to them by those organizations. Their excuse being, since NGOs don't have the organizational capacity of information gathering as government do, they're free to claim whatever they want based on whatever they (claim to) have. That's why the WUC's latest claim of "over a thousand Uyghurs deaths" based on "reports on the ground" continues to be quoted by every West media outlet.
I remember the conversation during a MFA press conference last year between spokesman Qin Gang and a correspondent of the German dpa. The latter was defending a report of his agency about the situation in Tibet that had turned out to be false, by saying they were forced to rely on exile Tibetan sources because they couldn't get more information from the Chinese authorities. Qin called it "gangster logic", comparing if to a man defending theft and robbery by saying he's hungry but has no money to buy food.
I thought it was a pity that that conversation didn't draw any attention in the China expat blogosphere, because it's a shockingly accurate characterization of the standard (or the lack thereof) of many, if not most Western media outlets' reporting on China -- or any other country outside the NATO and its allies.
Posted by: wgj | July 13, 2009 at 03:53 PM
Most Western media show knee-jerk sympathies for any organization/people that oppose the Chinese government, even when such people do horrible things, like the Uighur rioters. Reading through the major Western papers on this incident, it is obvious that most of them show no sympathies to the Han Chinese killed. They paint the picture of the rioting as another instance of ruthless government crackdown on a people that are "oppressed". There is no mention of China's preferential minority policies, which are among the best in the world. This is a persistent manufactured theme in Western media. It shows everywhere. The bias is clearly there. It is pathological.
I feel so sorry for the innocent Han Chinese who were killed in this riot. They were given almost no sympathies in Western media as if they deserved to be killed in such a cruel way. This is saddening.
On the other hand, I cannot say that I sympathize with the Chinese government, not after they started to block anti-cnn and other online discussions. They may have shown openness to international reporters this time. But they still tightly control domestic discussions on this incident as if its people are stupid and need to be told what to do and what not to do.
So let me say this categorically: down with Western media and down with the geriatric CCP Propaganda officials who are out of touch with the world.
Posted by: yinbin | July 13, 2009 at 07:55 PM
One other thing, I don't think the Chinese government shutting down the internet and cell phones was intended mainly to control the press.
What was happening was that people were using social networks posting extremely inflamatory and untrue rumors about massacres and atrocities that simply were not happening. Also, using social networks allow people to organize more easily and had those networks remained in place, it's pretty clear to me that the mobs would have used them to coordinate beatings and killings and to try to overwhelm the police effort to control the situation and protect the innocent.
Even considering that this power can be abused, I think that the Chinese government were perfectly justified in shutting everything down. Since shutting everything down didn't hugely adversely impact the ability for journalists to report what they saw. The natural tendency is to think of the police as the bad guys and the demonstrators as the good guys, but here is a situation where it seemed to me that this really wasn't the case.
Also talking about the Chinese governments "information strategy" makes it seem like things are more coordinated they they really are. Chinese bloggers think for themselves, and the government has to manage them rather than control them. In addition, a lot of the tactics that overseas bloggers have used against the "mainstream media" were invented by groups within the United States (conservative groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Media) against what they see as "liberal bias."
Also Western media has one huge weakness when it comes to accusations of bias. I've never heard anyone get upset that the People's Daily or Xinhua is biased. Everyone *knows* that they are biased in favor of the Chinese government, because they very loudly and very clearly state that they are biased in favor of the Chinese government.
The problem with the New York Times and the Washington Post is that they *claim* impartiality and neutrality, which makes targets for groups (both conservatives and Chinese nationalists) that don't think that is true.
Posted by: Twofish | July 13, 2009 at 08:56 PM
The media will inevitably make mistakes, and this is understandable. What's revealing is that these mistakes always manage to make China look worse. It's as if they're thinking, "When in doubt, always err on the anti-China side."
Posted by: konig | July 13, 2009 at 09:06 PM
Why did Kadeer and her organization claim (after the photo mistake had been pointed out) that someone--perhaps an agent working for the Chinese government---gave them the wrong photo just before she stepped into the interview room, and that they could not find the person who had deliberately misled her after the incident all across the US? Maybe Kadeer was sincere, but this ex-post explanation is not.
Posted by: WGJ has a good point | July 13, 2009 at 11:45 PM
Rebecca, very good analysis as always. I just have one small question: Rebiya Kadeer grew up in Urumqi; shouldn't she be able to tell apart Urumqi from another city (e.g., Shishou) in such a large photo?
Posted by: Xujun | July 13, 2009 at 11:53 PM