The Taelspin on Tibet: The Chinese Response to foreign media coverage of the 3.14 unrest

Authors

Date of this Version

3-27-2008

Document Type

Article

Citation

March 27, 2008 in The China Beat http://www.thechinabeat.org/

Comments

Copyright March 27, 2008. Used by permission.

Abstract

Foreign media coverage of the demonstrations and riots in Lhasa, Qinghai,Sichuan, and Gansu two weeks ago has sparked a significant backlash here in China. State media continues to release increasingly shrill diatribes against Western media bias as Chinese netizens take to the internet with their own protests sparked by a general perception that coverage of the riots was purposely warped and skewed by anti-China forces in the West. (For a sampling in English, check out the back and forth on this forum hosted by that bastion of journalistic integrity and objectivity: The China Daily.) There’s a whole website devoted to attacking CNN, and in this age of user-generated online content, we see the battle spilling over onto (the recently blocked and unblocked) YouTube. Moreover, some of these videos and blog posts seem intended for a wider audience, not just for domestic consumption.

Over at the popular online forum Tianya, I stumbled across a thread in which a patriotic and enterprising youth has cut and pasted pages from a media directory, telling readers that the telephone is their greatest weapon and they should use it against the foreign news organizations:

If someone is there, inquire about their mother (ahem). If they don’t pick up, keep calling and when somebody answers, curse them out and then hang up—the idea is to jam the lines so the SOBs can’t use their telephones. [paraphrase]