How they see us: Biased against China?

CNN has gone too far, said Yu Zhixiao in a commentary for the Chinese news agency Xinhua. One of its news anchors, Jack Cafferty, has “humiliated” the people of China with a gratuitous insult that was broadcast to millions of viewers. In a rant against the success of China’s economy, he called Chinese-made goods “junk with lead paint” and said the Chinese people were “basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” When outraged Chinese-Americans demanded an apology, Cafferty said only: “I was referring to the Chinese government, and not to Chinese people or to Chinese-Americans.” As the Foreign Ministry pointed out, this is no apology at all, but rather an attempt to try to sow division between the Chinese government and the people. All Chinese people, in China and abroad, have been “deeply hurt by the comments.”

This isn’t the first time CNN has shown its bias against China, said the Beijing People’s Daily in an editorial. A few weeks ago, in its coverage of the riots in Tibet, CNN’s website ran a photo in which the violent Tibetans who were throwing stones at Chinese security forces were cropped out. Viewers saw only the soldiers, looking menacing, without any context of the threat they were facing. That “serious violation of the professional ethics of journalism” has now been topped by the “baseless prejudice” that CNN allows its newscasters to spew on the air. CNN has definitively “lost its credibility among the Chinese audience at home and abroad.”

It’s not just CNN; it’s almost all Western media, said Zhou Yan, also for Xinhua. Chinese analysts have caught numerous American and European TV stations and newspapers in such transgressions as “dubbing videos with fake sound bites, putting up photos with misleading captions, and making groundless accusations against the Chinese government.” This widespread bias has a racist tinge. The Washington Post website, for example, ran a photo of a Nepalese policeman beating a Nepalese protester and captioned it: “China’s government is cracking down on Tibetan protestors.” Evidently these prejudiced editors “have never been to Asia” and can’t tell the difference between the “dark brown-skinned” Nepalese and the Chinese.

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The Chinese have a point, said Mick Hume in the London Times. China-­bashing seems to be the most popular Olympic sport in the West right now. China’s oppressive tactics in Tibet and its support for the Sudanese government are certainly legitimate targets of criticism—but many politicians and journalists seem to be making China a scapegoat for all modern ills. We blame the Chinese for “everything from human-rights abuses, war, and genocide to pollution, abortion, and rising food prices.” Let’s be careful that we don’t end up “recycling toxic old prejudices” from the imperial past.