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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Chinese Democratization
Before the end of the year, I will be delivering my second book (this one an edited volume), The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China, to its publisher. It may be that I am hyper-sensitive about China these days, as I spend many of my waking hours thinking about its future and its undeniable democratization process. But I find New York Times coverage of China outrageous. The Times appropriately gives China front-page real estate routinely; but only for stories that cohere with its agenda of criticizing the Beijing government. (Maybe this makes sense because the Times had one of its correspondents jailed by the Chinese.)
Today's story is typical and is part of a series of front page articles seeking to show the absence of the "rule of law" in China. It is important coverage -- but it is targeted to be highly critical of China and tells only part of the story of China's modern political reality.
Yesterday's coverage, however, was especially annoying. On Friday, the paper gave front page coverage to a protest in Guangdong Province, where police seem to have fired live ammunition into the crowd, leading to the death of some of the protesters. But on Monday, when the government actually prosecuted the officer responsible for the deaths, the Times buried the story of the wrongdoer brought to justice (on A5). It seems that China is front page news when it can be neatly criticized. However, when rule of law does prevail, that isn't newsworthy enough to make the front page.
(NB: Monday's front page was hardly overrun with especially important news that might have accounted for "displacing" the China story.)
Posted by Ethan Leib on December 13, 2005 at 12:16 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
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Comments
Nicholas Kristof is the person who probably has the most influence over the Times' China coverage, and he's a genuine expert with time in China, language skills, and a Chinese-American wife to boot. However, his China experience was formed by being there during Tiananmen, so perhaps there is some distortion.
That said, I don't think that the Times' coverage has been too scandalous. China is a very autocratic, nationalist, xenophobic country. Some of the articles you cite are actually positive on the subject of China's advancing adoption of the rule of law. For instance, the article on the judge who got in trouble notes that the judges' training college no longer gives party doctrine primacy over law.
There are positive signs coming out of China, but it is still basically a very tough country to do anything that the government doesn't like you doing.
FYI, the best reporter on China in my opinion, is the New Yorker's Peter Hessler. He's the only guy who makes me go wow.
Posted by: Bart Motes | Dec 14, 2005 11:51:34 AM
Ethan, my own reaction to coverage of China -- in the NYT and elsewhere -- tends to be that it tends to downplay the lack of meaningful religious freedom. Am I wrong? Thanks!
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Dec 14, 2005 10:06:38 AM
I suppose we can all agree that coverage of what happens in foreign countries is quite bad in the US- even in coutrines not that much different from our (witness the NY Times coverage of the recent viscious race riots in Australia- not all bad, I guess, but when they repeatedly mention the "long history of immigration" to Australia w/o ever once mentioning that for most of this history this was part of the 'white Australia' policy, and maybe that has some small bit to do w/ why white Australians are beating the hell out of the darkies it does make one wonder if the reporter has the slightest idea of what he or she is talking about.) Do you think the coverage of China is especially worse than that of other parts of the world? Not being anything like an expert on China I can't say, but I'd not be surprised given that, say, the coverage on Russia, a place I know something about, generally shows great signs of not having much of an idea of what's going on there. (Anna Applebaum of the WaPo also had this problem, despite many people liking her totally unoriginal and simple-minded book.)
Posted by: Matt | Dec 14, 2005 12:02:44 AM
Yes, yes. The Chinese have a long road ahead of them. I really don't mean to suggest otherwise. But there is much that is newsworthy and that is progressive going on there that the Times never reports.
Posted by: Ethan Leib | Dec 13, 2005 10:46:01 PM
Ethan: I, like you, am supportive of Chinese democracy (and, in fact, will be part of a labor and employment law delegation to the country next September led by former NLRB Chairman Peter Hurtgen). But
Neverthless, the New York Times' coverage in this most recent article (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/international/asia/13cnd-china.html
?ex=1292130000&en=6d1e821f72a7c5d5&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rssis) is not outrageous about how the Chinese government continues to cover up how the police violently suppressed (killing 20, 40 missing) a demonstration against the construction of a power plant.
In this cover up, the Chinese government has gone so far as "banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google."
You must admit that such stories remind one more of Tianemen Square and less of the hoped for democratic China of tomorrow. In short, China still has a long way to go to prove its democratic credentials.
A free press is essential to democracy and this
Posted by: Paul M. Secunda | Dec 13, 2005 10:41:17 PM
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