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Shame-nesty International: Or, "why NGOs don't do themselves any favors"

Monday, 12 May 2008


As long term readers of this blog will know, when it comes to China - and the many and varied human rights abuses that go on within its borders - ACB has some strong opinions over the various issues, but little time for the Big Media, and even less time for Western NGOs, when they become interested in said abuses.

True, the Big Media and Western NGOs can reach big audiences, and can apply political leverage to their own governments to do something, which can be useful. Sometime they can even make a real different.

However, ACB finds that for ever instance where the Big Media and Western NGOs can make the human rights situation in China better, there are 10 where they make them worse. The latter of which they usually achieve by (as ACB's foreign friends might say) "putting their mouths in gear, but leaving their brains in neutral": Deploying emotive arguments to grab people's attention, rather than intelligent arguments to stimulate much needed debate.

At best they tend to makes themselves look like stupid bandwagon jumpers to anybody with actual subject knowledge, and at worst they antagonize Beijing and turn the Chinese people against them. Making a bad situation worse by creating local animosity instead  of solidarity.

Why?

"What provokes this sudden outburst?" You may well ask. Well, it's simple. A day or so ago ACB was contacted by a representative (whom shall remain nameless) of a well known Western NGO (Amnesty international, to be specific), who kindly proffered a code sample that would let let this blogger embed Amnesty's latest video in this blogger's blog.

Needless to say, ACB watched said video and was less than impressed. More than that, ACB was would go so far as to say that was is one of the worst examples of an NGO video that they have ever seen, an active demonstration of how not to do things. It was so bad that ACB considers it to be an insult to the cause that it is trying to promote.

The Video?

To be fair to Amnesty, it's best that readers view the video for themselves before they go any further.


 If the embedded code doesn't work with your browser, please click here.

The Issue?

Question: What does this video actually tell us about the Sino-Tibetan situation, about the use of torture in China, about recent events in Tibet, or even about the Olympic controversy?

Answer: Nothing. It's worse than useless. In fact, it's an outright danger to Western credibility.

This video appear to be designed appeal to easily lead foreigner looking for a bandwagon to jump onto, oh, and to scare small children, too. Instead of educating the viewer about the situation in Tibet it goes for emotional impact. All emotive blather and no substance.

The transition from scenes of torture to the Flame of Shame - the handing over of the baton from torturer to runner - in particular is 100% shameless. It relies on the readers association of issues rather than their knowledge of events (in essence, their ignorance of both historic and contemporary issues). It glosses over what is really going on and instead draws links between China's actions in Tibet and the Olympics itself, despite there being no links other than those created by fact that the two are happening concurrently.

The video itself doesn't give any background details, none whatsoever. Making it next to useless when the viewer is trying to construct a well reasoned argument or to form an educated opinion.  In fact it doesn't even give the viewer anything that they can Google to look up somebody else's well reasoned arguments or educated opinions.

ACB can just see the conversation now on some message board, somewhere in cyberspace

Foreigner: China tortures people
Fenqing: Prove it. Who are they? What are their names? Why were they being tortured? Who was doing the torturing? Where is the evidence?
Foreigner:  er.... I don't know.. They were pink. they looked like a stuffed animal..... China is bad .... it tortures people...... Tibet... torture...... Olympic Games......
Fenqing: 你说什么,你在吃药吗?
Foreigner: er..... um... Amnesty International said so...... it must be true...... whaaaa I'm in over my head.
Fenqing:  操你, 外国人.

Worse still this video provides Fenqing with so much ammunition that it could have been written by them as a piece of false flag propaganda. Take, for example, the closing message: that Beijing tortures peaceful protesters. On this topic ACB will just say that even the slowest of Fenqing could point out, quite truthfully, that not only were the recent protests in Tibet anything but peaceful (Monks hurling brick were somewhat absent from the video), but that no Western country would tolerate such behavior within their own borders. In fact, the only way that a Fenqing could fail to tear this video to pieces would be if they can't read sufficient English or Chinese to understand what is going on.

At best this video tells the foreign viewer that China tortures Tibetans with electric cattle prods (even then it fails to distinguish between China and Beijing). At worst it will simply convince Chinese that the West is filled with ignorant foreigners who neither know nor care about Chinese issues, but who are intent on painting China in as bad a light as possible.

The only way get the message out is with facts and evidence. The testimony of torture victims. Video taps of oppression taking place. Hard facts about what is being done, why it is being done, and who it is being done to. The Amnesty video is lacking all of these.

Fenqing should have to work to deny the truth, they shouldn't just be able to sit back and let the Big Media and Western NGOs discredit themselves.

 

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Category: News and Politics Sino-American Human rights and personal freedoms Sino-Tibet News and Perspectives
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How much do foreigners really know about China?

Friday, 2 May 2008
When reading what foreigner have to say about China ACB often finds them self asking two important questions. 1) Is this person talking about the same China that ACB knows, or some other place entirely? 1) Based on what experience does this person make such statements. After giving thing some thought ACB has reached their own tentative answers to these important questions. 1) No, 2) None.

It would appear that ACB isn't the only person whom has reached there conclusion.

From the pen of Xu Wu: Assistant Professor of Strategic Media and Public Relations, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.

The real US deficit with China - knowledge

Americans are out of touch with today's China. It's a knowledge deficit that carries more weight in the long-term bilateral relationships between China and the United States than the ballooning US trade deficit with China. And as China makes a comeback on the world stage, it's one that the US should address.

Chinese visitors to the US have shared the shock of witnessing a severe dichotomy between how much Americans seem to talk about China and yet how little they know about it. The US status as the world's superpower, coupled with its location, warrants people this type of benign negligence.

But what about those experts who have the power to impose their perceptions of China on others? All too often China experts in the US cannot even speak the language. How can they claim to understand a culture without knowing how its people communicate?

This knowledge deficit accounts directly for widespread and deep-rooted misperceptions about China.

There are three faulty, recurring talking points in the American media.

First, China is a rising power, and a rising power is dangerous. The first part of this argument is incomplete, and the latter part is misplaced. China is not only a rising power; it is a returning power. China, as a united continental power, has existed for more than 2,000 years.

As a returning player, China is composed, restrained, and mature, just like a former champion returning to the title game after a short lapse. Also, if history is any guide, Chinese-ruling regimes have not been considered aggressive or expansive; they were famous for building walls. This fact alone should call into question the comparison of China's current resurgence with Japan's and Germany's disastrous rising path before World War II.

Second, China is a Communist country, and Communism is evil. Repeatedly placed upon China by media commentators, most notably CNN's anchorman Lou Dobbs, this characterization is both simplistic and utterly misleading.

To today's China, Marxism is as foreign as liberal democracy. When you look back at China's past, no alien cultures have uprooted Chinese tradition; instead, they were either localized, or submerged. China can still be Chinese without the Communism title.

Likewise, today's ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could easily be renamed the Chinese Confucian Party (CCP) without changing much of its ideological belief or organizational structure, or even its acronym for that matter.

Both the "ruling by virtue" policy promoted by former President Jiang Zemin and the "harmonious society" guideline proposed by current leader Hu Jintao were derived more from the Confucian doctrine than from the Marxist ideology. Singling out "Communist" as the definer confuses the reality.

Third, Tiananmen Square in 1989 is an iconic image that lingers in the minds of the Chinese. American observers' obsession with this tragic event reflects how deep their perception gap about China runs. There is no question that what happened that summer was historic. However, it was a generation ago, and sea changes have occurred since then.

Those who were born in 1989 are turning 19. What this new Chinese generation cares about is not the guy who blocked those tanks, but the Chinese Super Girl Singer and Yao Ming. America's unyielding interest in Tiananmen is out of touch. Is the Watergate scandal still the dominant issue facing the US today?

This lack of updated information about China becomes more problematic in a larger context. Chinese students are required to study English beginning in primary school. Students are exposed to both American culture and the Western way of thinking by college. For at least two decades, tens of thousands of the best and the brightest Chinese students attend American's top-tier graduate schools, channeling back the most updated perceptions and information about the US.

Although the number of American students studying in China witnessed a huge jump over the past few years, the accumulated knowledge deficits and language barriers are still immense.

This imbalance of knowledge, just like the imbalance of trade, is unsustainable. With the trade problem, Chinese leaders outlined a "win-win partner" scenario, and American policymakers have mapped out the "responsible stakeholder" blueprint. However, no strategy will be feasible if the two parties cannot understand each other well enough to weather the uncertainties ahead.

It is highly probable that the next generation of Americans will live in a world where China is the largest economic power. Are they prepared? When and how are they going to fix this current knowledge deficit with China?

While ACB doens't agree with everything said here, and notices that there are some strategic exclusions and whitewashings, this blogger does agree with the writer on a number of key points. Most significantly, that there exist a significant number of misconceptions about China that are held at every level of society, from the man on the street to leaders in their seats of office, and that these misconceptions are based largely on a lack of understanding of China today and China in the past.
Category: News and Politics Sino-American News and Perspectives
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Brainwashing: A Tibetan Monk Speaks Out

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

Not so long ago a reader dropped by this website and suggested that Beijing allowed Tibetans freedom of religion and culture. They cited the presence of many monasteries in Tibet as evidence of this, and voiced that if Beijing  were as bad as everybody says it is then they surely it would have simply shut the monasteries.

ACB responded by voicing that things weren't quite as simple as all that because Beijing was actively interfering with the monasteries, and was attempting to modify monastic teachings so that they could be used to change Tibetan culture into a more Beijing centric form.

Now it would appear that this topic has hit the headlines in the West care of Britain's Times news groups and respected journalist and China watcher Jane Macartney.

Original version available Here

China tries to teach Tibet a lesson that the monks have refused to learn

From civil servants to yak herders, barley farmers and street traders, the residents of the Tibetan capital and surrounding countryside are being subjected to a two-month re-education campaign to combat anti-Chinese sentiment.

Under the latest drive to instil a sense of patriotism — titled “Oppose splittism, protect stability, encourage development” — those involved in the anti-Chinese Lhasa riots of March 14 will be asked to denounce their actions and condemn others who took part.

China says that 22 people died when Tibetans rampaged through Lhasa, stabbing and stoning ethnic Han Chinese and burning shops and offices.

For thousands of monks across the restive Himalayan region and in adjacent provinces, such campaigns have become part of life in the monasteries.
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Reminiscent in tone and rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, patriotic lessons attack the “wrongs” of taking part in anti-Chinese protests or demonstrations in support of the Dalai Lama as China tries to persuade Tibetans to renounce their exiled spiritual leader.

Political education, an occasional if unwelcome interruption into monastic life, has become a daily ritual for monks such as Wangchuk — not his real name — who no longer have the freedom to watch the latest DVD, surf the internet or chat with friends on their mobile phones.

Wangchuk's monastery has been his home since he was a child. He gets up at dawn, offers holy water and lights a yak butter lamp to honour the Buddha protector of his temple and the Dalai Lama — in all his 14 reincarnations.

Under more peaceable circumstances Wangchuk's afternoon would have comprised an array of different activities, from saying prayers for the dead “to help their soul reach Heaven” to debates with his fellow monks or time spent with his teacher.

Now, the monasteries have been closed to the public and a very different study session forms part of his timetable: patriotic education:

“This is compulsory. There's no excuse for not attending — unless you're ill and then you have to have a note from doctor.”

The sessions used to be called for a week once every two or three months. They now take place almost daily. “We gather in the main hall and Communist Party officials deliver a speech telling us to be patriotic and they give each monk a paper to read.”

This session takes place in the morning; in the afternoon the monks are summoned to answer questions. “Usually it's pretty relaxed. If I can't remember my answers then I just repeat the same as the monk in front of me.

“Sometimes it turns more serious. That is when the police arrive. They stand beside each monk listening carefully to make sure each answer is correct. If the police come we have to lie. We have to say, ‘I love the Motherland. I don't love him'. They don't require you to explain who ‘him' is, because we all know.”

Beijing has blamed the recent violence on the Dalai Lama and his followers. “We learn from the patriotic education that many things are banned. For example, we can't have pictures of the Dalai Lama and we mustn't listen to what people outside China tell us.”

In the past few weeks groups of Tibetan monks have staged highly publicised protests, including hijacking official tours of the region put on for foreign journalists.

The latest re-education campaign, which will include films and television programmes, suggests that China fears the spread of the discontent.

When people talk about brainwashing by China, this is what immediately springs to my mind. Not the subtle (and often not so subtle) media manipulations and strategic exclusions found in the wider Chinese society, but the direct enforcement of "Political Education" on those whom Beijing fears.
Category: News and Politics Human rights and personal freedoms Sino-Tibet News and Perspectives
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