Health matters

By Liu Shinan

My column in last week’s issue of this newspaper triggered an intense response from readers, who posted their comments online. My sincere thanks go to them all, whether proponents or opponents, whose remarks enlightened me in different ways and on different levels.

Though I generally do not give my feedback to readers’ comments, online or in print, I would like to go deeper into the topic of my last column with regard to some of my critics’ points of view.

The critics’ repudiation of my accusation of Western media’s bias against China focused on three points: first, the media’s role is not to applaud a government but to keep a watchful eye on it; second, Western media do not have the obligation to manage China’s image abroad; third, the Chinese media is biased itself for it “only reports bad news from abroad”.

Right, media need to monitor the government rather than praise it. But this seems irrelevant to my argument, which concerns the Western media’s portrayal of China rather the Chinese government.

Again, it is right that the Western media are not responsible “to manage China’s image abroad”. However, I did not say that. All I said was that the Western media had been tarnishing China’s image before the world by focusing only on the negative aspects of the country.

Actually this controversy touches on a question that seems to have been ignored so far. The question is: What do the Western media come to China for?

My understanding is that a media organization send their journalists to another country to report whatever they see there so that their compatriots at home will get the right information about that country. For instance, social, political, economic and geographical conditions; the culture and customs; the people’s livelihood; the potential for external investment and cooperation, and so on. In all, facts, both positive and negative.

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By Raymond Zhou 

At the recent powwow of the nation’s top advisory body, some cultural elites proposed to add the teaching of fanti characters to the curriculum of elementary schools. In a related case, a Hong Kong representative said the Special Administrative Region should promote the use of jian-ti characters.

“Fanti” and “jianti” are Chinese for “traditional characters” and “simplified characters”, respectively. The former is used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and some overseas Chinese communities, while the latter is a simplified version of the former introduced on the Chinese mainland, after New China was founded.

The dueling for supremacy between the two writing systems often sparks controversy. Which one is better? Should one system accommodate the other? If you resist the temptation to politicize the debate, the answer is by no means elusive or complicated: Jianti is easier to learn because many characters have simpler forms; fanti looks better if you practice calligraphy or traditional painting.

Sadly, there are people who cannot help treating it as a manifestation of political clout - a kind of mainland versus overseas wrestling for soft power. The thinking goes along the lines that if you support the mainland, you should automatically prefer jianti, and vice versa.

Then, there are those who approach the issue from a practical standpoint. Detractors of jianti argue that the need to simplify the strokes no longer exists as handwriting is fast giving way to typing on a computer, which requires only recognition of a sound-based input. Opponents of fanti, on the other hand, contend that you don’t have to know fanti to read all the classics, as they are often available in jianti format.

The standoff between the two camps is not as extensive as it appears to be. By one count, of the 2,000 most common Chinese characters, 1,369 share the same forms; out of the 631 with different strokes, only 178 characters need special memorization as the rest are simplified at the root form and are applied systematically.

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Youths’ Reference, a Beijing-based newspaper, reprinted an article from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) which criticizes Chinese people for their loathing of the Western media’s negative reports about their country.

The author of the article is a reporter of the US newspaper and obviously a Chinese by origin.

In the article, the writer cited a number of examples to illustrate what she says is the excessive importance Chinese people attach to “face”. One example was the media coverage of contaminated drugs sold at the Hualian supermarket in Shanghai. After reading the report by the Guangzhou-based South Weekend online, most readers berated Hualian and China’s drug safety administration. The report of the same incident by the Wall Street Journal, however, earned for itself condemnation from angry Chinese netizens.

The author asked: “I feel puzzled why these netizens would rather bury their heads in the sand like an ostrich than know the facts, for the (foreign media’s) reports at least can tell them (what is wrong with the medicines). And why should they regard the face (of China) as more important than their compatriots’ livelihood and lives?”

I feel puzzled at her remarks.

Since she had noticed that the Chinese netizens had expressed their anger over the incident after learning about it from the Chinese media, how could she claim that they had turned a blind eye to it?

As for her query why Chinese people tolerate their own media’s negative reports about China’s affairs but are unhappy about the foreign media’s coverage of China’s dark side, the answer is simple.

Chinese people do not detest the domestic media’s critical reports of social problems because they know the reports do not serve to cover the brighter side of society as it is so obvious to every Chinese at home. Even if the media reports are all about negative things, people are fully aware that their country’s achievements and progress far outweigh the problems.

The majority of the Western media’s reports about China, however, are negative. Admittedly, most of these problems do exist. The question is, do they represent China’s real image? As the Western media dominates the world’s journalistic arena and thus constitutes the only channel through which the world learns about China, the image of China is all problematic. Is that not a distortion? Do people of any nation like their image to be distorted the same way?

In the Hualian case, what the Chinese people resented, according to the author, was the WSJ’s report. Therefore, according to her logic, these Chinese proved to be cold-blooded over a matter concerning their compatriots’ lives, because they did not like the WSJ’s report. What ridiculous logic.

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