BYU NewsNet - Viewpoint: Media Bias, Ignorance with Tibet

BY SAMANTHA CHEN

Let's take a look at some of last week's world headlines: "China Moves Quickly on Tibet"; "China Tightens Grip on Tibet"; "China's Actions against Tibet"; "Defiant China rejects dialogue, vows to smash Tibetan protests." My favorite headline, however, reads "China Terrorizes Tibet."

As the one-sided titles suggest, these articles are tainted by media partiality. Foreign journalists, with little knowledge of Tibet's political or socioeconomic history, overconfidently report on events that transpire in a region totally unfamiliar to much of the Western world.

Many foreign journalists, for example, consider Chinese-Tibetan relations to be 60 years old, a mere fraction of a history that spans the course of nearly 900 years. As a result, crucial episodes leading up to today's events have been ignored. In the early 20th century, the British attempted to annex Tibet in a violent fashion, though this is barely mentioned in British media coverage. The Chinese "liberation" or "occupation" of Tibet that followed occurred during a time of immense political instability and social unrest.

The complexity of China, a sprawling, ethnically diverse country, is also overshadowed by its media-fueled image as an "oppressive" and "socialist" state. Certainly, China has a long way to go in permitting political freedoms and abating ethnic conflicts. We must keep in mind, however, that racial tensions between Chinese ethnic groups are not black and white. There has been much talk of the Han majority being shuttled to Tibet to effectively create what the Dalai Lama calls a "Chinese apartheid." Most Han Chinese in Tibet, however, are impoverished migrant workers who travel to Tibet in search of economic opportunity; to them, moving to another region of China is about as blameworthy as moving from Minnesota to Colorado. Yet, the Western media often hold these migrants at fault for participating in a "cultural genocide" of the Tibetan people, an accusation that a struggling migrant family might find hard to comprehend.

While the Western media have increasingly singled out China for its human rights violations, environmental problems and lead-laced toys, they has ignored the hypocrisy surrounding have issues at home. For one thing, the importation of flawed Chinese products has often been blamed on the Chinese government, yet U.S. partner companies such as Wal-Mart and Mattel continue to exploit the cheap labor and lax safety standards of its producers without garnering such criticism. Furthermore, the Western media are quick to point out tensions between ethnic groups in China, yet domestically, it refrains from giving too much attention to certain hate crimes.

Ask the average "Free Tibet" activist about Tibet's history and see how much of his or her activism is based on fact and how much of it is based on an idealized perception of the protesters and the current Tibetan situation. While most Tibetans may be peaceful, what about those Tibetans who aren't monks - the young people who grow their hair out, frequent bars, and furiously contend Chinese rule? These are the protesters; these are the people I am most interested in, the ones whose rage and bitterness have boiled over and caused untold destruction all over Lhasa.

Western coverage on Tibet has done nothing but aggravate an already tense situation in East Asia. Rather than intensify already strained U.S.-Sino relations with sanctimonious rhetoric, the Western media should stay out of other countries' affairs and concentrate on their own.

Samantha Chen is a contributor to Emory University's Emory Wheel.