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narcasseBehind China’s Anti-Foreigner Fever Business Week
"The Western media always report problems that have occurred during the development of China and turns a blind eye to all the accomplishments China has reached," wrote one Chinese blogger.
Other than making a cynical quip that people evidently don’t seem to know how the media works initially, it did occur to me that what the problem here seems to be is a difference in media function. The Western media, to generalise, is employed as a means of critiquing and evaluating official policies which is why the media as a general rule tend to report negatively. I even have a citation for that somewhere in Peter, Semetko & de Vreese’s EU Politics on Television News: A Cross-National Comparative Study. Equally, negative reporting, especially of emotive content sells. The media in this case serves a dual function of entertainment in almost a sense of schadenfreude as well as a regulatory function by exposing policy to public scrutiny. Thus if something is functioning according to design it probably doesn’t bear reporting once the novelty of its newness wears off. Which is a marked contrast to what appears to be the Chinese media’s function of advertising state policy and reassuring citizens of its effective function. In this sense both styles of reporting serve to inform the public but do it rather differently.
The Chinese media appears to be weighted towards positive reporting in the same way that the Western media is biased towards negative coverage and with that difference it’s easy enough to see how rather disturbing interpretations can arise. From the perspective of expecting the media to behave in a more benign capacity in informing citizens of events and promoting a positive agenda then the Western reporting must seem like part of a huge hate machine churning out angry rhetoric in just about every direction. This works in the same way in reverse, thus expecting a harshly critical account of just about anything from media sources means that a Western interpretation of Chinese reporting would view it at the most basic level as far too positive to be believable. This then creates a cultural issue of a lack of appropriate translation, especially with Chinese bloggers being exposed to Western media sources directly via the internet. Without the necessary frame of reference to indicate that all Western media tends towards the negative and functions as a checking system against the state then it appears particularly shocking, especially if such bloggers are simply being exposed to articles about their own country which they interpret as a deliberate assault directed at China.
This in fact reminds me of what appeared to be US fandom outcry at a Terry Pratchett interview in The Sunday Times. The majority of comments seemed to entirely miss the dry satirical style of the interview, something that anyone familiar with The Sunday Times or any similar British paper would already be aware of.
It’s in situations like this that it’s not so much language that’s the issue but rather the interpretation, and it is literal translation without any context clues that tends to cause a furore. All of which is to say that if you’re coming from a background where the media doesn’t critique everything and in fact advertises the general way of things, at least in a prescriptive sense then using that frame of reference it’s very easy to see why Chinese bloggers are up in arms, since from their perspective the Western media is telling the Western public that they ought to view China very negatively. Of course what they don’t see is that the Western media also dislikes Western policy too for the most part but then that’s hardly something you’d go about researching if you’d just read that some foreign news channel was demonising your own country.
In other news:
Keep Lesbos for the Lesbians A Don’s Life
Boris wins: Europe trembles Mark Mardell’s Euroblog
Seven reasons why Conservatives must leave the EPP Daniel Hannan (Conservative Home)
"The Western media always report problems that have occurred during the development of China and turns a blind eye to all the accomplishments China has reached," wrote one Chinese blogger.
Other than making a cynical quip that people evidently don’t seem to know how the media works initially, it did occur to me that what the problem here seems to be is a difference in media function. The Western media, to generalise, is employed as a means of critiquing and evaluating official policies which is why the media as a general rule tend to report negatively. I even have a citation for that somewhere in Peter, Semetko & de Vreese’s EU Politics on Television News: A Cross-National Comparative Study. Equally, negative reporting, especially of emotive content sells. The media in this case serves a dual function of entertainment in almost a sense of schadenfreude as well as a regulatory function by exposing policy to public scrutiny. Thus if something is functioning according to design it probably doesn’t bear reporting once the novelty of its newness wears off. Which is a marked contrast to what appears to be the Chinese media’s function of advertising state policy and reassuring citizens of its effective function. In this sense both styles of reporting serve to inform the public but do it rather differently.
The Chinese media appears to be weighted towards positive reporting in the same way that the Western media is biased towards negative coverage and with that difference it’s easy enough to see how rather disturbing interpretations can arise. From the perspective of expecting the media to behave in a more benign capacity in informing citizens of events and promoting a positive agenda then the Western reporting must seem like part of a huge hate machine churning out angry rhetoric in just about every direction. This works in the same way in reverse, thus expecting a harshly critical account of just about anything from media sources means that a Western interpretation of Chinese reporting would view it at the most basic level as far too positive to be believable. This then creates a cultural issue of a lack of appropriate translation, especially with Chinese bloggers being exposed to Western media sources directly via the internet. Without the necessary frame of reference to indicate that all Western media tends towards the negative and functions as a checking system against the state then it appears particularly shocking, especially if such bloggers are simply being exposed to articles about their own country which they interpret as a deliberate assault directed at China.
This in fact reminds me of what appeared to be US fandom outcry at a Terry Pratchett interview in The Sunday Times. The majority of comments seemed to entirely miss the dry satirical style of the interview, something that anyone familiar with The Sunday Times or any similar British paper would already be aware of.
It’s in situations like this that it’s not so much language that’s the issue but rather the interpretation, and it is literal translation without any context clues that tends to cause a furore. All of which is to say that if you’re coming from a background where the media doesn’t critique everything and in fact advertises the general way of things, at least in a prescriptive sense then using that frame of reference it’s very easy to see why Chinese bloggers are up in arms, since from their perspective the Western media is telling the Western public that they ought to view China very negatively. Of course what they don’t see is that the Western media also dislikes Western policy too for the most part but then that’s hardly something you’d go about researching if you’d just read that some foreign news channel was demonising your own country.
In other news:
Keep Lesbos for the Lesbians A Don’s Life
Boris wins: Europe trembles Mark Mardell’s Euroblog
Seven reasons why Conservatives must leave the EPP Daniel Hannan (Conservative Home)
