"WATCHING In Tibet, the government keeps the people and the press under guard. Harmony is the official catchword these days." Photo by Andy Wong for the Associated Press.
There’s a sobering (if not terribly surprising) piece in The New York Times this week about the high degree of media control exerted by the Chinese government with regards to Tibet. Edward Wong, a foreign correspondent with the Times‘ Beijing bureau, had this to say after a recent (and heavily chaperoned) visit to Tibet:
Chinese officials brought the 30 or so foreign reporters to the sprawling Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, the seat of power of the Panchen Lama, a reincarnated leader in Tibetan Buddhism. The officials had arranged for a monk to brief us on the monastery’s history. But reporters preferred to pepper him with questions about the selection of the 11th Panchen Lama — the Chinese government appointed one in 1995 after whisking off a 6-year-old boy endorsed as the genuine reincarnation by the exiled Dalai Lama. The boy and his family have not been seen since.
A foreign ministry official from Beijing quickly signaled an end to the talk. Later, walking through the white-walled monastery, the official shook his head and said to me: “The questions you all ask — what’s the word I’m looking for? — they’re ridiculous!”
These days, the Chinese government wants foreigners to think it is moving beyond Orwellian controls on information. In Beijing and most other parts of China, a foreign journalist can usually travel freely. Plainclothes officers don’t regularly follow journalists around. And ordinary people who talk to journalists do not fear reprisals from the authorities to the degree that Tibetans do. They only speak to foreign reporters in quick, furtive conversations because of the omnipresent security forces.
China is pushing its state news agency, Xinhua, into new markets in hopes that foreign publications will run its stories as if they are those of The Associated Press or Reuters. Xinhua is even opening a newsroom in Times Square. One Xinhua reporter asked me, “When will foreigners view us like the AP?”
The Chinese government and its information agencies crave legitimacy among foreigners, and a growing number of Chinese journalists are trying to push the boundaries. But open and critical inquiry is still an alien concept to Chinese officials, as I discovered on this five-day government-run tour of Central Tibet.
Read the rest here.
