Two Face
by Kerim
Whether or not Liu Xiaobo’s ćææłą accusations [link to Chinese site] are true, the concept is fascinating. He is accusing Li Xiguang æćžć , Dean of the Tsinghua University School of Journalism, of having different political opinions depending on whether he is writing in English or in Chinese.
Li Xiguang is a very peculiar person who can be split into two persons both named Li Xiguang. One of those persons uses the name “Lixiguang” when he speaks to the western media in English or pens essays in English to advocate the benefits of freedom of media and the perils of opinion suppression. The other person has the Chinese name æćžć and is a hatchet person against freedom of expression inside China.
Liu Xiaobo cites someone named An Ti ćźæż who provides an example of the kind of two-faced behavior Li Xiguang/æćžć is accused of:
During the SARS period, CNN interviewed him and asked him about why China imposed a national blackout on information. He bluntly pointed out that there was no need for the government to do so and that the media should be allowed to collect and publish news. Then he turned around and told the Chinese students that the whole SARS terror was manufactured by the foreign media.
If this is true, the fact that it was caught probably reflects the increasing number of bilingual Chinese. A decade or two ago the number of truly bilingual Chinese would probably have been small enough that someone could have gotten away with behavior like this and never gotten caught. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are many examples of such behavior from all over the world. Does anyone know of other examples?
(via Jeremy Goldkorn, who provides some related links)
When I was studying Chinese at Tsinghua, I sat in on a class of Li Xiguang’s.
The first thing you notice about him are contradictions. His most famous books all center around his idea of “The Demonization of China” by the US media. Yet, in class, he teaches his students to model Western journalists’ practices.
After a little more thought, though, his contradictions seem reconciliable. Isn’t it possible that China is often portrayed negatively–sometimes unfairly–by the US media, but that Chinese journailists also have something to learn from the Western media?
Also, in the exmple provided by An Ti, I would agree with Li Xiguang that the Chinese government should not have blocked media coverage of SARS. I would also agree, however, that to some extent the *huge* panic worked up about SARS was feuled by the Western media. The worldwide deaths from SARS were a small fraction of the number of people who die from the flu each year in the US alone.
All of this said, your point about presenting different faces to the Chinese and Western media is interesting. Li Xiguang is an interesting, complicated and, yes, perhaps sometimes contradictory figure (don’t we all contradict ourselves at some point?). In this case, though, I would say that his positions are not necessarily contradictory; instead, they reflect the different interests of the Western and Chinese media, respectively. The Western media wants to hear about limits on journalists in China, while the Chinese media wants to hear about how China is treated unfairly in the Western press. To a certain extent, both phenomena exist.