The Chinese state media has reacted bitterly against what they called “double standards” of the western media in not describing last Saturday’s grisly knife attacks in Kunming as terrorism.
The controversy was over the use of the word “terrorist” within quotation marks by some news outlets.
The mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China (CPC) published a scathing piece saying that western media distorted news of the incident by not using the word terrorist or terrorism or in some cases using quotation marks before and after the word terrorist – like this, for example: Knife-wielding ‘terrorists’ kill 29, injure 130 at China train station.
“While China grieved and expressed its outrage following the savage stabbing of innocent civilians by Xinjiang separatists at the crowded railway station in southwest China’s Kunming Saturday night, some Western media organisations, including CNN, Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, were already presenting their audiences and their readership with a distorted view of events,” said an angry piece in the People’s Daily.
The newspaper added: “Did they not see the pictures of innocent victims lying in pools of their own blood? Did they show even the slightest concern for the victims and their “human rights”? Should such an event occur in America, how would they respond to the incident? Would they be quite so coy about describing the murderers as “terrorists”?
According to TeaLeafNation a website that tracks China’s social media said a post by the US Embassy added fuel to the anger.
“It did not, as many Chinese had hoped, characterise the attack as terrorism, but instead called it a “senseless act of violence.” Almost all of the more than 50,000 comments left on the post accused the the US Embassy of a double standard when it comes to violence in China.
“If the Kunming attack were a ‘horrific, senseless act of violence,’” the most up-voted comment, according to the website, read, “then the 9/11 attack in New York City would be a ‘regrettable traffic accident.’”
One can expect strong public opinion in the aftermath of violence but did the Chinese media overreact in its criticism? It’s a tough question: mass-scale violence in any country is a sensitive issue.
For China, the incident in Kunming in which civilians in a railway station were indiscriminately targeted is the worst such case in a long time. For the victims, it must have been a chilling experience: apparently masked attackers wielding long knives appear suddenly, literally from somewhere in the dark night, and start slashing them, their families and someone standing next to them in a crowded railway station. There is no condoning the incident.
At the same time, whether to use quotation marks around a word – a serious word like terrorist at that – especially where information is second-hand and from a tightly controlled official source is an editorial choice. It basically means that the particular media organisation is attributing it to the source or, okay, is doubtful about the veracity of the information.
Of course, that does not mean that this particular punctuation mark can be used to denote sarcasm or irony in context of violence. That usage cannot be condoned either.
If a media outlet has an editorial policy of sparingly using the word terrorist, it has alternatives not too far away: radical, fanatic, rebel etc.
But the point in China is that in most cases of violence involving ethnic minorities here, the flow of information is so one-sided, it can bring out that extra, hardened drop of cynicism.
Reporters are not allowed inside Tibet independently. In Xinjiang, towns and cities which have witnessed violence in the past months are out of bounds for journalists. You will be tracked by policemen in Kashgar.
The projected picture of these provinces is of regions that are bountiful and people who are happy and contended but mislead by a few who are termed rather generously at all times as “terrorists” and “separatists”.
Maybe not-so-ironically, the Chinese state media is not that averse to using quote marks in headlines if and when that helpless punctuation mark serves a purpose.
On February 26, a headline in Xinhua, China’s official news agency, read: “Taiwan independence” a dead end: spokesman.
What exactly does the use of the punctuation around the two words Taiwan and independence here mean? Is it sarcasm? Is it emphasis? Or is it double standard? I am willing to accept an answer within quotes.