A brief update on the situation in Urumqi:
The Christian Science Monitor is reporting today that China has staged something of a media coup by adopting modern PR tactics that have long been a staple of Western journalism. "Officials are certainly studying the media-management techniques that are practiced elsewhere in the world," says Rebecca Mackinnon, an expert on the Chinese media at Hong Kong University. "And they actually don't work too badly."
The unmitigated media disaster that followed China's clampdown in Tibet during the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics might seem, on the face of it, to have taught the Chinese a valuable lesson about free and open societies. Or at least that's what this current article in CSM is claiming.
"The approach appeared to mark a further step in Beijing's efforts to manage the news more subtly," Peter Ford writes, "taking a page from the Western public relations playbook and getting ahead of the news so as to spin it, rather than impose a total blackout." Maybe. But before we begin to lay laurels at China's door for their adoption of Western spin techniques, I think we need to make a few very obvious points about the differences between Tibetans and Uighurs. They both fall under the category of China's ethnic minorities, but that category is large enough to be essentially useless in making meaningful discriminations between the two groups, particularly when what is at stake here is a judgment of China's evolving media control.
First of all, there seems little debate about the fact that at least 156 are dead and over 1000 wounded, numbers that automatically elevate the unrest in Xinjiang to unprecedented levels. The Uighurs have a long tradition of separatism within China, and their willingness to embrace force and aggression when they deem it necessary distinguishes them from the Tibetans who have traditionally articulated a coherent non-violent stance. Tibetans, of course, do not speak with one voice, and non-violence has recently come under question among the Tibetan community. Nonetheless, as long as we are talking about media spin, it must be said that the Western understanding of the Tibetan community has been set largely by His Holiness and the monastic community--a distinct minority among the Tibetan community--and so Westerners, whether accurately or not, identify the Tibetan community with non-violent resistance.
Reports are now coming out of Urumqi that there are dead Han Chinese on the street, victims, presumably, of Uighur violence, and if this is so, it makes perfect sense that the Chinese would encourage the media to report this. Eighteen months ago, with monks and nuns being imprisoned in Lhasa, and with summary executions occurring in the more remote provinces, it also made perfect sense as well that the Chinese would ban foreign journalists from traveling anywhere in Tibet and covering the Chinese repsonse to the Tibetan protests. Executing monks and nuns doesn't make good copy.
So what the Chinese have learned is fairly rudimentary: let the media cover acts of violence committed against the government, but don't let the media cover acts of violence undertaken by the government against its own people. The American government has perfected this technique; that's what China has learned from Western media control, and it's unflattering to all of us.
Yet, we cannot miss the take-home message here. The wholesale slaughter of populations who have publicly articulated and privately embraced fundamental principles of non-violence will most often receive widespread condemnation from the world community. It is clear that this kind of slaughter must be hidden from public view, which is to say that, for one reason or another, non-violence still occupies the moral high road in the Western ethical sensibility.
Certainly, there may come a time when the Tibetan people will decide that this particular high road is leading them nowhere fast, and at this time perhaps they will decide to embrace more aggressive resistance strategies. The Tibetan people will make that decision, and they will, like the Uighurs, live with the consequences of that decision, whatever they may be.
I wouldn't presume to counsel the Tibetan people on their decision; I'm an American, and violence in every corner of my culture, both at home and abroad, is part of my birthright. Understanding just how saturated I am with violence is a full-time job, and until I've gotten a handle on it, I'll leave off giving advice to the Tibetan people.
But I will suggest that the next decade--and the next year, particularly, leading up to the election of a new Prime Minister--will find the Tibetan people having a conversation amongst themselves about the future of non-violence, national identity, political process, and life in exile that stands to have international implication.
I believe that Americans can a learn a lot from listening to that conversation. The Tibetans have a rich and diverse set of perspectives on issues that concern all of us, and they run the gamut from the sacred to the secular. Over the upcoming months, I hope to highlight some of these issues here.
