When Chinese state media is not so stately
Last week Yang Rui, an anchor of CCTV Dialogue, one of the flagship programs on China’s English language TV network, aired his views about the tens of thousands of foreigners living in Beijing and throughout the country. The remarks are worth reading in full, but to summarize, they’re a guide on how to “clean out ...
Last week Yang Rui, an anchor of CCTV Dialogue, one of the flagship programs on China’s English language TV network, aired his views about the tens of thousands of foreigners living in Beijing and throughout the country. The remarks are worth reading in full, but to summarize, they’re a guide on how to “clean out the foreign trash,” who “engage in human trafficking” and “seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage.” He adds “we kicked out that foreign bitch and closed Al-Jazeera’s Beijing bureau,” in apparent reference to Melissa Chan, expelled journalist I wrote about here.
The post blew up among Chinese-speaking foreigners in Beijing, and Charlie Custer, a Beijing-based blogger, posted a call on his blog for foreigners to boycott Yang’s show and called for it to be canceled in a post on Weibo. In return, Yang said Custer was “foreign trash” and that the “police should check his background.” (Disclosure: I knew Custer socially when I lived in Beijing).
Yang is supposed to be a neutral newsman. As James Fallows pointed out in a blog post on the subject, this is more akin to an anti-foreigner rant from Brian Williams than from someone like Rush Limbaugh. But it also illustrates the divide between what gets said in China in Chinese and what gets said in English. It appeared that Yang, who speaks excellent English, just assumed there wasn’t a critical mass of foreigners reading Chinese AND reading his Weibo account, which has more than 800,000 followers. The comments he uses in English, like “Very disappointed,” “Foreigners must not be above law,” are very different from the phrases he uses in Chinese, like “foreign trash,” and “bastard.”
It’s also a great reminder that Chinese state media is not made up of faceless apparatchiks but human journalists and editors, with inflammatory passions and prejudices. In an e-mail, Yang declined an interview request, and responded that “Dialogue on CCTV News is indeed a very good program which has won international acclaim over the past decade and I do not believe that it could be ruined this time around only due to the reckless overtones of some of my words on the crackdown on illegal foreigners in China.” It’s too early to tell whether CCTV will cancel Yang’s contract, but it’s a pretty clear sign of a set of views underpinning the show.
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