Rao Jin (饶谨) of Anti-CNN believes that “the West always applied a strategy of initial polarization and subsequent subjugaton on China”.
The following are excerpts from an (apparently live) online interview by People’s Daily (more precisely: People’s Net) with Rao Jin. tech.nen.com.cn republished the interview.*) Translation by JR – corrections are welcome. In the following,
ZHH stand for Zhai Huihui (翟慧慧), the host and presenter of People’s Net Media Channel / Media Parlor,
RJ stands for Rao Jin (饶谨), founder of Anti-CNN and Media Parlor‘s guest.
________
On July 20, 15:30 – 16:30, People’s Daily’s Media Channel hosted Rao Jin, founder of the Anti-CNN website, in its Media Parlor and had an exchange with internet users about the bias of some Western media under the title “Grassroots Patriotic Forces expose Western Media Bias”.
* * *
Advance Notice (in the morning)
The 7-5 violent vandalism and burning criminal incident inflicted heavy losses on the lives and properties of all nationalities living in Xinjiang and serious damage to local public order and social stability. While foreign media got the opportunity to travel there, certain Western media still deliberately distorted the truth, sowed dischord, fanned the flames and to an enormous extent hurt the feelings of all of China’s nationalities.
* * *
The Interview (15:30 – 16:30)
ZHH: Focus on the media and media personalities. Hello to all internet users, this is the People’s Daily’s Media Parlor. After the 7-5 violent vandalism and burning criminal incident of this year, China afforded a lot of help and convenience to foreign media, but some Western media deliberately distorted the truth and to an enormous extent hurt the feelings of the people of all nationalities. For today’s program, our esteemed guest is Anti-CNN founder Rao Jin.
RJ: Hello to all internet users.
ZHH: Many internet users know you well, not only because you founded the Anti-CNN website after the 3-14 incident last year, but also because you were our guest at People’s Net last year. After the 7-5 incident of this year, in which regards did Anti-CNN do its work?
RJ: After the 7-5 incident happened, we did what we had done last year, too: we focused on the coverage of Western media. Because the bigger the event is, the more biased and mysterious coverage on China there may be in Western media.
ZHH: Which parts of coverage are mysterious?
RJ: For example, some covered up the facts. For example, during all the incident, most of the focus was on how the Chinese government’s was brutal and repressive. Everything shown was pictures of the military police. Only few lenses were directed on ordinary people who had suffered injuries.
ZHH: They didn’t correctly provide the whole picture of our 7-5 incident.
RJ: Or they distorted some matters. One photo by Reuters, for example.
[still] RJ: Reuters had a photo which originally carried the caption that a Han national compatriot received treatment in a hospital after suffering injury. Later, the New York Times used the photo, saying it was made during the government-arranged visit, and showed an Uighur. In the end some guardful internet users discovered that the plate on the wall showed the name of a Han national named Liu Yonghe (刘永和), so clearly there was a problem with that photo. Then our internet users contacted Reuters, and Reuters replied very quickly. The editor answered on his own blog that their own caption with the photo had been alright, and that the New York times had tampered (篡改) the footnote, and later he exonerated himself again. For example, he said that the New York Times was one of their important customers for news contents, they are buying Reuters’ photos, and how they use them is their business, and if they changed the original caption of the photo and a mistake occured in that process, who should be responsible? We don’t know the details of the contract between the two companies, so we couldn’t evaluate that. Reuters exonerated itself very quickly, we asked the New York Times about their responsibility, but haven’t received a response until now.
ZHH: I basically seem to understand it this way – there is a photo, it actually shows a Han compatriot receiving treatment in hospital after suffering injuries, but this photo was used by the New York Times with a caption saying that it was an Uighur compatriot receiving treatment.
RJ: I discovered afterwards that the New York Times issued a correction today, but the correction is also very mysterious. For example, their original caption was that it was a photo of an Uighur made during an officially-arranged visit. But now the caption just says it was a photo made in a hospital during an officially-arranged tour. It’s no smooth sentence in English grammar. It’s been changed, but it clearly doesn’t fit. It’s like some internet users said: this is intellectual laziness, and also very unprofessional.
ZHH: We can see that their trick was very clumsy (拙劣). We can see right away that this is a Han compatriot receiving treatment who must not be changed into an Uighur compatriot receiving treatment, and afterwards, they issue a correction which one could say isn’t really in good faith, or this correction can’t conceal the mistake they previously made. There is no justification for this.
RJ: There were several other changed captions, too. For example, there was one showing a bloodstained car which was hauled off by a truck. It was clearly visible that the blood was from a person injured by a mob. The photo by Associated Press wasn’t mistaken either, but after the New York Times bought the photo from Associated Press, the caption was once again changed. After the violence had been repressed, they emphasized the repression by the military police, but didn’t say how the bloodstains had been left on the car.
[…..]
ZHH: I know that big international news agencys’ news have a high frequency of use, so if one of their photos leaves their company with a mitake already, they will influence the public opinion guidance of many media. If they originally contain no errors, but are tampered with afterwards we can already see the intentions of the Western media who falsify them.
RJ: These are quite clear, but there are some still more ridiculous ones. For example, a paper from Turkey had a two-minutes video about a “7-5 incident” on its website, but it included a lot of photos and images which weren’t from Urumqi. It also included some sequences of the violence in Honduras, as broadcasted by CCTV’s fourth channel, with a lot of people protesting, but the place where the protest was repressed was Honduras. They also inserted a BMW collision, so it was very misleading. All the explanations that came with the video said that this was repression by the Chinese military police, causing the death of more than 180 Uighurs.
ZHH: Complete nonsense.
[still] ZHH: News experts refer to faked news as secretly substituting one thing for the other (移花接木), making a fuss of nothing (无中生有), and this is just this kind of situation. At this time, did our Anti-CNN website pay attention to such things?
RJ: Actually, we have seen some of this. These are detailed technical questions. We can have these on the Anti-CNN website. Opening the website, we just see a list of false coverage. But I think that more of that is between the lines, infiltrating within the ideology.
ZHH: Western media have many tricks, words like discriminatory nationality policies, or ethnic conflicts. Many internet users believe it should be classified as terrorist attacks, as they [ZHH probably refers to terrorist attacks] lead to inter-ethnic conflict. But we can clearly see that these are double standards. Two years ago, there was violence by a handful of separatists in the suburbs of Paris (两年前，在巴黎郊区也发生过少数分裂主义的骚乱), in 1992, there was violence by black people in San Francisco, why didn’t the media make ethnic conflicts or a category of nationalities’ human rights of this, but only classified them as criminal offenses and riots? We Chinese didn’t criticize back then.
RJ: I believe the Western strategy against China has always been to polarize first and to subjugate next. Their wishful thinking is to lead the situation to the Balcanization of Xinjiang first, to a situation like in Yugoslavia, to create chaos inside, and panic inside, to increase ethnic hatred, to incite hatred between the nationalities, and thus achieving its actual goals.
[…..]
RJ: What matters most is internal unity. From last year’s 3-14 incident up until now, more than a year has passed, and we have been through all kinds of ups and downs.
ZHH: What kind of ups and downs?
RJ: The recent things aren’t really serious. But when we were just established, we were attacked by hackers, and of course I myself received some letters of a threatening nature (恐吓信之类). Maybe there are some people who put psychological pressure on me, and want to stop me from doing this thing.
[still] RJ: But I believe that these kinds of intimidation and threats have no effect on me.
ZHH: You are not afraid?
RJ: I had an encounter with death twice before I was ten years old.
ZHH: You don’t shrink from doing a meaningful thing.
[…..]
ZHH: We have just discussed how the Anti-CNN website confronts false reports by Western media. Do you have some suggestions concerning our official websites or big media organizations?
RJ: Our domestic media’s coverage this year is a lot stronger than last year.
ZHH: In which regards?
RJ: For example, open information for the first time, giving tit-for-tat rebuttals for the first time, and even exposing the distorted coverage of some Western media. Before, the counter-attacks by our media weren’t so strong. This time, although they didn’t take the initiative themselves, but at least they didn’t allow others to lead them by the nose. I think our domestic media are gradually maturing.
[…..]
____________
Note
*) The original link – http://tech.nen.com.cn/73468267456364544/20090722/2573929.shtml – is no longer available. The link replacement of above is another online re-publication, of July 21, 2009.
Justrecently's Weblog 
[…] temporary, too, just as they are at Argentine Radio and TV, and disputes over journalistic content don’t appear to…