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Monday, November 22, 2004 

Thoughts on Western Media Reports on China II

Another perspective on Western Media reports on China, from Jeff in China, to keep in mind and consider:
"I don't blame the journalists who invested in this [Human Rights] narrative. Almost all of us did, and in retrospect it's easy to see why. The events of 1989 -- here I don't mean only the Beijing massacre or the demonstrations that preceded it, but also the successful democratic movements in Eastern Europe -- seemed to herald a new paradigm in global politics, one in which autocratic governments were inherently unstable and mass popular protest would play a far greater role than in the past.

[...]

But the idea that the "China story" was fundamentally a story about political oppression depended on an unspoken premise: that popular resistance to that oppression might some day reemerge on the same scale as in early 1989. If that premise is false -- and within a year of Deng's death, most of us had realized that it probably was -- then the Human Rights Narrative was the wrong horse to bet on."


Read the entire post.

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