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Foreign media on China
Nonsense reporting about ChinaPosted by Jeremy Goldkorn, October 8, 2007 10:51 AM
The October Golden week holiday seems to have stopped certain Western commentators from checking their facts about China. Here are two cases of very shoddy reporting work: Sloppy Slate Soon after, the article mentions "a new Chinese law announced in September that forbids journalists from covering stories that might undermine Chinese stability and/or the ability of the central government to respond with emergency measures." Bremmer discusses how he heard "virtually no qualms about the idea from any of the Chinese I spoke with". Fair enough; shame Bremmer did not speak to any informed Chinese people who would have told him that the draft law was amended in June this year to get rid of the emergency reporting restrictions. While he is right that ordinary Chinese people did not seem to care either way, the draft law was hotly debated by Chinese journalists and bloggers. But hey, why stick with facts when making stuff up is so much more fun: Moving on to Dalian for the first annual meeting of Global Growth Companies, I can't help but be impressed. The population of this second-tier port city in China's northeast has rocketed from 500,000 (roughly the size of Portland, Ore.) to 6 million (a bit less than Hong Kong) in just five years. Where did he get that 500,000 figure from? The China Times perhaps? Chinese government data from 2000 says that the urban areas of Dalian had a population of more than 2.5 million. Feeding us a line of bullshit China's Great Firewall turns its attention to RSS feeds Uh, no. All blogs on Sina.com, China's biggest blog host have the word blog in the URL, and there are plenty of URLs and feeds that include the terms "rss" and "feed" that do not trip the Chinese Net Nanny's filters. Ars Technica feed are inaccessible in China because it is run through Feedburner's server (feeds.feedburner.com), which is blocked. Unfortunately, uber-blog Boing Boing linked to this piece of nonsense. |
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Comments on Nonsense reporting about China
Feedburner.com isn't blocked, just the server that actually does the feeding: 66.150.96.119.
It's not being keyword triggered, that IP is blacklisted.
Tough call on who's the bigger boob: the GFW for annoying people without actually censoring anything or the ArsT writer for being a silly ass.
Fair enough on the slapping down lazy journalism, Jeremy.
But.... bloggers can't be "ordinary people" too??
Thanks, jim. I've made that point a bit clearer in the post itself.
I'd wager that a lot of the complaints about keyword-filtered feeds are the result of blogs redirecting local URLs to feeds.feedburner.com.
You'd win that bet.
It's not only feeds.feedburner.com. Feedburner has that mydomain service that allows you to keep your domain as part of the feed, but with the DNS record pointing to their IP address.
The Gawker media sites all use it (feeds.gawker.com), but because it goes to the naughty IP address they won't work. Sites themselves are fine.
As much as I relish a good conspiracy theory, I think that someone at GFW HQ blocked it one day and just can't be bothered to change it back.
I have to agree with you on the Slate article. There's this bizarre tendency for news magazines to not get non-specialists and people who only have a cursory knowledge of China to write these articles. Ian Bremmer is well-respected, so I've heard, but why is he giving the report on the state of China? The "no-one I spoke to" factor is especially nauseating when they clearly are on a tight schedule and are working with a tiny sample size. I hope more people link to your post on this...
Fair enough.
But then again, given you have that insipid feature, "Sexy Beijing", it is rather tough to take shots at others for bad journalism.
SinaSource,
I dont have a problem with sexy beijing. In fact I recommended the series to some faculty members in our school who are interested in China. Did this card-carrying Chinese patriot miss something sinister in sexy beijing? I thought it was cool.
Put simply, it demeans Chinese.
Would those "faculty members" be, in fact, fellow English language teachers?
In that case, they are not faculty nor are they professors, though many claim to be, even though they lack advanced degrees or have never served in positions in universities outside of China. But they come here, teach English, and all of a sudden, they are "professors" and "faculty members".
I fear that the series appeals to people who have not the least bit of understanding of China, apart from Lonely Planet.