Bingfeng Teahouse

via: china daily opinion

MAJ defended his points by commenting in China Daily web site:

... scroll through all of the China-related articles that Richard has baked for his readers, and you will see that almost ALL of them are negative in their outlook. The reason why I describe these sites as "hate" sites is because they present a distorted view about China, and they do this by focussing almost exclusively on bad news stories.

So far for this month of December, Richard has 27 China-related stories on his Peking Duck blog. I have classified 21 of these as negative, bad news stories - as stories which view China through pessimistic eyes. That represents 77.7 percent.

for anyone who reads both China Daily and Peking Duck, i am afraid s/he could get a very well balanced view of nowadays' china. for anyone who only reads China Daily or Peking Duck, his or her views of china are no doubt very distorted.

so the questions to me are - do we have an environment in which people have full access to media of different angles of looking the same issues, if no, then are those isolated media themselves well-balanced in reporting these issues? questions come to me in that order since i believe creating a media environment that allows diversified voices is much more effective than making single, well-balanced media for the purpose of presenting a balanced view to people.

the peking duck site, no matter what motivates the blog host and how prejudiced the host is in selecting topics, has offered an opportunity for chinese readers to re-balance their views of the motherland, which include great achievements she made but also a lot of improvement opportunities that might not be heavily reported by media like China Daily.

i have previously accused some media of indulging into china-bashing or presenting imbalanced coverages, they are, to a large extent, different from what we observe from the Peking Duck - merely stir up negative emotions instead of thinking about china, or, intentionally omit the integral part of a single event.

the problem with sites like Peking Duck is that they attract some westerners who are obsessed in reading china in negative perspectives, just like some chinese militant-nationalists who are obsessed in make belligerent comments in web sites discussing military affairs, you are not going to ask those military web sites change into sites talking about french wines or californian bubble bath, are you?

via: r-conversation

also read related posts: danwei, peking duck

literally, ma-lie-lao-tai means Marxist-Leninist Old Ladies, which refer to those old ladies in 1970s' china who stubbornly stick to an ideologies without any clue how to fit them into the real ánd changing world.

what china's public security bureau mainly does is to prevent and punish crimes like everywhere in the rest of the world, just like 99% of american troops' daily job is not to abuse POWs at their hands.

chinese ma-lie-lao-tai in 1970s kept doubtful eyes on everything from the US since that country did something wrong in somewhere of this planet during some periods of the histroy, and i still remembered how to convince those ma-lie-lao-tai that american jeans are not the privileges enjoyed by abandoned american capitalists - american jeans are actually the dresses of american laboring class, the cow boys!

chinese public security bureau is evil? give me a break! chinese porn sites are much more evil than PSB because these sites consume a lot of time and energy of chinese young guys who otherwise will spend time to talk about democracy and freedom on the web. how familiar these american ma-lie-lao-tai mentalities are!

equipped with facilities imported, chinese PSB could do a better job in preventing crimes or hunting criminals, which leads to a safer envorionment for people to live, to work and ... to develop china into a civil society. compared with these that will benefit hunderds of millions of chinese people, filtering the information on the web that only a few hundred (or nobody) try to access seems to me a less pressing issue. what american ma-lie-lao-tai mentalities suggest is to throw away the dirty bathing water as well as the baby.

too bad that the mainstreams of american society are still dominated by such ma-lie-lao-tai mentalities when it comes to issues about china.