China-Africa: Biased Western media on China and Africa
By Salihu Abubakar
For five days in July 2009, African media officials interacted with officials of the State Council of Information of China and many other top officials of the Chinese government, to map out strategies for achieving closer cooperation between the Chinese and African media.
The media of the two regions proffered suggestions on how to “cross-report each other in an unbiased and balanced manner“ as against what they believe, are the heavily tainted ways of reporting their regions that is being carried out by their counterparts in Western countries.
They agreed that over the years, Africa and China were portrayed to the rest of the world as being backward and uncivilized; having no regards for human rights; and were not democratic or where they had some semblance of democracy, their elections were hardly ever free and fair.
The Western media had also flayed African and Chinese leaders as being corrupt, deceitful, dictatorial and lacking in the true meaning of leadership for their people.
The West always emphasise the disasters and conflicts in the two regions.
While the seminar was not anti-West and protective of the two regions, the consensus was that the Western media was overtly biased against Africa and China and were only interested in the negative things that happen in the two regions.
It is because of these that leaders in the two regions view media reports from the West as mischievous, considering the fact that their histories and cultures are far apart from those of their critics.
For instance, Africa and China are quick to point at the deprivations that they suffered in the hands of their colonial masters and that millions of their populations are still poor and in need of basic infrastructure.
“The main concern for us is the improvement of the living standard of our populace and putting food on their tables, not the pursuit of such things as “their so called human rights,’’ a member of the Chinese ruling party, Mr Liu Yao, noted during the tour.
According to Yao, China has strived to provide decent houses to its people through the introduction of efficient mortgage arrangements that helped many to own their houses and those in rural areas are being assisted to improve both their occupations and their places of abode.
He said that despite the successes recorded in the Chinese economy–the general improvement of the living standard of its populace and its ability to feed its more than 1.3 billion popu-lation, none-theless, the attack from Western media had remained unrelenting.
The Chinese say the sourest grape in relations between China and the West has to do with attempts to enthrone “so called” Western democracy and democratic norms and cultures in the heavily populated country as opposed to its communist ideology, which the West has maligned as a form of dictatorship.
Another sour point between them has been the question of human rights and recurring abuses that the West had repeatedly made so much noise about.
The Western media have refused to forget the incident at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing about two decades ago, when security agents had a face-off with demonstrating students.
According to the Chinese, the West believe that Beijing was too high-handed in handling the armless students, and had continued to harp on it, making a kind of anniversary out of it.
The Chinese believe that every country and people have their own standards for human rights and that no nation should dictate to the other.
“We have been debating this with them, we have been going annually to debate, argue and sometimes even fight with them in Geneva where the UN has a special body on human rights,” an official of Chinese State Information office said at the Beijing seminar.
“We are always ready to defend our policy anywhere, any day, and we are open for them to come and see,’’ he stressed.
“We are currently in a state of recurring reckless anti-Africa and anti-China rhetoric’s in the Western media and we must come together to nip this in the bud,” a Director-General with the Chinese State Council on Information, Mr Jiang Weiqiang, explained.
He therefore called for closer cross-coverage of activities by African and Chinese media, so as to ensure the dissemination of “true and undiluted information“ to their respective peoples.
Weiqiang said that there were a lot of misconceptions, half-truths and blatant lies about China and Africa that were being floated by the Western media.
“We are looking at each other, not directly, but through the distorted vision of the Western media“, he said, adding that China and Africa need to have greater presence of their media at each other’s backyard so that they could cover each other “truthfully and openly”.
He said that , China had already established offices of its official party Newspaper, the Peoples Daily and the official News Agency, Xinhua, in major African cities, including Abuja, Nairobi and Johannesburg, and urged African countries to post correspondents to Beijing.
He said that 46 African countries were working closely with China on the area of exchange of visits such as the seminar for top media officials, which was becoming a regular feature.
He noted, however, that so far, only Kenya and South Africa had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese government on collaboration in information dissemination.
Weiqiang insisted that for developing countries, the priority should be how to put food on the tables of their teeming populations and roofs above their heads and not “So called human rights for citizens”.
“Different countries at different stages of their development have different understandings of human rights, “ he said, noting that China and Africa must not be isolated at this time for incessant pummeling by the Western media.
“Unlike the Western nations, our priority is subsistence and housing for our people“, he said, noting that the Chinese government had brought together experts to define human rights as it affected China and that the government was satisfied that it was on the right track.
“China was never afraid of discussing the subject of human rights yesterday, today and will not be afraid to discuss it tomorrow, having published in 1991, its first position paper on human rights“, he said.
Speaking in the same vein, the Chinese Minister responsible for the State Council of Information office, Mr Wang Chen, called for the creation of a bridge across the gap between Africa and China.
“I urge you to build a bridge of China-Africa friendship with your Pens and Cameras; the Western media will never let us progress peacefully”.
On the African side, officials noted that a major problem was the corrupt tendencies of the leaders and their undying desire to hold on to power, even at the expiration of their official terms.
They agree that Africa, a continent richly endowed with human and material resources, was still groping in deprivation, disease, and gross under-development.
As noted by some of the African participants at the seminar, no Western nation would want to be doling out aid into a bottomless pit without seeing any positive improvement from those African countries that were dependent on such foreign aid.
Observers believe that some form of compromise will suffice in bridging the “war of words” between China, Africa and the West.
They also say that good government and development would further bridge the gaps. (NANFeatures).
(triumphnewspapers.com)