insult to Chinese people?
CNN was recently hot on Chinese agenda, for allegedly "insulting the Chinese people".
I heard a lot of about this last week, however, as I was straggling with my assignments, I really did not have time to find out what Mr Jack Cafferty, the CNN commentator said about Chinese.
Then I found transcipt, which I verified its source to make sure it is exactly how it happened. The alleged insult took place in CNN's "The Situation Room", when host Wolf Blitzer asked a question about American's relationship with China to CNN political commentator, Jack Cafferty.
The controversial conversation, is as below:
BLITZER: One of the arguments that some of the pro-China elements is making, Jack, is that this is a very different China today than existed 10 years ago, certainly 20 or 30 years ago. This communist regime today is almost like a capitalist regime. They’re a huge economic superpower and that we have a lot at stake in maintaining this economic relationship with China.
CAFFERTY: Well, I don’t know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different. We’re in hawk to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We also are running hundred of billions of dollars worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart.
So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.
The word "they" in the highlighted sentence was intrepreted as "Chinese people" in Chinese news reports. I doubt this, for simple reasons. Blitzer's question clearly defined the word "China" as the "communist regime", and Cafferty was talking about economical issues, although what he said was very extremist, I just cannot the reason why the last "they" word should be interpreted as anything else but Chinese government.
This "insult" angered many Chinese saying that they will boycott CNN. However, I don't really know how they are planning to boycott CNN, since they cannot watch CNN in their Cable TV anyway.
Although I don't feel offended about this, I believe Mr Cafferty should still apologise as his comments were really ambiguous, which he properly did, he apologised to those who "interpreted the comments in this way."
There is a trouble commonly seen across western media on how to properly refer a country called China, or Chinese government. In most cases, we refer American government as "Washington" or "the White House", British government as" the Downing Street", there is no ambiguity.
However, because of the complexicity of Chinese issues (Taiwan, Tibet ...), the word "China" can have different meanings in people with different political stands. Some of possible intrepretations on the word "China" I can think of:
- People's Republic of China's de facto controlled area, i.e. mainland China plus Hong Kong and Macau --- pro-independence people from Taiwan would interprete the word in this way.
- Republic of China, i.e. Taiwan --- likely interpretation by pro-unification people from Taiwan
- Mainland China only --- Some Hong Kong and Macau people would interprete the word in this way.
- Mainland China + Hong Kong + Macau + Taiwan --- offical interpretation of the word "China", by the PRC Government, Most people from PRC would interprete the word in this way too.
... and no need to mention, pro-independence tibetans interprete the word as the Han culture dominanted area of PRC, i.e. exclude Tibet.
The word "Chinese" can cause even more trouble. Oh, and the phrase "mainland China" I used includes Tibet, because it is a fact at this moment, and if you discuss Tibet seperately, you'll find that there are just unlimited number of possible interpretations.
If you are a journalist reading this, I strongly suggest you that next time when reporting on the issues relating to "China", don't forget to be more specific on what "China" you are really taking about, refer to their full names such as "PRC government" or "mainland Chinese people", otherwise when you wake up one day you may just find yourself under hails of criticisms and even death threats made by extremists from one or both side of the Taiwan Strait.
