What the meanness means about China and US
by
mallardsballadd
08/12/2008, 11:22 AM #
The Olympics represents friendly competition between countries. It is also supposed to represent sportsmanship.
However, the Beijing Olympics is about much more than athletic competition. It is about real competition and about real power and has nothing to do with sportsmanship or fairness. When people compete for the same and limited resources people will react emotionally and unfairly in a rational, self serving way.
And in the case between China and the U.S., both vying for the top spot in the entire world, fair and balanced reporting of the other country's actions and intents will hardly be evenhanded.
I doubt that the reigning champion will have anything nice to say about the upstart contender at a press conference. Especially given the fact that most of the world's important media outlets are a part of or beholden to the reigning champion. It is also against human nature to be particularly nice to our direct competitor.
Atlanta based CNN is not going to get a ratings boost by focusing on how much hard work China put into the Olympics. Indignant steel workers will be more likely to tune into a CNN story about how these job stealing Chinese are suppressing the Tibetans. Similar to the French journalists' love of the backwards-ness of some aspect of American culture, American media will probably never tire of focusing on some aspect of China that is less than flattering. The French prefer to propogate the worst of American culture not because it is that offensive, but because of its own insecurity about its relative power in the world in relation to the Americans.
I expect that the Americans will do the same as they feel more and more threatened by the Chinese. After all, the Chinese have had a command economy for decades, human rights violations a hundred times worse than anything they have now (cultural revolution), so why all the fuss now? Because of our insecurity with China's current rising power. When China was suppressing Tibet with their military guns, shipping off millions of dissidents to re-education camps or communes, American activists were not as concerned.
However, we should feel insecure about China's rise to power. If they develop an appetite for resources a fraction of what we have, we'd be forced to pay more for that resource or curtail our own appetites. As the fat cat, I think we're not going to let a bunch of developing world, upstart Chinese affect our comfortable way of living. We'll probably be able to gauge our own insecurities by the amount of negative stories about China that gets propagated.
In addition, nothing that the Chinese are being blamed for are things that the Americans haven't already been egregiously guilty of in the past or today. Americans have been polluting the enivornment for well over a century (Even today we're still at the No. 1/No.2 spot for the biggest polluter of the world), we still consume, use and waste more than anyone in the world, we've killed and shipped off almost all of our ethnic, indigenous populations to the worst parts of our country and still treat them poorly . . . a lot of criticism about this upstart China can easily be used against us.
But the whole 'meanness' of the media against China that the author mentions is really not about fairness. It's about competition. If they are going to compete with us for limited resources, we have to start by labeling them as some form of enemy. It's not about sharing resources, it's about making sure some upstart doesn't get a piece that should be rightfully yours.
