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Thanks.

UniversityChinese Skiers and the Western Media Filter

Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor has another article on “ancient Chinese skiers” in the Altay region of Xinjiang.
It’s a good article mainly focused on pro skier Nils Larsen who has gone out to the Altay region, which straddles Xinjiang and Mongolia, and checked out the herdsmens skis himself.
It also details the differences between Altaic skiing and Scandanavian skiing - wider skis with animal skin lining the bottom for grip which require far more boot and pole work to maneuver. But towards the end, Robert Marquand repeats what I can now confidently say is a bit of misinformation that has lodged itself firmly in the China narrative of Western media:

On Jan. 25, days before the ancient-skiing contest, China’s state-run news service Xinhua announced that China had essentially invented skiing.

Citing newly discovered Altaic regional cave paintings of four hunters on boards with poles in their hands, chasing cattle and horses - the Xinhua story proposed that “Chinese were adept skiers in the Old Stone Age,” and that skiing originated there 100 to 200 centuries ago.

In a previous post I addressed a Reuters article dated January 24th that began with “Cliff paintings of hunters of rugged remote northwestern China appear to prove that Chinese were adept skiers in the Old Stone Age, Xinhua News Agency said on Monday.”

Except on Monday, January 23rd, the only English language Chinese article I say was this one at People’s Daily Online which did not make any Chinese claim, but instead cautiously said ” Contents of ancient cliff paintings in northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have been verified as human hunting while skiing and, therefore, archeologists prove the Altay region to be a place of skiing some 100 to 200 centuries ago.”
The next day, Reuters cast this as a “Chinese claim” even though the original Chinese English-language article didn’t refer to any skiing whatsoever as “Chinese”.

Now Robert Marquand is quoting a January 25th article from Xinhua, which was in fact this one which reprinted, as Chinese media often does, the Reuters article verbatim. Marquand says the article was printed “just days before the ancient skiing contest”, which is true, but it was another example of the Chinese media plagiarizing foreign media (as part of what I believe to be a silly plan to increase China’s internet English media presence by sheer volume of material) rather than an example of China promulgating some all encompassing nationalist view of history within its borders.

Marquand is a good journalist, but the job of informing the U.S. and Western public on China is still dominated by China Watchers, the gatekeeper experts of the press and academia.
It’s downright sloppy and counterproductive to rely on Chinese historical nationalism as a given - it starts down the slippery slope of stereotype, which in turn dangerously invites alliteration.
This was actually an example of a Chinese press article, the original, taking a neutral viewpoint on the questions of national borders, sovereignty and identity. But since we’re all so used to China making too much of these issues, those of us who write about China risk doing exactly what Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor have done here: being blind to when they actually got something right.
It’s a disservice to the Chinese journalists and politicians who do care about getting historical facts right more than plugging a nationalist agenda, and a failure to promote better cross-cultural communication.
I can sympathize a little more with Chinese who feel they are unfairly maligned in the Western press when I read things like this, and I wonder if Western journalists will ever throw off the stereotypical memes used about China (e.g. “This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Cultural Revolution!”, “Gosh, Shanghai is Really Modern!”, “Ohmigod, China is a Bird Flu/Andromeda Strain Breeding Petridish!”, and so on).
I also wonder if the Chinese media will ever get a handle on the idea that their foreign language media is supposed to have, theoretically, an audience whom they have to respond to (foreign correspondents might be a good place to start), and finally how many foreign correspondents in China really know Chinese.
Metanoiac recently got to ask some the media elite from both sides about these issues, and he was unimpressed.

It sometimes becomes a bad habit when living in China that you’ve heard the same tired lines from so many people about the same issues on which you disagree, and you begin to anticipate the words “China has 5000 years of history”, “Taiwan is a part of China”, “it hurts the feelings of the Chinese people”, and all those other stale cliches that make us roll our eyes and, in rare extreme cases, bitch all night about it while getting progressively more drunk.
And then invariably there comes a time when that kneejerk instinct kicks in and we don’t listen to a Chinese person because it sounded like they were about to deliver another old chestnut, when in fact they ended up saying something far more interesting.
But we don’t hear it, because we stopped listening before they even began, thanks to fatigue and cynicism wrought by China’s very real suppression of independent thought, particularly on issues such as history.
The repetition of this claim that Xinhua made another sweeping nationalist proclamation seems driven by that same set of assumptions, because China correspondents have to guard against that dulling of wits even more than your average expat.