The Chinese march towards the superpower status may be unstoppable. But before they reach that status they would have thoroughly exposed themselves as a bullying and hypocritical nation unworthy of being regarded as a great power. Consider the wild reaction of the Chinese, ironically conveyed largely through their state-controlled media, after India refused to give yet another extension to the visa of three c333 working for the state-run Xinhua news agency.
The Chinese protest deserves utmost condemnation because China’s record in allowing freedom to journalists to work in their country is the poorest. First of all, journalists in China are indistinguishable from spies, informers and government agents. They are not free to write what they see and what actually happens. Heavy punishment, including long-term prison sentence, awaits those who write anything that the Communist government of China does not like.
There is no such thing such as investigative journalism in China. The movement of journalists in China is restricted. There is no tradition of liberal thinking or writing in China. Do the Chinese participate in any debate where their government’s action is liable to be put under scrutiny?
It is said that the Chinese constitution does have a provision that guarantees freedom of expression to journalists. An aggrieved journalist can approach the court. That it is a farce because this freedom is subject to the diktat of the Communist Party which appoints the judges.
There are strict no-go areas for journalists in China. You cannot visit and report from the perennially troubled areas of China—the western Muslim-dominated areas and Tibet. As far as the Chinese are concerned the people of these troubled areas have no grievances and anything written in the support of their demands is lies.
For Indians it must be funny to hear the Chinese mock Indian democracy when that word is akin to a four-letter word in Communist China. No less laughable is the Chinese accusation that Indians are becoming ‘nationalists’. Imagine, the Chinese crticising ‘nationalism’! What is more hilarious is a description in one of the propaganda journals of China that India is projected as the world’s ‘largest democracy’ only by the western media. Do the Chinese mean that the honour of being the ‘largest democracy’ belongs to them!
Falun Gong is a spiritual cult in China but the country frowns upon its followers. Reporting on their activities is prohibited. In the Chinese style of ‘democracy’ protesters are shot at without warning. Filming of protests and marches is frowned upon. Dissidents are promptly arrested and sent to jail; the luckier ones manage to escape to freedom in foreign countries.
The Chinese can be quite crude and violent in dealing with journalists whose writings they do not like—foreigners as well as the locals. Organisations like the American Freedom House have chronicled the Chinese way of dealing with critics. The sources of the journalists are threatened and physically attacked. One journalist was ‘manhandled and chained’ and held for more than 14 hours for questioning by the Chinese. His crime: he was trying to interview some people in Beijing.
For three years from 2009 the Washington Post tried—in vain– to get a China visa for its journalist, Andrew Higgins. The reason for not allowing Higgins to return to China was that about 20 years earlier he had written something about the Mongolian dissidents.
A longtime Al Jazeera correspondent in China was expelled for writing a series on corruption and inefficient handling of the aftermath of an earthquake. Correspondents of the New York Times and Bloomberg News were threatened with immediate expulsion for writing articles about the wealth of Communist leaders of China. Towards the end of last year, action was taken against a French journalist who had written what to many would sound like a mild criticism of the Chinese government’s failure to meet the aspirations of the minorities in the country.
It cannot be denied that India too has been guilty of unfair treatment of critical foreign journalists. Denying visas to prospective critics is not uncommon in India either. But what is different in India is that one, such instances are few, and two, freedom of expression in India is not restricted to the extent that unsavoury views find no expression at all, either by Indian or foreign journalist.
The Indian visa of the three Chinese journalists had expired earlier in January this year but the Indian government kept extending their visas on the understanding that their replacements in India—two in Mumbai and one in Delhi–would be posted soon. The Chinese had apparently no intention of doing so because that would have created problems in carrying out the assignment entrusted to the three Chinese journalists–snoop on the Tibetans in India.
The brazenness of the Chinese was breathtaking. They used their official mouthpieces-cum-propaganda machines to warn India of ‘serious consequences’ of the denial of visas to the three Chinese ‘journalists’ who doubled as spies for their country.
The three Chinese were concentrating more on doing the dirty work for their government than carrying out any journalistic work in India. Two of them had sneaked into the Tibetan camps in Karnataka where foreigners are not allowed to enter before first obtaining special permission from the government. The Chinese ‘journalists’ had clearly violated the law in India but that was not of importance to the Chinese who thought they could bully India with a warning of ‘serious consequences’.
Pray, what ‘consequences’ are the Chinese talking about? Are they going to invade India or lay claim to more Indian territory. If that is their intention they need to be reminded that India may still be weaker than the Chinese militarily but a repeat of 1962 is simply not possible. India can give the Chinese a bloody nose. The Chinese arrogance has probably blinded it to the fact that after the recent international court verdict against Chinese occupation of the South China Sea much of the world has begun to be more suspicious of the country for the contempt it shows to a world order based on rule of law.