Sunday, April 06, 2008
Opinion

The AJC’s China syndrome

How is it possible that...the AJC was trumpeting Delta flights to China on its front page and discouraging a boycott of the Olympic Games in China this summer in its opinion section?

Nepalese policemen arrest a Tibetan monk protester in exile during an anti-Chinese demonstration in front of the Chinese Embassy in Katmandu on March 25.
CREDIT: PRAKASH MATHEMA/AFP/Getty Images
By Stephanie Ramage

It isn’t often that a business’s latest offering makes it onto the front page of a newspaper. On the front page of a small-town paper, one might see that an advertiser now has some swanky new attraction—maybe, for example, a book store now features a large chain coffee shop. In that same edition, one might see an opinion column that claims that only rednecks are avoiding the chain coffee shop.

Such incestuous relationships between newspapers and advertisers are not, strictly speaking, ethical, but who can blame the publications? We’re constantly reminded that times are hard for all newspapers, allegedly through no fault of their own. Circulation is hurting, their leadership reasons, not because of anything they’ve done or haven’t done—it’s the Web and the economy that are making people cancel subscriptions. The economy, according to the geniuses who sit on editorial boards, is a distant god, easily angered, egged on by a cadre of high priests at the World Bank, the Fed and the mega-banks, and must be placated with the occasional sacrifice of workers who actually know how to do their jobs.

And right now, the economy god is angry, so it’s understandable that small newspapers fighting for breath might cut corners on ethics in an attempt to satisfy advertisers, basically prostrating themselves at the altar of the dollar. They are, as singer Jackson Browne put it so beautifully, “caught between the longing for love and the struggle for the legal tender.”

But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not a small-town paper. It’s one of the largest newspapers in the country, with the fat paychecks to show for it. So why was it behaving like the Mayberry Gazette, running what amounts to a free ad for Delta’s new nonstop service to Shanghai on the front page of the March 31 edition, with a headline that reads “China closer than ever,” along with an opinion piece on page A-11 under the headline “Hyping free Tibet is a futile cause” and a pull quote in bold that reads, “Tibet is part of China, and what happens there is an internal affair”?

It wasn’t Delta that made the ethical faux pas. When Delta’s public relations folks push press releases to news reporters, they are only doing their jobs. But any newspaper with a shred of self-scrutiny is supposed to know how stuff on Page A-1 might interplay with the stuff in the op-ed section.

There’s no question that the Chinese government has a role to play in working out permits for airlines as well as any other type of industry seeking to do business there. So Delta has a good relationship with the Chinese government and that’s good. Congratulations to Delta. But how is it possible that the editors at the AJC scheduled that story on the front page and then went out of their way to pay for and publish a syndicated column out of Florida to dismiss Tibet’s struggle for autonomy? How is it possible that it seemed Ok to the people putting together the A section that the AJC was trumpeting Delta flights to China on its front page and discouraging a boycott of the Olympic Games in Beijing in its opinion section?

The author of the column, Charley Reese, someone who evidently spends more time gabbing in coffee shops than fact-checking, makes the point that it’s wrong for Americans to encourage Tibetans in their struggle in any way when they themselves are not willing to face China’s guns. “As for us,” he says, “we should do nothing.” Reese claims that the days when the “European empires” (those are his words; it’s been a century since any European state had a real empire, but damn the facts and full speed ahead) are over, and they can no longer tell other countries what to do and so, he says, we Americans should just shut up.

Well, Reese is wrong, the AJC is wrong, and China is wrong.

Reese complains that there are too many “vocational intellectuals” and too few “real intellectuals,” a complaint that would have a great deal more merit if he used himself as Exhibit A. He seems ignorant of the fact that the Dalai Lama has said that Tibet’s struggle is not necessarily to be an independent nation. Tibet wants China to stop shipping in thousands of Chinese workers and destroying Tibet’s very character. Tibetans want China to leave Tibet’s Buddhist heritage in peace. They want religious freedom. As Columbia University’s Tibet expert Robert Barnett told Foreign Policy magazine last month, Tibetan protesters “feel they are adding muscle because they are doing what he [the Dalai Lama] can’t as a monk and spiritual figure.”

Contrary to what Reese says, there is something we can do to take some of the pressure off of the protestors and it’s right here on this page—we can say that China is wrong.

Two points: First, the protesters want outside pressure on China. Second, desperation breeds violence. By criticizing China from outside the conflict, we can help those protesters feel less desperate, and more willing to work diplomatically for change. They won’t feel so isolated, as they have since the Indian government issued an edict last fall forbidding its officials from meeting with the Dalai Lama. We don’t have to be an empire or wealthy and powerful to speak up—that is a distinctly American privilege. If you have a magic marker and a piece of paper, you can write “China is wrong” and no one will break your kneecaps.

And if we Americans don’t say it, who will? Since when do we cuddle up to the Chinese government, an egregious human rights violator? Since the economy god blessed China and cursed America?

Here’s a suggestion for the editors at the AJC: When your nonstop flight lands in Shanghai this summer and you board the bullet train for the 10-hour trip to Beijing, carry signs that read “China is wrong to oppress Tibet” and let us know how that goes over, won’t you? SP