The October Golden week holiday seems to have stopped certain Western commentators from checking their facts about China. Here are two cases of very shoddy reporting work:
Sloppy Slate
Slate has published a breathy article titled A political scientist in China by Ian Bremmer. On the first page, it refers to a newspaper called The China Times. Apparently Bremmer meant China Daily; China Times is actually a Taiwanese newspaper.
Soon after, the article mentions “a new Chinese law announced in September that forbids journalists from covering stories that might undermine Chinese stability and/or the ability of the central government to respond with emergency measures.” Bremmer discusses how he heard “virtually no qualms about the idea from any of the Chinese I spoke with”.
Fair enough; shame Bremmer did not speak to any informed Chinese people who would have told him that the draft law was amended in June this year to get rid of the emergency reporting restrictions. While he is right that ordinary Chinese people did not seem to care either way, the draft law was hotly debated by Chinese journalists and bloggers.
But hey, why stick with facts when making stuff up is so much more fun:
Moving on to Dalian for the first annual meeting of Global Growth Companies, I can’t help but be impressed. The population of this second-tier port city in China’s northeast has rocketed from 500,000 (roughly the size of Portland, Ore.) to 6 million (a bit less than Hong Kong) in just five years.
Where did he get that 500,000 figure from? The China Times perhaps? Chinese government data from 2000 says that the urban areas of Dalian had a population of more than 2.5 million.
Feeding us a line of bullshit
From influential tech news site Ars Technica:
China’s Great Firewall turns its attention to RSS feeds
More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with “feeds,” “rss,” and “blog,” thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that aren’t blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless.
Uh, no. All blogs on Sina.com, China’s biggest blog host have the word blog in the URL, and there are plenty of URLs and feeds that include the terms “rss” and “feed” that do not trip the Chinese Net Nanny’s filters. Ars Technica feed are inaccessible in China because it is run through Feedburner’s server (feeds.feedburner.com), which is blocked.
Unfortunately, uber-blog Boing Boing linked to this piece of nonsense.