Howard W. French comments on what he calls the Chinese “candor gap” – the apparent inability of a lot of people in China (and Chinese people living in other countries?) to accept views different from their own, and from the views endorsed by their government:
The Chinese press is [...] full of claims of Western media bias and distortion, a charge made straight-faced in a country that routinely blocks foreign media, strictly censors its own news, and has only allowed the media to cover street violence by Tibetans. The Chinese government has effectively banned coverage of the use of force by the authorities in clamping down not just on dissent in Lhasa, but on the largely peaceful protests by Tibetans that swept much of western China.
French goes on to ask:
[What would happen to someone in China] with the temerity to publicly damn this country for, say, tens of millions of deaths in politically caused disasters, or wave after wave of political witch hunts, which destroyed countless lives in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, or the atrocities committed against Tibetans, or Uighurs or Mongolians in various drives to bring ethnic minorities under control?
The likely answer should give pause to those who are quick to take offense at speech that goes against the grain: He would be sent for re-education, like the monks in Lhasa today, or he would be locked up, never to be heard from again, and certainly not in the Chinese media.
And finally, he sums up:
In some quarters, people obsess about China’s rise, focusing on its GDP figures or military spending, but there is a gap that shows no sign of closing and that is at least as fundamental as these: Call it the candor gap, and until Chinese society can learn to get over its seemingly allergic aversion to conflicting views, to the airing of controversy, and to unsparing exercises in truth-telling, it is hard to imagine this country truly fulfilling its potential.
