The Olympic Torch was relayed through Changsha last Wednesday June 4th and I, along with a handful of other foreign teachers at Hunan University, was invited to attend the opening ceremonies. The relay in Changsha was set to start at the foot of the Yuelu Academy in the heart of the university campus at 8:18 in the morning (the auspicious 8) and university officials saw it as a prime time to show off some of their foreign faculty, going so far as to call it a "free marketing opportunity". I personally felt lucky to view the entire thing from a privileged position without having to fight my way through the crowds of enthusiastic Chinese college students.
The photo above and many variations of it ended up in several of the cities main newspapers as well as several online news sources. I was asked by one of the flag-bearers at the ceremony to hold the flag while he snapped some pictures and in seconds became the target of about 20 trigger-happy photographers for the local news who jumped at the opportunity to capture a shot of a foreigner holding a Chinese flag. What better way to sell newspapers and calm fears of foreign dissenters, protestors, tibetan sympathizers and the like?
Most of the reporters captioned the photo with "Hunan University Foreign Exchange Student", a few got "Foreign Teacher" right. But what bothered me the most was a particular caption in which the reporter quoted me as having said "我今天是长沙人" -- which literally translates to "today I am a Changsha person". I never said that! Most of the photographers didn't ever bother to even ask me anything, assuming I couldn't speak Chinese. I never said anything!
The message itself doesn't personally offend me. I love Changsha. But the fact that the press has absolutely no qualms about literally pulling words out of thin air and passing them on as my own? Hello professionalism? Accountability? Truth? I did not have a chance to see any of the other newspapers where my photo got printed, but I would not be surprised to find that similar misquotations happened elsewhere.
It's hard for me to say if this is singularly a Chinese phenomenon or not. I have never really been interviewed or photographed by a newspaper back home or anywhere else for that matter. But when I learnt that a Japanese friend of mine living in China had been quoted in a newspaper as apologizing in the name of Japan to the Chinese people for the atrocities committed by the Japanese in WWII I couldn't help but make some assumptions.
The Chinese are generally very patriotic and extremely touchy when it comes to foreign perceptions of China and the image of China in the foreign media. Historically they are a society that has closed itself off to the outside world for millennia. As they struggle to deal with these issues and with creating a new image of China in the world one wonders about the role of the Chinese media in defining the country's image for the Chinese people themselves. I can't help feeling that the media here has a tendency to jump at opportunities to portray foreign approval of China (a broad generalization, I know), whether through making up quotes that they wish they had heard or through overindulging in an opportunistic photo op.
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