The recent rumor fest showed a lack of context and the reluctance of most Indian media houses to take foreign news coverage seriously.
The recent rumor fest showed a lack of context and the reluctance of most Indian media houses to take foreign news coverage seriously.
The last fortnight has been very surreal for Indian correspondents in China. In the last week of September, several Indian television news channels began reporting on rumors of a “coup” in Beijing and military convoys entering, even blocking the Chinese capital. The post spread like wildfire, so much so that it seemed that every Indian in China was getting a flood of anxious calls from people back home to ask about the “situation”. A diplomat was asked if there were tanks on the streets. For the record, Beijing looked as normal as ever.
Despite there being absolutely no evidence for the claims, the consensus on these news stories, even of veteran foreign affairs experts, was that “there is no smoke without fire”. But was it so?
In this example, the “smoke” was flight data showing the mass cancellations of flights and the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping had been publicly for a week since his return to China from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand on 17 September. were not visible. , Yet both “warning signs” appeared far less suspicious to those on the ground in China who are familiar with the context of the country’s current pandemic policies.
Indeed, the mass flight cancellations were a bane of my travel plans since arriving on the mainland in June. As I ended the mandatory quarantine, I found that most flights to and from the city were canceled overnight, due to only a few cases in Shenzhen. This was due to China’s ‘zero COVID’ policy, under which cities at medium or high risk are immediately isolated from the rest of the country, making mass cancellations hardly uncommon.
As for Mr. Xi’s “disappearance”, those who had been following his rare trips outside the mainland knew that he was likewise in public for 10 days after his visit to Hong Kong in July. had not appeared. Under ‘zero COVID’, all foreign arrivals are required to isolate for 10 days, and the Chinese leadership should be aware of the poor optics, be the same leader who imposed the stringent ‘zero COVID’ regime on the country He broke those rules.
Furthermore, to those following Chinese politics, the original source of the rumours, which appeared on foreign websites linked to Falun Gong, was completely familiar. As mentioned by Zi Yang in MIT Technology Review“If you follow a lot of Chinese-language Twitter accounts, it’s not rare to see strong political rumors like this”, which are part of a whole world of “commenters and anonymous accounts that openly speak to the state of China.” guessing just about every faint signal coming from the media,” capitalizing on every word and gesture, and interpreting it as something coercive. This is true in the political season in China and twice on the eve of a decade-long Communist Party Congress.
To me, the latest rumor fest indicated, above all, the importance of context in journalism. For those unfamiliar with both the ‘zero COVID’ regime and the ecosystem of foreign political speculation, it is quite difficult to separate fact from fiction. This is especially true in an authoritarian country like China where politics is the darkest part of the black box. In Xi’s era, the ambiguity has only increased so much that it has become impossible to confirm or deny a political development that has not been confirmed on state media. And ambiguity is fertile ground for rumour-mongering. However, this should not become an excuse for media outlets to forgo basic standards of fact-checking. It is worth reflecting why the rumors appearing in Indian media outlets were not covered by most of the organizations in the West or Asia.
A major problem is that most Indian media outlets are reluctant to post their own correspondents on the ground to take foreign news coverage seriously. Grassroots journalists aren’t infallible, but they have a better chance of getting the context right to separate the rumors from the news. Only four Indian correspondents are reporting from China (from Hindu, Press Trust of India, Hindustan Times, and Prasar Bharati), all of them are in Beijing. If there are, say, 40, rumors that have garnered attention in the past two weeks, their shelf life may be too short.