State news site Tibet.cn celebrates a French newspaper’s departure from the Western “double standards”, “biased reports” and “Cold War mentality” often lamented by Chinese officials, highlighting and partly translating a recent article on unrest in Tibetan areas of Sichuan.
French newspaper Courrier International published an article entitled ‘Dalai clique intends to undermine the unity of China’, in which it mentioned that after some interviews in Tibetan-inhabited areas, its reporters found that pursuing harmony and development are the most universal desire of ordinary people in these areas.
Those extreme political claims, such as “Tibet independence” and “high-degree autonomy”, are of no social foundation. What common people care about is how to live a better life. Appeals of some self-immolating individuals and political extremists do not conform to the fundamental interest of the local rea, because they are transplanted from outside and “airborned” to the masses in Tibetan-inhabited areas.
However, it was the Chinese-language Global Times whose “reporters found that pursuing harmony and development are the most universal desire of ordinary people in these areas.” Courrier International collects and translates news articles from sources around the world to present foreign perspectives: in this case, a Global Times piece demonstrating the view that unrest in Sichuan “is engineered by Tibetans in exile, infamous minions of the West” (from the translation’s introduction).
Courrier International’s reference page for Global Times does not lavish unreserved praise upon it: “a quality newspaper at its launch, it now freely surfs the wave of national pride that has accompanied China’s emergence onto the world stage.”
For actual Western media coverage from the troubled region, see reports by The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts and McClatchy’s Tom Lasseter, via CDT.
