Following up on my earlier post on the Chinese protests in relation to Tibet, there have been some further developments in the whole Chinese protesters and Chinese online media saga.

- After coming home from the protest on Saturday afternoon I rang the offices of Sky Kiwi to try and find out the reasons for my banning. Having had my IP address blocked it was not possible to look to the site itself for help. I was given the mobile number of a Sarah Li, who seems to run Sky Kiwi. I left a detailed message regarding the situation with the man who answered her mobile (she herself was apparently sick). I told him I wanted to know why I had been banned from the site. Had I offended some part of their terms of service? Had there simply been a mistake? I emphasized the irony of the situation and said that I hoped they would get back to me soon. The man promised to have Sarah call me back as soon as possible.

- On Sunday violent threats against me appeared on the site. Netizens talked of tracking me down and arranging to have me “fucked up”. Other netizens discussed my identity, describing the clothes I had been wearing at the protest and thus making me easily identifiable from photographs posted online. Ironically, while some members of the community discussed my identity, potentially with a view to facilitating my assault, other members of the community were very concerned to protect the identity of the Tibetan, in case his family were assaulted. You need to understand that Tibet is an immensely happy place, and things can easily turn violent when a Tibetan who is merely contented encounters a compatriot who is actually blissfully ecstatic.

- I spent Sunday afternoon making numerous phone calls to get the threats removed. Sarah Li never answered her phone, and nor did anyone at the other mobile numbers I was given by the office. The office kept telling me to call back on Monday, but I wanted the material removed before things got out of hand. In an incident a few years back (the China Bounder Affair to be precise) an acquaintance complained people visited his offices in China to make threats over a similar matter. In the end a guy called Wesley decided to help. It took much convincing to get him to speak English, then more convincing (including mention of police involvement if he didn’t act) to get him to actually do anything. In the end though he took action and the offensive material was removed from the site within an hour or so. Great job Wesley! You actually did something to help. Thanks.

- On Monday I had been expecting a call from Sky Kiwi (I had left enough messages by this stage). No call came. I made a reminder call and left another message for Sarah.

- I left another message at the Sky Kiwi offices on Tuesday.

- On Wednesday (today) I called the Sky Kiwi offices again. They told me to call Sarah. I did so. Surprisingly, Sarah answered her phone. I briefly identified myself and asked if she had received my messages. She said she had, and moreover had already returned my call. This was odd since she had definitely not called me. I tried to explain the situation in case she was mistaking my identity. She interrupted to tell me again that she had already returned my call. Then she told me I should not be calling her and that she had no obligation to return my calls. She said I should deal with the matter through the site. I tried to tell her that I could not do anything through the site while my IP was blocked. She hung up. I called back. She hung up again, saying she was “in a meeting”.

- Having had no luck with Sarah I tried the Sky Kiwi offices again. This time they told me to write them an e-mail since they could not deal with the matter by phone. If they could not deal with the matter by phone then what had the last four days of taking messages been in aid of? I told them this. They told me to write an e-mail and that whatever I wrote would be “given to their lawyers”. Really? What is going on here? Should this not be a simple issue of explaining their forum moderation policy to a frustrated reader/contributor. I don’t want to talk with their lawyer. I want to talk with somebody in charge and find out why a site whose members are organizing a protest against ‘media bias’ bans the one member who asks a few thoughtful questions about that protest. How and why does this happen? The answer must : 1 – site moderation policy, or 2 – site bias, or 3 – a mistake. Somebody at Sky Kiwi has the answer to my question. Can we not communicate about this simple matter without going through lawyers?

At this point I have given up trying to deal with Sky Kiwi. From Saturday through to Tuesday they were just uncommunicative and hard to deal with. On Wednesday they turned peculiar, with Sarah lying about having called me and the desk staff talking about getting lawyers involved. I have tried to understand them. There seems to be no point trying any further.

In a side note, a New Zealand journalist told me that he had tried unsuccessfully to contact one of the protesters to follow up on Saturday’s protest. The reason they didn’t want to speak to him? The protester felt that the journalist, as a Singaporean Chinese, was “not a real Chinese”.

Lets finish by analyzing this last matter. A segment of the Chinese community decides to protest what they see as ‘western’ media bias against them, a form of discrimination if you will. The point of the protest is supposedly to communicate their views to mainstream society (‘western’ society, if you like). A journalist approaches them to discuss the protest, but is rebuffed on the basis that, as a mere Singaporean Chinese, he is “not a real Chinese”.

A couple of points. . . First, who is discriminating against whom here? The discrimination within the Chinese community suddenly looks worse than the discrimination they are supposedly facing. Second, how will the protesters communicate with mainstream society if they harbor such bigoted attitudes? Are the protesters trying to engage and influence mainstream opinion (hint: this may require two-way communication), or are they just angry patriots clutching flags?

Gentle readers, it was at that point that your good narrator became involved, with ironic and entertaining results.

I heard that Chinese students in Auckland were planning to protest western media bias, and specifically New Zealand media bias. The New Zealand angle interested me because it was local, and because I had not personally noticed anything remarkable in the New Zealand media coverage*. Therefore I looked around for details on the planned protest, and found them at www.skykiwi.co.nz, New Zealand’s largest electronic media serving a Chinese audience. The protest was to be held on Saturday noon in Aotea Square here in Auckland.

Reading through the site and sensing the anger of these young Chinese I could not help feeling a little unease. I was reminded of the anti-Japanese protests (riots?) that I had attended in Shanghai a couple of years ago. That was the only previous occasion on which I had personally witnessed a protest by educated and privileged young Chinese. The day had ended with the Japanese consulate and numerous Japanese businesses seriously vandalized (in an interesting cultural aside, the mob ignored the beer fridges in the smashed up Japanese restaurants). I asked myself why privileged and educated young Chinese only ever protest foreign things. It appeared to me that they only ever become moved to express their views when the issue is Japan, or Taiwan, or Tibet, or some other perceived slight to China.

Rather than sit there asking myself this question, I went ahead and asked New Zealand’s Chinese netizens. I wrote a post asking a few things. I asked why their protests only ever targeted foreign things and never targeted their own government. I told them that I had attended the Shanghai anti-Japanese protest, and that at times it had appeared like a riot. I noted that Japanese in Shanghai had been too scared to leave their homes on that day and that numerous innocent business owners had suffered mob violence. While nobody had died or been seriously hurt in the Shanghai demonstration, were there not some parallels between the behavior of demonstrators (rioters?) in Shanghai and in Tibet? Somewhat provocatively, I asked if Tiananmen had simply made educated and privileged young Chinese too afraid to protest their own government. Finally, I asked when the Chinese media was going to ask the Chinese government to produce proof to back its allegations that the DL orchestrated the Lhasa riots.

The response was interesting. Various posters attacked me as a “foreign devil” (洋鬼子) and a “foreign pig” (洋豬). Others apparently believed I was a Chinese pretending to be a foreigner and called me a “fake foreign devil” (假洋鬼). The thread I had started was swiftly locked and I received a disciplinary message. The message gave no explanation of why the thread had been locked, but did suggest that I was not welcome on the site and should leave. I do not know if the people who abused me also received disciplinary messages.

I started another thread to ask why my previous thread had been locked. Provoked by this stage, I sarcastically suggested that the protesters were just mindlessly trotting out the party line in the manner of the Cultural Revolution period. Specifically, I took the piss with a wisecrack about them being “good children of Chairman Mao” (毛主席的好孩子們), and suggested the chairman might reward them all with a Popsicle (冰棍) if they organized a good protest. I knew that was likely to get an ‘interesting’ reaction. But really, if netizens call me a “foreign pig” and site administrators lock my threads and ask me to leave, all because I asked a question, how charming am I supposed to be?

The response was more abuse, then my account on the site was deleted and my IP address blocked. I was no longer able to even read the site without using a proxy. Of course having lived in China I am familiar with proxy servers.

I find this sequence of events hilarious. It took less than 12 hours for the NZ Chinese media most instrumental in organizing Saturday’s protest against bias in the western and New Zealand media to ban (probably) its only non-Chinese contributor. The crime was simply questioning the nationalistic tendencies of educated young Chinese. While the online Chinese New Zealand media was busy displaying its massive bias on matters Chinese, the “your views” section of the New Zealand Herald website was allowing Chinese overseas students to engage local New Zealanders in vigorous debate on the China-Tibet issue. I have no idea if the New Zealand Herald censored comments in that debate, but there is no question that the debate occurred.

Could there be a double standard?

Could the irony of this situation be deep enough for a pod of whales to go swimming in?

I attended the protest on Saturday and chatted with a couple of the protesters. The ones that I spoke to seemed reasonable enough, if (in my opinion) slightly misguided. My criticisms would be as follows:

First, they failed to identify any specific examples of bias in the New Zealand media. Yet their protest claimed to be (at least partially) a response to New Zealand media bias.

Second, they shot themselves in the foot by using some rotten examples to demonstrate western media bias. Most notably, one of their leading examples was the Fox News photo of Nepali police arresting a demonstrator, the caption for which read “Chinese troops parade handcuffed Tibetan prisoners in trucks”. It is obvious that the picture was incorrectly captioned and not a serious attempt to mislead. A person who believes the newspaper used the caption to trick its readers into thinking the Nepali police are Tibetan must also believe the newspaper wants to dupe its readers into seeing invisible trucks, parades of prisoners, and handcuffs. None of these things were in the photo. Why did none of these protesters have the mental facility to spot this obvious truth? Spotting this truth requires nothing more than elementary English and an open and critical mind. Do none of them possess this? To somebody like myself who has followed this story closely from the start, they were simply regurgitating the propaganda from the anti-CNN website. I think they could have done much better.  You can find biases in the western media if you look, but few of the examples they presented fitted my definition of meaningful bias.

Third, the English copy of the flier they distributed was extremely difficult to understand and degenerated into illogical rambling in places. This was an unprofessional attempt at communication. Why had a native English speaker not edited it? The copy is almost too lousy to analyze so I am not going to seriously attempt that. Notably though, the flier stated that western news organizations had been unable to report directly from Tibet because of its geographical remoteness. The flier went on to state that the students were committed to ‘Freedom of Speech’, and framed ‘freedom of speech’ as a shared western and Chinese value. How is this professed commitment to freedom of speech consistent with ignoring the Chinese government’s vigorous restriction of foreign media access to Tibet? Why talk about geographical remoteness (surely a side issue), while ignoring tight Chinese controls over media access to Tibet (surely a major issue). Are they genuinely concerned with free speech and the truth, or are they merely concerned with China’s image?

Fourth, a general survey of the discussion on Skykiwi before and after the protest reveals far more discourse on feeling good about China and abusing things foreign than there is discussion and analysis of the issues they say they are protesting. For example, one common theme in the online discussion was to draw a parallel between their protest to the anti-Japanese protests (riots?) in Shanghai. Another characteristic was describing the event as an “(ethnic) Chinese rally” (華人集會), not a protest against biased coverage of PRC government handling of the Tibetan issue by the western media. A further feature has been the protesters publishing long diatribes online that are expressions of Chinese nationalism and anti-western xenophobia, not genuine attempts to address western media biases. The failure of the protesters to identify concrete bias in the New Zealand media, plus their failure to critically analyze the media material presented by their own protest, also support my feeling that the protest was primarily nationalistic. Social anthropologists sometimes say that you should analyze what people do, not what they say they do. The protesters say they are protesting a specific grievance, but their discourse before and after the protest neglected the grievance itself in favor of simple nationalistic fervor. Of course, being motivated by nationalism is not inconsistent with being motivated by real grievances. However, I think a question should be asked about degree. To what degree are young Chinese protesters critical thinkers who analyze issues and respond rationally? To what degree are they uncritical nationalists primed to respond irrationally to all kinds of triggers?

Fifth, there was some odd amateurism, or even the hint of a conspiracy. The online discussion of the protest mentioned that a Tibetan who had recently returned to (or arrived in?) New Zealand from Lhasa came past to offer words of support. The posters mentioned that this Tibetan described Lhasa to them as a thoroughly harmonious place where all Tibetans feel 100% Chinese and are hugely contented with life. He also said he had been present in Lhasa during the riots, and knew for a fact that the disorder had been orchestrated by non-Tibetan speaking agitators from outside Tibet (who were presumably agents of the DL). Having made a special trip to express his support, the Tibetan seemed to then take his leave fairly quickly, maybe without participating as a protester. There was discussion on Skykiwi about how it was not safe to post the Tibetan’s photograph online because doing so could endanger his family back home. I am not quite sure how this works since Lhasa is said to be a harmonious place inhabited by contended people. The really interesting thing however is this. The sentence previous to the one requesting the Tibetan’s photo not be published provided his full name. How can the protesters be such amateurs? Wasn’t the same person who published the Tibean’s name supposedly concerned with protecting his identity? Maybe the Tibetan told them he was happy to be represented by a name but not by a photograph? Maybe he used a false name? But if the Tibetan hid his true identity from the protesters, could his whole agenda in approaching them have been a deceptive one? I assume the protesters are simply amateurs, but the whole scenario is weird.

Well that just about wraps up what I have to say about the matter of bias in the New Zealand Chinese media and the protests against bias in the western media. Comments are welcome. Abuse is not.

Update: Some follow up to all this is here – including death threats!

* Do not take that to mean that i think the New Zealand media coverage has been problem free. I have not even read most of the New Zealand coverage because I prefer to get my news on Chinese issues from specifically China oriented sources. However, I noticed nothing unusual in what I did read. I also note that the New Zealand Herald website appears to have allowed a free debate in its online comments section, which saw an exchange of views between those supporting and opposing the Tibetan protesters (and rioters).

I am sick of reading this garbage so on Friday I shot a letter off to the editor of the New Zealand Herald. Of course my letter was way too long to publish (one of the problems with the whole Taiwan issue is that it is complex and doesn’t lend itself to simple analysis), but hopefully the New Zealand Herald will pass the letter on to Mr. Nadkarni. My letter follows (slightly edited from the original version, which went out unedited and contained a couple of typos).

Dear Editor,

Dev Nankarni’s article on the KMT election win in Taiwan and its implications for Chinese-Taiwanese relations and Pacific diplomacy was ridiculously misinformed. Some quick points follow.

To blandly state that China and Taiwan were united until they “went their separate ways” after the civil war misrepresents history. Taiwan was originally a non-Chinese Austronesian society. Ironically, despite being based in Fiji, Mr. Nadkarni completely ignores Taiwan’s Austronesian beginnings. Permanent Chinese settlement in Taiwan only began during the Dutch colonial period in the early 17^th Century, when Dutch subjugation of the Austronesian aboriginals first made settlement attractive to Chinese emigrants. Taiwan first became part of a China based state only when the Ming loyalist Koxinga (a mixed Chinese-Japanese born in Nagasaki) drove the Dutch from Taiwan in the later 17^th Century. From this point Taiwan evolved as a predominantly ethnically Chinese society.

Koxinga’s government did not represent the Manchurian Qing Dynasty that ruled China at the time though. Koxinga was the head of a small anti-Qing state (little more than a couple of cities) that fell to the Qing armies shortly after he seized Taiwan. The Qing Empire (technically a Manchurian Empire that happened to rule China) then gained control of Taiwan but largely neglected it. While the Qing Empire exerted political control in Taiwan, its control never extended into the mountainous interior or across to the east coast of the island.

In the late 19^th century the Qing Empire ceded Taiwan to the Japanese following a short war, trading Taiwan to keep Japanese influence out of the Chinese and Manchurian heartlands. This trade demonstrated the peripheral importance of Taiwan to China at that time. Taiwan then experienced 50 years of Japanese rule. The Japanese invested heavily in the economy and Taiwan leapt ahead of China in terms of development.

After WWII the Americans handed Taiwan over to the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) government of Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan saw its considerable wealth siphoned off to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and gangsters in Shanghai and the island’s economy collapsed. When the CCP defeated the KMT in the civil war, the KMT fled to Taiwan and spent the next several decades oppressing the Taiwanese population and trading occasional shell barrages with their CCP enemies. The arrival of the KMT in Taiwan was as much another colonization as it was a joyous return of Taiwan to the Chinese ‘motherland’ – a ‘mother’ that adopted it relatively late and never especially cared about it. Hokkien (the Chinese language spoken by the majority of Taiwan’s inhabitants) was banned from education and public life, and Taiwanese school teachers, officials and intellectuals were harassed and murdered and saw their jobs taken by KMT loyalists from China. The situation only improved as democratization was gradually introduced during the 1980s and 1990s and Taiwanese once again got the opportunity to run their own affairs.

Taiwan has spent centuries as the pawn of other nations. In the past decade or two democratization has finally given Taiwanese a chance to chart their own future. It is depressing to see badly informed commentators unquestioningly swallowing Beijing’s rhetoric on the nature of the “Taiwan issue” and thus constraining the space available to democracy in Taiwan. A few points that Mr. Nankarni should take note of:

- The chequebook diplomacy Mr. Nankarni complains about was initiated decades ago by the KMT. It has absolutely nothing to do with the DPP, which has controlled the presidency for less than a decade and has never controlled the legislature, which has remained KMT controlled. There is no reason to assume this chequebook diplomacy will vanish following the KMT’s recent electoral win. The budget for this activity has always been approved by the KMT controlled legislature!

- The DPP actually slightly increased its vote total in the recent legislative election, but the electoral map and electoral rules had changed relative to the previous election. The KMT landslide results from a new electoral environment, specifically gerrymandering of electoral districts and the collapse of the minor parties allied with the DPP (namely the TSU). Vote counts do not indicate a strong shift in public sentiment against the DPP.

- It is ridiculous to claim that Taiwan under a DPP president has not pursued a policy of engaging economically with China. Most of Taiwan’s industries long ago moved their production facilities to China. Some figures rank Taiwan as the biggest foreign investor in China, and however you work the figures Taiwan has a top three ranking. Also remember that a large percentage of Hong Kongese investment in China is by Taiwanese controlled but Hong Kong registered companies, meaning the official figures understate the real level of Taiwanese investment in China. The number of Taiwanese working in China must already exceed a million, with over 300 thousand in Shanghai alone. Taiwan’s total population is only a little over 20 million. How economically engaged with China would Taiwan have to be for Mr. Nankarni to drop this nonsensical claim?

- There has been high dissatisfaction with the poor performance of the Chen Shui-bian presidency. However, much of the poor performance results from obstructionist behavior by the KMT controlled legislature. When Chen Shui-bian won the presidency the initial reaction of the KMT leadership was to seek to have the results overturned. There were even subtle suggestions that a military coup could be an option. Senior KMT leaders commandeered trucks and used them to assault riot police! Since the DPP presidency started the KMT has used its control over the legislature to block huge swathes of legislation, much of it routine and uncontroversial. Economically stimulatory infrastructure spending has mostly been blocked. Unfortunately the presidency is weak in Taiwan so the DPP has been powerless in the face of these obstructionist tactics. Surely the KMT is as much to blame as the DPP for the messy governance?

- Mr. Nankarni claims that people-to-people relations between Taiwan and China have worsened in recent years mainly because of Chen Shui-bian and the DPP. I would say that a larger reason for poor people-to-people relations would be the behavior of China and its people. Lobbing missiles into a Taiwanese harbor to try and influence election results, as Beijing did in 1996, is not a good way to win friends. Encouraging your citizens to harass Taiwanese participants in international events is also guaranteed to escalate a sensitive situation, yet it has become routine to see PRC citizens demand that organizers of international events remove Taiwanese flags. The Chinese government regularly threatens to ban representatives on national teams from attending future events or denies them funding if they fail to prevent the display of the Taiwanese flag. Young Taiwanese computer gamers have seen their awards ceremonies ruined by politics as Chinese boo their flag. Taiwanese beauty queens have been reduced to tears in similar displays of nasty bigotry. I have been harassed myself by Chinese staff in a Foodtown here in Auckland simply for wearing a t-shirt displaying a Taiwanese flag. Ironically the t-shirt was a historical souvenir purchased in a museum in China - the ‘Taiwanese’ flag being the pre-CCP Chinese flag. Blaming Chen Shui-bian for poor people-to-people interactions ignores the real problem. Certain behavior is simply unacceptable regardless of what some democratically elected politician may or may not be saying.

I have no opinion on how to solve the ‘Taiwan question’ other than to urge everyone with an interest to open up their minds, study the facts, and consider the wishes of the Taiwanese people, whatever those wishes may be. Badly researched and misinformed articles are counterproductive. Mr. Nankarni’s piece was extremely disappointing.

Regards,

Seamus Harris

P.S. I realize this is far too long to publish, but please forward it to Mr. Nankarni. If you could distribute it among any other writers on your staff who are likely to write about Taiwan then that would also be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

For the past 24 hours the New Zealand media has been full of tributes, summaries of his achievements, reactions from around the world, various miscellaneous interest stories. Some might call it overdone, but it isn’t like he’s done this before, so lets let the media go to town. If talk-back radio is anything to go by the interest is out there. Since he passed away there has been little else on the airwaves besides people ringing in and sharing stories and thoughts. OK, there has been a little bit of silly stuff (replacing Waitangi Day with Hillary Day can only seem a good idea if harmonious race relations bore you), but mostly it’s been a feel-good media fest.

So far the New Zealand Chinese media is a glaring exception though.

This morning the newspapers got their big chance to run the story. Lets compare today’s New Zealand Herald (probably the closest thing New Zealand has to a national newspaper) with the New Zealand Chinese Herald (its Chinese language sister publication) [UPDATE: It appears the publications are not related. The story seems a bit complicated and I have not bothered to find out the truth.  They may have been related initially, but the New Zealand Chinese Herald is now separate.].

The New Zealand Herald led with the headline story “Happy Ending to a Life of Heroic Feats and Care for Fellow Man”. That was supplemented by an editorial, two pieces by columnists, and something like 13 supplementary stories. This count was based on the paper’s website, and it is possible that one or two of the supplementary stories didn’t make it into print, or that they were put on the site later in the day – it is already Saturday evening now.

The New Zealand Chinese Herald led with the headline story “U.S. Sub-Prime Lending Storm Reaches New Zealand” (美國次貨風暴進襲紐西蘭). The story details the increased cost of borrowing facing home buyers. Honestly. . . What the fuck?

Today’s New Zealand Chinese Herald contains not a single news story on Sir Edmund Hillary. The local news stories are as follows: “Farmers are Prepared to Deal With La Nina”; “Teenage Girl Escapes Abductor”; “Adventure Cavers Criticized for Lack of Professionalism”; “Japanese Tourist Ordered to Pay NZ$10,000 to Family of Deceased”; “Almost 6,000 Dangerous Drivers Still on the Roads”; “Policeman and Superiors Accuse One Another of Neglecting Duties” (a bad translation on that one sorry); and finally and most unfortunately, “Is it Really Possible to get into New Zealand without a Passport?” (不用護照就能進入紐西蘭？).

All of those stories are supposedly written by the publication’s own reporters, of which there are several judging by the various names that appear. This is not a publication that simply lifts the English news from the previous day and translates it into Chinese. Well maybe that is what they do, but it is not how they present themselves.

So the casual reader of the New Zealand Chinese Herald for Saturday 12 January 2008 would have no idea that Sir Edmund Hillary had died, though they may have decided that the rejection of Auntie Liu’s visa application is no biggie after all. More thorough readers would find an obituary for Hillary tucked away on the editorial page in Section D . The obituary took up about a quarter of a page and was a very standard piece, simply listing the main facts of Hillary’s life, without any real thoughts on his significance to New Zealand or other opinions from the editor.

The obituary did contain one detail that I don’t think the English language media picked up on despite devoting far more space to the story. Apparently, a Chinese sculptor named Chen Weiming (陳維明) was commissioned to produce a statue of Hillary over a decade ago. This detail was simply added as a sentence after the obituary. There were no details on where the statue was (it might be the Orewa statue since the one at Mt. Cook is only five years old). The editor hadn’t tried to track down the sculptor to get a comment, mentioned why they got the job, or expanded on who they were. Perhaps Chen Weiming is a household name in China, but I have never heard of him and wouldn’t have minded knowing more. There was nothing about whether the statue had started to attract wreaths or other tributes. By stretching the statue business a little more she could have created a Chinese angle on the whole story; but no, the statue detail just sat there like an incomplete afterthought.

Another more obvious Chinese angle could have been that Mt. Everest is sort of a Chinese mountain. The mountain’s Chinese name is 珠穆朗瑪山, and Everest Base Camp is located in Chinese territory.

Of course the most obvious Chinese angle of all would have been that Hillary’s climbing partner Tenzeng Norgay was not a Nepali, or a Sherpa, but an ethnic Tibetan from what is now China. Tenzeng grew up in a Sherpa region of Nepal after his family emigrated there, but he was an non-Sherpa outsider in that society, having been born in Tibet to Tibetan parents. Given that Tenzeng had grown up a cultural outsider, in a border region before the surrounding nations formalized their borders, he was in a sense stateless. Following the Everest success the Indian PM Nehru decided Tenzeng was the sort of hero who could be useful in building the Indian nation, and offered to formalize his hazy legal status by the grant of Indian citizenship together with generous patronage. Tenzeng thus gained the financial security he desperately wanted for his family, but also had plenty of reasons to keep his ‘Chinese’ origins quiet. He would raise his children (all to Sherpa women) as Sherpas rather than Tibetans.

Admittedly it’s a literal borderline case, given that Tenzeng was born in a remote border region of Tibet, at a time when Chinese control over Tibet was nonexistent, and back when national borders didn’t mean a great deal anyway. However, the Chinese rant endlessly about Tibet being an indelible part of the Glorious Chinese Motherland, the Tibetans being their brother race (subordinate of course), and so on, and therefore I can’t explain why this angle was overlooked in the New Zealand Chinese media. Most nations like to claim their heroes, and Tenzeng was a remarkable partner to Hillary who the Chinese have a claim to.

Much like Hillary, Tenzeng was an ordinary guy who overcame a humble background to achieve worldwide fame through his skills, determination, endurance, and perhaps a spot of luck with the weather. His story is very like that of Hillary, but sort of an Asian version.

The New Zealand Chinese Herald has embarrassed itself badly. After the papers came out this morning it was announced that Hillary would be getting a state funeral. So we now have a state funeral scheduled for Hillary, but the ‘news team’ at the New Zealand Chinese Herald has yet to report the guy dead!

This group of ‘journalists’ have assigned the most famous New Zealander (the only one who features on the currency – how did that one pass them by?) to the ‘irrelevant to our Asian readership’ category, despite his most celebrated achievement being done in partnership with one of the most famous Asians (and arguably ‘Chinese’) of the 20th Century. Incredible. Presumably these guys draw salaries. They don’t deserve them.

When I picked up the Chinese Herald I initially thought that their printing schedule must be too early to run the Hillary story. Or maybe the staff were so out of touch with the rest of society that they were unaware of the news? The journalists at the Chinese Herald can’t spell Dominion Rd. (they favor the more exotic ‘Domainion Rd.’) despite the fact that their readers either rent or own most of it, so nothing is impossible. But the editor was aware that Hillary had died and had sufficient time to write an obituary before she put the paper to press. Her editorial has a note attached saying it was written in the early evening, so the publication had at least half a day to react to the story.

Despite being aware of the news then, the editor was happy to let the Saturday paper go out with a headline on the cost of borrowing? Did she have no sense of her responsibility to inform her readers of the day’s big story? Didn’t she consider that by leading with interest rates when a national hero had just died she might be making the Chinese community look a little insensitive, ignorant, insular, and errr. . . money-obsessed?

Surely a major function (among others of course) of minority language media is to relay current news and help members of minorities understand the societies they live in? How could the New Zealand Chinese Herald treat a major news story, and a very easy one (i.e. uncontroversial and simple to research), so stupidly and unprofessionally? They didn’t even have the imagination to make the story directly relevant to the Chinese community, despite the enormous potential to do so.

I haven’t seen any of the other Chinese papers yet. Hopefully they have done better. You don’t expect blanket coverage, but surely this has to be front page news?