Who’s to blame for the violence in Urumqi?

Today, there was another link between the two biggest emerging powers in the world: India and China. This brought to mind the recent unrest in Tibet and Urumqi in Xinjiang province over China’s right to sovereignty in the regions in and around their borders.  

In the UK, we were not given a comprehensive view of either of these conflicts. Despite the fact that the major news organisations attempted to be as neutral as possible, the lack of information from both areas made reporting difficult.

Reporters were banned altogether from Tibet by Chinese officials and this severly restricted the conclusions they were able to make. During the Urumqi crisis however, journalists were allowed to view the protests, but the Chinese state delivered its preferred message first.

Of course, using different sources of information to gather news is supposed to throw up different accounts and opinions, but in recent years the increase in Churnalism and monolithic news agencies such as AP and Reuters has eroded some of this difference. The Chinese media therefore is often able to give Westerners a completely unique viewpoint on events.

Compare these reports on the crisis:

Given our awareness of the restrictions imposed on the media by the Chinese state, the presumption that we make, as news consumers, is that the CCTV report is incorrect. This is further backed up by having knowledge of the history of that area*.

However, the CCTV report poses an interesting question: Had the violence occurred in the UK, would the BBC have approached the issue in the same way?

For example, the BBC’s coverage of the the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland did not include interviews with the IRA and tended to focus on the suffering of the innocent (as you would expect) and often suggested potential culprits. Surely this is what CCTV is doing? Regardless of whether any crimes have been committed against the Uyghur people, no person has the right to attack others.

In short, what makes us (in the West) so sure we are correct on this issue?

As an aside: The only thing that I would (and can knowingly) criticise about the CCTV would be the fact that the people who supposedly masterminded the violence were implicated so quickly. How could government officials have compiled the evidence before the story had even broke? The full details of this are detailed in this report:

* Specifically that the Chinese government have arguably exploited the US’s ‘War on Terror’ to further marginalise the Muslim Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region. Clearly, the US and UK have made the world a more dangerous place as a result of their actions in the Middle East. You can add this shift in micro-politics in China to the justification given by Israel when bombing Lebanon. The ‘War on Terror’ has made unreasonable force against those accused of being terrorists accceptable.