Seeking truth from facts

The International Campaign for Tibet highlighted an interesting Xinhua editorial earlier this week in a post on their blog. The Xinhua article was about "mass incidents" in China, specifically one at a steel mill in Jilin province, and criticized the government for saying that the reason for these incidents was that those who rose up against the authorities "don't know the truth." This editorial says that if this is the real cause of anti-government actions, then simply telling the citizens involved "the truth" should be sufficient to stop them from striking out against officialdom. Now, Xinhua is of course talking about the kind of localized protests and anti-government violence that occurs all over China every day (some 90,000 times a year, apparently), but ICT's Stewart Watters makes the point that:

One of the challenges that Tibetans and their supporters face is to reach a point where commentators like Huang Guan or Chinese officials or ordinary Chinese citizens can begin to draw parallels between their own mistrust of the way the government characterizes and responds to mass incidents, and the factors that lie behind the Tibetan mistrust of Beijing.

Good point!

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