News travels fast here

This past Saturday, I picked up a copy of China Daily, the English language newspaper published by the Communist Party. It's not a very reliable source of news (one travel book called it a "propaganda sheet"), but it syndicates the New York Times crossword puzzle, so I shell out the 1.5 yuan a few times a week to get it. This particular issue carried a headline saying, "Xi'an safe for foreign tourists, mayor says". The story went on to explain how a bus carrying ten Australian tourists was hijacked by a man with explosives strapped to his chest. The hijacker was eventually shot dead and none of the tourists were hurt. This happened on Wednesday. The news came out on Saturday, four days after this occurred. There was no other mention of this event, before or after it happened, and the reason for this attack is still unknown. After asking all my students about it this week, only a few had even heard about what happened.

This is just one example of the extremely censored media that I have access to in China. While vacationing in Cambodia, I read about a mine that collapsed in Shanxi province in December 2007, killing 147 workers. This happened only a few hours away from Xi'an, yet there was never any news about it. Part of the problem is that I don't speak Chinese, so anything I hear comes from the English websites that I can still reach through the Great Firewall (BBC not included), from word of mouth, or from publications like China Daily.

Still, I'm constantly amazed by the kind of information my students receive (read: completely biased). A few months ago, a student asked if I had ever heard of the student demonstrations in 1989 in Beijing i.e Tiananmen Square. He had only chanced upon this information by watching a documentary that had been officially banned in China but that he had downloaded from the internet.