Absurdity, Allegory and China

I wrote this piece yesterday and posted it to a listserv I belong to before I realized that yesterday blogspot.com had been unblocked here in China. Or maybe the block was just in Tianjin. Hard to know who blocks what and where the blocks originate. Some seem to be national and others local. Controlling access is a multi-layered business.
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April 17, 2007, 3:00 PM (+8 GMT)
It’s always curious to observe how the rush of news – and what might resemble it – after a disaster spawns a spate of speculative stories, some of which seem to reflect hopes and desires rather than fact. As we all know, ‘News’ is a broad and extremely sloppy brush. Ask Richard Jewel. Or more recently, the three Duke lacrosse players who were essentially ‘guilty’ until, of course, they weren’t, despite the shakiness of evidence and the reported mental instability of their accuser from the outset.

This morning in China I read this from the lead story by Michael Sneed on the Chicago Sun-Times home page at 11 PM (April 16) local Chicago time, under the headline “EXCLUSIVE: Gunman may have been in US on visa” (no time signature):

“Authorities were investigating whether the gunman who killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history was a Chinese man who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa. The 24-year-old man arrived in San Francisco on United Airlines on Aug. 7 on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said. Investigators have not linked him to any terrorist groups, the source said. Police believe three bomb threats on the campus last week may have been attempts by the man to test the campus’ security response, the source said.”

At the same time, on the Xinhua website (April 17, 12 AM Beijing time) referred to the massacre with a one-line link on its home page under World [News]: “Latest developments of worst US mass shooting.” Following the link took you to a page linked to a “Special Report” which led to another page with further links to several stories related to the shooting. One of those stories was entitled, “No Chinese students found among victims of Va. Tech shooting” (2007-04-17 09:42:40).

“No Chinese students have been found among the dozens of victims in Monday’s shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), in the eastern U.S. state of Virginia. Ray Wang, a board member of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars (ACSS) at Virginia Tech, told Xinhua that he was not at the scene of the shootings, but he had contacted quite a number of Chinese students and had so far got no word that Chinese students were injured or killed in the incident.”

At the time these two stories were reported officials in Blacksburg had not released the names of the shooter or his victims, though most news outlets were reporting that the shooter was “a young man of Asian descent,” dressed in “a sort of Boy Scout outfit.” When I first received the news of the murders 5 hours prior to seeing these stories, I saw a photo of an Asian man lying on the ground in handcuffs, which clued me in that a principal in the shooting was probably of Asian descent. After all, they wouldn’t be handcuffing a fleeing Tri Delt unless, of course, the info the law enforcement folks had received somehow fingered a svelte blonde.

It is possible that both are true; one does not exclude the other. A Chinese man who exited his country via Shanghai last August could have killed his non-Chinese ex-girlfriend, went hunting for her new boyfriend, and ended up killing 31others – all non-Chinese – as well as killing himself. This sort of thing is within the bounds of credibility. In this scenario, both stories are true, since the Xinhua speaks only to “victims.”

It is also possible, and, well within the bounds of credibility, that both reports are false. Mr. Sneed’s story implies the shadowiness and secrecy of “sources” - perhaps the same sort of chumminess with “sources” that fingered the luckless Mr. Jewel of ‘96 Olympics infamy. The Xinhua story draws its conclusion based on the reported finding of a man from ACSS who could very well have been ringing up a Chinese student phone tree; contacting “quite a number of Chinese students” and finding them alive and well is not evidence that there were no Chinese “found” among the victims, especially when Mr. Wang admits to not having gone to the “scene” of the shooting. Perhaps someone should tell Mr. Wang that there were two shooting scenes, and that his unofficial exit poll could be just as fraudulent as the insider info that Mr. Sneed was being dealt and, subsequently, re-dealing.

In the Chinese case, it is the rush for position, even if only for a moment – place the idea first and it’s that much more difficult to shake loose, even if it isn’t true. That the next bit of info that may officially be announced is that the shooter was Chinese is buffered by the news that there were no Chinese victims, even if there were. In a land where the translation for ‘propaganda’ is not a word with baggage, first news usually carries the day. Get out ahead of a story, and it eases the fall. In fact, in a place where news is a state-controlled business, there’s no guarantee that there will be any further reporting of this story, especially if it’s bad. (I suspect that if we learn that the shooter was Chinese, the editorials in the papers will have everything to do with a corrupt system that allows for the relatively open purchase of guns. Here it is more civilized; it’s confined to the black market where corrupt officials can share in the profits.) The Chinese take this sort of thing seriously, and if, in fact, the shooter was from China, there will, of necessity, be consequences – unofficial, of course – for the shooter’s family. That’s the way things are ‘roun here.

If it turns out that the shooter was not from China, there will be great huff and roar, and the Sun-Times may very well get blocked. Even if the Sun-Times article is, in fact, true, it still may earn a block, just for being the first to tell it. That’s also the way things are ‘roun here. If events were somehow reversed, and the massacre happened in, say, Datong, and the murderer was an American student, there would, no doubt, be monumental marches against the US Embassy and consuls, as there were in ’99 when the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed.