Opinion - News Analysis   

Seeing India and China through fresh eyes

Qiu Yonghui

The quality of media coverage of each other by the two neighbours has improved.

"THE JOURNALISTS in both China and India have been sick for a very long time." This is one of the several opinions I heard during the annual conference of the Chinese Association of South Asian Studies, which was held in Shanghai last month. A participant, a journalist by profession, reacted immediately by arguing her claims on being healthy and balanced in her own news reports concerning India. I myself, as a regular Chinese reader of Indian newspapers for a long time, started thinking about various news reports on China published in the Indian media. My working days always begin by clicking the website samachar.com and grasping the news stories as much as I am interested in. I can therefore easily add more examples of balanced reports concerning China from the Indian side.

In The Hindu alone, only recently in May 2006, in their reports both Pallavi Aiyar and Harish Khare have commented on almost all aspects of the leading developing country in the world. Their stories covered different places in China: the sandstorm-suffering capital; the shops on Huai Hai Road in the commercial city of Shanghai; a huge market in a small town called Yiwu in Zhejiang; a Buddhist Temple called Shaolin in Henan. They even commented on the Indians working or studying in China ("The Return of the Hong Tou A-San" — the Sikhs with their red turbans — and "Made in China-Indian Doctors"). It's really a wonderful experience having seen these two Indian journalists covering lots of interesting topics. As far as I am concerned, such Indian newspaper reports have undoubtedly enriched my discovery of India.

Compared with these extraordinary reports, we, both Indians and Chinese, can't deny the fact that previously we used to read all the boring reports, most of them covering catastrophes, road accidents, conflicts and so on for whatever reasons they might have been. Later on, we could only read the arguments and talks concerning the Sino-Indian border conflict of 1962, which were later followed by news stories perhaps on the doubts about the reforms and opening up in both countries. In one word, we really did not know what was happening in our neighbourhoods.

And of course, we paid heavy prices for this. As one of the outcomes of reading those deadly stories in newspapers, both Indians who visited China and Chinese who came to India after 1990 were taken aback by what they saw with their own eyes. For Indians, it's a great surprise that the infrastructure in China, particularly in the big cities, has been developed well. For Chinese, "I wonder if all people in India are Buddhists," for instance. Even this year, an Indian visiting scholar in Beijing University complained: "Since I am here, I have seen a completely different picture of China. They made us fools for long. Now I know even the Chinese food I take in India is not really Chinese."

In this condition, we fail to understand why the representatives from India and China shared the same or similar views on numerous issues on the international stage without consulting each other in advance, even during the most difficult period in their bilateral relations. Maybe it is due to the fact that journalists in both China and India had been sick in the past. Let's hope they do not remain the same any more, not any longer. In fact, it's not difficult to understand some very complex, and yet simple, familiar words like socialism or communism. Harish Khare has made a good attempt by wandering along the streets in Shanghai ("Broad-mindedness on Huai Hai Road," The Hindu, May 27, 2006).

And for the Chinese, as the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider, they may come to understand that something much better has happened in India to narrow the gap between the two segments of the society, something like the reservation policy being implemented and debated now-a-days.

(The author is a Research Professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and also Secretary General of the Chinese Association of South Asian Studies.)

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