By FENG ZHAOKUI (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-10-09 07:30

Recently there has been a lot of negative coverage about the quality problems plaguing food and other products made in China.

A friend of mine who had just come back from overseas told me that people living in countries like the US and Japan seemed to have developed a kind of conditional reflex: whenever the word China appeared on television, the first thing that came to mind was "That can't be good news".

And some of the foreign media entities now sound almost like they "specialize" in spreading, criticizing, dramatizing and exaggerating China's negative issues.

"As a Chinese I was really upset by what I saw," he said. "I had planned to spend some more time with my daughter there. The annoying mood of published opinions was one of the reasons why I came back to China early."

This writer has just returned from Japan, and had similar feelings about the media's unusual enthusiasm in covering China-related negative issues when I was there. I discussed this with some Japanese journalists: Why is there so much negative coverage of China in the Japanese media? And what should we think of it?

An old Chinese saying goes: "Every family has its own difficult issues." All kinds of incidents happen everyday throughout the world, such as campus shootings in the US and "fake beef" sold by meat processing companies in Japan. Japan, in particular, has seen in recent years many cases of murder and destruction of corpses and close relatives killing one another, such as a son killing his father, a mother her son and a teenager murdering an innocent mother and son.

As incidents and problems like these happened one after another and were repeatedly hyped by the media, people began to feel Japan was really an unsafe society. Supposedly dictated by market demand, the media tend to ignore the "dog bites man" type of news but go gaga en masse when anything resembling "man bites dog" happens. Because coverage of positive developments are normally not considered exciting in Japan while negative issues usually grab people's attention, it seems "bad news" dominates Japanese media coverage more often than not.

China is a neighbor the Japanese are very much concerned with. Every time something or a problem happens in China the Japanese press report it with relish. There is nothing out of the ordinary about it and normally no conspiracy theory applies here, such as "the Japanese media are deliberately fanning anti-China sentiment". Otherwise, should we believe the Japanese press is also "deliberately fanning anti-Japan sentiment" when it gives extensive coverage to problems in its own country?

Nevertheless, overseas Chinese cannot but feel that foreigners are obsessed with airing China's shortcomings, such as environmental pollution, water shortages, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, rampant corruption and food safety problems.

Recently, a foreign correspondent who was based in Beijing for many years wrote a book about "all of China's problems" with a title that accuses China of "messing up the world". It is said to be selling pretty well and has been translated into several languages. The book takes great pains to highlight the negative impact that problems in China's economic development have had on the world but says little about the contributions of China's economic development to global economic development.

In a sense, people have the right to talk about your shortcomings as long as what they say about you is true. Doesn't the Chinese press often report various shortcomings of Japan and the US? To be fair, it also "airs China's own problems", which shows we have the determination and confidence to overcome our own shortcomings and problems.

The Chinese leaders have repeatedly emphasized in recent years the building of a "harmonious society" and attached great importance to advancing "the scientific concept of development".

It is safe to believe that, as this guiding principle continues to be applied in practice, China will no doubt solve whatever problems and issues arising amid fast development. With this in mind, we should not take others' talk about our shortcomings automatically as "ill-intended" but pay more attention to what shortcomings they are talking about, like a mirror to examine ourselves with.

In the meantime, China is still a developing country. As more and more foreigners come to China, they are bound to experience inconvenience every now and then. This writer, for instance, heard more than one foreigner complain about the smog in big Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai when they returned home.

There is nothing abnormal about increasing "China-foreign comparisons" by foreigners arriving in our country. And it just might help us do a better job it we take a closer look at those comparisons.

Ill-intended behavior worth our attention is that some foreign media entities have been playing up the food safety issue by twisting, exaggerating and blurring the facts. For example, some Japanese newspapers went out of their way to scare Japanese consumers over food safety by wantonly labeling Chinese imports that failed to meet outrageous Japanese standards as "poisonous vegetables", "poisonous fish" and "poisonous medicine". Such tricks may or may not help Japan's own farm and food industries, but will surely hurt the interest of Japanese consumers, because the average Japanese depend mostly on high-quality and inexpensive imports from China to maintain their living standard. That's why Japanese consumers have welcomed made-in-China food.

This author recently compared some "made-in-Japan" foodstuffs with their "made-in-China" counterparts sold in supermarkets and found the former are usually two or three times more expensive. The popularity of high-quality and affordable food from China is right there for all to see, but of course some people just can't face this reality.

As a matter of fact, not all made-in-Japan food is absolutely "safe". Some experts in Japan found through their own investigations that certain instant meals sold at some convenience stores contained unsafe levels of chemicals such as preservatives. Remember the "fake beef" reference above? That was a scandal in which a Japanese food company made meat products mixing fresh meat with leftovers more than six months beyond the expiry date or even discarded parts.

Despite the extremely gross nature of the practice, not one Japanese media entity has used the word "poisonous" to describe the horrific products. Looking at these contrasting responses, one cannot but suspect protectionist or some other motives were behind those Japanese media establishments' unwarranted misinformation regarding the quality of food from China.

Reality is, be it in China or Japan, achievements are always accompanied by regret and there will always be individuals who don't care to play by the rules. With a population 10 times, land area 26 times and number of nationalities more than 50 times that of Japan's, a giant country like China can hardly be expected to avoid some problems amid such unprecedented development.

Responsible members of the media should be nothing but objective and fair. As the improvement of China-Japan relations gathers strength, objective and fair news coverage of Japan is now growing. Regrettably, some mainstream media outlets in Japan are doing the opposite in their coverage of China, wildly exaggerating and distorting the truth about China's problems or presenting isolated blots as the whole picture to paint China as good for nothing.

It is very hard to believe they don't have ulterior motives in calling a spade something else.

Sure, Japan has many strong points, but it has a lot of problems, too. Take the multiple cases of one family member murdering another in recent years for example, none of the Chinese media entities have reported those tragedies as a "national crisis" in Japan, to my knowledge.

As more and more Japanese people realize that improved bilateral ties with China benefit both nations, the "mud-slinging" campaign against China by some Japanese media outlets is apparently aimed at fomenting "distrust" of China among the Japanese public. This kind of behavior hurts bilateral relations between Japan and China, blocks the progress of "ice-melting" efforts and runs counter to the good wishes of most Japanese people.

The author is a researcher with the Institute of Japanese Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

(China Daily 10/09/2007 page11)