This seems like as good a time as any to start talking about China. Eventually, I would like to talk about public relations and communications strategies in China, but to begin I need to tell a bit of my story to set the context. It will probably take a couple of posts to do this, so bear with me.

Friday’s headline from CBC News reads: China blames Dalai Lama for Tibet protests that left 2 dead. As some of you may or may not know, I have spent, in total, a year in Taiwan and one year in China (on two different journeys) and some of the most interesting time I spent there was in ‘what used to be’ Tibet.

I am quite sympathetic to the Tibetan cause, not in itself surprising, but I got to this place in a very roundabout way. Before I ever went to Asia, I thought Tibetans had been given the short, sharp end of an incomprehensibly big stick. I had read some Tibetan Buddhist teachings and had been fortunate enough to have an ordained Buddhist teacher in my first year of university. Politically, the situation seemed cut and dried: China bad – Tibet good. Looking back, I know now that I really couldn’t comprehend much more about the complicated history between China and Tibet than any other average Canadian.

This vague understanding of the situation, I think, will help explain the next ‘phase’ I went through. Peter and I moved to China in September 2002. We didn’t really know what we were doing there or where we would end up. Most people move to a new country with some idea of what they might do or, at the very least, have a general idea of where they might live. We did not. We flew into Hong Kong, took a bus to Fujian to meet a dear friend and tried to figure it out from there.

As luck would have it, we ended up with very good jobs in Beijing. We taught English at a private school and became in-house editors at a Chinese government bureau. We made great money, ate wonderful food and for some reason did not buy a DVD player to pass our time in the bleak winter evenings of Northern China. No. Instead, we sat on a loveseat studying Mandarin in front of the TV drinking Yanjing beer night after night.

We had just met and were just getting to know each other, so this was quite enough stimulation for us. We were hapless, easily amused, in love with each other and this new, strange world we had to navigate to survive.

Barring a full-on tale of our never-ending adventures, suffice it to say that we decided somehow not to buy a $10 DVD player (even though we were amassing an inviting collection of DVDs that we found in the ubiquitous black-markets we visited on a daily basis). Instead, we watched the aptly named CCTV-9. I love that, in English, CCTV is an acronym for Closed Circuit Television – the kind we use for surveillance in North America. CCTV-9 was the only English TV channel that aired in China at that time. We had our favourite segments – the in-depth reporting show, the creepy culture show, the documentary programs and the Learn Chinese segments. We developed a bit of a routine.

These programs were amazing. My favourite documentary was called ‘Donkey Looks for Steamed Bun’. We were quite aware that these programs were Western-directed propaganda, but like teenagers raiding their parents’ liquor cabinet for vermouth, we ignored the taste and relished in the saturation.

The overall effect – after a few months in the PRC – was disturbing. CCTV-9’s coverage of ‘minority news’ was bald-faced misinformation. Anything about Tibetan, Uigher or Hui people was indubitably about how China was bringing prosperity to these lesser, unfortunate places and people.

And, quite ashamedly, this propaganda in confluence with our daily experience of the hardships of Beijingers actually worked us over to some degree. It’s difficult to explain now, looking back, but we were truly aliens in China and all around us we intersected with people who lived very difficult lives. In Canada, when we think about hardship we do not and cannot understand what lengths the average Chinese person must go through to ensure a living wage, self-respect, support for their family, political safety and ‘freedom’. So it was that when we thought about Tibet and Richard Gere and the popularity of the Free Tibet cause, we couldn’t really wrap our heads around it. No, we were never ‘anti-Tibet’ (that just sounds ridiculous) but to be perfectly honest, we just couldn’t imagine China being in a position to ‘lose face’ or cede any control over what they had so savagely taken from their neighbours. If anything was clear from CCTV-9, it was that China was ‘back’. They were out-doing, out-performing, out-selling everyone on the planet and the feeling was that they weren’t interesting in letting anything slide.

From our perspective, hunkered down in Commie Central, the idea of ‘freeing’ Tibet was a lost cause.

To be continued …