China Witness

only a very few exceptions, such as Frans-Paul van der Putten's letter in the International Herald Tribune on 6 April 2008, showed a real and all too rare understanding of China and its inherent problems in the last century.

On the BBC website, which became accessible in China just a few weeks before the Olympic torch went around the world, Chinese emails flooded in, showing the confusion and passionate hurt experienced by young Chinese:

– The Dalai Lama supports The Beijing Olympics, as he has stated many times, and agreed that Tibet could be a part of China. Why, I wonder, do both sides, Tibetan and Chinese, never listen to him? And why does this complication almost never play a part in the news I watch in the UK?

– The 2008 Olympics was voted by the world democratically seven years ago, the UN recognizes China as a country including Tibet. How do we respect that democratic process, both UN and Olympic, when we see the sort of attacks on China's human rights record and democracy constantly reported in the news?

– What will be said, I wonder, if someone points out that the London Olympics in 2012 should be cancelled because British troops invaded Iraq, are illegally occupying it?

– What's the difference between 'freedom fighters' and 'terrorists'? By what standard are we judging? The Western news coverage on the Beijing Olympics seems to follow an agenda as clearly set as any propaganda.

– There are hundreds of thousands, millions of people who speak English in China. I'd like to know how many British people speak Chinese. Most secondary school children in China know Shakespeare, Dickens and are aware of a wide range of Western music. How many Westerners know of Chinese books or music? Is this because of Western press controls, a deliberate policy by the government or simply arrogance?

– Why Western media hate China so much? We are not living in the same China as our parents and grandparents had, even though under the same name as PR China. Why none tell this difference to the world from those highly respected and luxurious living foreign media in China?

'Why' has become not only a word or a question, but symptomatic of a deeper questioning and shock in young Chinese hearts and minds… It could turn China towards a better political system in the future, or, simply destroy their trust in the developed Western world.

I wonder how many people have realised that the naivety and ignorance of some Western media risks damaging the belief of young Chinese in democracy, and that it could also possibly force the Chinese authorities to slow down the faltering progress of the democracy movement which began in 2008. I don't think most Westerners have any idea how much the Chinese had suffered in the hundred years up to the late 1980s… Twenty years is a very short time for this nation to have the chance during relatively peaceful times to change its thinking, and to learn about freedom and democracy, including how to be with Tibet and Tibetans…

I believe it would be a great chance for the Chinese people to touch and feel the world through the universal language – of sport and music – if the Beijing Olympics were to succeed. Otherwise, there is a risk that young Chinese may feel the same confusion about democracy and find themselves in conflict with the Western world in the same way as the previous three generations after the Opium War, when China lost its national pride.

This world will not be in peace if we don't really understand and respect democracy everywhere, if we don't give people all of the information they need to make a choice, and then move on to a peaceful future. This is true all over the world. Humanity has paid so much for its past mistakes because we are too often taught to hate one another.

As a Chinese media person I struggled with Chinese censorship for a long time before I moved to London in 1997. Now, I feel the same sense of struggle again, but in the West, not with censorship, but with ignorance about my motherland.

Please, let us all think and work towards not producing more darkness with hate. Only light and the brightness of understanding can destroy darkness.

***

At about 10.30 pm on 12 May 2008, as I was going through the mountain of emails that had built up while I was at a conference in France, one subject with many exclamation marks jumped out at me.

'North Sichuan, Wenchuan, a 7.8 earthquake at 14:28 on May 12. The tremor was felt in all but three northern provinces but the whole of China has been shaken!!!!!!!!!'

For the first few seconds, I couldn't believe what I had read, and then, almost immediately, I thought of the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, when nearly 300,000 people lost their lives. (Chinese government statistics list 240,000 dead, though I was told that figure does not include the military, those travelling through the area, or the un-registered migrants who worked in the coal mines.) I felt a chill through my whole body and I couldn't help my tears. Tangshan was a terrible blow to the Chinese people. In my book The Good Women of China, one chapter is about my interview with a group of mothers who all lost their children in that earthquake. Every single morning since then, those women have set an alarm for the time when their beloved children disappeared so that they could pray.

At the time of writing this on the 18 May 2008, over 32,000 deaths have been confirmed in this latest earthquake, and over 17,000 bodies are still covered by rubble. Thousands of children will have died because the earthquake took place at 2.28pm during afternoon school time. One town, which had a population of tens of thousands, has only 2200 survivors, and their homes have been completely destroyed. Today, China's State Council has decided that 19-21 May will be a national time of mourning for the earthquake victims of Sichuan Wenchuan. It is the first time in China's history that a natural disaster will be mourned nationwide.

I can see the huge difference from the government's response 30 years ago, when they banned news of Tansghan to save political face and refused international support out of a misplaced and distorted sense of national pride. This time, the Chinese government announced the Sichuan earthquake witness within 58 minutes and asked for international help immediately. The images of crying mothers in amongst the ruins of Sichuan on the front page of Western newspapers have drawn the world's attention from the political chaos of the Olympic torch and I sense a huge sympathy for China's loss. Also, many Chinese have learned and realised that human lives are far more important than any political or editorial angle, as the BBC and other Western media put the Sichuan earthquake as their top story.

The Chinese internet is full of every kind of Chinese voice: sad laments for the lost and for those single child families, who will never have the chance to have other children; warm thanks to the rescue teams and the People's Liberation Army who have been fighting day and night to save lives; thanks and encouragement for everyone who continues to donate to the poor victims; hatred towards those who allowed the poorly constructed buildings; anger with the millionaires who haven't stood up to help the people lost in this natural disaster; worry about the China Engineering Physics Research Institute, located in Sichuan Mianyang near Wenchuan, because the research station is responsible for China's nuclear weapons – it is hard to imagine the consequences if the reactor was damaged; and warnings about the North Sichuan Dam, which, if it were to break, could flood at least 160,000 lives.

These voices mostly come from the younger generation, I guess, because most of their parents and grandparents don't know how to use a computer – they are a generation who know, instead, of civil war, political madness, and queuing for food. In seeing those young Chinese united in such a way, in their care, their outrage and national pride, I realise I may be wrong about them. I used to think that they were too comfortable and too rich to understand China's hungry past, or those poor, uneducated peasants and the misunderstood last generations.

All of this made me think of that song 'Dyed with my Blood', again: why does the national flag have to be painted with Chinese blood? I pray for my motherland – I hope there will be peace and strength, rooted in love and happy families, and with friends around the world.