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Listed below are comments made by freeflowfox between Wednesday, 18th June 2008 and Thursday, 5th March 2009.

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Super China 4:39pm on 05 Mar 2009 Clear-sighted, astute, and insightful analysis. Has the BBC finally consented to abandoning fear mongering and the adoption of a balanced, reasoned, on the ground view of things?

I especially liked the fact that Preston comments on what "every single Chinese person" he met thought about the situation. Good work.
Limited viewing 03:18am on 18 Jun 2008 As a Chinese Canadian who has spent equal measures of his time in China and Canada, i feel i have a little to contribute here.

One thing I've noticed on these forums is that the Chinese readers often feel that the BBC is unnecessarily biased towards China. While some Western readers seem to feel that the Chinese viewers are indoctrinated or just blinded by nationalism?

Now as someone who has lived half his life in China and the other half in Canada, i feel the pain of these contradictions most intensely. Here's what i think the whole thing comes down to...

The West has for the past 200 years enjoyed almost total domination over most of the world. Intervention and self-righteousness characterizes the western mentality, westerners think they are right in the end, period.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have in recent years begun to recover their historic position as the defining great power of this world. People in the West fears this, and as the western media tends to play on people's fears, and fear sells (in New York city, where i lived for 3 years, the nightly news begins with "it's 10 PM, do YOU know where your children are?"), they choose to demonize and fearmonger, it is no one's fault, simple economics. What the people in the west don't understand, is that China has traditionally considered itself the center of the world, and that the rest of the world isn't better. This means two things, first the Chinese only want to be left alone to develop and prosper, and have no desires to throw its weight around. Second, Chinese people in general see the west as a friendly place, and want to have cordial relations (this is partly because the Chinese state controlled media's goal is to maintain stability, and therefore NEVER fearmongers, ethnic tensions are played down and they try to indoctrinate Han to be friendly to the minorities, this is my personal experience.)

Soon enough, China will be the greatest power on earth, and it's painful to see that people in the west have let their jealousy and collective insecurities get the better of them, and allowed their fears to drive opinion and blind frank discussion in the media. Fear mongering creates a culture of conflict. 2008 has seen this tendency play out, China's people have in this year finally seen the level of paranoia in the West directed at China, and their opinions are starting to be turned, irrespective of the Chinese gov't's attempts to maintain the image of an orderly house, the Chinese people are becoming very, very angry with the kind of mis-representation in the West about a country they love and have spent the past 100 years rebuilding from the ashes of conflict sewn by the west. This is unfortunate, because the Chinese body politic is a much more direct representation of its population's moods precisely because it is not a elective democracy, the gov't is forced to be much more responsive to collective demands than in the west, and if the west continues down this road of paranoia, fear mongering, and accusation without objective information, then the results could only be unfortunate for everyone.

The people of the west think they know everything that's wrong with every place, well you don't, no one does, NO ONE should be intervening in anyone else's affairs as if they knew better, this only causes chaos and death. (iraq and afghanistan are perfect illustrations)

Go to China, go see its people, go talk to them. A rail road anywhere else on earth is a good thing, but in tibet it kills wild-life and threatens indigenous culture. Rail roads built by the Chinese in Africa somehow "establishes" some kind of nefarious Chinese influence in a continent the europeans destroyed and left to rot in the filth of ethnic strife and disease. What have the europeans ever done for africa? I watch the BBC everyday, and whenever a Chinese person appears on screen, its somehow always someone nearly incapable of expressing themselves or saying something obviously designed to make them sound ridiculous. Now i assure you there are many Chinese who speak english quite well, they're just not being interviewed.

Fear... jealousy, people in the west want the feel of glory, of doling out "aid" to poor savages and unenlightened heathens. 200 years of world domination seems to have given them the ridiculous notion that they'll always rule the world. Well here's a shocker, what goes up, must come down, it's time for the west to accept that China will soon be greater, and no, the Chinese don't want world domination, they just want to live in peace. Before america's economic dominance, guess which country had the world's largest GDP... no, not Britain, China. And China had it for over 2000 years before that, they know greatness, and they know that power is not an easy thing to possess or to be taken for granted, that's why they will be much wiser in using it than the immature Americans and Europeans.

There, that's my spiel, hope this changes somebody's world view for the better. Peace is what people want, not fear and pointless conflict.

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