About 10 days ago it was reported that steamed buns in China’s capital were being made with cardboard and pork flavouring. It was then announced earlier this week that the ‘cardboard baozi‘ story was a hoax created by a ‘journalist’ to up his ratings.
While the many who touted it being a fake from the get-go are boastfully shouting their ‘I-told-you-so’s, the rest of the world’s media are sitting a bit red-faced wishing they knew what stories out of China they could trust as being factual and which were bunk.
The whole thing reminded me of a riddle from when I was a kid:
A man reaches a fork in the road. He knows one path leads to his destination and the other to his doom (for effect). Between the paths are a pair of twins. One twin invariably lies and the other always tells the truth. What question can the man ask to find the right way.
Other than taking all the paths themselves, there is no easily reliable way for foreign media to know who is telling the truth and who is lying when it comes to reports out of China. This extends past reporters grabbing stuff from CCTV, Xinhua and (gasp) China Daily. This is as equally a difficult decision for inspectors responsible for the quality of products coming into their respective countries from China.
For the PRC’s part, they know they’ve got to sort things out, and like a kid that’s been told to clean his room for the 100th time, they’re sluggishly doing so. But it’s going to be a long night of sweeping under the bed and arranging what’s behind the closet door – and the health and safety of the world cannot wait.
Internally it is getting worse, or rather, staying the same – which is near as worse as it can get. On the news the other day I saw a people-calming broadcast telling citizens that foreign news reports about dangerous and poor quality products from China are simply not true – and as per usual, the foreigners are just picking on poor China.
As much as people in Panama need worry about their toothpaste and the folks in North America should be concerned with where their dog food was manufactured – the real pressing concern should be for the Chinese population at large, as they’ve little recourse, and leaders that seems more keen on showboat executions than actually solving the problem.
What is often overlooked when Western media goes off about invasions of crappy Chinese products is that Chinese people (and us expats) use them every day. And if the lies outward are bad, the lies inward are much, much worse.
The way propaganda works is not by telling lies and hoping the people will believe it. People are far too smart for this. Effective propaganda works much like my local chuar vendor. He often uses the cheaper pork on his sticks over the more expensive lamb. However, he always mixes in a bit of lamb, or lamb fat to flavour it up and slip it past me.
So that leaves us residents, foreign media and quality inspectors one burning question: how do you deal with a compulsive liar?
Placation. China’s shown itself to be a monstrously defensive nation, and if confronted in any way, nearly always reacts in the same knee-jerk manner. If lies are displayed for all to see simply for the voyeurism of it, more lies will be told to cover the initial lies and this cycle can do nothing but repeat.
So it is we also must assume that all things – including the truth – are lies. A drop of oil in the well, so to speak. Though this may seem harsh, it’s the only way to see the truth.
The answer to the above riddle, for anyone that didn’t learn it as a kid, is that you choose a twin and ask him what path his brother would say is the correct one and then take the opposite. The truth telling twin, knowing his brother is the liar, will say the wrong path. The liar, knowing his brother would tell the truth, lies and says the wrong one too.
As the answer shows us, lies can be just as effective at showing us the truth as the truth itself. They may not give us an easily digestible answer that we can take at face value for copy ‘n’ paste regurgitation, but with a little brainwork on our part, they can show us a great deal about how the liar sees itself.
With that knowledge, cutting through the bullshit becomes not altogether easy, but at least possible.
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Related:
Ryan, here’s another “hoax” of sort – from American media.
Accusation about unsafe Chinese-made tires turned out to have passed all US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards:
http://tinyurl.com/27tks4
Anyone that wants to see an article about it but not download a PDF: China says alleged faulty tires up to US standards.
And so in lives the problem outlined above. Who/what do you believe? It’s not the accusers reporting this, but the accused.
It’s not to say that it isn’t true and that there are likely going to be MANY reports out of the fear riddled US about crap from China. The problem is we’ve got a fearmonger media on one side and a lying/cover-up policy on the other.
Bad math.
As for me, I’ll remain skeptical.
I am with Chris, I have so say that although skepticism is not all that fun, at least you are welcome to the notion that there might be a problem rather than the, “meiwenti!” attitude I see so often.
Tires, catfish, Evian and crabs are not the end, and this tit-for-tat defense is not going to end soon.
Chinese need to step back and not get emotional and let the “professionals” do their work of detecting bad goods. I think they have a tendency to take everything as a personal attack on their country.
Foreign media needs to do a little more work on their stories. This however will not change soon I fear. Western media is less that balanced and will do anything to get a “story”.
At the end of the day it is the fault of the importing structure that did not check the good properly as they were entering Panama, the US, or Taiwan. If they were stopped at port and checked properly this would not have even become a story.
As you said with the Chuar, people will lie, cheat, and steal for money everywhere in the world and knowing that we all have to be more careful. “Meiwenti” is not an answer we should accept so often.
Actually, one just gets one of the twins in a armlock, and says: “Tell me which path is safe or I’ll break your arm. And oh yes, you’re going to be walking it two feet in front of me, so don’t play games. How’s the arm, by the way?”
There’s something in that for all of us.