One Problem, Two coverages: Tibet and Taiwan

WaPo has an article on the recent offer by China to negotiate with Tibet, and the usual noises of criticism by China's colonial officialdom of the Dalai Lama.....look at the opening paragraphs:

Less than 24 hours after China offered to meet with an envoy of the Dalai Lama, state-controlled news media on Saturday kept up their campaign of denunciations of the Tibetan spiritual leader.

"The behavior of the Dalai clique has seriously violated fundamental teaching and commandments of Buddhism, undermined the normal order of Tibetan Buddhism and ruined its reputation," the Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper reported.

China Daily, the official English-language newspaper, published an interview with Lahlu Tsewang Dorje, a Tibetan who fought on the Dalai Lama's side in a failed 1959 uprising, according to the paper, and later became a top political adviser to the Chinese Tibetan authorities. "I think the Dalai clique is our enemy and we should fight until the end," he was quoted as saying.

The tone of the articles raised questions about China's seriousness in preparing for negotiations with the Dalai Lama over restoring stability to Tibet, which has essentially been under government lockdown since deadly rioting in Lhasa, its capital, on March 14.

Rather than stepping back from its hammering of the "Dalai clique" for instigating the violence in an attempt to split the country and sabotage this summer's Olympic Games, China continued to hit hard. "The Lhasa March 14 incident is another ugly performance meticulously plotted by the Dalai clique to seek Tibet independence," said the Tibet Daily, another Communist Party newspaper.

And of course, the reporting on other nations' reactions and on the "analysis" offered by WaPo:

The official New China News Agency reported Saturday that the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the head of the European Commission had all praised China's offer to meet.

"It's too early to tell if the meeting will produce results or is just for PR purposes in advance of the Olympics," said Mary Beth Markey of the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.

Note the sympatico tone towards Tibet, the detailed citing of officialdom's position on the Dalai Lama, in which every bombastic word is captured, followed by the analyst who implicitly argues that the whole 'talks offer' is just pro forma nonsense for public consumption ahead of the Olympics.

Contrast that with the media presentations on Hu Jintao's "peace offer" to Taiwan last year (my post on some). Large numbers of newspapers used positive terms -- "peace offer", "olive branch"......Hu "reached out to" Taiwan's people. Consider the NYTimes presentation on the "peace offer" of a few days later, after it was rejected by Taiwan....

Mr. Hu's remarks were the latest sign of a more sophisticated Chinese policy of trying to reach past Mr. Chen's hostility to appear nonthreatening to Taiwan's voters. But Chinese officials remain vitriolic about Mr. Chen himself, irritated by his persistent advocacy of greater independence for Taiwan.

Through more than seven years in office Mr. Chen has inched closer and closer to a formal declaration of independence without actually changing the island's Constitution, flag or legal name, the Republic of China.

''Taiwan is an independent, sovereign country; Taiwan is not part of China, nor is Taiwan a local government of the People's Republic of China,'' Mr. Chen said during the interview, reiterating a formulation that he has been using lately to the irritation of Beijing officials.

In an interview last month, Wu Jianmin, a top Chinese diplomat for two decades and the president of the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, said of Mr. Chen, ''His problem is he loves to make trouble.'' He added, ''People don't like tension, and he likes tension, and whenever he can he does what he can to increase tensions.''

Instead of positives about the Dalai Lama, we get negatives about Chen Shui-bian, including a needless quote from a Chinese diplomat. There is no suggestion in any of the media presentations on this issue that Hu's offer might be pro forma. At most, they observe the precondition which Taiwan will not accept: that Taiwan is part of China. That such a precondition might be made in an insincere way is a question never raised by any of the media pieces, though bloggers all over the world were able to see it clearly. This is totally unlike the Tibet article, where insincerity on China's part is practically assumed -- indeed, in the NYTimes article about Hu's "peace offer" the only suggestion of insincerity is about the DPP:

Mr. Chen's continuing criticisms of Beijing have made Mr. Hsieh appear more moderate. That has prompted questions here of whether Mr. Chen and Mr. Hsieh, who have worked together for two decades, are secretly coordinating a policy of seeming to take divergent policies toward the mainland to ensure Mr. Hsieh's election.

Clearly the independence side in Taiwan's politics has a serious problem with its international image.

[Taiwan]